Episode #302: When Music Clashed With Reality, It Made You Think

What advertising was like back in the mid 2010s: cartoonish and cringeworthy.

Back during my younger years (that would cover 1980 thru 1999), I used to hear all kinds of songs that were based (sometimes loosely, sometimes not) on real events. Those songs would always make you think and sometimes search out the event in question that piqued your curiosity.

For example, my earliest memory of a good song based on a real event was Ohio by CSNY (listened to it a lot on oldies radio). Unless you've been living under a rock or in a non-Western country, the song was about a shooting that took place during a protest of the Vietnam War at Kent State University.

As I grew older and expanded my musical horizons to include non-commercial  radio stations, I would often hear other songs based on real events that received a lot of notoriety upon release.

The punk band The Dead Kennedys performed a cover of I Fought The Law but reworked the lyrics to have it based on the shooting of Harvey Milk and George Moscone by Dan White (he of the Twinkie Insanity plea). I heard this one on college radio because no same commercial radio programmer would in fact, add it to the playlist.

A few years after the previous song listed, the Boomtown Rats (Bob Geldof's original band) wrote a song based on a school shooting in California called I Don't Like Mondays, which was the reason the shooter gave for shooting up the school. Now that song still gets fossilized on the classic rock/alternative radio stations. Song itself has quite the orchestral feel to it, which is perfectly suited for the lyrics.

Fast forward almost two decades, and now you have a solid major label debut from one of those flavor of the month 90's alternative bands that had one banger of a release then got forgotten about. Seven Mary Three released an exceptionally dark c.d. that produced two radio friendly hits: Cumbersome, and Water's Edge. Water's Edge, according to the band, was based on a real life event that took place in Chicago. It seems that a young woman was being chased by two drug dealers and they boxed her in on a bridge. Frantic, she took her only route available for her to escape: jumping off the bridge into the water below, where she ultimately drowned.

Staying in the same time frame, R.E.M. created the song What's The Frequency, Kenneth, which was based on an incident involving CBS news personality Dan Rather, when he was attacked by a mentally ill man who kept repeating that phrase throughout the attack (note, he wasn't caught until almost a decade later).

Drift back to 1991, you have the song Tears In Heaven that Eric Clapton wrote as a tribute to his young son who tragically passed away after falling out of an apartment balcony.

These few rock songs are the only ones that stick out to me, if only because the majority of songs like this are done in other genres, like Bluegrass, Americana & Folk, which can pack a more powerful punch and leave a far reaching lasting impression.

Are there any songs that you know of that are based (loosely or completely) on real life events?

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