In 1998, superstar singer Barbra Streisand married actor James Brolin. This was her second marriage, and Streisand was keen on keeping out swarms of photographers from the ceremony. She accomplished this by having a van stalk the media encampments around her Malibu mansion while playing White Zombie's "Thunder Kiss '65" at ear-splitting volume.

When Rob Zombie heard about the incident he was thrilled. "Hopefully she'll use a track from Hellbilly Deluxe to ward off meddling paparazzi at her divorce hearing," he said when asked how he felt about it. Streisand and Brolin are still married, but it's nice to that Zombie keeps making music appropriate for the split should it ever happen.

One of our favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer involved the vampire Spike being made to kill people through a hypnotic suggestion triggered by the English folk song "Early One Morning." Whenever he heard the song, the whole angsty, tortured monster thing was dropped like it was hot and Spike made with the blood feast.

Among our other skills, Rocks Off is a trained hypnotist, and we're always careful to tell clients that this kind of magic trick does not work... except that it actually might. If you spent months with someone in isolation, constantly hammering a specific trigger home to them without ever letting them catch a breath or think or communicate with the outside world, then yeah, you could use a suggestion as a catalyst to all kinds of behavior.

The reason that no one does this is because the amount of time and total isolation needed to accomplish this is usually just not worth the effort. That same amount of time could be spent on much more reliable methods. Then again, the actions of Charles Manson's followers are a pretty clear-cut case of this kind of hypnotic brainwashing. He was a musician, too.

King Abdullah one of the world's wealthiest monarchs, and is the absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia. He's also one of the most criticized world leaders. Parade magazine labeled him the second worst dictator in the world in 2003, which is double insulting because it implies that he's not even good at totalitarianism.

He went to visit England in 2007, and the Queen's Royal Guards were tapped to play some band music for the king. The band, eager to let Abdullah know just what their opinion was, decided that the tune would be the "Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back.

Apparently Abdullah didn't notice that he was being compared to Darth Vader... or worse, maybe he did notice and he thinks it's great. Yeah, this one might have backfired pretty bad.