There’s a short list of hard rock songs that are beloved even by people who hate hard rock: “Back in Black,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Runnin’ With the Devil,” and “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” It was also said to be one of Gary Gilmore’s favorite songs, which scans in terms of chronology: the song reached #12 on the Billboard singles chart in November 1976, two months before Gilmore was executed. America’s red, white, and blue bicentennial was dotted with gothic black.

As Ken Tucker noted in a Rolling Stone review of Agents of Fortune, the album that included “Reaper,” they also put “less emphasis on absurd, crypto-intellectual rambling.” The album even had sax solos, for Lucifer’s sake! Coincidentally (or not), it was released two weeks after the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. “Cult” had a scary resonance in the ’70s, so soon after the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders committed by members of the Manson Family, and the decorative umlaut in the name puzzled people, though it subsequently caught on as an in-joke among rock bands, including Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Hüsker Dü, Spin̈al Tap, and, turning the knob to 11, Möngöl Hörde.īy 1976, Blue Öyster Cult was focusing more on hooks and melodies, which had never seemed important to them. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in mass-market paperback. Unlike with Black Sabbath, it wasn’t clear whether they were mocking or embracing the wizards-and-warlocks fantasy culture that took hold after 1965, when Ballantine published J. “Reaper” and the word meme even share a year of birth, 1976.Īll five band members wrote and sang lead, so there was no frontman to give BÖC a focus. But it had already been in the bloodstream of pop culture for three decades. In April 2000, Saturday Night Live’s “I need more cowbell!” sketch, starring host Christopher Walken as producer Bruce Dickinson, and cast members Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Parnell, and Horatio Sanz as Blue Öyster Cult, turned the song into a ubiquitous one-liner and eventually a Twitter meme. And an assortment of bands has covered it in a catalog of styles: country “Reaper,” blues “Reaper,” punk “Reaper,” dance club “Reaper,” and even two-identical-twins-play-it-on-harps “Reaper.” Few songs have ever been this durable and flexible. Every few years, it turns up in another Hollywood movie-usually the scary ones. An industry source estimates that it generated more than $637,000 in revenue in 2020, not including from album sales. Last year, it had 50,000 spins on terrestrial and satellite radio. It became a hit 45 years ago but has never disappeared from pop culture. “Reaper” narrates the tale of a couple who are “together in eternity,” and the song seems eternal as well. Many A minor songs are so familiar, we’ll mention them only by title: “Angie,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Smooth Operator,” “Rhiannon,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” “It’s Too Late,” and the most A minor of A minor songs, Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” A song written in A minor has an unstable and unsettling presence, a weight, an undertow. You may not know the key of A minor when you hear it, but you certainly feel it.

Blue oyster cult don't fear the reaper