History DownerEnding / Music

* Although Music/StevenWilson has stated that the fate of the teenage protagonist in [[Music/PorcupineTree Porcupine Tree's]] ConceptAlbum ''Fear of a Blank Planet'' is open to listener interpretation, the increasingly desperate lyrics as the album progresses and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBKebb5NV78 bleak mood]] of "Sleep Together", the album's final song, strongly imply that he is DrivenToSuicide.

* Music/BarryManilow's ''Copacabana''. Lola the showgirl and Tony the bartender both work at the same nightclub, and fall in love. A man named Rico shows up and wants Lola for himself, which starts a fight that leaves Tony dead. Thirty years later, Lola is still sitting at the bar at the Copacabana, wearing her old showgirl dress and feathers, drinking her sorrows away and mourning for Tony.

** The English version has a [[ForWantOfANail faulty early warning system]] identify the balloons as an incoming missile, causing both sides to scramble jets out of panic and escalate things into all-out nuclear war. In an extra GutPunch, it was the protagonist and a friend who released the balloons - it’s implied the friend was killed somehow, with the protagonist [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone wracked with guilt]] over causing both the war and their death.

* Music/BarryManilow's ''Copacabana''. Lola the showgirl and Tony the bartender both work at the same nightclub, and fall in love. A man named Rico shows up and wants Lola for himself, which starts a fight that leaves Tony dead. Thirty years later, Lola is still sitting at the bar at the Copacabana, wearing her old showgirl dress, drinking her sorrows away and mourning for Tony.

* Music/BarryManilow's ''Copacabana''. Lola the showgirl and Tony the bartender both work at the same nightclub, and fall in love. A man named Rico shows up and wants Lola for himself, which starts a fight that leaves Tony dead. Thirty years later, Lola is still sitting at the bar at the Copacabana, wearing her old showgirl dress, drinking and mourning for Tony.

* Music/BarryManilow's ''Copacabana''. The plot is that Lola's a showgirl at the titular nightclub and falls in love with Tony the barmaker...only for Rico to make advances on her, pressing Tony's BerserkButton. Cue a huge fight that ends in Rico shooting Tony and skip thirty years ahead to show Lola a wasted alcoholic.

* Music/{{Nirvana}} had two clear depressing album closers ("Something In The Way" from ''Music/{{Nevermind}}'' and "All Apologies" from ''Music/{{In Utero}}'') and a borderline example ("Sifting" from ''Music/{{Bleach|Album}}'' - though the mainstream reissue ends with one which ''is called'' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc67atweLKI&feature=related "Downer"]] but it's not a DownerEnding).

* A particularly notorious example was Music/MichaelJackson's music video/short film "Black or White" from ''Music/{{Dangerous}}'', based on the hit single of the same name. It was shown on three basic cable channels simultaneously one night in the fall of 1991, so it was guaranteed to garner a huge audience with many children watching. The video, which included (among other things) African tribesmen, Thai dancers, Native Americans, Michael Jackson dancing with an Indian girl, fur-capped Russian dancers, two babies playing with a snowglobe, Michael Jackson dancing on the Statue of Liberty, and Macaulay Culkin performing a rap, concluded with a montage of different people of various skin colors and body types, as well as of both sexes, morphing into each other, ending with a young black woman miming to the end of the song, who's revealed to actually be an actress in the studio where the video is being filmed. The camera then pans away until it is following a black leopard as it stalks its way out of the studio and into the dark and rainy night. Once outside, the leopard transforms into Michael Jackson and begins to compulsively perform a dance that becomes more and more unnerving as it goes along, with a great deal of crotch-grabbing. Suddenly he begins smashing a car, shop windows, etc., screaming all the while. As this orgy of godlike destruction concludes, Michael's screams are mixed with the roars of his leopard alter ego. He finally rips off half his clothes and collapses into the rain-slicked street, whereupon he transforms back into the leopard, snarls, and stalks away. And ''then'' in a particularly egregious case of MoodWhiplash, the scene cuts to an animated living room, where it is revealed that [[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons Bart Simpson]] has been watching the entire time. Homer bursts in and orders Bart to turn off the TV, prompting Bart to retort with one of his trademark wisecracks and him to turn it off himself. Needless to say, this video left many in its television audience confused, traumatized, and angered. Jackson was forced to issue a public apology for the incident and the video was recut so that it ended just before the "black leopard" sequence. Later, the full-length version reappeared with CGI effects superimposing racist graffiti on the objects he smashed to provide justification for his rage.

* Brave Shores's Never Come Down. A bald man named Adam wishes for hair, and almost instantaneously, his wish came true. He wildly shakes his head throughout the video. Near the end, he felt pain in his neck, making him go to the doctor. Because Adam realized his neck is fractured by looking at the x-ray, the doctor tells him that he's dying.

* Music/MyChemicalRomance's SING. The video starts off as the band/killjoys killing their enemies to rescue their little girl companion. They manage to get her to safety all die in the process.

* Music/VanMorrison's album Astral Weeks, a dreamy, impressionistic work full of stream-of-consciousness images and hazy childhood memories, ends with Slim Slow Slider, a frank twelve-bar blues number about a girl who appears to be on a path of self destruction. "I know you're dying, And I know you know it too / Every time I see you, I just don't know what to do" mark the final lyrics of the album, as the instruments abruptly go out of tune and Morrison slaps the side of his guitar repeatedly.