Here are other Beatles songs that I used to find unnerving:
Good Morning Good Morning - opens with a blasting horn riff and then the lines, “nothing to do to save his life/call his wife in” which I take to be in reference to someone who has died in a hospital. Then “nothing to say but what a day/how’s your boy been” - in other words, a guy just died, whatever, just another day at work. Unsettling.
Glass Onion - really heavy drumbeats and bass riffs always used to kind of scare me as a kid; this song also has lots of weird cryptic references to the whole “Paul is dead” thing, which gave me the major creeps; and there are those fucking eerie pitch-bending string instrumentals at the end.
The last thirty seconds or so of Lovely Rita - the song goes from a major to a minor key, and the lyrics are replaced with weird animalistic panting sounds and shouts. What the fuck?
Getting Better - there’s a nonchalant reference to spousal abuse: “I used to be cruel to my woman and beat her” in this otherwise jolly song.
I don’t know if the Beatles intended for these songs to be creepy or what, but they always bothered me.
Not sure about that. From what I understand, John’s contribution (lyrically) to the song was the line It can’t get much worse. “I used to be mean to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” verse was probably all Paul’s work.
However, I find Run For Your Life to be the creepiest song ever. I honestly don’t believe that Lennon intended it to be a creepy song–I don’t think he really intended anything besides a rock number. What I find even more bizarre is that John didn’t even come up with the creepiest line by himself. He stole it from Elvis’s Baby, Let’s Play House. We were at a venue last weekend for a concert, and they blasted it over the speakers at one point. It was the first time I’ve heard it in probably a year, and it really, really creeped me out. The explictly threatening lyrics paired with the extremely upbeat and poppy music let me wondering just what the fuck any of them had been thinking.
Sammy Davis, Jr.'s cover of “The Candy Man.” The original song works fairly well in the context of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and became a Davis standard once he covered it. He was interested in acting in the movie, so his use of the song is completely innocuous. Yet, when I hear it now, all I can think of is that it sounds like a song a stereotypical “Free Candy” van-driving child molester would sing.
The instrumentals that open the TV shows Taxi and MAS*H are both creepy to me. (I’m aware that “Suicide Is Painless” was meant to be somewhat melancholy, but it’s just plain creepy to me.) Not sure why-- Taxi’s one of my favorite shows to this day-- but I used to get the same feeling of dread from those songs that I do when, say, I hear a TV or radio station signing off or when an Emergency Broadcast System tone/warning used to come over the air. (As to why I find those creepy… yeah.)
The HBO program Big Love used this song very well when a girl was singing it while trying to escape being married to an 80 year old prophet of a FLDS religious compound.
Never heard this version, but the original was done by The Vogues, a Lettermen-esque group, and I found it disturbing.
The song that’s always creeped me out, though, is “Black Is Black,” by Los Bravos. Not long after it came out, I had the flu and woke up out of a fever dream with this thing going through my head. It still gives me the shivers thinking of that.
The video’s creepy too, made even more so by the bad quality.
I’ve never been able to sit all the way through “Revolution #9”. Ever. It’s just so weirdly constructed that it’s very unsettling to me. I can’t really describe the feeling…almost like everything’s falling out from under me, conceptually. It’s the only song on the White Album that I’ll skip over if I’m listening through.
Barbie Girl just to freak me out, too, when it first came out. I’m not really sure why. I guess maybe the idea of a Barbie doll being that obviously sexy? Now I just sort of see it as kind of adorably sleazy.
You know something bad is going to happen in that wee little room. It’s a toss-up whether he or the woman will end up dead. There will be blood on the walls for sure.
I will follow him, follow him
Wherever he may go,
And near him I always will be,
For nothing can keep me away,
He is my destiny.
I love him, I love him, I love him,
And where he goes I’ll follow, I’ll follow, I’ll follow.
She’s either a stalker, or someone in desperate need of some independence.
The song being played is “Ach du lieber Augustin”. It has a slightly cheery tune that’s almost identical to “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?”, but it’s about a drunk guy who passed out in a pit full of corpses in plague-ridden Vienna. So it takes naturally to being made creepy.
I find just about anything by The Big Bopper, but especially Chantilly Lace, to be really creepy. He just sounds like a sexual predator for some reason.
I second your mention of Time of the Season, spoke-. Maybe it’s the “Who’s your daddy?” line.
