Come on, Delilah by Tom Jones has to make this list. “I felt the knife in my hand, and she laughed no more”
There’s a long history of murder ballads, and Delilah is part of that tradition. Other famous murder ballads includ Long Black Veil, Tom Dooley, and Pretty Polly.
Also, Delia’s Gone.
actually not true–BB King’s “Sweet 16” gets lots of air play on stations that play Blues
They never play “Timothy” any more, and it is just a song about eating dinner with the lights dimmed.
Hmmm, Iiiiiii dunno… I think the murder ballad genre, of which this is a classic example, may have slightly different “playability” rules.
The murder ballad has always been recognized as describing a really transgressive and shocking act, about which the perpetrator generally feels either unavailing remorse or grim determination (if the victim “needed killin’”).
That’s different from treating, say, statutory rape or threats of intimate partner violence or the use of racist slurs as a normal phenomenon that the hearer is supposed to be unbothered by, or even perceive as kind of a laugh.
It’s that ”what? this is a totally normal thing to sing about” attitude of outdated nonchalance that gets songs dropped from the playlists, AFAICT. Not the mere fact of their portraying a character doing something awful or shocking.
My neighbor from awhile ago played those songs with the door open. Her black neighbors could hear them. She had some sort of magic where she could get away with stuff like that.
How about the suicide ballad? Maybe Don’t Fear the Reaper has lost its impact after Will Ferrell cowbelled it, but there are others like Alone Again (Naturally) and Now I Taste the Tears, a dark country/rock piece from the 1960s that’s been covered by a surprising number of singers. In an era of trigger warnings, would anyone play a song where the singer wants to end it all?
Wasn’t there a song called Pumped Up Kicks about a school shooter?
Don’t forget the mother of them all, Gloomy Sunday.
I don’t know about “Pumped Up Kicks,” but I do know that “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats was about an actual school shooting:
From the item:
Stranded in the Jungle by The Cadets.
You probably could play Screamin’ Jay Hawkins I Put a Spell on You but don’t show the video.
Funny, that song’s been in my head recently.
Metallica’s Fade to Black still gets play on radio (well, I heard it a couple of years ago on the last heavy metal radio station in the area) as well as general heavy metal Spotify playlists. And Metallica is still playing it live (I see a live recording from just a few days ago).
Rick Derringer’s Jump Jump Jump is one of those “end it all” songs, but it’s one of my favorite songs of his.
The only song i know by this name is by Santana (and i had to look that up) and i was really confused why it was listed here. But i just found the Benny Mardone song.
I found it very squeamish hearing 50+ year-old Jimmy Buffet singing “Hitting on the honeys right out of high school” and “15 will get you 20, but that’s all right” in Livingston Saturday Night.
As for most of the ballads about 15- or 16-year-olds, the target is high school kids, and they’re implying the singer is school age, too.
Yeah, a sign that’s plausibly about a 16 year old boy who is chasing a 16 year old girl comes across very differently than if the singer send to be a 50 year old man, or even a 25 year old man.
Hmm, I dunno, she kind of gets disqualified for the brown bikini in the video. Bikinis can be many colors, but I feel they should never be brown.
Yeah, I thought of those when I read the title, but I couldn’t think of how to discuss them without being offensive, as even the title are pretty hair raising. I had a friend who had a few of those singles. Apparently they were only sold at the concerts. It kind of sucks, because he really was a good songwriter.
Yeah, I think simple murder cant throw out a song- otherwise we’d have to dump " But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die".
Well, if you actually read the lyrics- Baby, you were just sweet sixteen
You just left your home then, woman
Ah, the sweetest thing I’d ever seen
[Verse 2]
But you wouldn’t do nothing, baby
You wouldn’t do anything I asked you to
Yes, you wouldn’t do nothing, baby
Oh, you wouldn’t do anything I asked to"
He loves her, she runs aways from him too, and that’s it. Not that creepy.
I concur.
That seems to be the case.