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Fan Disservice / Music

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Artists, Songs, Albums, and Live Performances

  • John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the nude on the album cover of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. John actually said that a lot of the controversy about the nudity had more to do with the fact that they weren't attractive nude people.
  • They Might Be Giants' song "The Catalyst":
    Close your eyes! Darth Vader is naked!
    Close your eyes! Darth Vader is naked!
    Close your eyes! Darth Vader is naked!
  • A Walking Shirtless Scene is sexy right? Not when the person walking shirtless is Rick Ross.
  • Murdoc Niccals of Gorillaz is basically made of Fan Disservice.
  • The cover for Intestinal Disgorge's "Depravity" is a man having sex with a lady in S&M gear... who has obviously been dead for at least a few days and is thoroughly mangled from the waist down.
  • The cover of The Bloodhound Gang's Hefty Fine depicting a naked obese man.
  • Miley Cyrus's bizarre performance at the 2013 VMAs, in which she wore a teddy bear costume, mimed sex with teddy bears, slapped the asses of twerking black women dressed as teddy bears, then stripped down to a flesh-colored latex bikini and ground on Robin Thicke's crotch while singing his incredibly rapey song "Blurred Lines". Was it racist? Sexist? Ethical Slut feminism? A bad influence on the (apparently dumber than boys) little girls who loved her as Hannah Montana? A Stealth Parody of the music industry playing to the fetishes to such extremes? A rather sad act of rebellion against her Good Ol' Boy father? Miley trying to deliberately spark flamewars and shitstorms the internet because she thinks it's hilarious? A really blatant attempt to drum up controversy? Pretty much the only thing seemingly everyone can agree on is that Miley Cyrus was definitely not trying to be sexy.
  • Any arousal that could possibly be derived from the porn variant cover of Kanye West's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, in which the usually handsome Kanye is depicted in a painting naked and screwing a hot Monster Girl, is destroyed by the intentionally awful quality of the art.
  • "Shaven" by Funker Vogt is about a man who derives pleasure from shaving women's pubes. "Bloody sperm" is also mentioned.
  • The cover to Dangerous Toys' The R*tist 4*merly Known As Dangerous Toys: To go with the "The Trope Formerly Known as X" album title, they made the album cover a take-off on a Prince album starring their Metal Band Mascot. Their mascot is a Monster Clown and the album they chose to parody was Lovesexy, so the cover involves a naked monster clown.
  • Ministry's Dark Side Of The Spoon features a nude obese woman in a dunce cap in front of a blackboard. The back cover focuses on the woman's buttocks, and the single to "Bad Blood" is the same woman from the front, albeit with her hands held up in front of her breasts and her large belly obscuring everything else.
  • Eminem does this rather a lot, often to satirise the way most rappers present themselves as sexy.
    • All of the Ken Kaniff skits involve a Depraved Homosexual describing nauseating sex acts, the low point being the nearly two-minute simulated blowjob that turns up on The Marshall Mathers LP featuring Kaniff and Insane Clown Posse.
    • "Superman" on The Eminem Show is an outrageous Misogyny Song in which - over a sexy Southern Rap beat - Slim mimics the adorable, romantic cadence of LL Cool J before announcing the woman makes him want to vomit, that she has to be drunk to want to have sex with him, and that he hates her so much he wants to "put anthrax on a Tampax and slap you 'till you can't stand". He also raps in the voice of the girl via a goofy pitch shifting effect, and she tries to ignore his tattoo of his wife's open grave.
    • D12 sicko Bizarre is often recruited for this. During his tour in 2001, Bizarre would perform his "Purple Pills" verse (which is already about disgusting sex) shirtless, then spend the next section of the song massaging his nipples. He reprises a similar role in the video for "My Band", where he appears shirtless and exercising, parodying 50 Cent's (famously sexy) "In Da Club" video, then in a figure-hugging sequinned dress and pasties, with Eminem clinging onto him. In live performances of "My Band", during the line "big ass stomach, bitches think I'm cute", he's also shirtless and Eminem caresses his belly.
    • Most of Eminem's attempts to branch out into Glam Rap and In Da Club ended up like this due to his tendency to rap them as his Heroic Comedic Sociopath Slim Shady persona. A few obvious examples include:
      • As A Wild Rapper Appears! on "Smack That", he turns a bump-and-grind stripper anthem into idiocy by rapping like an overwhelmed nerd - "Tryin' to hold my woodie back through my drawers".
      • "Shake That" is a sexy party anthem that opens with Slim Shady telling the listener to vomit repeatedly. He goes into graphic detail about the chunks on your shoelaces.
      • "Crack A Bottle" is relatively tame, but Slim still sings "let your body waddle", sings about the bitches in his Tahoe in a nerdy voice, then begins his Boastful Rap with an order to "lick fromunda cheese from under my nuts". Slim's introduced in the song as having committed 17 rapes, and then there's the music video, which inexplicably shows a grotesque homeless crone lipsyncing the song while lying in the gutter.
    • The entirety of "FACK", where Eminem is having amazing sex with a really hot girl, flirting with her in the flow of LL Cool J before ending up screaming his orgasms in the voice of Eric Cartman. And that's before they get to the particular sex act they eventually do in the song, which won't be repeated in detail.
    • Relapse is full of horrifying sexual perversions that do a lot to ruin the appeal of a Pretty Boy rapper in the most athletic shape of his life adding Vampire Tropes to his existing image. Due to it being a Horrorcore Concept Album, the content is so extreme that the majority of it is far too graphic to describe here. A few tamer things include Slim bragging to girls about his foreskin restoration in "Old Time's Sake", the music video for "3 a.m." showing Slim shirtless in a Blood Bath rapping with Dissonant Serenity about murdering his cousin and drinking his bathwater, and the Nausea Fuel of "Insane", in which Slim reveals his backstory of being raped as a child, pops out one of his eyeballs, and raps graphically about felching. There's also the scene in "Medicine Ball" in which Slim seduces and has sex with several gay men before murdering them, which was probably intended as this but plays out more like Faux Yay fanservice if you don't think Queer People Are Funny.
    • "Love Game" has a passage in which Eminem raps in character as a woman giving him a blowjob, complete with slurping noises.
  • The Dead Kennedys song "Too Drunk to Fuck" has the following lines:
    You give me head, it makes it worse
    Take out your fuckin' retainer, put it in your purse!
  • Goth Rock band Christian Death's album Catastrophe Ballet has a cover photo of a naked woman sprawled on a bed. However, both the bed and the woman are a chalky white colour, and the woman herself both has an Eyeless Face and is also The Noseless, and appears to be screaming, which is not entirely surprising, under the circumstances.
  • The band 'Vaginal Ass' with Black Metal Hentai Wanking falls under this with their album cover featuring tortured, naked anime girls. You know things turn chaotic when Black Metal and Hentai meet, the former being (in)famously known for abundance of Satanic imagery and actual crimes related to the genre.

Music Videos Specifically

  • Nine Inch Nails:
    • The music video for "Closer" from The Downward Spiral has this in spades. There are naked women (and naked bondage-Trent) but the other images and the music itself prevent it from being anywhere near Fanservice.
    • Meanwhile, the music video for "Happiness In Slavery" makes "Closer" look tame. It involves a naked man torn to pieces in gruesome ways. If it weren't in black and white, it would be completely unwatchable. And this is just the most widely seen portion of the semi-unreleased Broken Movie, which is apparently twenty minutes of stuff like this, though most of it is rather tame music videos by Happiness in Slavery standards. The rest will remove parts of your soul that you can never reclaim.
  • In the full version of Robbie Williams's "Rock DJ," Robbie takes it all off. By "all off," that includes his skin and muscle tissue.
  • P!nk:
    • The "Stupid Girls" video has three scenes of Pink wearing not very much — the first is her in a bikini getting a completely ugly orange spray tan, the second is her pants getting ripped off completely in the gym to her humiliation and the third is her topless but getting ready to have a ton of cosmetic surgery. She was probably going for this as well with the piss-take of Jessica Simpson in "These Boots Are Made For Walking".
    • In "Perfect" the girl in the video is seen in a bathtub, carving the word "Perfect" into her arm. Squick.
  • There are plenty of bikini-clad women in Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker." The catch: all of them have Richard D. James's face.
  • The music videos for "Pon De Floor" and "Keep It Goin' Louder" by Major Lazer.
  • Lady Gaga uses this trope as frequently as she uses fetish appeal:
    • In "Bad Romance" she's seen naked several times, but she also looks unnaturally thin... and then you see that in-video, she's actually portraying a Sex Slave.
    • Also the random hairless cat that flashes for a fraction of a second in Bad Romance.
    • Then there's the (NSFW) short movie The Abramovic Method Practiced By Lady Gaga, directed by Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, in which she stalks through a glade completely naked except for a blindfold and poses nude on a rather uncomfortable looking crystal, all set to rather unsettling throat singing and synthesizer noise.
    • A fair few of the pictures she released via Twitter over the years may also qualify as this.note 
    • The music video for "Paparazzi" features a large amount of attractive-looking supermodels. They all appear to have been murdered in various gruesome ways.
  • The music video for "Girls & Boys" by Good Charlotte. Elderly people dressed like younger people.
  • The Scissor Sisters' video for "Invisible Light." Among other moments, a man licks the stigmatic hand of a naked, bone-thin woman while the screen cuts to a cleaned (as in, for cooking) rabbit crucified.
  • LMFAO:
    • The video for "Sexy and I Know It". It starts with the band members themselves nearly naked, and while they're not all that good-looking, they're not bad-looking either. But by the climax of the video, there's a huge, hairy overweight man at the camera.
    • Most fan videos for "Sexy and I Know It" use unattractive characters in a joking reference to this. There's even one using a lot of incredibly unattractive pictures of various exposed flesh from People of Walmart.
  • The Foo Fighters promoted their 2011 US Tour with "Hot Buns" (this might still be NSFW, even though it's censored), which apparently was inspired by Dave Grohl waiting for his food in a truck stop.
  • In the uncensored version of her video to "Pagan Poetry" from Vespertine the ever lovely Björk presents us with some very candid shots of her topless self... interspersed with visuals of needles piercing through skin and then revealing herself to be covered in bead chains attached to her whole upper body. Nightmare Fuel to some — wicked sexy to others...
  • The music video for Maddie & Tae's "Girl in a Country Song" contains gender-flipped scenes of boys wearing skimpy country-girl outfits like Daisy Dukes and flannel shirts tied above the navel. The real kicker is a particularly overweight guy wearing overalls with one strap undone lathering himself with soapy water.
  • The (NSFW) music video for the British group Hefner's song "I Took Her Love For Granted" features some very pasty blokes running around in the nude. In slow motion. Not only are they not exactly attractive, but the way their genitals bob and sway in the wind (completely uncensored, mind you) is also very creepy.
  • In the video for Los Fabulosos Cadillac's "Matador", it's hard to focus on the hot and sexy dark-skinned dancers wearing few more than white bikinis... when the video in itself shows the story of a freedom fighter being bloodily murdered. Including the guy being shot on-screen, squirting lots of High-Pressure Blood...
  • The music video for "Black Skinhead" features Kanye West either shirtless or fully naked depending on the shot. However, it is also full of symbolism about the suffering of African Americans, including shots towards the end of Kanye with tribal tattoos and whip scars, barking dogs, and people wearing black pointed hoods. Not to mention that it's actually a CGI model of him, dipping right into the Uncanny Valley before the animation glitches up.
  • a-ha:
  • The (NSFW) music video for "Fantasy" by DyE begins with four teenagers breaking into a pool together, but shortly after they start getting frisky, a series of seriously disturbing events are triggered.
  • While mostly full of fanservice in the form of scantily clad dancing women, The Revolting Cocks' "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" video has a couple of moments of fan disservice: Early on in the video, a woman dancing in lingerie suddenly has her face morphing into that of Al Jourgensen and starts miming the song's chorus, causing Chris Connelly to do a Spit Take. Later on, Connelly is making out with a beautiful woman when he finds a zipper on her back — she turns out to be some kind of ghoul in a Latex Perfection full-body suit.
  • Evillious Chronicles: In "Flower of the Plateau", we get a completely nude image of Mikulia. Pretty hot, huh? Nope. Not only is her lower half seemingly mutated graphically to look like a flower, but one of her breasts has a massive slug crawling on it. Ewwwww.
  • Even for an extreme Metal band, Cephalic Carnage takes this beyond the fringes on their confrontational, NSFW video for Ohrwurm. Moments of fanservice abound.
  • Around 2011, T-Mobile asked Watsky to participate in one of their commercials. Watsky refused, but T-Mobile made the commercial anyways, casting another rapper in Watsky's place. Watsky responded by creating a scathing parody of the commercial. This doesn't seem so bad... aside from the fact that the parody video replaces Carly Foulkes, T-Mobile's famously attractive former spokeswoman, with a fat bearded guy... who's still wearing her dress and makes plenty of sexy poses.
  • The music video for the Seeb remix of Mike Posner's "I Took a Pill in Ibiza" shows the singer being accosted by beautiful women while partying, including having casual sex with one in a bathroom stall. The problem is two-fold: first off, the song is about living a depressing and meaningless life after becoming rich and famous, which is highlighted by the editing and overall plot of the video which show that wasting your life with drugs, partying, and casual sex is empty and self-destructive. If the subject matter isn't unappealing (and depressing) enough, Posner is wearing a gigantic smiling paper mache version of his head the entire time.
  • The video for Lacuna Coil's "Reckless" features several of the band members in skimpy clothing, Cristina Scabbia getting her top torn open so her bra is exposed, and full frontal nudity (of a woman who is not a member of the band). The gory, nightmarish context makes this much more angst-inducing than sexy.
  • "Prezes" by Grupa Operacyjna has the titular character take off his pants in front of a military commission. As he's fat and bald, it's not appealing, but, fortunately, there's a censor box in front of his private parts.
  • The Axis of Awesome's "The Glorious Epic of Three Men Who Are Awesome" has the band playing a D&D-type game and appearing as their characters on an adventure. Three pasty, out-of-shape, and (in the case of Jordan) very flabby nerds dressed in skimpy Barbarian Hero costumes.

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