Now, this isn’t TMZ where we unravel various conspiracies of the world through little proof and high speculation. I wanted to let this piece be an informative and entertaining hub and take these conspiracies of the music world and consume them the way they are meant to be consumed(i.e. giving them almost 1 percent of your brain power). For decades, we have ignored the conspiracy theorist and laughed at him. We have actively chuckled at the idea of propaganda-ish mysterious events and dismissed them. Now that’s changed, and conspiracy theories are having a yuge moment in the mainstream.
I would like to list some of the most interesting theories that I have come across and share them with you, so that we can all know how real or faux they are: Case #1
Did Paul McCartney die in 1966?
Of course he didn't. Who wrote the Frog Chorus in that case? This didn’t stop American radio DJs concocting a bizarre tale back in 1969, that the Beatle had been killed in a car crash and had been replaced by a lookalike. Among the bits of flimsy evidence: on the cover of Abbey Road, he’s not wearing shoes (LIKE A CORPSE), the VW Beetle license plate in the background says “28IF” cos Paul would have been 28 IF HE WERE STILL ALIVE (actually, he would have been 27 in the summer of ’69). If you play the end of I’m So Tired backwards, John says: “Paul is dead, man - miss him, miss him, miss him”.
Case #2
Biggie and Tupac, killed by the FBI
If you buy the idea that Tupac is dead, a case can be made that he was murdered by the U.S. government. The writer John Potash did just that in his 2007 book The FBI War on Tupac and Black Leaders. This article sums up his arguments. He says that the FBI was interested in Tupac because he came from a radical family, both his mother Afeni Shakur and step-aunt Assata Shakur being prominent members of the Black Panthers. When Tupac emerged in 1991 as a rapper with a message, the Feds turned their attention to him.
Subsequent to bugging Tupac over the first few years of his career, the FBI got a lot more proactive. In October 1993, off duty cops in Atlanta got into a shootout with him. After a month, he was blamed for rape, and a year from that point forward, he was shot multiple times at a recording studio in Manhattan, all occasions Potash says were set up by the FBI. During his prison stint for the rape conviction, Tupac was exposed to "Corrective Coercion techniques," Potash contends. Thus his first collection when he got out, All Eyez on Me, released on Death Row, was angrier and less moving than those that preceded it.
Case #3
Did Bob Dylan actually write his classic folk anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind”?
The answer, my friend, is no, according to this theory made famous by a 1963 Newsweek article that “threw Dylan into a depression for months". According to his biographer, the song was supposedly written by a New Jersey high-school student named Lorre Wyatt. Dylan bought the song from Wyatt, or stole it, depending on which version of the story you believe, and put it on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Believers in this theory will point to a 1962 performance of Lorre Wyatt’s band at his New Jersey high school. The band played “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Wyatt told the school paper he had written the song, so when it appeared on Dylan’s album the following year, those who heard it before assumed it was theft. The theory was further bolstered by the song’s copyright date, which came after Dylan recorded the song. Theorists say he realized after recording it that the copyright was up for grabs, so he grabbed it.
If anyone is in a position to squash this theory, it’s Wyatt. Oh, and he has. In 1974, he wrote an article admitting that he was the only liar in this story. He had found the lyrics and music to “Blowin’ in the Wind” published in a 1962 issue of Broadside, a folk magazine. He passed it off as his own and inadvertently created a legend that would stick for decades while, as he put it, making “Pinocchio look like he had a pug nose.”