The thinking being that these cultural messages of influence would be echoed by real behaviour on the streets of LA and would therefore result in more felonies: more inmates. How does that lead to profits? Well in the private prisons industry profitability arises per diem: the more inmates, the more money they get. And so through investment and cultural influence, the music industry was said to make profit over and above just album sales.
 
Is it true? Well it’s some theory. Even if it is a bit dark, it potentially holds up the argument for how culture influences commerce.
 
Hip-hop did get a bit darker and did have a change of direction. On N.W.A’s acclaimed album Efil4zaggin and Ice-Cube’s Death Certificate, lyrics reflected gang culture and revealed the dark side of hip-hop. This was the year after the iconic Parental Advisory sticker began appearing on album covers.

But the most significant flaw was that in fact, 1991 was the first year that crime started to drop in decades. There was a rise in the number of inmates, but this simply stems from changes in government legislation to incarcerate a wider range of felons.

 

This idea is hardly novel and in fact, its theorists argue that the first signs of New World Order are traceable back to the nineteenth century and prophecies about the “end time” in the Bible. They assert that a group of people have made a deal with the devil to gain wealth and power that will ultimately lead to a dystopian world empire, which imposes the imperial cult of an ‘Unholy Trinity’. In more recent years the Freemasons, Illuminati and an American ‘secret team’ in black helicopters have been blamed as the imposers of this new ruling system.
 
Is there a higher power we don’t know about? Is there someone higher than the supposedly powerful G8?

Well if you forget the bit about the devil and reducing the world’s population by 5.5 billion people, the liberal in you says that in fact describing the power of globalization, a shift to a truly global flow commerce, culture, communication and nationality.
 

A mineral that he argues can increase the nervous system’s capacity ten thousand-fold thus enabling the individual to process vast amounts of information, speed up trans-dimensional travel and shape-shift from reptilian to human form.
 
Now we can’t help but hope that somehow, this is true. If it were, these super-human nervous entities would surely be able to solve the world’s economic and political problems.

Of even higher hopes, perhaps we could get a hold of some ‘monoatomic gold’: do a week’s work in a day; teleport to Samoa for the weekend and have a conversation with a goldfish (if you so wish).
 
Unfortunately I’d imagine that the critics are right, this substance doesn’t exist and even if it does, it doesn’t have these qualities.  
 

Even after the 1940's validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying they failed to treat the patients. So, should we think twice before our next vaccination? Are governments or drugs companies using us as guinea pigs and opportunities to make cash?
 
In recent years a number of other medicines have been under fire for failing to treat the diseases they claim to, namely Cervavix (or Gardasil), the HPV vaccine that was administered by the NHS to all school-girls.

Critics have suggested that these vaccines were ‘pushed by pseudo-scientific nonsense’ solely to create huge cash flow for the pharmaceutical companies. As evidence, they cite an FDA background document that airs worries of an increase in cervical cancer in certain groups of women who have had the vaccination and that “no significant evidence of a vaccine therapeutic effect was observed”.
 

Why do we refuse to believe that a celebrity is dead, or accept that they died the way we are told? Why these more than regular people?
 
Perhaps it’s because we place them on a pedestal that surpasses death, as their music lives on, and their cultural influence never dies. Interestingly those with such theories surrounding their death, whilst are celebrated icons of their time, also had a number of issues – Elvis was overweight and a drug user, Michael Jackson struggled with his image and health; so perhaps it is human nature to fantasise about their new idyllic lives. 
 
Wishful thinking perhaps, but either way the conspiracy theories help us remember such icons. With this in mind, here are five of our favourite Elvis conspiracy theories.