When it comes to diss tracks, the genres of rap and hip-hop dominate, with rap battles being a standard part of those musical cultures. But musicians from other genres do occasionally dip their toes into the musical fight. Here are the stories behind 10 savage songs from other genres—some of which you might not have even known were personal attacks.

Related: Top 10 ’90s Songs You Didn’t Realize Were So Heartbreaking

10 “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 hit song “Sweet Home Alabama” was written in response to Neil Young slandering the southern American states in his songs “Southern Man” and “Alabama.” Not only is the song a retaliation, but Young is even name-checked in the lyrics: “Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her / Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down.” Lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant later told Rolling Stone, “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two.”

Instead of firing back, Neil Young actually admitted in his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace (2012) that “My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.”^[1]

9 “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” by Queen

Freddie Mercury has pure venom in his voice when singing “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” from Queen’s 1975 album A Night at the Opera. Although who exactly the song is dedicated to isn’t mentioned in the lyrics, it’s known to be about Queen’s former manager, Norman Sheffield.

The opening lines are about Sheffield withholding money from the band: “You suck my blood like a leech / You break the law and you breach / Screw my brain ’til it hurts / You’ve taken all my money—you still want more.” Apparently, Roger Taylor was even told that he shouldn’t play his drums too vigorously because there wasn’t enough money to buy new drumsticks, yet Sheffield was being driven around in a limo.

Despite not being named, Sheffield was so angered by the lyrics that he sued Queen for defamation, a move which outed him as the target of the song. Sheffield has denied that he mistreated the band, telling his side of the story in his 2013 autobiography Life on Two Legs: Set the Record Straight.^[2]

8 “Teenage Wildlife” by David Bowie

Although the target of David Bowie’s “Teenage Wildlife” (1980) isn’t certain, the general consensus is that it’s Gary Numan, with Bowie calling him “one of the new wave boys / Same old thing in brand new drag.” This speculation was partly fueled by an interview Bowie gave at the time where he criticized the younger musician: “What Numan did he did excellently but in repetition, in the same information coming over again and again, once you’ve heard one piece.”

Numan was aware of Bowie’s animosity toward him, saying in an interview with Uncut that he was booted from the Kenny Everett show at Bowie’s request. “I think he saw people like me as little upstarts,” Numan commented. For Bowie’s part, he never acknowledged the song as being about Numan, instead saying, “I guess it would be addressed to a mythical teenage brother if I had one, or maybe my latter-day adolescent self, trying to correct those things one thinks one’s done wrong.”^[3]

7 “Cry Me a River” by Justin Timberlake

For years, it was assumed—but not confirmed—that Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” (2002) was about the breakdown of his relationship with Britney Spears, with the song pinning the blame on her for cheating: “You don’t have to say, what you did / I already know, I found out from him.” It wasn’t until 2011 that Timbaland, one of the song’s producers, finally confirmed that Spears was indeed the target of the track.

Spears may have responded with her 2003 single “Everytime,” but she then overtly commented on their breakup and Timberlake’s song in her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me. She admits to once kissing choreographer Wade Robson but writes that Timberlake had already cheated on her multiple times. “There were a couple of times during our relationship when I knew Justin had cheated on me,” she explains, before saying that she let it go “because I was so infatuated and so in love.”^[4]

6 “Bad Blood” by Taylor Swift

In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Taylor Swift said that “Bad Blood” was about a fellow female artist. She didn’t name names but said that they became enemies after the singer “basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me.” The day after, Swift’s one-time friend Katy Perry tweeted, “Watch out for the Regina George in sheep’s clothing…,” leading to obvious speculation that she was the target of the diss track.

The two traded veiled barbs in interviews, and then in 2017, Perry seemed to drop her own diss track, “Swish Swish,” which included pointed lyrics such as “A tiger don’t lose no sleep / Don’t need opinions / From a shellfish or a sheep.” Soon afterward, while on James Corden’s Late Late Show, Perry gave more details about the beef, saying it was because three of Swift’s backup dancers left her tour to work with Perry instead.

By 2019, the two stars had made up and left their drama in the past, with the pair publicly reconciling on social media and even sharing a hug in the music video for Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down.”^[5]

5 “Rockin’ the Suburbs” by Ben Folds

Thanks to its parody styling, Ben Folds’s “Rockin’ the Suburbs” doesn’t have the mean personal edge of most diss tracks. The satirical song takes aim at the angry rock music made by bands like Korn and Rage Against the Machine, opening with the lyrics, “Let me tell y’all what it’s like / Being male, middle-class, and white / It’s a bitch if you don’t believe / Listen up to my new CD.”

Folds said that he was “taking the piss of the whole scene” and that he decided not to namedrop in the lyrics because “it wasn’t as funny when I directed it at somebody.” There are some visual references in the song’s music video, though. At one point, he mimics Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst by wearing his trademark New York Yankees cap—backward, of course. At the end of the video, there’s also a clear nod to Korn’s music video for “Freak on a Leash,” with Folds playing in front of a hole-punched black background that allows light to dramatically stream through.^[6]

4 “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani

Courtney Love has inspired her fair share of diss tracks, from “I’ll Stick Around” by Foo Fighters to “Starf*ckers, Inc.” by Nine Inch Nails. But the highest charting song about the grunge singer is Gwen Stefani’s No. 1 hit “Hollaback Girl” (2005). Although Stefani didn’t mention Love’s name, in an NME interview shortly afterward, she said, “Someone one time called me a cheerleader, negatively, and I’ve never been a cheerleader. So I was, like, ‘OK, f*ck you. You want me to be a cheerleader? Well, I will be one then. And I’ll rule the whole world, just you watch me.’”

Just one year earlier, in an interview with Seventeen magazine, Love commented, “Being famous is just like being in high school. But I’m not interested in being the cheerleader. I’m not interested in being Gwen Stefani. She’s the cheerleader, and I’m out in the smoker shed.” In a nod to this comment, the lyrics and music video of “Hollaback Girl” lean into high school imagery.^[7]

3 “How Do You Sleep?” by John Lennon

After the breakup of The Beatles, the former band members traded numerous diss tracks. One of the first was George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah” (1970), which reflected on the tensions between Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 album Ram also included multiple swipes at Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 1984, McCartney admitted that “Too Many People” was written because Lennon had “been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit.”

Although the digs aren’t particularly pointed, Lennon picked up on them and decided to write a far more obvious diss track with “How Do You Sleep?” The lyrics sharply comment on McCartney associating with sycophants (“You live with straights who tell you you was king”) and not having written anything good since their 1965 hit “Yesterday” (“The only thing you done was yesterday”). Lennon even makes reference to the conspiracy theory that McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced with a lookalike: “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead.” Damn!^[8]

2 “Get in the Ring” by Guns N’ Roses

When Guns N’ Roses were penning “Get in the Ring,” they decided to namedrop as hard as humanely possible. The song is an attack on music critics, but instead of merely leaving it at “all you punks in the press, that want to start sh*t by printing lies instead of the things we said,” Axl Rose also listed specific people. “Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr. at Spin.”

The bad blood between the band and journalists was sparked when Guns N’ Roses started demanding creative control over interviews. The media turned on them, with Guccione printing that the band was “drug-addicted, paranoid, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, ruthless, violent, a threat to the liberty of the press, and a pain in the ass to almost everyone.” After the release of “Get in the Ring,” Guccione happily accepted the challenge of a physical fight, but Axl backed down.^[9]

1 “Obsessed” by Mariah Carey

The feud between Mariah Carey and Eminem started with his insistence that they briefly dated in 2001, which Carey says is a lie. They traded minor musical jabs shortly afterward, but things didn’t really heat up until Eminem released “Bagpipes from Baghdad” in 2009, which included lines such as “Mariah, what’s ever happened to us, why did we have to break up?”

Just one month later, Mariah released her own diss track, “Obsessed,” which was accompanied by a music video of the pop star being stalked by an Eminem lookalike—with the addition of a goatee—played by herself. Both Carey and Nick Cannon, her then-husband, denied that the stalker was styled to look like Eminem, with Carey saying, “All the speculation about who I’m playing in the video, it’s not accurate.” And Cannon claimed the song was inspired by a line from Mean Girls (2004).

However, the rapper clearly saw the connection, responding with “The Warning,” where he says, “I’m obsessed now, oh gee / Is that supposed to be me in the video with the goatee? / Wow Mariah, didn’t expect ya to go balls out.”^[10]

South America is widely considered to house some of the most incredible and most dangerous wildlife on the planet. While the former is certainly true, the latter may be overstated somewhat, as we’ll promptly examine today.

This, though, isn’t to say that being careful is wrong; wild animals will always pose a threat and some on this list have seriously injured or even killed people. What’s also true, however, is that their reputation is almost always worse than the reality and they’re not an imminent threat to constantly worry about, especially not when basic precautions are taken.

10 Eerily Well-Preserved Remains Of Extinct Animals

10 Most Caimans

Caimans are typically small sized crocodilians of the family Alligatoridae, composing one of the only two subfamilies within that, the other being alligators. Given this, it’s no surprise people are afraid of them, especially when the aforementioned small size is often greatly exaggerated.

As all crocodilians, they do still pose a threat, especially the species Melanosuchus niger, known by its common name as the black caiman, one of the largest crocodilians in the world, responsible for a horribly tragic fatal attack on a small child. You might ask, why are they on the list of animals that are less dangerous than their reputation, then?

The answer mostly boils down to looking at caimans as a whole versus just a single species. While the black caiman is dangerous to children especially, even its attacks are relatively rare, and a lot of other caiman species that are virtually harmless as long as they’re left alone get grouped in alongside Melanosuchus niger. As always, being careful is important, but a single outlier doesn’t make a whole, diverse group of species all dangerous monsters. Most caimans are small, largely nocturnal animals that care way more for fish than people.

9 Green Anaconda

The heaviest extant snake in the whole world, nearly the longest too, that’s got to be one dangerous animal, right? To its prey, absolutely. To humans? No, not really.

A truly incredible snake, the green anaconda may be as heavy as 70 kilograms which equates to a whopping 155 pounds and reach a length of over six metres, or 20 feet. While it’s nonvenomous, like all boas, it famously constricts its prey, swallowing it whole.

While this is all true, and certainly paints a scary image in one’s mind, the green anaconda rarely eats prey as large as humans, as massive as this snake may be. In films and popculture it famously has the reputation of being a man-eater, but in reality, such attacks are extremely rare and largely undocumented.

Even discounting a person’s size, though these snakes have incredibly varied diets, humans are simply not a source of food green anacondas seem to be interested in. There’s no doubt that an adult female of the species could kill a person if it wanted to, it really doesn’t seem like most wild specimens have any desire to do so. As usual, take care and avoid approaching or touching one, but as long as you’re careful you’ll be alright.

8 Piranha

Massive amounts of carnivorous fish moving in groups and capable of devouring a person or large animal in mere seconds, what’s not dangerous about that? The answer to that is; the non-exaggerated version.

Piranhas are indeed fish that move in groups called shoals, but in actuality they’re omnivorous and scientists believe that their formed groups are more for their own protection than anything. Additionally, yes, you’ve read that correctly, these famously or perhaps infamously vicious fish are actually omnivores and their diets typically consist of more vegetable matter than meat.

They do still eat meat, however, and have an incredibly powerful bite force, but even the famous example of a shoal of piranhas devouring a large carcass originates from nothing more than a former American president’s journal. Their bite is powerful, yes, and they may be able to devour an animal quite quickly, but they aren’t thought to represent a serious risks to humans and even the ideas that have some basis in reality were presented to the public after a great deal of colouring.

7 Poison Dart Frog

Another animal that’s been a mainstay in popular media, these beautiful, colourful frogs, like their name suggests, are poisonous. More than that, Phyllobates terribilis, also known as the golden poison dart frog, is famously, lethally poisonous. Certainly scary, but, as we’ve seen on this list so far, reality is typically tamer than sensationalised depictions of it.

While they are poisonous, yes, many people don’t grasp how nonthreatening that is to the average person. Their poison is almost surely lethal if it gets into a person’s bloodstream, but given the fact that they have no method to deliver said poison, you’re only really at risk if you attempt to eat one or handle and agitate one over an open wound.

Interestingly, as poisonous as they are, they completely lack these fearsome toxins in captivity, where they’re frequently kept as pets. Fairly intelligent, pretty, and a very recognisable cultural element in many indigenous cultures, these frogs are better admired than feared.

6 Cougar

Cougars, also widely known in the United States as mountain lions, or elsewhere as pumas or panthers—not to be confused with other large cats also referred to as panthers -, are the second largest New World cat species. Given the fact that they live near inhabited areas and may emit terrifying, scream-like sounds, they’re a common element in folklore and urban legends.

Often thought to be quite dangerous as well, that conception certainly seems logical on the surface. Large cats are famously threatening predators, the idea of one so close to home for many people is a scary thought, and cougars are common all across the Americas, South America being no exception.

Thankfully, however, attacks on humans from cougars are extremely rare. Additionally, it currently seems as though they’re at a much larger risk from us than we are from them, given the fact that they’re commonly killed due to their dangerous reputation, thus more and more sources are speaking out against the embellished claims in hopes of stopping the species’ decline.

5 Brazilian Wandering Spider

Arachnophobic people are presumably already protesting that such a monstrous creature is being defended, but, again, there are good reasons for that. Wandering spiders are large, active arachnids, reaching leg spans of up to 6 inches or 15 centimetres, and preferring to actively hunt rather than wait in a web.

The aforementioned facts coupled with one of the most toxic spider venoms on Earth and the fact that their bite, strangely, causes human erections certainly makes them odd, at the very least. Sometimes hiding in banana leaves or even international banana shipments, these creepy crawlies are rightfully feared as far as spiders go.

While that is all true, spiders aren’t rightfully feared to begin with. Wandering spiders specifically have been characterised as infamously aggressive, even though the reality is that they’re instead rather defensive. They, like all spiders, are not out to harm humans and will only bite in self-defence. What if one does bite, though? Well, the outlook isn’t as bleak as one might think, certainly not instant death. According to a Brazilian study, only 2.3% of all reported bites require antivenom and chances of survival are very high.

4 Giant Otter

Giant otters, to many, might sound like adorable animals, however, to others, they have a horrible, vicious reputation. The truth is somewhere between the two, as it’s usually the case.

Twice as large as American otters, growing up to 2 metres or over 6 feet, they’re an apex predator and hunt using their great senses and, yes, surprisingly vicious nature. While they’re perhaps cute on the surface, their bad reputation isn’t inherently unfounded and these opportunistic carnivores could probably kill a person.

Once again, however, they really are generally uninterested in doing so, hunting for much smaller prey and only really fighting large animals in self defence. In addition, unfortunately the giant otter is a greatly endangered species, its range having been reduced to a fraction of its former size due to human poaching. Another case of us posing a much larger threat to them than they ever do to us.

3 Amazonian Giant Centipede

The largest centipede in the world, growing up to or even over one foot or 30 centimetres in length, armed with modified legs capable of injecting a fairly serious and, to some, incredibly painful venom, Amazonian giant centipedes are nothing to scoff at.

Scolopendra gigantea preys on a large variety of animals and may live for as long as a decade. They’re carnivores and may hunt any animal they’re able to overpower, some potentially as large as they are. Definitely a combination to be afraid of for anyone who’s afraid of creepy crawlies, but, realistically, they’re unlikely to be fatal.

There’s been only one human fatality associated with the species, a case in which a child was tragically bitten by one of these centipedes hiding in a soda can. While they may not be a serious threat in the vast majority of cases, that’s a deeply unfortunate scenario and a horrifying image.

2 Bullet Ant

Bullet ant—an ant with a sting so powerful it feels like being shot. Scary? A little. Dangerous? No. These large ants certainly deliver a sting that lives up to their name, a powerful venom leaving anyone unfortunate enough to be stung with waves of intense pain, one apparently so horrible that it holds the top spot on Schmidt’s sting pain index.

Additionally, a disturbing image to add, indigenous Brazilian tribes willingly sting themselves using tens of these ants at once woven into gloves that they must wear for minutes, presumably making for a deeply awful experience that’s certainly one to remember and be scarred by.

That being said, even though the pain is truly terrible and bullet ants can sting multiple times in a row, no human fatalities have ever been attributed to their stings as of this article, ever.

1 Goliath Birdeater Tarantula

Topping off the list is perhaps the most sensationalised animal of these ten, which is certainly saying a lot. Goliath birdeater tarantulas are among the largest spiders on Earth, holding the #2 spot when it comes to leg span and the top spot for heaviest spider currently known. They’re massive, hairy, and can launch the urticating hairs from their abdomen at rapid speeds as a defence mechanism, extremely irritating hairs that may even block airways.

They’re, as their name suggests, huge, with a leg span that may be as large as one foot, and a weight up to six ounces or 175 grams, it’s a truly impressive spider. Even though, despite their title, they rarely eat birds, they’re probably the spider best suited to do so on the planet.

Their size, however, is often exaggerated to be even larger than their already nearly record-breaking proportions, alongside claims of their urticating hairs causing people to suffocate or their venom being deadly. While they perhaps aren’t as docile as other South American tarantulas, they still aren’t the most defensive and certainly not aggressive. To this date, no human fatality has ever been attributed to a tarantula, not this, nor any other.

10 Amazing Color Mutations In Animals