Can a song make you kill yourself?
by Tyler Munro
July 7, 2014
Songs can make us do some pretty inexplicable things—laugh, cry, “The Dougie”—but can they drive someone to suicide? Decades before grieving parents mistook an Ozzy Osbourne lyric for an endorsement to kill yourself—he was actually making a lewd reference to a woman’s privates—there was “Gloomy Sunday,” better known perhaps as the Hungarian Suicide Song.
Written in 1933 by pianist Rezső Seress, the song tells the story of a widowed lover contemplating suicide after his lover’s death and, paired with its incredibly melancholy composition, is thought by some to have driven its listeners to suicide.
Sure, that sounds absurd to us now, but the threat was considered so real that it was banned on virtually all platforms until the BBC lifted its ban on Billie Holiday’s version… in 2002.
In total, the song is linked to at least 19 suicides around the time it was written. While those can mostly be chalked up to famine and poverty as a result of the depression, Seress ended up committing himself some 30-plus years later when he jumped out of a window, survived, then choked himself in his hospital bed.
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