Between 2002 and 2012, at least six people were killed in the Philippines while singing Frank Sinatra's 1969 song My Way at karaoke bars — a phenomenon that came to be known internationally as the My Way killings, and that prompted many Filipino karaoke bars to quietly remove the song from their playlists

In February 2010, the American journalist Norimitsu Onishi, then serving as the Manila bureau chief of the New York Times, filed a 1,200-word feature story titled “Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord” reporting on a specific pattern of homicides that had, across approximately the preceding decade, occurred in Filipino karaoke bars during or immediately following amateur renditions of the 1969 Frank Sinatra hit song “My Way.” Onishi’s article, which subsequently sat at or near the top of the New York Times’ most-emailed articles list for approximately five consecutive days and produced substantial international press attention across the following months, documented what Onishi described as “at least half a dozen” killings that had occurred between approximately 2002 and 2010 in Filipino karaoke establishments, all specifically connected to performances of the Paul Anka-written lyrics that had, in the substantial four decades since their initial 1968 English-language recording by Sinatra, established “My Way” as one of the more commercially successful English-language popular songs in the recorded history of the postwar American music industry. Approximately two years after Onishi’s article, the accumulated Filipino documented total of “My Way”-related karaoke fatalities had, by the substantially higher estimates of the Manila-based Esquire Philippines magazine, reached approximately twelve. Many Filipino karaoke establishments had, by that point, quietly removed the song from their machines.

The specific song at the centre of what Filipino and international press coverage progressively came to describe as the “My Way killings” was, in its original musical form, not an American song at all. As detailed in Crime + Investigation UK’s institutional analysis of the specific “My Way” killings phenomenon and its subsequent cultural interpretation, “My Way” was originally composed in French in 1967 under the title Comme d’habitude (“As Usual”) by the French composers Claude François, Jacques Revaux, and Gilles Thibaut, and had been a substantial French popular music hit in François’s original recording of the same year. The Canadian-American teen-idol singer-songwriter Paul Anka acquired the English-language adaptation rights during a 1967 vacation in the south of France, wrote entirely new English lyrics that transformed the original song’s specific narrative content from a domestic morning-routine observation into a substantial first-person life-summary monologue delivered by an aging speaker reflecting on his own accumulated personal choices, and offered the resulting lyrics to Frank Sinatra in late 1968. Sinatra recorded “My Way” for Reprise Records on 30 December 1968. The song peaked at approximately #27 on the American Billboard Hot 100 in the spring of 1969 (a substantially unremarkable commercial performance by Sinatra’s contemporary standards) and progressively established itself across the subsequent 30 years as Sinatra’s substantial signature song — the specific track that essentially every subsequent Sinatra concert would close with, that essentially every subsequent Sinatra impressionist would perform, and that would, by the specific 1998 date of Sinatra’s death, become one of the most-performed songs at American funerals in the recorded history of the American memorial services industry.

The specific mechanism by which the same song came to be associated with a substantial pattern of homicides in Filipino karaoke bars across the 2002-2012 period is, on the accumulated 15 years of subsequent cultural analysis of the phenomenon, substantially contested. As reported in Grunge’s summary of the specific documented “My Way” killings and the various proposed explanations for the pattern, the substantial majority of the documented incidents shared a specific common structural feature: the murdered singer had been performing “My Way” at a public or semi-public karaoke establishment, had been singing (per subsequent witness accounts) substantially off-key, and had been either mocked or challenged by another patron shortly before the fatal altercation. In the substantially most-documented single incident, which occurred in the Manila suburb of San Mateo, Rizal in 2007, a 29-year-old Filipino man named Romy Baligula was performing “My Way” at a karaoke bar when the 43-year-old security guard at the same establishment complained about the specific pitch accuracy of Baligula’s rendition. Baligula continued singing. The security guard drew his sidearm and shot Baligula in the chest at the specific point in the song at which Sinatra’s original lyrics reach the substantial climactic assertion “I did it my way.” Baligula died at the scene. The security guard was arrested. The subsequent legal proceedings did not substantially clarify what specific quality of Baligula’s musical performance had produced the security guard’s specific decision to shoot him.

What explains the pattern

The substantial subsequent debate about the specific “My Way” killings has produced approximately three competing analytical frameworks. Per the American journalist Floyd Whaley’s Southeast Asia-based analysis of the specific “My Way” killings phenomenon, the first framework — advanced most substantially by the Manila-based singing school proprietor Butch Albarracin in his contemporary interviews with the New York Times — is that the specific lyrical content of “My Way” (with its substantial first-person assertions of personal pride, defiant self-reliance, and refusal to acknowledge personal failure) produces a specific psychological effect in the singer that other karaoke patrons find substantially provocative in ways that other karaoke standards do not. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer,” Albarracin told the New York Times in 2010, “as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.” The second framework, advanced by the University of the Philippines cultural studies professor Roland Tolentino, is that the specific “My Way” killings are essentially statistically unremarkable within the broader pattern of Filipino karaoke violence — which has produced substantial numbers of homicides across the same 2002-2012 period from disputes over microphone hogging, off-key singing of other popular songs, and general violations of the substantial unwritten “karaoke code” that governs Filipino public singing behaviour. The third framework, advanced by the American cultural critic Eric Alterman in his 2010 rebuttal to the original New York Times article, is that the entire “My Way killings” phenomenon may be substantially an artefact of thin journalistic sourcing — that the specific New York Times reporting had relied on unnamed “authorities” and “news media sources” without producing specific witness testimony, police reports, or documented case files sufficient to establish that “My Way” was actually killing Filipinos at a statistically-elevated rate relative to other popular karaoke standards.

What Filipinos actually did about it

The substantive Filipino response to the accumulated “My Way” killings across the 2007-2012 period was, in essence, straightforward: many karaoke bar owners in Manila, Cebu, Davao, and other major Filipino cities quietly removed the song from their karaoke machine playlists. Per the Center for American Progress’s critical review of the New York Times coverage and its subsequent international propagation, the removals were not the result of any specific Filipino government policy or industry-wide coordinated action but were instead the accumulated individual business decisions of specific bar owners who had concluded, on the basis of local incidents in their own establishments or their own neighbourhoods, that the specific commercial risk of hosting “My Way” performances was substantially higher than the specific commercial benefit of doing so. Similar removals subsequently occurred in karaoke establishments in Bangkok, Tokyo, and other Southeast and East Asian cities where Filipino overseas workers and the substantial regional karaoke industry both operated. The specific Filipino individuals who continued to sing “My Way” in Filipino karaoke bars across the subsequent decade did so in the specific knowledge that the substantial accumulated fatality rate of the song’s performance in the same establishments was substantially higher than the accumulated fatality rate of essentially any other popular karaoke standard — a specific epistemic condition that essentially no other genre of amateur recreational performance in the recorded history of modern popular music has produced. Frank Sinatra had died in May 1998 in Los Angeles, approximately four years before the specific 2002 date at which the current documented “My Way” killings pattern is generally considered to have begun. He is not recorded in any published biographical account as having been particularly fond of “My Way” during his lifetime — he reportedly considered its lyrics substantially self-indulgent — and did not live to observe the specific set of postmortem cultural developments that would eventually make his signature song one of the more dangerous popular recordings in the recorded history of Southeast Asian recreational music consumption.