In 2017, Avril Lavigne was dead. Or, at least, according to X (formerly Twitter), she was.
I was in high school when this conspiracy took off, more amused than concerned by the lengthy twitter.com thread proclaiming that Lavigne had died back in 2003 and was thereafter replaced by a body double named Melissa. The primary evidence for “Avril is Dead” consisted of differences in her physical appearance, the disappearance of her Canadian accent, a promotional photoshoot in which the name “Melissa” was written on her hand and purported subliminal messages within her songs that hinted at the replacement. The incendiary post itself was captioned with the clickbait “avril lavigne is dead & was replaced by a lookalike: a conspiracy theory thread.”
Although the hoax has now largely been dispelled as a templated meme, it remains a pervasive force in Lavigne’s cultural relevance. It still pops up on the first page of a Google search for the singer and routinely arises in her interviews. Every post she has made in the past several years on any social media platform is flooded with comments jokingly referring to the existence of the “Real Avril.” Lavigne herself has refuted the claims of her death on multiple occasions, but like most internet jokes, the sheer preposterousness of the theory has become the gift that keeps on giving, only growing more ridiculous and hilarious to its purveyors with time.
It seems that Lavigne possesses the precise degree of fame that allows a conspiracy like this to manifest to such an extreme. Twenty years after her initial success with “Sk8er Boi,” she is still a household name, emblematic of early aughts pop-punk and familiar to multiple generations. And yet, before this conspiracy, she wasn’t often on the forefront of current popular culture — most people knew who she was, but not what she’d been up to lately. This lapse in her whereabouts is what allowed the theory to escalate.
When I first heard that Lavigne had been “dead” for over a decade, I, like many others, couldn’t immediately outright deny it. I had no proof to the contrary, no intimate knowledge of her music post the 2000s and no awareness of her professional or personal life. She had no notable online presence to keep her in the current digital conversation, so as long as you hadn’t clicked onto Avril Lavigne’s Wikipedia page in a while, there was a good chance that at least for a moment, you also thought this insane theory was true.
But the absurdity of this phenomenon isn’t limited to one singer or even the digital era of X (formerly Twitter). It’d be easy to blame this conspiracy’s spread on the lightning speed or far-reaching tendrils of social media, yet these types of theories have pervaded our culture for decades. It’s difficult to fathom how such a death hoax could have happened before the internet — how would the news travel, and why would we get so hung up on it in the first place? Rest assured, we did, and we have the fake death of one of The Beatles to thank for it.
In 1969, Paul McCartney was dead. Or, at least, according to The Michigan Daily he was.
As early as 1966, for reasons unknown, rumors began to circulate that McCartney had died. The story goes that in the fall of that year, he was killed in a car accident and subsequently replaced by a trained lookalike sent in from Britain’s MI5 to mitigate the potential distress his death would cause The Beatles’ fanbase. For years, calls to The Beatles’ press management poured in inquiring after McCartney’s well-being, incited by the concerned gossip that he had died.
Yet it wasn’t until American college campuses sparked the rumor into an all-out frenzy that this conspiracy truly took off. Tim Harper, a student at Drake University, was the first to address the prevalence of the theory and its evidence with the article, “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?”
On Oct. 12, 1969, callers to a Detroit radio station discussed the conspiracy and its potential clues on the air. Two days later, Fred LaBour penned a satirical review of Abbey Road titled, “McCartney dead; new evidence brought to light” for The Daily, explaining how various details on The Beatles’ album covers evidenced McCartney’s death. LaBour has since said that the “clues” used in the article were entirely of his own invention, written as a joke after listening to the exchange on air. But its fictitious (and humorous) origins didn’t seem to matter — the story spread like wildfire and was soon picked up by mainstream newspapers and broadcast radio stations across the country before becoming an international phenomenon.
Even though The Beatles’s PR kept refuting claims of his death, the joint timing of the band’s disbandment and the birth of McCartney’s daughter exacerbated the situation considerably. For the first time in years, McCartney had withdrawn from the public to focus on his family and refused to do any press, causing the rumors to skyrocket. Things only eventually died down because Life magazine tracked him down to a remote farm in Scotland and published photographic proof that he was alive. The headline of the cover story: “Paul is still with us.”
For a time, Beatles fans became pseudo sleuths, hunting for clues in the music, determined to find the proof that had sparked such mass hysteria. LaBour instigated the early scrutinization of their album covers by pointing out that on the back of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, McCartney is the only one to face away from the camera, and that the yellow flowers on the front were in the shape of a “P” for Paul’s grave. The iconic walk across the cover of Abbey Road became a funeral procession: John in all white symbolizing the divine, Ringo in all black as the undertaker, George in denim as the gravedigger and of course, Paul, barefoot and out of step with the group, as the corpse.
Much of the commonly cited evidence for the theory also drew on The Beatles’ penchant for backmasking, an experimental technique that involves recording something backward on a track meant to be played forward. The result is a “hidden message” that can only be deciphered by listening to the track in reverse. Supposedly, playing “Revolution 9” backward elicits the line “Turn me on, dead man,” and the song “I’m So Tired” leads to “Paul is dead man, miss him.” There was also the common misinterpretation of John Lennon saying “I buried Paul” at the end of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” when he actually just said “cranberry sauce.”
As morbid as these hidden messages are concerning an alleged death, you can sense the potential excitement derived from close listening in this way, of trying to “crack the code” to a favorite song. It might even be why the theory garnered as big of a following as it did, especially among young people. I don’t think they necessarily wanted McCartney dead — rather, they wanted to partake in the uncanny rush of uncovering such an absurd, large-scale hoax, and maybe also the excuse of listening to a great Beatles record one time too many.
One of the most fascinating and baffling aspects of both of these conspiracies is their fixation on the so-called clues buried within the music. If anyone had gone to such elaborate lengths to cover up a death, why would they leave behind a trail of Easter eggs to follow? That’s like Scooby-Doo Mystery 101. It’s telling that the “Avril is Dead” and “Paul is Dead” theories offer the exact same reasoning: Their surviving counterparts felt such immense guilt over the farce that they decided to leave messages in the music to communicate the truth to the fans. It sounds … laughable and utterly insane. But as preposterous as it may appear in retrospect, this kind of fervent and irrational analysis of famous artists is still common practice today.
Perhaps the most direct parallel can be made to a musician who hasn’t been subject to a death hoax but has rather concocted a conspiracy at the heart of their own public persona. Now I say this kindly as a fan of Taylor Swift myself, but her fanbase goes to deranged extremes to piece together the clues pointing towards her next creative project. Nothing is off-limits. The precise timing of her public appearances, the articles of clothing she wears, the style of her hair, the wording and punctuation of her posts. Her fans are constantly in avid pursuit of being able to predict her next move, to solve the intricately built puzzle of her artistry.
What sets her fanbase apart is the fact that this type of analysis is actively encouraged by Swift herself. It started out innocently enough, with hidden messages in the liner notes of her albums, repeated visuals in the music videos. But it quickly moved beyond the music itself. Swift is the self-appointed “mastermind,” scheming to time press releases so that they align with her favorite number, 13, or hinting at future projects innocuously, years in advance. She once released an album announcement accompanied with a crossword puzzle for fans to decipher the track titles. She arranged “secret sessions” in which select fans were invited to one of her eight houses to listen to a new album ahead of time. Swift has always had a keen focus on her marketability (she is both an untouchable, statuesque pop star and a relatable best friend), and positing herself at the center of an unsolvable maze of lyrics and inscrutable decisions is a highly intentional move.
Conspiracies thrive in the blindspots of our knowledge, and Swift’s invite a thoroughly fabricated intimacy and a close, personal kinship with an enigmatic, elusive figure — spotting the Easter egg gives you the inflated sense that you are a “special” fan, better than the casual listener. You are sharp-eyed and dedicated enough to notice the clues, to have an encyclopedic knowledge of not only Swift’s career or personal life, but her lore.
Swift’s tendency to subtly “clue” fans in over the years has now made everything she says or does appear cryptic and intentional. It doesn’t really matter whether she’s truly planning out every little thing in advance, because the fans’ belief is unwavering. They’ve cultivated her narrative meticulously; it lends an all-knowing mystique to her artistry and public persona that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Nothing about Swift or her music is all that experimental or inventive, but this phenomenon makes it feel worthy of our interest. It keeps her perpetually in the apex of her career, floating along carefully crafted fanaticism and hysterical reverence.
There usually isn’t a bright side to being subject to conspiracy. Everyone was briefly talking about Avril Lavigne again, but as the face of a joke. An insane rumor caused concern over Paul McCartney’s well-being, but he really just wanted to be left alone. Taylor Swift is different. She exists within a self-imposed mythos of her own creation. She wields the sort of influence and cunning to actually pull off the elaborate conspiracies we regard incredulously. With the Avril and Paul conspiracies, I brushed off the “evidence” as being coincidental or misinterpreted. If someone told me the same of Taylor Swift, I’d have no difficulty believing that she’d left behind hidden messages for the fans. She may not have had to stage a death hoax to do it, but this is how she has irrefutably become the stuff of legend.
Daily Arts Writer Serena Irani can be reached at seirani@umich.edu.