Move over, Johnny Cash and “Cocaine Blues.” Sure, “Early one mornin’ while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down… Shot her down because she made me slow / I thought I was her daddy but she had five more” are often the first lyrics one thinks of when considering the violent end of the toxic masculinity spectrum in white people music. (Is this not something you ponder? Confront more white folk who somehow only see these things in black music, you’ll get there.) But The Beatles took things to just as dark a place.

Enter “Run For Your Life” from their 1965 album Rubber Soul, a song as catchy as it is chilling: “You better run for your life if you can, little girl / Hide your head in the sand, little girl / Catch you with another man / That’s the end.” Jesus. It’s jarring, the cuddly “All You Need Is Love” boy band singing “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man” and “Let this be a sermon / I mean everything I’ve said / Baby, I’m determined / And I’d rather see you dead.” But jealous male violence in fact showed up in other Beatles songs as well, and in the real world, with the self-admitted abusive acts and attitudes of John Lennon, later regretted but no less horrific for it.

This awfulness ensured The Beatles would be viewed by many of posterity as a contradictory element, with proto-feminist themes and ideas of the 1960s taking root in their music alongside possessive, murderous sexism. That is, if these things are noticed at all.

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