Insult Backfire / Music

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• Daft Punk got its name from a review of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's previous band Darlin', which the reviewer called their two songs "a daft punky thrash".
• Roland Orzabal composed "Fish Out of Water" as The Diss Track to Curt Smith for quitting Tears for Fears, and the former describes some of the lyrics as "pure vitriol." Instead of being offended, Smith was actually flattered that Orzabal hated him that much and expressed it publicly through music. Smith considers it his favourite Tears for Fears song that didn't have his input.
  Smith: It's a compliment, in some ways.
  Orzabal: Absolutely, it means I cared deeply for him. (laughs) That's one way of interpreting it, anyway...
• After The Yardbirds broke up, Keith Moon told Jimmy Page that his new band was 'going to go down like a lead balloon.' The name of the band alone illustrates how spectacularly that insult failed.
• Hip hop example: In the song "Second Round K.O.," Canibus included in his disses of LL Cool J, "99% of your fans wear high heels." The intention was to insinuate that LL was not "hard" enough to appeal to men, but the impact is considerably weakened by the fact that the name "LL Cool J" stands for "Ladies Love Cool James." LL Cool J responded in the song "The Ripper Strikes Back" with the following lyric: "Ask Canibus, he ain't understandin' this/'Cause ninety-nine percent of his fans don't exist."
• A musical at Six Flags called "Love at First Fright" featuring an evil sorceress who wanted to hero's brain for her creation. At one point all the protagonists chorus, "WITCH!!" This is followed by a long beat, after which she gleefully replies, "Guilty!"
• Savage by Helloween:
  They just call us savage
  That's what I like to be
• A lot of critics — including John Lennon, his former writing partner — were fond of sneering that all Paul McCartney ever wrote were 'silly love songs'. In response, he wrote 'Silly Love Songs', which acts as a cheerful affirmation of this:
  Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs
  And what's wrong with that?
  I'd like to know
  'Cos here I go
  Again!
• The band Incubus does this in a creative way. When the band first became popular, a female music critic dismissed them as another splash in the pan Nu Metal group who won't last long. Instead of being offended, the band wrote a hit song called "Just a Phase" and used the critical words she used in the article as lyrics to the song.
• Insane Clown Posse:
  Call me a psycho schizo freak...
  and I'll call you by your name!
• Axl Rose once contemptuously referred to the Eagles of Death Metal (who had opened for them in one of their pre-Chinese Democracy tours) as the "Pigeons of S*** Metal". The band loved it so much that Jesse Hughes got the phrase on a tattoo◊^note He hated it at first, but came around with time, and they released a limited-print Cover Album with that exact name as its title.
• Those who play "Born in the USA" as anything but the protest song it was meant to be.
  • Not as much of a protest song, but Elton John brings us "Made In England", which many mistake for a pro-English anthem. However, the lyrics betray the negative aspect of England that a gay man growing up in 50s England would have experienced.
• The song "Yankee Doodle" is thought to have originated from British soldiers in the Colonial Army to mock the colonials. "Doodle" is thought to have originally meant a fool or simpleton. The verse "stuck a feather in his cap and called it Macaroni" mocks a foppish fashion at the time involving feather caps and tall wigs. Essentially the song paints a typical American as a backwoods hick with delusions of sophistication. The insulting meaning was quickly forgotten and it has become perhaps the most classic patriotic song outside of the national anthem.
• The song "American Woman" from Canadian band The Guess Who is a criticism of American politics, but many people think it's about the singer's interest in an American woman. Others knew the song's meaning and agreed with it and liked it for calling out America's foreign policies (this was during The '60s when The Vietnam War was taking place and many young people were very unhappy with their government, to put it mildly).
• Tom Lehrer's fight song parody "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" is regularly performed by the Harvard marching band at football games. (And Lehrer himself liked to quote negative reviews on his album covers.) He even called one of his albums "An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer".
• The Does Not Understand Sarcasm variant is used in several of the Smothers Brothers' well-known routines.
• Frank Zappa wrote 1982's "Valley Girl" to mock the titular girls, going so far as to let his teenage daughter, Moon Unit, improvise the spoken word parts to insult schoolmates she didn't like. The song was responsible bringing the name and the slang to the masses, who rather than being insulted or joining the mockery, embraced both for the next decade.
• In the track "The Wrong Nigga to Fuck Wit", Ice Cube lets out the line: "And you can New Jack Swing on my nuts!" in a diss at the musical style. Two years later, New Jack Swing group Tony! Toni! Toné! would sample the line in the song "If I Had No Loot".
• A critic attending a Minor Threat concert dismissed the group as "muscle heads", meaning something along the lines of Dumb Jocks and/or Jerk Jocks. Ian MacKaye decided to turn it into a compliment by taking the phrase literally - a "muscle head" as in someone who is strong-minded and keeps themselves mentally sharp. Thus, he can be heard ad-libbing the lyric "flex your head!" in Minor Threat's cover version of "12XU", and the phrase was also used for a compilation issued by Dischord Records (co-owned by Minor Threat members MacKaye and Jeff Nelson)
• According to David Lee Roth, he was once insulted by someone claiming he only wrote songs about "partying, sex and cars". Which made Dave realize he'd never written a song about a car, so he went and created "Panama", one of the biggest hits Van Halen ever produced.
• After watching a Grateful Dead concert in 1984, journalist Alice Kahn wrote a review in which she called Jerry Garcia the "hippie abominable snowman". Garcia liked it enough to ask her to interview him in person.
• Someone called Hayley Williams, from Paramore, a "tiny hot topic bitch" who "bossed around" the "cucks" in the band on Twitter. In response, Hayley changed her Twitter bio to "tiny hot topic bitch" and even partnered with Hot Topic to sell "tiny hot topic bitch" t-shirts and hoodies, with the proceeds going to the preservation of historic/independent rock venue in Nashville (Paramore's hometown).
• Eminem incorporates a lot of this into his style, with his Villain Protagonist persona and his background in Battle Rapping.
  • In Eminem's Diss Track "Killshot", an Answer Song to Machine Gun Kelly, he flips around several of Kells's insults:
    • Kells attempts to cast Eminem as an old man soaking up attention past his prime, refusing to allow young rappers like him to compete or to speak to the young. Eminem agrees that he's way more popular and successful than Kells, remains the poet of choice for the world's angry ten-year-olds, and that no other rappers can measure up to him.
    • Kells jeers at Eminem for not going outside — "last time you saw 8 Mile was on a treadmill!"^note punning off the actual 8 Mile Road in Detroit for which the movie was named. Eminem happily replies that he was "watching 8 Mile on my NordicTrack", reminding Kells he's a movie star with a premium home gym.
  • "Rhyme Or Reason" contains a passage sampling a pastor saying "hip-hop is the devil's music!". Slim responds "does that mean it belongs to me? A white-honkey-Devil with two horns that don't honk, but every time I speak, you hear a beep?"
  • Lord Jamar of the hip-hop group Brand Nubian described Eminem a "guest in the house of hip-hop" due to his race. In "Fall", Eminem responded by agreeing that hip-hop is the house "you own", but that he's going to make himself at home in it.
• One of MGMT's better-known studio albums, Little Dark Age, was explicitly meant to be a response to the 2016 Election in America. The title track was seized upon and subsequently used by a wide variety of people who the original writers would probably strongly disagree with, as a backing track for an explosion of counter-cultural memes. The title track was subsequently more strongly associated with counter-culture than with the actual band that wrote the song.
• Heavy Metal as a genre was dismissed as "Satan worship music". Years later.. there is Black Metal, which has bands that are proud to be actual Satanists.

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