Attention tinfoil hat people: Are these music-related conspiracies on your radar?
If you’ve been keeping up with world weirdness, you may have heard the recent theory that Mark David Chapman did not assassinate John Lennon. Just as with JFK in 1963, Lennon was shot not in the back but in the front by a second gunman.
Yes, Chapman admitted to shooting Lennon outside the Dakota on the evening of Dec. 8, 1980. There were witnesses. Yoko knows Chapman killed her husband. Case closed, right?
Not according to British author David Whelan. He’s spent the last three years investigating Lennon’s murder and has come to the conclusion that someone other than Chapman is responsible and will lay everything out in an upcoming documentary and book entitled Gimme Some Truth: The Assassination of John Lennon. Here are the basics.
So many questions. Why would the CIA want Lennon, a semi-retired rock star, dead? Why would these forces choose Chapman? Where, exactly, was this second gunman perched? Lennon was right behind Yoko as the two entered the building. What about the witness corroborations?
Insane stuff, really, but this is just one of many alleged conspiracies to be found throughout the history of music. Here are some of my favourites.
Omaha’s 311 has been dogged by rumours that their name is a veiled reference to the Ku Klux Klan? How? “K” is the eleventh letter of the alphabet, ergo 3 x K = KKK. This story was once so rampant that some schools banned the wearing of 311 T-shirts on campus. None of this is true. The band says that “311” is actually Omaha police code for “indecent exposure.”
And while we’re at it, “KISS” does not stand for “Knights in Satan’s Service.”
Adherents to this theory believe that the Sex Pistols (among others) were scripted by Soviet agents in hopes of destroying British society from within. A major source for this conspiracy was a retired KGB agent named Alexandrov Varennikov Volishin who claimed that the entire punk movement, from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols to the Clash, was financed by shadowy Soviet forces. The goal, he said, was to “create utter chaos” and to “pervert the Western youth to nihilist, anti-establishment, and anti-American ideologies.”
Volishin also claimed that many punk songs were written by teams of propagandists and psychologists to promote revolutionary thinking, increase cynicism, and encourage heavy drug use.
“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn the baby boomer generation of the West into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture that would create uprisings and bring Western democracies into utter chaos,” Volishin said.
“We even infiltrated mainstream radios to promote their music and reach millions of people every day. For many of us in the KGB, infiltrating the 1970s punk scene was one of the USSR’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date.”
This testimony has been completely and utterly debunked. The origin of the claims was a website called World News Daily Report which specialized in satire and fake news. They made it all up, but every once in a while, the story makes the rounds on social media.
On a related note, some believe that the Britpop of the 1990s was pushed by MI5 to distract youth from pressing domestic issues. Tony Blair was a fan. Case closed.
Wind of Change is The Scorpions’ biggest hit, selling somewhere around 14 million copies after it was released in January 1991. Driving sales was the song’s popularity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Singer Klaus Meine wrote it after the Scorps participated in the Moscow Music Peace Festival in the summer of 1989.
The lyrics, “I follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park / Listening to the wind of change,” resonated with the glasnost-loving citizens. The band even presented Mikhail Gorbachev with his own gold record.
For years, rumour swirled that the song was a plant, a CIA construction to promote change and revolution in the Eastern Bloc. The notions of freedom contained in the song swept the region, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and most of its satellite authoritarian regimes. It worked so well that by the end of 1991, the USSR was no more and the Iron Curtain had crumbled. Nice, one CIA.
If you want to explore this rabbit hole, there’s an entire podcast series designed to get to the bottom of this conspiracy. (SPOILER: Klaus Meine wrote it on his own.)
Given the U.S. Government’s recent transparency about UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), Tom may actually be onto something. He’s convinced that someone or something is surveilling the human race using technology (e.g. “zero point energy“) far beyond our capabilities. Tom also claims the following: He experienced “lost time” while camping out near Area 51 in the Nevada desert; the moon landing was real but we’re not being told about what NASA really found up there; and something about fossilized remains being found on Mars.
Although he’s back with blink-182 now, it’s said that his deep interest in the UAP thing caused the riff that resulted in him leaving the band. While estranged, he co-wrote several books, both fiction and non-fiction, on the subject. (I’ve read them all and they’re quite good. Search for “Sekret Machines” on any online bookstore and you’ll find them.) There was a History Channel series called Inside America’s UFO Investigation that I quite enjoyed. Finally, there’s Tom’s To the Stars Academy, an institution loaded with academics from NASA, the CIA, and the White House that wants to know the truth about what’s going on.
Let’s leave things with this song Tom wrote for blink-182. Keep watching the skies!
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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.
Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play
by Global News
