What is the most cursed song in music history?
People have been calling music cursed long before the arrival of devil-spawned bands like Black Sabbath. But what is the most hellish song in all of history?
When we think about the crossover with music and evil, it’s not hard to think of the one thing that changed the music landscape forever: the satanic panic. Across the 1980s, this was a major point of contention, with some claiming music had a legitimate insidious agenda.
There’s that one story most of us will think of when talking about this, and it’s the curious case of Judas Priest, and how they found themselves wrapped up in a bizarre lawsuit in the mid-1980s, with people claiming they were responsible for the deaths of two men from Nevada. But beyond this, it lurked in the unholy corners of music and art itself, with people criticising its influence over impressionable youth.
Some even went so far as to suggest that there was something even weirder curling around all musical output, things like hidden messages lurking when played backwards. But if we remove all this, and look at the actual facts – the songs that genuinely had a ripple effect of some of the gnarliest stuff you’ve ever seen in all of history, what do we have left?
‘Music Must Change’ ended up being a pretty intense experience for members of The Who whenever they’d revisit it after Keith Moon’s death. To the point where Roger Daltrey said he just couldn’t face it. “I kind of got a weird feeling about it,” he told Howard Stern. “Because it [the song] is about how it’s gotta move on. And that it’s our time to move on.”
This is a similar story to ‘Cross Road Blues’, which seemed to trigger something in all those who performed it. Like Robert Plant and Eric Clapton, whose sons died after they sang it. Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers also covered it, then suffered accidents where some band members died. Kurt Cobain was also apparently considering taking it on before he died by suicide. But can a knock-on effect so intense ever be attributed to a singular song where the connections are inherently ambiguous?
Well, as it turns out, yes.
So, what is the most cursed song in history?
There are cases to be made for countless songs in history perturbed by any so-called curses. But the one that stands out above the rest, the one that undeniably had a ripple effect that’s genuinely disturbing, is ‘Without You’.
The difference here is that the song seemed to be genuinely involved in everything that transpired in connection with it. The song initially came from Badfinger, landing in Harry Nilsson’s lap when he heard it once and thought it was by The Beatles. He didn’t like the song, especially not for himself, and kicked up a bit of a fuss when he was urged to cover it.
The first sign that this should have probably been left well enough alone was that it caused a bit of a fiery tiff with Nilsson’s manager, Richard Perry. Nilsson was adamant the song wasn’t for him, but ended up doing everything he could to make it more his flavour. But the dark cloud was far from over after its release, and its original writers, Peter Ham and Tom Evans, experienced such intense financial difficulties that they ended up hanging themselves from the stress.
The curse didn’t let Nilsson off lightly either, and in the years that followed, he spiralled into the depths of poor mental health and an alcohol addiction, exacerbating his heart problems and leading to his death in 1994. While it’s anyone’s guess whether all these events would have happened in the absence of ‘Without You’, there’s no denying its heavy hand and how much people avoided listening to their gut at a time when it was crucial.
