When your neighbors party late into the night or a garbage truck wakes you up two hours before sunrise, you might curse your neighborhood. We’re not all fortunate enough to have rolling emerald lawns and central air conditioning, but most people reading this have access to the most basic of amenities: heat, running water, electricity, and Internet access. Unfortunately, there are many people throughout the world who are not so blessed—men, women, and children crammed into slums ruled by crime and ravaged by drugs and disease.

10Cité-Soleil, Port au Prince
Haiti

On the outskirts of Port au Prince, Haiti is Cité-Soleil (“Sun City”), a foul slum ruled by gangs and sitting in a pool of its own squalor. Cite Soleil has no sewage system and is composed of hovels. Garbage and excrement sit in stagnant, mosquito-infested puddles. AIDS is prolific, and the life expectancy hovers in the low 50s. There is no police force, and for years, vicious drug lords and kidnappers controlled the streets. According to the Red Cross, “the shanty town of Cité-Soleil is a microcosm of all the ills in Haitian society: endemic unemployment, illiteracy, non-existent public services, insanitary conditions, rampant crime and armed violence.”

In 2004, the United Nations deployed thousands of troops to Cité-Soleil, where they engaged in numerous gun battles with the gangs. Some vague sense of order was restored, but the area remains a hotbed of violence. To this day, one must pass through an armed UN checkpoint to enter the slum. Cité-Soleil weathered Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake well, with many of its structures still standing, but the nearby National Penitentiary was damaged, and 3,000 deadly inmates flooded out in the resulting chaos. They returned to Cité-Soleil with a vengeance, riding motorcycles with assault rifles at the ready. They burned all their arrest records and took back the slum, setting back the progress made by the United Nations.

9 Favelas Of Rio de Janeiro
Brazil

Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful, sprawling city frequently visited by tourists for such events as Carnival and for the white sands of Copacabana Beach. But on the fringes of the city, there exist huge slums called favelas: piecemeal shacks built haphazardly atop each other. The dwellings are tacked together from odds and ends, cast-off bits of lumber, metal, and stone.

Of the approximately 1,000 favelas around the city, one of the most notorious is Rocinha. Rio is a major port for cocaine traffic traveling to Europe, and the favelas are often ruled by heartless drug lords. One of the more colorful characters from the area was Erismar Rodrigues Moreira (street name Bem-Te-Vi, after a Brazilian songbird). His gang carried gold-plated weapons and subjected enemies to “necklacing”— jamming a tire over a man’s head and then setting it aflame. In 2005, Ben was shot down in a police raid. The future of the favelas remains uncertain; since Rio de Janeiro has been accepted as the host city of the 2016 Summer Olympics, the authorities have showed an increasing presence in the streets they once ignored.

8Detroit, Michigan
USA

Once heralded as the “Motor City,” Detroit has more recently come to be known as one of the United States’ “Murder Capitals.” The decline of the American automotive industry has left this city reeling. The population has dropped 25 percent since 2000, and many areas have become a wasteland of foreclosed homes, boarded up and selling for pennies on the dollar—some for less than $100. Of course, this is an “as-is, buyer beware” situation if there ever was one. Many of these houses have been taken over by squatters, and the basements of abandoned buildings are a favorite haunt of dog fighters. Detroit has a huge problem with strays; tens of thousands roam the streets, most of them pit bulls.

On July 19, 2013, Detroit declared bankruptcy, approximately $18 billion in debt. Many residents of the city are also feeling the crunch—unemployment rates stand at around 16.3 percent, actually a marked improvement from 2009, when 24.9 percent were out of work. One need look no further to witness Detroit’s crippling poverty than truTV’s hit show Hardcore Pawn, which takes place in the largest pawn shop in the city and often features lines of people out the door trying to peddle their valuables to make rent and keep the lights on. Data compiled from various sources including the FBI and the US Justice Department reveals that the top three most dangerous neighborhoods in America are all located in Detroit. The worst, the area surrounding West Chicago Street and Livernois Avenue is so bad that you have a one in seven chance of becoming the victim of a violent crime there each year.

7Ciudad Juárez
Mexico

Ciudad Juárez sits just south of El Paso, Texas, the two cities separated by the narrow stretch of the Rio Grande. And yet the difference between these two places is like night and day. In the last decade, Ciudad Juárez has become the epicenter of the Mexican drug war. Rival cartels visit horrifying violence upon each other as they battle for turf, corpses stacking up. In 2009, the city was crowned the murder capital of the world, with 130 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In truth, the number is probably much higher, as many people simply vanish, buried in mass graves. Police officers are often either too corrupt or too afraid to leave the station.

It is particularly dangerous to be a woman in Ciudad Juárez; sexual assaults are prevalent, and hundreds of women, many just teenagers, have been murdered since the ’90s. Hundreds more remain missing, victims of domestic violence, the drug trade, or worse—some believe that serial killers roam the streets in abundance, their crimes masked by the chaos around them.

6Medellin
Colombia

During the height of the cocaine trade in the late ’80s, Medellin was the most violent city in the world, with Pablo Escobar’s cartel and paramilitary groups running rampant. Escobar was killed by police forces in 1993 and crime declined significantly. Unfortunately, there are still thousands of murders here each year. In 2009, there were 2,899 homicides (down from an astonishing 6,500 in 1991), many tied to drug trafficking. Other schemes perpetrated by local criminals include extortion and kidnapping. Tourists are frequently targeted, held for ransom and forced to empty their bank accounts through visits to ATMs. Since 2012, there has been increasing violence between two rival cartels (the Office of Envigado and Los Urabeños) as they scrap over territory.

5 Brownsville, Brooklyn
USA

New York City (and Brooklyn in particular) have some sordid corners if one looks hard enough, but Brownsville stands out among the rest. Most of the housing in the neighborhood is made up of projects run by the New York City Housing Authority—huge, low-income apartment buildings where crime is prevalent. While much of New York has been subject to gentrification and tumbling crime rates, Brownsville remains quite dangerous, and possibly the most violent place in the entire city. In this neighborhood, some UPS drivers make their deliveries in the company of an armed guard.

As in many rough areas, much of the crime is related to the drug trade. Luckily, the crack-cocaine epidemic of the ’80s and the ’90s is long over, and things have grown (relatively) more peaceful in the interim, with organized gangs fractured into small fragments of their former power. It can be tough to get by on the streets of Brownsville, and many are forced into making their way with their fists. It is no coincidence at all that this neighborhood was the home of a long list of championship boxers, including Riddick Bowe, Shannon Briggs, Zab Judah, and “Iron” Mike Tyson.

4La Perla, San Juan
Puerto Rico, USA

La Perla is a settlement on the outskirts of San Juan that was once home to a slaughterhouse. Today, it is a shantytown known for the proliferation of drugs, particularly heroin imported from suppliers in South America. About 15 square blocks, the streets of La Perla are often omitted from maps of San Juan to keep tourists from traveling there. Despite the abject poverty, La Perla is quite beautiful in many ways, with multicolored homes, breathtaking views, and its own expanse of Caribbean beach. In 2011, La Perla became the site of a massive police raid, netting 114 drug arrests based on an 18-month investigation by the DEA, the Puerto Rico Justice Department, and several other agencies.

3Ferghana Valley
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan

The dissolution of the Soviet Union made for a great deal of tension as the world’s largest country was chopped into independent republics. More than 20 years later, these hostilities remain, some more bitter than ever before. Few places have seen more violence than the Ferghana Valley, an area split in three by the nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The Ferghana Valley is a center of Islamic fundamentalism and home to a patchwork of ethnicities who are known to clash viciously. The economy is deeply flawed, and the government corrupt. Hundreds of thousands of refugees wander the streets, and corpses litter the sidewalks.

Perhaps the most savage event in the area occurred on May 13, 2005, when the Uzbek town of Andijan became the site of a horrifying massacre as the military opened fire on a group of protesters massed in the main square, decrying the economy and the policies of Preident Islam Karimov. The government would later claim the body count at 187, but those present allege that over 1,000 were killed, including many women and children. They claim that many of the bodies were buried in secret mass graves as a way of downplaying the true scope of the carnage.

2Kibera, Nairobi
Kenya

Nairobi is the capital of Kenya, founded by the British as a rail depot in 1899. Today, it is one of the most important cities in Africa, but it is not free from turmoil. On the outskirts of the city sits Kibera, one of the world’s worst slums. Like many such places, Kibera is forsaken by the government. Enterprising criminals tap into Nairobi’s power grid, bringing electricity to a few select places, but for the most part the area is dark. Homes are typically mud and concrete huts with dirt floors. The water is mostly polluted, causing typhoid and cholera, and toilet facilities consist of holes dug into the ground and used by hundreds. Women leaving their homes after dark are often raped.

About half of Kibera’s population is unemployed, and to alleviate their crushing boredom, they often partake in cheap drugs—glue-sniffing is a big problem—or drink changaa, a powerful local brew. AIDS spreads like wildfire in Kibera, with women selling their bodies just to make enough money to eat, and orphaned children, often born with the disease, haunt the trash-choked streets.

1Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong
China

Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City was demolished 20 years ago, but it certainly deserves mention. A former Chinese military fort, it became densely populated with squatters in the years following World War II. Inside the walls of the fort, ramshackle high-rises were built largely devoid of creature comforts like heat or running water. In 1987, a survey by the Chinese government indicated there were approximately 30,000 residents inside the tiny 6.5-acre territory—a population density of 3,250,000 people per square mile. As a means of comparison, the city with the highest population density today is Manila, with approximately 111,002 people per square mile.

Greater Hong Kong largely turned a blind eye to activities within Kowloon Walled City. For years, it was governed by the Triads, Chinese mafia members. Police would only enter in large groups. There were high rates of prostitution, gambling, drug use, murders, and opium dens. Only the faintest trace of sunlight filtered down to the muddy streets, and rats proliferated in the ruin. In the early ’90s, the government finally decided to destroy this anarchic slum. An evacuation was ordered, and in March 1993, the demolition began. Today, the area is occupied by Kowloon Walled City Park, a verdant expanse of gardens and monuments.

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist.

Everyone loves going to a concert. There is a certain thrill to seeing your favorite artist live and up close in front of your very eyes. Even in the biggest of stadiums, you can feel completely at home surrounded by people who share a love and appreciation for something.

But what happens when gigs go wrong? It can be an embarrassment for the artist, a shock for the audience, and an absolute gift for social media. Here, we’re going to discuss the top 10 live music mess-ups, falls, and fails!

10 Michael Jackson
Oslo (July 15, 1992)

When it came to live shows, the king of pop was known for his energetic stage presence and complex dance routines. Unfortunately, such an active stage show means that a live vocal isn’t always going to sound the best. That’s why MJ employed the use of playback—where he would lip-synch to a prerecorded vocal. This is all well and good . . . until it’s not.

During his one and only night in Oslo, Michael started to lip-synch to his opening song, “Jam,” but found the playback vocal wasn’t there. The crew had to hastily switch to Michael’s somewhat wobbly and out-of-breath real live vocal until the playback issue was fixed a little further into the song.^[1]

9 Justin Bieber
Glendale, Arizona (September 29, 2012)

Love him or hate him, it can’t be denied that Justin Bieber is a music sensation. Midway through a performance of “Out Of Town Girl” during the opening night of his tour, Bieber turned from the audience and doubled over before vomiting all over the stage.^[2]

He rushed off while the backing dancers professionally continued on as if nothing was wrong. Sheepishly, Bieber returned a few moments later. After the show, he took to social media and blamed drinking too much milk before the concert for his unsettled stomach. Nice!

8 The Foo Fighters
Ullevi, Gothenburg (June 12, 2015)

During a particularly enthusiastic rendition of “Monkey Wrench” with his band, The Foo Fighters, lead singer Dave Grohl made for the edge of the stage but tripped and stumbled forward, spectacularly nose-diving from the 2.4-meter-high (8 ft) platform. He tried to stand. But unfortunately, his leg was broken and he had to abandon the show.

Medics rushed in and put him on a stretcher. But before being whisked away from the stadium, Grohl said to the crowd, “I’m gonna go to the hospital, I’m gonna fix my leg, and then I’m gonna come back and we’re gonna play for you again!”

He was carried to an ambulance to wild cheers and the audience chanting his name. Rock ‘n’ roll!^[3]

7 Paul McCartney
Quebec (July 20, 2008)

Positioned two-thirds of the way into the ex-Beatle’s mammoth live set, “Live and Let Die” was supposed to be a highlight of a concert containing over 30 songs. However, things didn’t go quite as rehearsed one night in Canada!

Having obviously missed playing a note during a quiet section, McCartney looked to his drummer and took the wind out of the song’s sails by audibly laughing during the final word of the lyric “makes you give in and cry, say live and let die.”^[4]

Seconds later—as if to compound this goof-up—the people in charge of the pyrotechnics also missed their cue, with the spectacular fireworks coming in several seconds late. Live and let d’oh!

6 Oasis
Toronto (September 7, 2008)

Mistakes are not always the fault of the band, artist, or crew, as happened with Oasis while performing their smash hit song “Morning Glory” at Toronto’s 2008 Virgin Festival. Midway through the song, a man ran up behind lead singer and guitarist Noel Gallagher and forcefully pushed him off the stage.^[5]

Of course, the show was brought to a halt as security tackled the assailant and Gallagher limped into the wings. A few tense moments later, a band member came out and addressed the concerned audience: “Thank you for your patience. Just give us five minutes, and we’ll be right back!”

Much to the delight of the fans, the concert soon resumed without further incident!

5 U2
Vancouver (May 14, 2015)

We’ve all done that thing where we’ve tripped over something or walked into something when we’re not looking where we’re going. Well, a similar thing happened during U2’s performance of their smash hit “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in Vancouver.

It seemed The Edge was concentrating more on looking out over the expansive crowd than looking where he was going . . . and he stepped right off the edge of the stage. He fell several feet from the platform where he was quickly attended to by staff at the venue.

Luckily, this was the final song of the show. U2 lead singer Bono kept the crowd going and the energy up during the mishap as the rest of the band left the stage in the planned fashion.^[6]

4 Metallica
Abu Dhabi (April 19, 2013)

Performing in front of so many people puts a lot of pressure on an artist as Metallica’s Kirk Hammett discovered while strumming the subdued intro to “Nothing Else Matters.”

After hitting several bum notes, he stopped playing, stepped up to the microphone, and addressed the metal-loving audience: “My hands are really sweaty, and it’s just really hard for me to play. So I’m going to do it one more time, okay?”^[7]

The audience roared their approval, and he performed the intro flawlessly the second time around!

3 Pink
Nuremberg (July 15, 2010)

Pink is renowned for her super energetic and gymnastic-filled live performances. The encore of her 2010 tour consisted of her being whirled around the venue on cables while performing “So What” like some sort of glamorously amazing musical pinata.

Unfortunately, she was not properly secured into her harness in Nuremberg and ended up being dragged off the stage and into the pit below. Clearly in pain and complaining that she couldn’t feel anything in her back, Pink was rushed to the hospital for X-rays.

Luckily, she avoided any serious injuries.^[8] She just had a few bruises to both her body and her ego!

2 Ed Sheeran
London (July 12, 2015)

A huge draw to Ed Sheeran’s live shows is that he is pretty much a one-man band. With the help of his loop pedal, he can do amazing things and sound so much bigger than just one man and his guitar.

But one evening while performing “You Need Me” in London, the loop pedal^[9] went haywire and stopped working. Insisting that the pedal be quickly fixed by the crew so that he could re-perform the song, he told the audience, “We do have a curfew, but I’m not having this!”

1 Paul McCartney
London (July 13, 1985)

This is possibly one of the most widely seen mess-ups in live music history! During his solo performance at Live Aid, Paul McCartney took to the stage to serenade Wembley Stadium (and approximately 1.5 billion people watching live around the world) with The Beatles’ classic “Let It Be.”

However, when McCartney started to sing, he found the microphone wasn’t working.^[10] It turns out that a technician for the band that played before McCartney had accidentally unplugged the mic, meaning that no one in the arena or at home could hear him.

It took over a minute, but the problem was identified and fixed. The very next day, McCartney went to a studio to rerecord the missing vocals for all subsequent broadcasts and releases.

So which of these was your favorite live mess-up? Have you seen musicians mess up, fall, or otherwise fail at any concerts you’ve attended? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below!

I am Josh Gill from Barnsley in the UK. I studied journalism and English literature/language at Coventry University before going on to work as a freelance writer. I love music, sci-fi movies, and dark humor. I also daily vlog on my YouTube channel JoshAndLaurensWanderWorks.

Hacking is a misfortune we’ve had to deal with since even before computers and the Internet came along. We often think of e-mail accounts, websites, and cloud servers when we think of hacking. This is even though hackers can strike plenty of other things, including live television broadcasts.

Hackers have been hacking television stations for decades. The most notorious of such incidents occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s. The hackers would interrupt a live program and chip in whatever live or recorded audio they want. Some even took over entire broadcasts and replaced them with their own videos.

10 Southern Television

On November 26, 1977, someone hacked into the now-defunct Southern Television several minutes into the 5:00 PM news. (Southern Television is now a part of ITV in the UK.) Viewers could still see the newscaster, Andrew Gardner, but they could not hear his voice.

Gardner’s voice was replaced by that of someone claiming to be an alien called Vrillon. Vrillon claimed to be the spokesperson of an alien group called the Ashtar Galactic Command.

Over the next six minutes, Vrillon warned humans against engaging in warfare. He ordered the destruction of every weapon and advised humans to live in peace. He added that only peaceful people would advance to what he called “the higher realms of spiritual evolution.”

Gardner continued reading the news as Southern Television engineers tried to recover their audio while the transmission lasted. Most viewers thought it was a prank or some mix-up. The hacker remains unknown.^[1]

9 HBO

On the evening of April 27, 1986, a hacker hacked HBO satellites during a live transmission of the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. The hacker called himself Captain Midnight and had full control of the satellite for four and a half minutes. During that time, he replaced the movie with a still image of a message that read:

GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

Investigators later revealed that the hacker was John MacDougall, an engineer and satellite dish seller who had a personal vendetta against HBO.

During the early 1980s, satellite dish owners could use their dishes to receive any satellite-broadcasted programming, including that of cable networks. However, many cable channels, including HBO, started scrambling their signals, forcing viewers to buy the descramblers they were selling. HBO also charged $12.95 a month for access to its content. This affected the business of satellite dish sellers like MacDougall, since homeowners were no longer buying dishes.

MacDougall got back at HBO using equipment at the satellite transmission station where he worked. His job required him to upload movies to satellites. He had just uploaded a movie that evening when he directed the equipment at HBO’s satellite to transmit his message.

The Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation and arrested MacDougall a few months later. Fortunately, he got off with a light punishment. The court sentenced him to a year of probation and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine.^[2]

8 WGN And WTTW

At around 9:15 PM on November 22, 1987, a hacker got into WGN-TV in Chicago. Fortunately, the incident didn’t last long before WGN engineers recovered their signals. However, the undaunted hacker returned to attempt another hack that night.

This time, the target was WTTW, also in Chicago. As he did with WGN, the hacker replaced WTTW’s live broadcast with a video of a man in a weird-looking mask. The man did several strange things, including ridiculing WGN and having a woman beat his bare buttocks with a flyswatter. He also did a free advertisement for Pepsi.

The notorious incident is remembered today as the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion. Interestingly, the hacker remains unknown. He would have received a one-year sentence and been ordered to pay a $100,000 fine if he had been arrested.^[3]

7 Playboy And American Exxxtasy

In September 1987, a hacker got into the live broadcasts of two adult entertainment cable television channels, American Exxxtasy and Playboy. The man hacked into the programs three times on the same day, twice into American Exxxtasy and once into Playboy. During all three hacks, he replaced the networks’ content with a religious message.

The hacker was later revealed as 38-year-old Thomas M. Haynie. Haynie worked for the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), a cable channel that only produced Christian programs. Investigators claimed Haynie used CBN’s equipment for the hacks. However, CBN directors claimed that was impossible because their equipment was incompatible with Playboy’s and American Exxxtasy’s.

Investigators insisted that the equipment was compatible and even provided evidence to prove that Playboy was hacked using CBN’s equipment. Haynie was given one felony and one misdemeanor charge for the Playboy hack. Two charges of felony and misdemeanor involving the American Exxxtasy hacks were dropped because of a lack of evidence.^[4]

6 Al-Manar

In August 2006, hackers working for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) hacked into the Al-Manar television station, the official broadcaster of Hezbollah. The IDF replaced Al-Manar’s broadcast with pictures of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The pictures were captioned with words like “Your day is coming, coming, coming.”

The IDF also transmitted pictures of dead Hezbollah fighters with captions like, “This is the photograph of a body of a member of Hezbollah’s special forces,” “Nasrallah lies: it is not us that is hiding our losses,” and “There are a large number of corpses like this on the ground and Nasrallah is hiding this truth.”^[5]

The photos of the dead fighters broadcasted to counter Hezbollah claims that it won the 2006 Lebanon War against Israel. Israel had actually bombed Al-Manar in an attempt to take it off the air during the war. However, the station somehow survived the bombing and continued broadcasting.

Israel also hacked several websites and radio stations belonging to Hezbollah around the time of the Al-Manar hack. In addition, it sent voice and text messages to Lebanese citizens informing them that its attacks were targeted at Hezbollah and not Lebanese civilians.

5 The Weather Channel

On April 18, 2019, someone hacked the Weather Channel. However, the perpetrator was more concerned with stopping the channel from running its regular programming than causing mischief. The hacker struck between 6:00 AM and 7:39 AM.

The Weather Channel was forced to air a recorded program throughout the hack. It later issued a statement saying that the hack was a “malicious software attack on the network.” Investigations later revealed that the incident was a ransomware attack. That is, the hacker wanted the station to pay him money before they could resume airing.^[6]

4 Channels 2 And 10

In November 2016, a hacker hijacked Israeli television stations Channels 2 and 10 on the same night. Both stations were transmitting the evening news when the hacker struck. He replaced their broadcasts with messages mocking Israel and suggesting that recent wildfires which had raged through Israel were God’s judgement on the nation.

Earlier that month, several parts of Israel were ravaged by wildfires that forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. Around 80,000 people were evacuated in the city of Haifa alone. There were suspicions that at least some of the fires were the handiwork of Palestinian or pro-Arab arsonists.

The hacker also transmitted images of Islamic religious areas and an audio of an Islamic call to prayer. The hack happened around the time the Knesset was deliberating before voting on a bill to ban loudspeakers in religious buildings. The bill affected every religion, but there were suspicions that it was targeted at Muslims.^[7]

3 KRTV

In February 2013, someone hacked KRTV, a station in Montana, during a broadcast of The Steve Wilkos Show. The perpetrator actually hacked into KRTV’s emergency alert system to warn viewers of an ongoing zombie invasion in Montana. The hacker claimed that zombies were leaving their graves and had already taken over parts of Montana. He advised viewers against approaching the undead assailants.

The warning was not taken seriously. Gawker later suggested it was probably an advert for The Walking Dead. However, the hack was real; investigations showed that the hacker had attempted to hack other television stations without success.^[8] His identity remains unknown.

2 KVOA

In February 2009, someone hacked KVOA in Tuscon, Arizona, during a live transmission of the Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The hack only affected viewers in Tucson who were watching the game on KVOA through Comcast.

The hacker replaced the game with 30 seconds of pornography featuring a couple engaged in what viewers called “a graphic act.” Interestingly, many people watching thought it was just another commercial until the couple, shall we say, went overboard. The video itself was from Club Jenna, an adult cable television channel.^[9]

Comcast was so embarrassed by the incident that it gave a $10 credit to 80,000 customers for free. Two years later, the FBI unveiled the hacker as one Frank Tanori Gonzalez. Gonzalez worked for Cox Cable at the time he hacked Comcast.

1 An ABC Affiliate In Wyoming

In 2006, someone supposedly hacked an unnamed ABC affiliate servicing Niobrara County, Wyoming. We say “supposedly” because details of the hack remain sketchy, raising doubts whether it even really happened.

The name of the station involved is a mystery, and there is limited information about the whole saga. The video that was supposedly aired during the hack definitely exists. However, its veracity is questionable. Nevertheless, people who say it happened call it “The Wyoming Incident” or “The Wyoming Hijacking.”

The hacker supposedly struck when he interrupted the evening news broadcast with a five-minute video of an animated head and several static texts. The first text contained the phrase “SPECIAL PRESENTATION.” Subsequent texts included “YOU ARE ILL . . . WE JUST WANT TO FIX YOU” and “YOU WILL SEE SUCH PRETTY THINGS.”

However, the hack gained infamy after viewers reportedly ended up with headaches, nausea, amnesia, and hallucinations after the hacker showed several strange pictures with an annoying tone. Some viewers also vomited on hearing the tone.

Some scientists think the broadcast wasn’t a hack or any sort of paranormal activity as some claimed. They say the tone that made people sick was likely created after some other signal interfered with their television signal. According to these scientists, the frequency of the tone was such that it caused hallucinations in those hearing it.^[10]

Rome was a beacon of civilization in a dark world. In the words of one of their own, Rome was “the seat of virtue, empire, and dignity,” ruled by laws so just that they could “surpass the libraries of all the philosophers.”

The Romans, though, had a different definition of “virtue” and “dignity” than we do today. Some of the laws the Romans were so proud of were a little bit strange, and some of them were outright insane.

10Wearing Purple Was A Crime

Purple, in ancient Rome, was viewed as the most dignified and majestic of all colors. The emperors would dress themselves up each morning in the finest of purple togas, and they looked so good in it that they wouldn’t let anyone wear it.

The law against wearing purple was a “sumptuary law,” a Roman law designed to keep lower classes from making extravagant displays of wealth. Romans wanted to be able to take one look at somebody and know their social standing, to make sure they didn’t go around accidentally being polite to peasants. These laws were strict. If you weren’t a citizen, you weren’t allowed to put on a toga.

Purple togas were reserved for the emperor, because purple dye was incredibly expensive. It had to be imported from Phoenicia, where they made the dye from mollusks. To make enough dye for one toga, they had to crush 10,000 mollusks, so a purple toga was literally worth its weight in gold.

9Women Were Forbidden From Crying At Funerals

A Roman funeral started with a procession, where people would walk your body down the street, weeping as they went. The more people you had weeping, the more popular people figured you were. So, to impress their neighbors, some people hired professionals to pretend to cry.

Women who didn’t even know the deceased would be paid to walk in the procession, literally ripping out their hair and scratching their own faces in make-believe sorrow as they went. It got so bad that they had to outlaw crying at Roman funerals, just to keep people from hiring actors.

8Fathers Could Murder Their Daughter’s Lovers

If a man caught his wife having an affair, he was encouraged to lock his wife and her lover up and call every neighbor he could to come see. He had 20 hours to call as many neighbors as he could and invite them to check out the guy his wife has been sleeping with.

He then had three days to make a public declaration describing where he found his wife, who was having sex with her, and any extra juicy details he could supply. He was also legally required to divorce his wife, or else he would be charged with pimping.

He could murder his wife’s lover if he was a slave or a prostitute. If it was a citizen, though, he would have to talk to his father-in-law. Fathers, in Rome, could legally murder their daughter’s lovers no matter how nice of a toga they wore.

If a woman caught her husband having an affair, pretty much the only thing she could legally do was cry about it. As long as there weren’t any funerals going on nearby.

7The Ultimate Punishment Was Drowning In A Sack Filled With Animals

If you did something sort of bad, you’d get away with a simple beheading. If it was really bad, they’d take you up to the roof of the prison and throw you off. And if you killed your own father, you were sentenced to something truly horrible.

If someone was found guilty of patricide, they were blindfolded and told that they were unworthy of light. They would then be taken to a field outside of the town, stripped naked, and beaten with rods. When you couldn’t take anymore, then put you in a sack, throw in one serpent, one dog, one ape, and one rooster, and you and your whole menagerie would all be sewn in there together and thrown into the sea.

6Prostitutes Were Required To Dye Their Hair Blonde

Roman ladies all had naturally black hair. Natural blondes, in Roman time, were barbarians, especially the Gauls. Since the prostitutes couldn’t be associated with the dignity of a proper Roman woman, they had to make themselves look like barbarians, so they made them dye their hair.

It didn’t totally work, though. Roman women were jealous of all these blonde barbarians. Some started dying their hair blonde, while others forcibly chopped the hair off of slaves to make them into wigs, and, once again, the high-class ladies were indistinguishable from prostitutes.

5Suicidal People Could Apply To The Senate For Permission

In some circumstances, committing suicide was just considered prudent thinking. Kings typically kept poison on hand in case things turned bad, and sick people would be encouraged to drink hemlock to put an end to their suffering.

The only people who couldn’t commit suicide were soldiers, slaves, and prisoners, and this was just for economic reasons. Soldiers were useful and couldn’t be allowed to quit. Criminals couldn’t be allowed to die before they were convicted because if they did, the state couldn’t seize their property. And if a slave committed suicide, the owner was often entitled to a full refund.

In one area, they even had a formalized system to request suicide. A depressed person could file a petition to the senate requesting death, and if the senate agreed they really were better off dead, they received a free bottle of poison.

4People Killed By Thunderbolts Couldn’t Be Buried

Lightning strikes, the Romans believed, were acts of god performed by Jupiter. If something got hit by a lightning bolt, it wasn’t bad luck. Jupiter just really hated it. Whether it was a tree or a person, Jupiter had decided it was time for it to go.

If it was your friend who got hit, you were legally forbidden to lift the body above the knees, and you definitely couldn’t bury his body. If you did, you’d stolen a sacrifice from Jupiter.

They let people make up for it, though. If you buried someone who got hit by a lightning bolt, the Romans would sacrifice you to Jupiter instead.

3Fathers Could Only Sell Their Sons Into Slavery Three Times

Fathers in Rome had the legal right to temporarily sell their kids. An agreement would be made between the father and a buyer, and the son would become the buyer’s possession. The buyer, as part of the bargain, was expected to bring the kid back home.

Anyone who sold their child into slavery three times, though, was considered an unfit father. Their child would have to finish his third session as a slave because a deal is a deal, but afterward, he would be legally emancipated from his parents.

The limit, though, was three sales into slavery per child. So if you’d already sold your eldest twice, you could always move on to the next kid.

2Women Had To Leave Home Three Days Each Year Or Become Property

Romans had a set rules they called “usuacpio,” which were laws on how long you had to possess something before it became your property. If you held onto anything long enough, it could become legally yours, including people.

Wives, legally, became their husbands’ property if they stayed in his house for one straight year. But if she really wanted her freedom, she could have it—as long as she left her house for three continuous days each year. So, every year in Rome, women would leave their homes and hide somewhere else for a few days, or else become possessions.

1Fathers Could Legally Murder Their Whole Families

In the early days of Rome, there was no limit to what a father could do to his family. He could dole out any degree of abuse he could imagine. That didn’t just mean he was allowed spanking: If his children misbehaved, he could straight up murder them.

Fathers held on to those rights even after their kids grew up. Daughters still had to fear their fathers after marriage, and his sons only earned independence when their fathers died.

In time, Rome relaxed these laws a little bit. The right to murder family members ended in the first century BC, although, even then, they kept a few exceptions. Now, the law said, fathers could only murder their sons if they’ve been convicted of a crime.

What better way is there to express your creativity and fun side than in your interior decorating? Below you can find images of 10 crazy places that are (or were) lived in and—presumably—loved. They may not be to everyone’s taste but they certainly make for compelling viewing!

10House of Sarcasm

We probably shouldn’t be surprised this place is in Portland. Known as the house of sarcasm this is definitely a crazy home. The owners, Mr and Mrs Charles Claringbold are psychic artists who also rent their place on AirBnb.

9 Casa Neverlandia, Austin

Owned by a hippie couple, Casa Neverlandia has been inspired by vision quests and other novel aspects of the owner’s lifestyle. James Talbot (owner) had a business building children’s playgrounds, and some of the aspects of his home reflect that.

8Nylo Hotel, Warwick Rhode Island

This is probably the least unusual property on the list and it is a hotel rather than a home, so when the novelty wears off you can get the hell out. The hotel is part of the Hilton Tapestry collection (3–4 star hotels).

7Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Home

Gaultier loves Breton Stripes and he has used them on many of his clothing items and even his men’s perfume bottles. He loves them so much that he had his minimalist home decorated in them. Breton stripes look great on a model. I’m not sure I can say the same for a room. Imagine this with a hangover!

6Snow White’s House, Washington

This one is so weird we had to include an exterior shot too. Recently on the market this fairy-tale house would no-doubt be a great place to raise kids. Not only do they get a fairytale home, there are no sharp edges to hurt themselves on!

5 Steampunk New York

What happens when you fuse retro with futurism? Steampunk! This New York loft apartment has been decked out entirely in steampunk style. Cool as it is I think the fun might dissipate pretty quickly once cleaning day arrives.

4 Nautilus House, Mexico

Designed by Javier Senosiain and clearly inspired by the shell of a nautilus. The house is very striking and definitely unique and would especially suit a family who enjoys the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

3 Palais Bulles—Lunar Palace

The Palais Bulles was designed by Antti Lovag but was later owned and lived in by the famed designer Pierre Cardin. It is valued at 350 million Euros but it is currently used as a hotel—so if you have an urge to stay in a bizarre home, look no further!

2 Verner Panton’s Home

Verner Panton was one of the great designers of the 20th century. Not surprisingly his house was an eclectic mix of his weird and wonderful taste. He actually used the house as a testbed for many of his ideas – so as weird as some may seem, he actually lived with them before he tried to sell them to others.

1 Vanderbilt Home

Admittedly this one is no longer being lived in by the Vanderbilts, but given the fame of Anderson Cooper from CNN, it seemed a worthy inclusion—especially as it’s rather creepy. This is the house in which Cooper (son of Gloria Vanderbilt) grew up. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

The past was far more disgusting than most of us realize. We’ve told you before about Pompeii’s trash can streets, medieval London’s otherworldly stink, and the appalling hygiene of the 18th century. But even these horrors have nothing on the various parasites and diseases of the past.

10 Exploding Teeth

Remember the last time that you had a bad toothache? Awful, wasn’t it? Now imagine that pain roughly 100 times worse. It’s so bad, in fact, that you lose touch with reality and start acting like a rabid dog. And your dentist has no way to help you.

That was the sort of toothache that a small number of patients encountered in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Luckily, the infected teeth had a simple method for curing themselves. They exploded.

In 1817, Reverend DA from Springfield suffered a toothache so bad that it made him act like “an enraged animal,” banging his head against the ground and biting a fence post to relieve his agony. But the pain kept getting worse.

One morning, the reverend’s wife heard a crack like a gunshot. Shortly after, her husband walked in and declared himself cured. His tooth had just exploded, sending calcium fragments flying across the room.

There are a handful of similar cases on record. Although the patient usually felt better after the infected tooth burst, the explosion could be damaging in itself. In 1871, one woman was nearly knocked off her feet by the blast, which was so loud that she briefly went deaf.

Cases of exploding teeth mysteriously stopped in the 1920s. It’s now thought that the mixture of metals used in old-time fillings may have caused cavities to occasionally fill with hydrogen, eventually leading to a miniature explosion.

9 Gigantic And Painful Intestinal Worms

Intestinal worms like tapeworms still affect people today. But these parasites are wimps compared to some worms observed in the 18th century. In 1782, an article in Medical Essays and Observations reported on a young man who passed a worm 0.5 meters (1.5 ft) long and 4.0 centimeters (1.5 in) thick. By “passed,” we mean that he had to get a friend to help him pull it out of his rear end.

Made up of earthworm-like joints and full of dark, sticky blood, the worm was like something out of a horror movie. It had a jaw like a duck’s bill, was dark chocolate in color, and had apparently been burrowing in the poor guy’s intestines for days. As it moved, it caused him excruciating pain. Whatever this monster was, it wasn’t a tapeworm.

A similar story from the 16th century is just as bad. Italian goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini recorded in his autobiography that he once vomited a worm that was 13 centimeters (5 in) long and covered with long, dark hairs. No one had any idea what the heck it was.

8 Dancing Plagues

Mass hysteria is when a group of people start doing something absurd on a grand scale with no rational explanation. Famous examples include the Loudun possessions and the Salem witch trials.

At certain times in history, mass hysteria has also intersected with medicine to create creepy, inexplicable “plagues.” One of the creepiest may be the dancing plague of 1518.

The plague began one hot July in Strasbourg when a woman began dancing in the street and didn’t stop. Ever. She was still dancing days later, apparently no longer in control of her body. At that point, things got weird. At least 100 other people started dancing and quickly discovered that they couldn’t stop, either.

According to old eyewitness accounts, the victims appeared to be terrified and begged those around them to make them stop dancing. Within a few short days, people were literally dancing themselves to death.

Luckily, the town had a bizarre but effective solution. It was decided that the plague’s victims just needed to dance the compulsion out of their systems. Halls and stages were set up for dancing, and musicians were hired to play 24/7. By September of that year, the dancers—whose number had swollen to 400—finally tired themselves out. The plague was over.

Although this was the last dancing plague in European history, it wasn’t the first. There had been at least 10 beforehand. In 1374, one of them engulfed what is now Belgium, Luxembourg, and most of northern France.

7 Bladder Beetles

There are certain things that no man ever wants to have happen to him. Hearing his doctor say the words “prostate cancer” is one of them. Another is having a living creature crawl out of the end of his penis. For one unfortunate man in 1838, that’s exactly what happened.

As reported in American Journal of the Medical Sciences, the 23-year-old victim was suffering from a urinary tract infection. After days of urinating blood and pus, he found himself unable to pee.

His agony was so great that doctors urgently sent for a catheter. Before it could get there, the problem sorted itself out in the worst possible way. A pea-sized object popped out of the guy’s penis, followed by a heavy discharge of pus and urine. When doctors examined the blockage, they discovered that it was a living beetle.

Terrifyingly, such cases were not unusual at the time. The former BBC journalist Thomas Morris has covered many of them on his gruesome blog. Apparently, one young boy peed out 16 slugs.

6 Sleepy Sickness

If you were to be mysteriously whisked back to 1918, there’s one disease that you’d probably try to avoid above all others. That was the year that the Spanish flu blasted its way across the globe, killing up to 50 million people—over twice as many as World War I. But that pandemic overshadowed one that was just as inexplicable and potentially freakier.

Although it was far less deadly than the Spanish flu—killing “only” one million people—sleepy sickness was horrifying. Officially known as encephalitis lethargica, scientists now believe that it was a reaction to a rare form of Streptococcus bacteria.

At the time, though, nobody knew what was happening. All they knew was that people were starting to fall asleep like they had narcolepsy. And some of them never woke up.

But they didn’t die. Some sufferers lapsed into coma-like states, unable to control their bodies and unable to wake up. Shunted into medical units, they still showed signs of brain activity, but they didn’t respond to stimuli.

Millions of people worldwide suffered this horrendous fate. Although some were “awakened” with drug treatments in 1969, many slipped back into their sleeping state after only a few weeks.

Scarily, the disease hasn’t entirely vanished. The odd case still crops up today, although another major outbreak seems extremely unlikely.

5 Eye Spiders

The words “eye spiders” alone are enough to give a significant number of people nightmares. Unfortunately for any arachnophobes reading this, the story behind that headline is even worse.

In 1840, Dr. Lopez of Alabama was called out on a gruesome case in Charleston. The previous night, his patient had felt something drop on her face while sleeping. The next morning, she woke up with a hideously swollen eye. When the eye was examined, a mucus-covered spider was found living in the cavity.

Incredibly, the horror story was only just beginning. A few days later, Dr. Lopez was called to see the woman again. More spiders had been discovered in her eye socket.

Over the next few weeks, Dr. Lopez visited her every morning. Each time, he extracted a tiny, mucus-coated spider from inside her eye. After two months of this, locals were convinced that the original spider had laid an egg sac behind her eyeball, causing this terrifying condition.

We’ve got good news for all you readers who are trying not to vomit. As Dr. Lopez soon realized, such a thing is basically impossible. It turned out that the woman was mentally ill and had been placing the spiders in her eye each morning, possibly as a means of getting attention.

Still, the 19th century was a fertile time for extracting animals from bodies. On his blog, Thomas Morris records the stories of a boy who vomited millipedes and another person who supposedly had a live mouse extracted from his intestine.

4 Ice Age Superbugs

Antibiotic-resistant bugs are a potential nightmare. Bacteria that can shrug off treatments have been around since 1947 and are growing in number. Commonly called superbugs, these Darwinian monsters could be what finally kill off modern humans.

Yet recent research has shown that these superbugs might not be so modern after all. There is evidence that they spent their formative years in what is now Canada, killing off our ancestors during the last ice age.

In 2011, Scientific American reported that antibiotic-resistant superbugs had been found buried deep in the ice outside Dawson City, Yukon. These tiny killers were at least 30,000 years old and hadn’t seen sunlight in millennia. Thousands of years before we humans figured out antibiotics, Actinobacteria had set up a defense system to stop us from killing them.

Of course, this made no difference to our ice age ancestors. Bugs killed them swiftly whether they were resistant to antibiotics or not. But if you ever go back in time via a DeLorean or a TARDIS, you might want to avoid prehistoric Canada.

3 Laughing Plagues

The dancing plague may have occurred centuries ago, but you don’t have to go too far back to find creepy instances of mass hysteria. In modern-day Tanzania, you would only need to take a time machine back to 1962 when the mainland was still called Tanganyika. That was the year that the laughing epidemic hit. One day, people suddenly started laughing. Months later, they still hadn’t stopped.

Like the dancing plague, the laughter epidemic was creepy because those affected apparently didn’t want to be laughing. People laughed so hard that they injured themselves. Entire schools were shut down, and whole villages were quarantined. When the plague vanished months later, 1,000 people had laughed themselves into illness.

Perhaps the creepiest part is how the symptoms were described. Those affected said that it felt like “things were moving about in their heads” and that they were being controlled by an alien force. However, just about every expert in the world now chalks the whole thing up to mass hysteria.

2 Vomiting Up A Fetus

In 1835, Dr. Ardoin, a French doctor living in Greece, recorded that a young boy named Demetrius Stamatelli had vomited up a fetus. This already disgusting sentence gets even worse when you realize that the dead baby spewed by Demetrius was probably his own twin.

Parasitic twins occur when one twin “absorbs” the other in the womb. Usually, the absorbed twin goes unnoticed until death. Occasionally, it has to be surgically removed if it starts to cause problems. The case in 1830s Greece is the only time on record that someone apparently vomited their twin.

The details of the case are utterly gruesome. Demetrius had abdominal pains so bad that he was at death’s door. It was only after a horrendous vomiting fit that his symptoms abated—after the dead twin was spewed out of his mouth. Apparently, it had been attached to the boy by some kind of umbilical cord. Dr. Ardoin seemed to find this horror show utterly fascinating.

1 The Plague Of Athens

Of all the gruesome and mysterious plagues that have racked human civilization over the centuries, none is more gruesome or mysterious than the Plague of Athens. Between 430 BC and 426 BC, the cradle of democracy was transformed from a serene place of ancient wisdom into a grand showcase of gore.

According to the only surviving eyewitness account (as related by Thucydides), those affected saw their eyeballs turn red, their tongues become bloody, their throats decay, and horrible ulcers pop up all over their bodies. If that wasn’t enough, death typically came after a horrendous bout of diarrhea.

It’s estimated that up to two-thirds of the Athenian population died this way, including some of the city-state’s greatest leaders and generals. Scarily, we’re still not sure what caused it. Many scientists believe that the Plague of Athens could be the earliest-known Ebola outbreak.

Yet that interpretation comes with issues because there was no other recorded outbreak between 426 BC and the 1970s. Others have suggested cholera, bubonic plague, typhoid, and even measles.

Much like NFL season tickets, or an ultra-expensive sports car, “a house by the beach” is one of those commonly desired albeit unobtainable luxuries. . . or is it? Thanks to SmartAsset crunching some numbers on various different aspects, we have managed to come up with the 17 cheapest beach towns in the entire country:

17. Deerfield Beach, Florida

Median cost of home: $124,900.00

Located between Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale, this city provides easy access to nearly all of South Florida. The beach itself is large and wide and is somehow never, ever too crowded. It includes some of the state’s best breweries such as 26 Degrees and Holy Mackerel.

16. Lake Worth, Florida

Median cost of home: $151,100

This place was once only populated by University of Miami football team recruits and old folks. Now downtown is dominated by culture and the arts. The city has numerous art galleries and holds one of the country’s largest street painting festivals. Stop in at the popular Mulligan’s Beach House, too.

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With advances in DNA techniques, the days of an impostor posing as a long-lost relative is all but over. Proving a familial relationship can be solved by a simple blood test.

See Also: Top 10 Influential People Who Never Lived

However, before DNA was heard of it was a much more subjective process, especially if a long period of time has passed. Identification relied on documents, which can be forged, and eye-witnesses who can be mistaken.

Or bribed.

Here are 10 impostors who tried to live a life that wasn’t theirs.

10Jeanne Calment

Jeanne Calment was known as the world’s oldest woman, dying at the ripe old age of 122. However, research by a group of Russian researchers suggests that Calment was, in actual fact, only 99.

According to a mathematician and a gerontologist (gerontology being the study of aging), the real Jeanne Calment died in 1934 at the age of 59. They believed that her daughter, Yvonne, assumed her mother’s identity in order to avoid paying large amounts of inheritance tax.

It is claimed, the mother was buried under the daughter’s name, and her death certificate was issued without confirmation from a doctor or coroner. Yvonne’s husband never remarried, and lived for many years with his ‘mother-in-law’.
Calment certainly looked good for her age, and bore a striking resemblance to her daughter in the few photographs that exist. Calment ordered that her personal papers be destroyed after her death.

The researchers interviewed Jeanne Calment and asked her questions about her childhood. While it is true that she made several errors, it was a long time ago. By the time of Jeanne’s death, in 1997, she was the longest-lived human by a considerable margin, having over 3 years on her closest rival.

Only an exhumation and DNA test can conclusively establish whether Jeanne Calment was really 122 when she died. Either way, mother and daughter are finally laid to rest together, and no one is willing to dig them up.^[1]

9 Roger Tichborne

Roger Tichborne was the eldest son in a wealthy Victorian family who was lost at sea when his ship sank in bad weather in the middle of the Atlantic. His mother refused to believe that he was dead and placed adverts in newspapers all over the world, seeking information.

Ten years passed, then Lady Tichborne received a letter from the long-lost heir in Australia. This man had an Australian accent, rather than the expected French. But, then, he had been away a long time. He was fatter than he had been, but his diet may have suffered without his home-cooked meals. He was also several inches shorter than Tichborne, which would, ordinarily, have been a deal breaker. However, Tichborne had had a particularly distinguishing, but not immediately obvious, characteristic—deformed genitals. An inspection showed that, in this respect at least, the claimant measured up. Lady Tichborne declared to be her son.

In order to reclaim his inheritance, Tichborne needed to prove his identity in court. At the trial, several witnesses claimed that Tichborne was, in fact Arthur Orton from Wapping. The case collapsed after Tichborne was asked about the contents of a sealed envelope that had been left in the care of his estate manager before he went away. Tichborne said it contained provisions in case the ‘high-born lady’ he was sleeping with turned out to be pregnant.

He guessed wrong.

The false Tichborne, who was never conclusively identified as Orton, or anyone else, was convicted on 32 counts of perjury, and sentenced to 14 years hard labor.^[2]

8 Perkin Warbeck

If you are going to impersonate someone, why not think big? This, presumably, must have been Perkin Warbeck’s thinking when he made his claim to be the rightful King of England.

Warbeck bore a passing resemblance to Edward IV, which may, or may not, have been a coincidence, but it lent credibility to Warbeck’s claim to be the Duke of York, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, imprisoned by dastardly King Richard II in the Tower, and therefore, the rightful king.

He found supporters for his cause, some of whom may have believed him. Many, however, were desperate for a legitimate reason to overthrow Henry VII who had deposed Richard to set up a new Tudor dynasty. If they could prove Warbeck’s claim before Henry became established as King, they might succeed.

In 1496, James IV of Scotland invaded England with Warbeck by his side, but they were quickly repelled. Warbeck organised several more invasions before being captured in 1497, when he surrendered to the King, and retracted his claim to the throne.

For a while, it seemed that Warbeck was forgiven. He was entertained at Henry’s court and even attended royal banquets, though he was kept under guard. However, when he tried to escape, he was captured and sent, perhaps for the second time, to the Tower of London, before being hanged in 1499.^[3]

7The False Dmitry

Dmitry, the youngest son of Czar Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, was supposed to have died in 1591, after cutting his own throat. Some, however, believed that he had been murdered by the usurper Boris Godunov, or that he had escaped.

Three other people came forward claiming to be a Dmitry who had escaped his assassins, but only one of the False Dmitrys, as they became known, went on to become Czar. In 1603, our Dmitry began to amass an army against Boris Godunov. Godunov declared that Dmitry was in fact, Grigory Otrepev, a runaway monk.
Dmitry began his uprising, just as Godunov died. Almost without opposition, Dmitry marched into Moscow as undisputed Czar. He ruled for a year, and was reasonably popular with his subjects.

Dmitry married in 1606, but in the middle of the wedding celebration, a riot broke out, and rebels stormed the Kremlin and killed the Czar.

Many people hoped that Dmitry had, once more, managed to escape his assassins, and a civil war was fought in his name, leading to several more hopefuls, with dreams of the Imperial Crown, to claim to be either the Original Dmitry, back from the dead, or the Back From the Dead Dmitry, back from the dead.

It can never be known for sure whether the body that was dumped in Red Square was really that of the son of Ivan the Terrible, but historians think that it is unlikely.^[4]

6 Paul Tagaris

Paul Palaiologos Tagaris was a Byzantine monk who claimed a royal lineage.

Tagaris got ordained as a priest in the Greek Orthodox church in Jerusalem in order to get away from his wife. He clearly had charisma, and, in respect of his royal heritage, was given a post of authority over bishops in Jerusalem. Whereupon, he sacked the bishops, and sold their sees.

He gave himself the title Patriarch of Jerusalem, and just before he was arrested, he fled to Rome, where he presented his credentials to the Pope, publicly confessed his sins, pledged his allegiance to the Catholic Church, was forgiven, and given the title of Latin Patriarch of Constantinople.

His epiphany seems to have been short lived, since it was not long before the clergy of his new diocese were complaining about the taxes he levied on them. He fled again, this time to Avignon where a rival pope sat, and confessed once more.
It didn’t last.

He returned to Constantinople, made a final dramatic confession, renounced Catholicism, and was again forgiven. It is not recorded whether this new epiphany was genuine, but the odds seem against it.^[5]

5James Reavis

James Reavis was a pragmatist. During the Civil War he enlisted with the Confederates and developed a profitable side-line, selling forged leave passes.

When he was about to get caught, he fled, and joined the Union army.

After the war, he began to fake land titles. He created a number of documents relating to his ‘ancestor’, who, apparently, worked for King of Spain, and had been appointed the Baron of Arizona. Along with the title, of course, the King presented Reavis’ forebear with a large parcel of land to be passed down the generations.

Which was handy.

Whilst waiting for his claim to be assessed, Reavis made a deal with a railroad company for access to the land, netting him a tidy fortune. He also sold quitclaims, selling titles for land he did not own.

When it looked like he may lose his claim, Reaves went to Spain ‘looking for evidence’. Soon after he visited an archive, documents would be discovered by the archivists. Though it was suspected he was planting documents, it could not be proved.

His land claim was eventually dismissed, and he was convicted of forgery, receiving a two-year sentence and a $5,000 fine.

Which seems rather lenient considering how much money he made from his cons.^[6]

4 Natalya Bilikhodze

In 2002, a press conference was called, and statement by video staked Natalya Bilikhodze’s claim to be Anastasia, the youngest child of Czar Nicholas II. Despite almost certainly being assassinated by Bolsheviks, 1918, the rumor has persisted she somehow escaped.

Though there have been many Anastasia claims, Natalya Bilikhodze’s will almost certainly be the last one. Anastasia would then have been 101.

Anastasia had been living in obscurity in Georgia, but a committee had been formed to prepare her ‘homecoming’ to Moscow. Although her exact location was kept secret, the committee’s chairman that they wanted to ‘restore the honorable name of Anastasia’.

Which is admirable, maybe.

They also wanted the billion-dollar Romanov inheritance to be handed over as soon as her identity was confirmed.

Ah.

While it may not come as a surprise that the Grand Duchess of the Romanovs was not, in fact, still alive, what was surprising, was that Natalya Bilikhodze wasn’t either. The video testimony of the ‘heiress’ had been made several years before, and Natalya herself had died 2 years earlier. She was buried without the benefit of a state funeral.

When this was discovered, the committee seemed to dissolve overnight, and the chairman lost interest in restoring Anastasia’s honor.^[7]

3 Martin Guerre

Probably the most famous impostor of all time, Martin Guerre was a peasant in 16th century France who married up. In 1548, he was accused of stealing from his own father, and absconded in the middle of the night.

For 6 years his wife was alone, unable to divorce him and unable to prove that he was dead, which was a difficult position for a woman at that time. So, when Martin suddenly reappeared, she was probably almost as relieved as she was angry.

Though some people doubted New Guerre’s identity, he did look a little like Old Guerre, in height and build, and he certainly seemed to remember them. New Guerre lived happily with his reunited family for 3 years, until he decided to sue his uncle for an inheritance that had passed him over during his absence.

Uncle Guerre was not a believer. When a passing stranger told him that the real Guerre had lost his leg and that New Guerre was a fraud, he investigated further, and discovered that Arnaud du Tilh, from a nearby village, was missing and looked a lot like New Guerre. After much persuasion, he convinced Martin Guerre’s wife to file a suit against him.

At the trial, Guerre’s wife gave evidence against him with reluctance. New Guerre challenged her to declare him a fraud, saying that if she did, he would willingly be executed. She stayed silent. Despite his wife’s refusal to condemn him the trial continued with over 150 witnesses to his identity called. Many affirmed that he was the Real Guerre, including Martin Guerre’s 4 sisters, and many declared him to be Amaud Du Tilh. In the confusion, Guerre was convicted, and sentenced to death.

New Guerre appealed, and his wife and uncle were arrested for perjury, with New Guerre testifying that his wife had been intimidated by his uncle. He was questioned in detail about his past and answered them all.

The judges were about to acquit him, when a man with a wooden leg turned up, claiming to be the Real Martin Guerre. This man, too, was questioned about his past, and his memory was found to be faulty at a number of points. Damningly, however, when New New Martin Guerre was presented to his wife, uncle and sisters, they all agreed instantly that he was the Real Martin Guerre.

Amaud du Tilh was convicted of fraud, and afterwards confessed that he had several times been mistaken for Guerre because of their likeness, and, on finding that there was an inheritance to be claimed, bribed people who had known the family to give him information.

Tilh was hanged in front of Martin Guerre’s house a few days later.^[8]

2 Mary Baynton

If you lived in a remote village in 16th Century England, and a stranger arrived professing herself to be the daughter of the king, you might a little nervous. If that king was Henry VIII, famous for his bad temper and tendency to chop off people’s heads, you might be very nervous.

So, when Princess Mary arrived unexpectedly in a village in Lincolnshire, no one was brave enough to challenge her identity. Princess Mary was, she claimed, the daughter of Henry and Katherine of Aragon, his first wife. She also told of a prophecy made by the Queen of France that Mary “would one day face great hardship”.

She was, she said, trying to make her way to Spain, where she would be safe. The place she had chosen to stay was, perhaps coincidentally, a region known for its sympathies towards Mary Tudor, whose future claim to the throne was being ignored.

She did solicit money for her escape, claiming that the king had abandoned her, but it is believed that the amounts she received were relatively small. It is probably also true that many people would have known that their ‘Princess Mary’ was not Mary Tudor, but they treated her as a kind of mascot for their cause.

Princess Mary was in fact, plain old Mary Baynton. In 1533, she was arrested and recanted her claim to royal status.

She was never heard from again. Unfortunately for Mary Baynton, and indeed for Mary Tudor, the aunt’s prophecy about one day facing great hardship, turned out to be true.^[9]

1 The Countess of Derwentwater

In 1857, a woman with the improbable name of Lady Amelia Matilda Mary Tudor Radcliffe filed a claim to the defunct state of Derwentwater. She was, she claimed, the granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Derwentwater who had died 120 years earlier, supposedly without an heir.

She said the Earl had abandoned his family during the Jacobite rebellion, and had faked his own death. The Countess provided a complete family tree to back her claim. Lady Amelia, as she was known to her friends, brought along documents, portraits, and even family jewels to support her claim to the land, which now belonged to the trustees of a hospital.

Her claim was dismissed.

Undeterred, Lady Amelia went to the press, and impressed many readers with her credibility. Many contributed money to ‘her cause’. In 1868, she broke into the ruined Derwentwater mansion, whilst dressed in royal-ish regalia, including the ‘sabre of her sires’ which was slung around her waist. She hoisted her family flag over the ruined tower and put the family portraits on the wall.

When the hospital evicted her, carrying her bodily from the building in front of the press and public, she set up camp on the road outside, attracting much sympathy for this ‘distressed gentlewoman’. Lady Amelia began to collect rent from ‘her tenants’ and even auctioned off property and livestock owned by the hospital.
The hospital sued, and she was fined £500 and the Countess was forced to sell off her family heirlooms to pay the debt.

Historians are certain that there never was a Countess of Derwentwater, and no one really knows who the impostor really was or where she came from. The heirlooms she sold turned out to be rather clumsy fakes and the family portraits had been painted by the ‘Countess’ herself.^[10]

Sometimes creative types just refuse to conform. And sometimes, you can’t just edit it out. Harmonious humping, political picture desecration, and aiding and abetting arson are just a few on-stage antics broadcast live to millions.

Whether shameless publicity stunts or poor spur-of-the-moment decisions, the ensuing controversies are often half the fun. In chronological order, here are ten things musicians have been caught in the act doing while doing their act.

Related: Top 10 Live Music Mess-Ups, Falls, And Fails

10 Holy Humpin’ Hound Dog

Elvis Presley’s self-titled debut album was released in March 1956, and by the middle of that year, he was well on his way to becoming The King. The smash-hit “Heartbreak Hotel” rocketed to #1 on the charts, and plans were in the works for his first movie. With the possible exception of cultural appropriation, Elvis could do no wrong.

Presley had already appeared on national television several times by June of that year, but it was his performance on The Milton Berle Show that brought his career’s first full-blown controversy. Despite the date being a Tuesday, for Elvis, it was hump day.

Performing his latest single, “Hound Dog,” Presley pumped and thrust his way across the stage at a time when sitcom married couples slept in separate beds. Careful there, fella, or you might catch something far worse than a rabbit.

Critics across the country slammed the performance for its “vulgarity,” “appalling lack of musicality,” and—oddly considering the song’s title—”animalism.” The official magazine of the Catholic Church’s Jesuit sect ran a piece called “Beware Elvis Presley,” which in retrospect seems like deflection.

In the aftermath, Ed Sullivan, already TV’s most popular variety show host, declared he’d never have Presley on. By August, though, he relented and signed the poke-happy performer to an unprecedented $50,000, three-show contract. However, the performances’ camera angles were tightly controlled, keeping a sexually safe distance—and only above the waist.

9 High Times: The Doors Do Ed Sullivan

Three years after The Beatles sang three catchy-but-banal songs on The Ed Sullivan Show (“She Loves You,” “All My Loving,” and “Till There Was You”), both rock and rock lyrics had significantly matured. But ol’ Ed wasn’t having it.

On September 17, 1967, The Doors were invited to perform their hit “Light My Fire” from the band’s self-titled debut album. They were popular, yes, but hadn’t cemented their envelope-pushing legacy just yet, and likely Sullivan had never heard of them until he glanced at the pre-show guest list.

Someone apparently alerted Sullivan to an arguably controversial line in the song: “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” a double entendre alluding to both happiness and drug use. A firm believer that there’s no hope in dope, Sullivan personally visited the band’s dressing room before the show and demanded that “higher” be changed to “better”—which, of course, doesn’t even come close to rhyming with “fire.”

Frontman Jim Morrison agreed…then sang the original lyrics anyway. Sullivan, who had a history of censoring acts he considered racy (including the aforementioned Presley), banned The Doors for life.

8 To Heel with It: Madonna’s Improper Improv

In 1984, the then-fledgling MTV Network hosted its first annual Music Video Awards. The show opened with a showstopper: Madonna, already a superstar, kicked off the evening performing her smash hit, “Like a Virgin.”

The set featured a traditionally virgin scene: A wedding-dress-clad Madonna atop a giant wedding cake. A little parade float-ish, but okay. The beat started, and Madonna began crooning. Then…her shoe fell off.

That’s right: television’s steamiest, sexiest live performance to date was precipitated by a dropped high heel. To make the mistake seem planned, Madonna promptly kicked off the other. Then, as the song progressed, she descended the cake to stage level. There, she realized the only way to make retrieving her shoes look natural was to crawl around on the ground.

Decades later, Madonna shared her thinking with talk show host Jay Leno: “So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just pretend I meant to do this,’ and I dove on the floor, and I rolled around.”

Her dress stuck to the floor, exposing her undergarments. Only then did Madonna make an active choice to lean into controversy. Instead of reverting to her rehearsed routine, she thrust and gyrated her way across the stage in a pantomimed portrayal of what “touched for the very first time” means.

Many—even her own manager—thought Madonna had just ruined her blossoming career. Yet, four decades later, she’s sold more records than any other female artist.

7 Out of Sync: Milli Vanilli’s Downfall

In the end, a pair of fakers had no one to blame their comeuppance on. Not even the rain.

In 1990, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan—better known as the pop duo Milli Vanilli—took home the Grammy for Best New Artist. One reason for this was the unimpressive competition; the most prominent also-ran was Tone Loc, of the female-tested and Bill Cosby-approved “Funky Cold Medina.”

Another reason is that despite the embarrassing live performance we’ll discuss shortly, the Grammys had never really penalized live lip-syncing. Especially as music acts incorporated increasingly complicated dance moves, pre-recording live performances wasn’t considered a critical dealbreaker.

But sometimes, a screwup leads to a spiral. On July 21, 1989, during an MTV Concerts performance of the hit song “Girl You Know It’s True,” a record skipped and repeated, blaring the line “Girl you know it’s” over and over. Milli or Vanilli (who the hell knows which was which) panicked and ran offstage.

Temporary hiccup, right? Wrong. In the ensuing months, suspicions mounted that the duo was not only lip-syncing live music but also that the voices weren’t even their own. Say it isn’t true, girl. The two were revealed as nothing more than pretty poster boys and were summarily stripped of their award—the only take-back-sie in Grammy history.

6 Let Her Rip

Irish singer Sinead O’Connor is best known for two things. The first is 1990’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a ballad that has graced several “Top 100 All Time” lists. When Prince remakes your song, as he did in 1993, you’re doing something right.

O’Connor’s second claim to fame, however, was far more controversial. In hindsight, however, many find it prescient.

In October 1992, O’Connor was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Her second song was an a cappella ballad disparaging racism and abuse. She then picked up a photo of Pope John Paul II, exclaimed, “Fight the real enemy,” and tore the picture in half on live television.

At the time, O’Connor claimed the act was to protest the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church—an accusation that has been broadly substantiated in the three decades since. Many Catholic higher-ups deserved a hell of a lot more than bad publicity.

Regardless, the backlash was fierce. Not only SNL but its network, NBC, banned O’Connor for life, and she was booed offstage at a Bob Dylan tribute. The highest-profile dis came the following week on SNL when guest host Joe Pesci taped the photo back together and threatened to smack O’Connor in a monologue that doesn’t age particularly well.

5 The Least Surprising Band Ban Ever

What do you get when you cross a conservative presidential candidate with an anarchist hard rock musical act? The most predictably controversial performance of all time, that’s what.

On April 13, 1996, billionaire businessman and recent Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes hosted Saturday Night Live. It was an odd choice because Forbes was neither charismatic nor a realistic contender for the White House. The musical guest was even odder: Rage Against the Machine was scheduled to play a pair of songs from their recently released album, Evil Empire. Um…red flag?

Anyone remotely familiar with RATM knew the album’s title didn’t allude to Russia or Nazi Germany. So Rage did what Rage does. They played an absolutely kick-ass rendition of Evil Empire’s lead single, “Bulls on Parade,” whose lyrics refer to the Pentagon, the seat of the U.S. military, as “that five-sided fist-a-gon, that rotten sore on the face of Mother Earth.”

Politics aside, this was a terrific live band performing one of their best son…wait, is that an upside-down American flag hanging from the amplifier?

Yup—though you’ll have to take our word for it because the show’s stagehands removed them quickly, and online video crops the display. Not only was RATM banned for life from SNL, but they also weren’t even allowed to play their second scheduled song that evening.

4 From Red Hot to Too Hot

Thirty years after the most iconic music festival of the 20th Century, Woodstock ’99 was billed as a revival of its predecessor’s celebration of peace, love, and music. In fact, the original Woodstock’s co-founder, Michael Lang, was the brainchild of the end-of-the-millennium sequel. So, what could go wrong, right?

Well, pretty much everything. Turns out transparently recreated nostalgia, huge crowds, and price-gouging aren’t the best mix. At Woodstock ’99, fans who shelled out $150 ($250 in today’s money) for the three-day festival found more than their favorite bands. They found $5 hot dogs, $20 tee shirts, and—worst of all, considering the weekend’s searing heat—$4 bottles of water. MTV broadcast the concert live…on Pay-Per-View, at $60 a pop. How festive.

Making matters worse, on Day #2, the portable toilets began to overflow, covering the ground in human waste. Then, as temperatures approached 38°C (100°F) with little shade and ridiculously overpriced beverages, the crowd began to crack. What would eventually turn into a full-scale riot started out as a few isolated fires, as pissed-off fans literally burned off some energy, setting trash cans ablaze.

Then, the Red Hot Chili Peppers came on and broke into a rendition of…you guessed it, Jimi Hendrix’s classic, “(Let Me Stand Next to Your) Fire.” After that, the number of conflagrations grew exponentially, chaos quickly ensued, and here’s some fun footage of Gen X going apeshit.

3 Eminem’s Same-Sex Partner

Hip-hop and the LGBTQ community have never exactly gone hand in hand. As the genre emerged, some of rap’s best artists—Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z—frequently dropped “the other f word” (rhymes with “maggot”) as a general putdown. In 1992, Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self” dedicated an entire verse to an incarcerated rival becoming a prison queen.

One rapper, however, took gay-bashing to another level. In 2000, Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP, considered one of the best rap records of all time. One track in particular, “Criminal,” took hip-hop homophobia to new heights: “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge, that’ll stab you in the head whether you’re a f*g or lez. Or a homosex, hermaph or a tranves. So pants or dress, ‘hate f*gs?’ the answer’s ‘yes.’”

Ouch. The uproar was both immediate and understandable. The Grammys faced a conundrum: the odds-on favorite to win Best Rap Album was a PR nightmare.

Eminem was just as skeptical. “I was like, ‘The only way I’ll perform at the Grammys is with Elton John,’” he later told MTV News. “And I was saying it in kind of jest, thinking it would never happen.”

But happen it did. Elton John played piano and sang the hook to the smash hit “Stan,” an eerie anthem chronicling an obsessed fan. The song ended, the crowd erupted, and Eminem saluted the viewing audience with a double middle finger.

2 The Nip Slip Seen ‘Round the World

On February 1, 2004, the Super Bowl XXXVIII Halftime Show featured Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, who were dating at the time. As the NSYNC alumnus belted out the last line of his hit song “Dance With Me”—a promise to “have you naked by the end of this song”—he put his hand where his mouth was by tearing a section from Jackson’s shirt. Briefly, the viewing audience of 150 million saw her exposed right breast, albeit with tape over the nipple.

Kiddies, meet t*tties. So much for a family-friendly environment.

Soon, Jackson’s manager released a statement about the nascent Nipplegate: “[Timberlake] was supposed to pull away [Jackson’s] rubber bustier to reveal a red lace bra. The garment collapsed, and her breast was accidentally revealed.” The phrase “wardrobe malfunction” then entered the lexicon.

MTV, who produced the halftime show, wasn’t buying it. Its own statement: “The tearing of Janet Jackson’s costume was unrehearsed, unplanned, completely unintentional and was inconsistent with assurances we had about the content of the performance.” The media largely sided with MTV’s version, declaring the act a shameless publicity stunt.

Jackson’s singles and music videos were subsequently blacklisted from various Viacom Media holdings, including the CBS Network, MTV, and the Infinity Broadcasting radio station group. A likely nod to racism, sexism, or both, Timberlake suffered no such backlash despite being the one who did the nip rippin’ in the first place.

1 A Bad Girl on a Bad Song: M.I.A. Outdoes Madonna

Madonna is making her second appearance on this list, but this time, the Material Girl is really just a material witness. In 2012, Madonna was tapped to perform the Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show. Not exactly a target audience match, but her career credentials were undeniable.

Unfortunately for hundreds of millions of eardrums, among the songs Madonna performed was “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” the awful first single from her awful 2012 album, MDNA. Come on, lady…you have 12 #1 hits to your name, and we get this drivel?

The song’s lone bright spots are rap features from Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., two highly talented performers who also served to make the show more current. Minaj has several Grammy nominations to her credit, while M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” is routinely ranked among the best songs of the 21st Century.

Minaj’s cameo went off without a hitch. M.I.A.’s? Not so much. The “Bad Girls” singer wrapped up her appearance by brandishing a middle finger to the international viewing audience.

The NFL sued M.I.A. for breach of contract for—and I quote—”tarnishing the goodwill and reputation” of a league that brought the world such role models as dog-murderer Michael Vick and human-murderer Aaron Hernandez. M.I.A. ridiculed the league for its insincere virtue signaling.

Performance art is known for many things, and weirdness is definitely one of them. While this list of weird live art looks at the (sometimes bizarre) inner-workings of artists’ minds, we’re steering clear of the blatantly offensive and inflammatory works that the art form is often cited for.

Instead, we’re looking at “the weird” as an expression of an artist’s creativity and emotion. In one definition of performance art, it’s characterized as “[a] live artistic practice that evolved as artists sought to extend art beyond conventional media,” and this tells us that the very nature of this art form is expressive.

These 10 live art performances were created as a means to break free from the confines of censorship and tradition, in turn allowing for potentially infinite experiences and ways of expressing oneself.

Related: 10 Artists With Insanely Unique Art Forms

10 Butoh

Butoh is a Japanese contemporary performance art that started in the late 1950s. It was developed by the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata following the end of WW2. At the time, art movements like French Surrealism and Dadaism were coming to Japan and influencing perspectives on traditional Japanese performance art.

Butoh started as “anti-traditional” and “anti-establishment” in nature, rejecting more traditional movements focused on strength and conformity. Instead, Butoh “resonates with weakness.” Some practitioners say that this movement resembled mercury poisoning, a major problem in post-war Japan.

What is thought to be the first presentation of Butoh, called “Forbidden Colours,” was an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Mishima Yukio. The performance starred Yoshito Ohno alongside Hijikata.

9 Parade (1917) by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau

This ballet was originally performed in 1917 by Ballet Russe and recreated by Europa Danse for the modern stage. Not only was it created by French composer and pianist Erik Satie, alongside the French poet Jean Cocteau but the costumes and sets were also designed by none other than Pablo Picasso.

Considering that the ballet is notoriously strict and traditional, Picasso’s extreme costumes, including a two-person horse, were heavily criticized by viewers. The dancers were constricted in their movements due to the shape and size of Picasso’s designs, making the performance very different from what 1917 audiences would have been used to.

This was Satie’s first ballet and first time working with Picasso. The ballet was poorly received by critics and audiences alike, with the premier even causing the audience to riot. Rumour has it that Satie was even slapped by an infuriated audience member following the show.

8 Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneemann

The first performance of Interior Scroll was In 1975, during the Women Here and Now exhibition in New York. Multidisciplinary artist, Carolee Schneemann, climbed on a table dressed in nothing but two sheets, undressed, painted her naked body. Then she read from her book Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (which would be published the following year) and then pulled a scroll of feminist discourse out of her vagina.

This performance was repeated one other time during the 1977 Telluride Film Festival. Although she was invited to simply introduce a collection of erotic films made by women, upon arrival, Schneemann chose to perform Interior Scroll due to her frustration with the way the collection was titled.

7 Gavin Krastin’s BODY/BAG

Gavin Krastin is a South African choreographer, curator, and performance artist that proudly represents the LGBTQ+ community. He is known for his extreme and out-there performance art, self-describing his work as prompting the audience to question what is ugly and what is beautiful.

His work, BODY/BAG, is supposedly a commentary on race and politics. However, he doesn’t go much into detail about what exactly that means. This performance and EPOXY (2016) both involved vacuum-sealing his naked body in a human-sized plastic bag.

Some of his other works involve having someone eat food off of his naked body, attaching himself to a chair and dancing, and filling his lips with clothespins while holding a pig’s head.

6 Payau #2 Waterproof

Payau #2 Waterproof is a dance performance choreographed by Jakarta Institute of Arts (IKJ) alumna Yola Yulifianti. It was performed at the 2012 Indonesia Dance Festival as the main piece for the entire festival. It consists of movement choreographed to the beat of dripping water and a dance solo where the dancer has a pink bucket on their head while they perform.

Yulifianti’s choreography examines the social problems within communities, and Payau #2 Waterproof is no exception. This piece was created through the process of working with the people of Penjaringan, North Jakarta, Indonesia.

5 Allan Kaprow’s Yard (1961)

Legendary performance artist, Allan Kaprow, created an interactive art piece given the title Yard in 1961. The work consisted of filling a space in the Martha Jackson Gallery with tires from cars, as well as other objects covered in tar paper. The audience would then climb up the tires and move them around freely.

Kaprow is known for pioneering the performance art term known as “Happenings.” The Routledge Performance Archive describes Happenings as “cross disciplinary non-text-based events that utilize all media and means at an artist’s disposal, often from outside the maker’s own field, to blur boundaries between art and life.”

In 2009, three artists would recreate Yard as an event celebrating the opening of the New York Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

4 Bobby Baker’s Cook Dems (1990)

Bobby Baker is a British performance artist that uses food as a vessel for her art. Some of her more famous shows, notably Kitchen Show and Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, are known for their sarcastic and witty commentaries on gender roles and running a household. Yet, it is in her performance of Cook Dems that she truly embraces her art’s weirdness.

In a later performance titled How to Live (2004), Baker takes a frozen pea through an 11-step recovery program modeled after the cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) programs that she had gone through herself in the latter part of the 1990s. In an interview for the Guardian, Baker opens up about her struggles with her mental health, self-harm, and even her stay at the Pine Street psychiatric hospital.

Cook Dems is performed in front of a live audience and includes Bobby Baker decorating a man in a speedo like he is a cake. The man stands there, emotionless, following Baker’s commands, as she paints him and smears icing on him.

3 Lukas Avendaño

The art of Lukas Avendaño is an experience that cannot be described in mere words. It is a live performance involving dance, movement, sound, and props. Avendaño is an Oaxaca-born, Muxe artist and anthropologist that explores themes of sexuality, gender, and Muxe identity through their work. Much of Avendaño’s work involves partial nudity, with the body being the vessel for expression.

According to Siwarmyu, “Muxes are a community of indigenous people who are assigned male at birth and take on traditional women’s roles presenting not as women but as muxes.” Moreover, Muxe is a gender that is particular to Be’ena’ Za’a (Zapotec) culture.

2 Wafaa Bilal’s …and Counting (2010)

Wafaa Bilal is a well-known Iraqi-American performance artist and art professor. Following the death of his brother Haji at the hands of a missile in Kufa, Iraq, Bilal started exploring the pain and trauma of war in his work. Other works of Bilal’s, including 3rdi, where he had a camera surgically implanted into the back of his head, are intended to create a conversation about the state of American surveillance.

In his 24-hour performance piece called “…and Counting,” Bilal is tattooed for a collection of visitors at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. Not only was this a performance piece, but it also raised $105,000 US to be used as scholarships for Iraqi and American students that lost families in the war.

1 Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P.

Senga Nengudi is an African-American visual artist with a very long and impressive career. According to MOMA, her career began along with a collection of other black avant-garde artists from New York and Los Angeles throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She worked in famous galleries such as Just Above Midtown (JAM), as well as the Pearl C. Woods Gallery in LA, paving the way for future black women in visual and performance arts.

R.S.V.P. is a series of performances and installations using “previously worn, dark-hued pantyhose partially knotted into pendulous, sand-filled sacks, then stretched and tethered to the wall in various changing arrangements.” These installations then become vessels for performance, where Nengundi and collaborators like Maren Hassinger entangle themselves in and interact with the pantyhose.

Honorable Mentions

Unfortunately, we had to narrow this list down to just ten, but here are some honorable mentions that just about made the cut (if only to keep this as family-friendly as possible):

• Pope L. performing Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000)
• Cabaret Voltaire (1916) by Various Artists
• Trans-fixed (1974) by Chris Burden
• Self Obliteration by Ron Athey
• Testicle Banquet (2012) by Mao Sugiyama
• Rhythm 5 by Marina Abramović