I am at work and the easy listening station just played Hello by Lionel Ritchie. That song creeps me out. I mean, it’s not a creepy song like Thriller or even Somebody’s Watching Me or whatever. Maybe it’s the music video that creeps me out: grown adult, chasing around the school and making crank calls to a blind high schooler… creepy to me. (And how well would it have gone over if a female made a similar video… Annie Lennox didn’t sing No More I Love Yous to a wheel-chair bound teenage boy…) Anyway, whenever I hear that song, I get the heebie-geebies.
What other songs give you the creeps even though they’re not inherently creepy song?
Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat & Tears. It’s mostly the end. The flutes playing “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?” mixed with the ominous horns bring to mind a horrific accident at a carnival to me.
“He Keep Me Alive” by Sally Sharpio. No, it’s not about someone held hostage and dependant on an evil kidnapper, but about a seriously one-sided relationship that the singer seems to think is *all *she deserves. The creepy part is knowing that there are people who are really this lost and feel they’re worth so little.
I don’t think Hotel California is supposed to be a creepy song…
But when I was in high school my clock radio was playing that tune one morning as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I had a wicked, scary dream to that song and from then on it always creeped me out.
I’m going to have to go with Turn Around, Look At Me, by the BeeGees. Apparently creepy sounding enough to be put in the movie Final Destination 3 (heard three times total in the movie–usually before something bad happens).
A lot of Christmas songs are creepy when you think about them. ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas’ sits astride the line between heartwarming and bloodchilling. Of course, I might think this because of the X-Files ep it was used in.
Man, that really is creepy! Hard to believe that they thought ‘there is someone walking behind you. Turn around, look at me. There is someone watching your footsteps,
turn around, look at me,’ wasn’t creepy, but the song then becomes more upbeat in the way they’re singing, if not the words.
No, it’s not just that – and the song you know isn’t as bad as the original lyrics:
“Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past”
“Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us no more”
Damn shame they changed the words. Though I like the newer version’s ambiguity of faithful friends being near to us once more - yep, we’re gonna die, but at least we’ll see our old friends on the other side!
I feel that way about the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams.” It doesn’t creep me out now but when I was younger, like 12 or 13, it felt weird. Maybe the line about people wanting to be used/abused?
I call this the “Stalker’s Lament” . It’s such a lovely tune, and her voice is so soft and sweet, that you almost miss the actual words she’s saying. . .
Is “Fire on High” by ELO supposed to be creepy? The reversed music in the beginning always gave me the willies when I was a kid. This is probably because I first remember hearing it in the mid-80’s at the height of a “backmasking” scare. I figured ELO was up to noooo good.
Even though “We Three Kings” is my favorite Christmas song, I find the music kind of ominous. Hearing it belted out on an organ in an old church during Midnight Mass is kind of eerie to me.
Those are the best… the ones that lull you into a sense of happiness or peace, but it sounds like she’s kidnapped him and placed him in a dungeon if you really look at the words.
Kinda like the song The Christmas Shoes. At first, I thought the kid was a con artist. I pictured mom in the old car, chain smoking with a 40 in a paper bag teaching her kid this speech so he could con some guy out of a new pair of shoes for her. I mean, the kid repeats the same speech over and over, verbatim. (I know that’s the chorus, but still.) Now I feel like an evil person. It’s supposed to be about giving and selflessness.
Anyway, that was a little off the topic. Another creepy song is Brain Damage by Pink Floyd. Shoot, most of Dark Side of the Moon is pretty creepy. But all that song especially gave me the creeps.
“The Rain, the Park, and Other Things” by the Cowsills. The backing vocals sound disembodied… haunting. It’s like a bizarre disorienting dream in which your feet can’t find the ground. And everything seems to be coming at you from this high birdsong register - it’s just discomfiting.
Also the Ronettes “Best Part of Breaking Up.” The way the group singers do a chanty kind of vocal part while the drum bangs away inistently sounds sort of cultlike & frightening.