Lyrical Dissonance / Music

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Subpages include:

• Alternative
• Christian
• Classical
• Country
• Electronic
• Folk
• Hip-Hop
• Indie
• Metal
• Pop
• Rock
• Vocaloid
• Other Music

A cappella

• "Another Irish Drinking Song" by Da Vinci's Notebook is a song about people dying, but it's so upbeat and catchy that you'll find yourself clapping to it. Not to mention that the minions sing it in Despicable Me 2.
• Julia Ecklar's song "The Light-Ship" is a close-harmony piece sung a capella in the style of a 17th-century madrigal. It's about life on a power generation satellite. It's also one of her cheerier works.
• Rockapella's "Zombie Jamboree" is a light-hearted song about zombies taking over New York and eating everyone. Narrator included.
• Tonic Sol-fa's version of the folk song "Man of Constant Sorrow". The song is about what you'd expect based on the title, and their version is bouncy, upbeat, and in drastic contrast to the words.

Avant-Garde

• The Bonzo Dog Band's "I'm The Urban Spaceman" is a catchy tune with incredibly misanthropic lyrics when you examine it closely — basically, the sort of person who "never lets my friends down" is the sort of person who does not actually exist. The lyrics describe a person who is exemplary in many more ways than a real person could be (and is implied to have superpowers as well). It could just as well be about a comic book character. In the performance on The Innes Book Of Records, the Urban Spaceman was an invisible man in a tuxedo — a perfect-yet-nonexistent person.

Baroque Pop

• "White Winter Hymnal" by Fleet Foxes. It's a beautiful little ditty about decapitation.
• of Montreal:
  • "Chrissy Kiss The Corpse" is a jaunty number about desecrating an old woman's corpse in public.
  • The band employs this trope to an extreme level in their album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Almost every song on said album mixes very happy instrumentals with lyrics about religious confusion, anti-depressants, and other such themes. Rather than Black Comedy like the last example though, in this case it's because the lead songwriter was going through a nervous breakdown and marital troubles at the time.
• "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum is a serious tune with silly, random lyrics; "wandered through my playing cards", "the ceiling flew away". Unless, of course, it's really about drugs.
• The sixties group The Zombies released a jolly bouncy number called "Care of Cell 44", basically about a poor boy whose girlfriend has been imprisoned for an unspecified crime.

Comedy and Parody

• Garfunkel and Oates are known for combining dark and raunchy lyrics with a peppy indie pop sound, like "The Loophole", a song about a Holier Than Thou girl who insists she's a Technical Virgin because she's only had anal sex.
• There's a Josef Stalin-related parody of "Gaston" from Beauty and the Beast (which is technically a Villain Song to begin with, but a lighthearted and cheerful one).
• "Super Bad, Transmittable, Contagious, Awful Virus" is a Dark Parody of the peppy song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from Mary Poppins, which is about the Covid-19 pandemic.
  If you get bored, just think of the immunocompromised
  Who can't go much of anywhere unless it's sterilised
• A parody of the inspirational-sounding "Let it Go" from Frozen (2013) titled "Let it Flow" is about Anakin Skywalker turning to the Dark Side.
• Present in many songs by The Arrogant Worms, although it is comedy — "Killer Robots From Venus", for example, is about killer robots but is set to a cheery tune more suited to happier subjects.
• Mitch Benn:
  • "Now He's Gone" is a parody of Teenage Death Songs that sets a homicidal teenager murdering her boyfriends before they can hurt her to a 50s teenybopper tune.
  • "Imagine You Were Mine" is a cheery song from the perspective of a particularly creepy stalker. From his jail cell.
  • "Doctor Who Girl" is a sweet-sounding love song from the viewpoint of a misogynist who longs for a subservient woman to feed his ego, like the stereotypical Doctor Who companion.
• Brazilian comedy team Casseta & Planeta has "Eu tô Tristão", a cheery tune that could fit any Carnival ball, and has been described as an "exhumation samba", as the lyrics roughly go "I am so sad/I am a fucking wreck/I'm in the shit/Became a card out of the deck".
• "Diarrhea" by Da Yoopers is played as a straight, serious love song (well, except for the fart solo). It obviously isn't a straight, serious love song — he wants to go on a date with her but has to stay at home because he has the runs.
• The Irish comedy band Dead Cat Bounce has particularly nice once called "That Summer When We Killed That Guy", a cheery little number performed in the style of The Beach Boys.
  We were young and fancy-free
  We never had that much to do
  The world was made for kids like me
  In the summer of '62
  We were too young to be blue
  We never had that much to do
  But then we found something to do
  
  Oh, remember that summer when we killed that guy?
  The way we tortured him, the way we watched him die?
  The way we mangled his corpse on the railway line?
  That sunny summer's day we killed that guy
• Flight of the Conchords:
  • "Nothin' Wrong" from the duo's first release, Folk The World Tour. The song is an extremely upbeat, country-esque ditty about a man who kills his wife for leaving him. The track lampshades this trope a bit: it was recorded live, so when Bret delivers the verse in which the narrator kills his wife, there is a tense silence from the audience and the band until the latter crosses the line a second time a moment later.
  • Semi-parodied with "Robots"^note also known as "The Humans are Dead". It's meant to be a serious ballad to the plight of robots killing humans and taking over. It's played totally for laughs, especially in the monotone the duo get.
• The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has created a pair of CD collections of holiday music with the lyrics replaced by references to a wide variety of H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories: A Very Scary Solstice and An Even Scarier Solstice. So you get the music to, say, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" with lyrics talking about the singer being chased through Innsmouth by Deep Ones.
• Eric Idle's song "FCC Song" is a cheery little number about Idle being fined by the FCC, while it points out several people and issues who are causing trouble in the world; the underlying message being that instead of focusing on things and going after people that are actually problems, the FCC decides to fine him for language. The song, if broadcast, would allegedly cost Idle $250,000.
  "And fuck you all so very much!"
• Les Inconnus had a field day with this, usually in the name of lighthearted satire. Their most notable piece is arguably "Et vice et versa", a soothing, melancholic-sounding piece that could almost be mistaken for a genuine song... that is, unless you speak French, in which case the deep-sounding, hellenism-laden lyrics are nothing more than hilarious pseudo-philosophical ramblings full of misused words and laughable grammar and mean absolutely nothing.
• Spike Jones's "Der Fuehrer's Face" (a Breakaway Pop Hit from a Wartime Cartoon featuring Donald Duck) has the tune of a jaunty German drinking song but is actually a biting Hail to the Thief-style "The Villain Sucks" Song about Adolf Hitler and Those Wacky Nazis.
  Ven der Fuehrer says ve ist der master race
  Ve "Heil! Heil!" right in der Fuehrer's face
  Not to love der Fuehrer is a great disgrace
  So ve "Heil! Heil!" right in der Fuehrer's face
• "Up, Up, Down, Down" by Kirby Krackle starts out as a simple story about a geeky gamer guy who works at a video game store having a crush on a girl who frequents the store, but goes into something completely different all together when it's revealed that the girl is a stalkerish cannibal who cooks the singer alive. All while the song still keeps its absurdly happy tone.
• Jon Lajoie employs this in most of his songs. About the only exception is the oeuvre of "MC Vagina", which is more in the Hollywood Tone-Deaf category. For example:
  • "Everyday Normal Guy" is a gangsta rap about a boring 9-5 average Joe.
  • "Pop Song", were the lyrics to be taken out, would be a normal, if above-average, 2010s-era song. Said lyrics are about the manufactured nature of pop music, its committee-designed origins, the interchangeable nature of its artists, and its tendency to be marketed by using sex appeal to prey on the emotionally insecure.
  • "Sunday Afternoon" is a techno dance mix about doing chores at the end of the weekend.
  • "Stay At Home Dad" is a heavy metal piece about a house husband on paternity leave.
  • "Alone in the Universe" is a soulful song that wouldn't sound out of place in a Coldplay album... if it wasn't about masturbation.
  • "Please Use This Song" is a cheerful, catchy, inoffensive pop-rock number full of triumphant chords... about the singer explaining that he's broke and begging for someone to license the song out, while listing off the products the song could potentially advertise (including hair remover, videogames about shooting hookers, unneeded medications, the banks that took his house, and suicide hotlines). The song concludes with him cheerfully noting, "The music industry's dying, but consumerism is thriving."
• Denis Leary has a song titled "Life's Gonna Suck", a Raffi-esque campfire song about how horrible life is when you're an adult. It ends "You're gonna end up smoking crack / On your back / Face the fact / You're gonna end up hooked on smack / And then you're gonna die!", all sung in an incredibly cheerful manner. Of course, it's played for comedy, with Leary even noting "well, I think I smell a lawsuit in that one!" at the end of the song.
• Tom Lehrer plays this trope to the hilt, for comedy purposes. It is worth mentioning that the majority of Tom Lehrer's musical career was in the late fifties to early sixties, and how he pulled off some of this stuff boggles the mind. And yes, it is still friggin' hilarious.
  • "We Will All Go Together When We Go" is a cheery ballad about the results of a Class 3 nuclear holocaust.
  • "Be Prepared" is another song in the same style about, among other things, how important it is for boy scouts to hide their reefer from the scoutmaster, and make sure they get a cut when pimping out their sister.
  • "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie" is reasonably congruous, but still manages to include throwaway lines that praise slavery and the KKK.
  • "I Got It From Agnes" is about the spread of VD through, among others: parental incest, zoophilia, sedative-assisted rape and a homosexual threesome (Aha! Lucky Pierre!).
  • "The Old Dope Peddler" is a ballad praising the friendly neighbourhood drug dealer.
  • "My Hometown" is in the same style, and about how his high school chemistry teacher now runs an LSD lab and hands out samples to his students, his high school sweetheart has become a prostitute, and the nice guy who ran the diner killed his mother-in-law and served her ground remains as ice-cream garnish.
  • "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" is a love ballad that mentions that the singer killed the girl in question, and said hand is no longer attached.
  • "When You Are Old And Grey" is a cheery love song about how the singer will abandon his beloved when she becomes too old for him.
• Lemon Demon does this a lot. A few examples:
  • "The Saga of You, Confused Destroyer of Planets", a catchy little tune about blowing up millions of lives. "It's just a paradox, it isn't wrong."
  • "Atomic Copper Claw" is a hyper song sung by a paranoid person who believes that he's being stalked by someone wanting to kill him, with the instrument the song is named after hiding under his long sleeves.
  • "I Know Your Name", a catchy surfer-rock melody about an insane man who accosts random people and burns down a supermarket.
  • "Dead Sea Monkeys", a cheerful, upbeat song about... dead sea monkeys.
  • "Gonna Dig Up Alec Guinness" is perhaps the best example, a cheerful, 80's-sounding rock song about exhuming Alec Guinness and putting him on display for profit.
  • "Stuck", a slow, cheerful-sounding song with a lot of whistling about a person who is literally trapped in a song and wants you to put him out of his misery by skipping the track.
  • And then there's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", a happy little song about dozens of pop-cultural characters fighting a free-for-all epic battle to the death that devastates the Earth.
  • "Eyewishes", a catchy rock song with a great guitar riff about committing suicide.
  • "The Satirist's Love Song", a cheerful tune in which the narrator tells his girlfriend or significant other that their entire relationship was a work of satire.
• The Lonely Island:
  • "I'm on a Boat" is an angry and confrontational-sounding rap in pure "gangsta rap" style... about being on a boat.
  • On a similar note, there's also "Like a Boss", which starts out as a corporate performance review done to the tune of a rap song. About halfway through, the lyrics take a turn for the weird.
• Stephen Lynch bases his entire career around this trope, singing happy, upbeat tunes about venereal diseases, Satan, Nazis, schizophrenia, and many horrifying things he does to children. And that's just in one album.
• MC Hawking's canon, which consists of a vocal synthesizer gangsta rapping about science.
  Kicking science like no one else can
  My dick is twice as long as my attention span
  So if you cross me bitch you're out of luck
  'Cause Stephen Hawking is crazy as fuck
• Napoleon XIV's... anything, pretty much. Most of his songs are cheerful, happy-sounding tunes about various forms of mental illness.
• Bill Oddie of The Goodies stole a lot of tropes from Tom Lehrer and came up with songs like "Mummy, I Don't Like My Meat", a cheerful song about eating the family pets to avoid starvation.
• This trope is the entire basis for the comedy act Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine. They take songs such as the hip hop song "Baby Got Back" and perform them in the jazzy swing style of Frank Sinatra.
  "This one is for the ladies! Rape me / Rape me, my friend..."
• The song "Kosovo" by Seattle radio comedian Bob Rivers is a parody of "Kokomo" by The Beach Boys, keeping the cheerful tropical rhythm intact but referencing the bloodshed of The Yugoslav Wars to mock US foreign policy. This led to a minor scandal in 2005 when some Norwegian peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo made a video of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to the song.
• Adam Sandler is prone to doing this. For example:
  • "Ode to My Car" has a reggae-sounding feel to it. The song itself is about all the problems he's had with his misshapen, breakdown-prone, old, ugly "car", and curses it out in just about every lyric. Observe:
    It got no CD player, it only got the eight-track
    Whoever designed my car can lick my sweaty nut sack (Make 'em bite his ass, too)
    And I got no fucking brakes; I'm always way out of control
    Eleven times I day, I hear, "Hey, watch it asshole!" (You fucking piece of shit!)
  • He also has a reggae-sounding song about casting voodoo curses on people who annoy him.
• "You're Always Welcome At Our House", written by Shel Silverstein, is a jaunty children's tune about a bunch of kids killing unsuspecting visitors and hiding their bodies.
• The Tripod song "Congo" starts off as a serious song about the pointlessness of war, and while the lyrics stay depressing, Gatesy and Yon eventually turn it into an upbeat cheerful song, complete with cheerful dancing.
• Many "Weird Al" Yankovic songs use this technique as part of their humor:
  • All the polka medleys dip into this to varying degrees, but it's most glaring when he uses particularly violent songs such as "Hey Joe" or "Pumped Up Kicks" and throws in whimsical-sounding stock gun sound effects.
  • "Happy Birthday" from his self-titled album is a spirited, up-tempo birthday song. It encourages the celebrant to enjoy this birthday because everyone dies, and the world is probably going to end soon.
  • Cable TV is an peppy upbeat song about a guy who is borderline suicidal and obsessively watches television to fill the void in his life, much to the concern of his friends.
  • "Such A Groovy Guy" sounds like '80's pop fluff, and then you listen to the lyrics...
    Baby, are you in the mood for a little romance?
    Well, for starters I can pour some chocolate pudding down your pants
    And then attach electrodes to your brain and watch you dance
    Oh, golly, wouldn't that be fun?
  • "One of Those Days" is a jazzy bit of '80s pop-rock about a guy going through one of the worst days imaginable, though he plays the dissonance within the lyrics as well:
    I just wrapped my Cadillac around a tree
    A big swarm of locusts is following me
    There's not even anything good on TV
    It's just one of those days
  • "Christmas at Ground Zero", about celebrating Christmas in the middle of a nuclear war, manages to use this trope within the lyrics themselves:
    We can dodge debris
    While we trim the tree
    Underneath a mushroom cloud
  • "Good Old Days" from Even Worse sounds like a pleasant reminiscence of lost childhood innocence, but the lyrics are about a childhood delinquent who grows into a psychopath.
    Do you remember sweet Michelle
    She was my high school romance
    [...]
    Then I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair
    And I left her in the desert all alone
    Well, sometimes in my dreams
    I can still hear the screams
    Oh, I wonder if she ever made it home
    Those were the good old days
  • "Trigger Happy" is a Beach Boys/surf music-inspired tune about a gun-obsessed paranoiac.
  • "You Don't Love Me Anymore", which, while sounding soft and melancholy, is all about a guy who apparently realizes very slowly (after being so clueless) that the girl he's in love with is just too sadistic and abusive towards him (even describing actions done to him that should have killed him, all while acting rather mildly surprised of it all).
  • "Bohemian Polka", which takes Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" about a man facing execution and turns it into, well, a polka.
  • "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is a happy, upbeat song in which the singer gets involved in a serious accident, gets vivisected by aliens, dies of a papercut, and has to face the existential quandary of being repeatedly told that everything he knows is wrong, by no less than Saint Peter, the disembodied head of Colonel Sanders, and his hibachi dealer. In the Style of They Might Be Giants, too.
  • "Since You've Been Gone" describes the torture of the dumpee (in reasonably cheery '50s a capella doo-wop), and ends with the brilliant line "I feel almost as bad as I did when you were still here".
  • The entire song of "I Remember Larry" is a contender, since it's a fast-paced, upbeat song about a horribly abusive neighbor that made the singer's life miserable with his increasingly cruel pranks, with the last verse not breaking step when he describes breaking into Larry's house in the middle of the night, dragging him bound and gagged into the woods, stuffing him in a plastic garbage bag, and leaving him for dead. It puts a different spin on the rest of the song, such as the chorus repetition of "I'll never forget about Larry, no matter how I try". It gets even better when you listen to him describing Larry as "...a funny, funny guy..." and realize that he's saying it with an undertone of sarcasm.
  • "The Night Santa Went Crazy", arguably his darkest song to date, in which Santa goes on a murder spree. With a folksy tune reminiscent of Soul Asylum.
  • "Your Horoscope For Today" is a rather upbeat song about the obvious. The horoscopes in question tend to be some combination of weirdly ominous and/or oddly specific:
    Gemini
    Your birthday party will be ruined once again by your explosive flatulence
    Your love life will run into trouble when your fiancé hurls a javelin through your chest
    [...]
    Sagittarius
    All your friends are laughing behind your back
    KILL THEM
  • "Weasel Stomping Day", an upbeat holiday song where the holiday in question is devoted to maiming and killing innocent mustelids.
  • "Do I Creep You Out" is a direct parody of the soothing Taylor Hicks soul song "Do I Make You Proud", whereas it describes the tendencies of a stalker in a humorously over-the-top fashion.
  • "Skipper Dan" from Alpocalypse has a catchy, bouncy, upbeat tune and is about a man who used to be a well-known actor and has seen his ambitions go up in smoke, forced to work a dead-end job at Disneyland.
    Look at those hippos, they're wiggling their ears
    Just like they've done for the last fifty years
    Now I'm laughing at my own jokes but I'm crying inside
    'Cause I'm working on the Jungle Cruise ride
  • "Party In The CIA" is a similar case, which takes the happy, catchy tune of "Party in the USA" and turns it into a song about a CIA agent brutally torturing the nation's enemies before (in the music video) eventually being captured and killed himself.
  • "Inactive", which combines a badass fist-pumping melody with hilarious Black Comedy lyrics about a phenomenally lazy, fat, apathetic loser.
• This song is peppy and set to the tune of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town]]", but it talks about things like Santa being ground into Ludicrous Gibs, his sleigh destroying things with sonic booms, and employing children instead of elves.
• Kat McSnatch: "I Don't Like You" is a perky-sounding song, but it's about how the singer has an irrational hatred for the listener and is even homicidal towards them.
• Songdrops:
  • "You Turn My Pinkies Blue" sounds like a slow love song, and it technically is a love song, but it mentions things like wetting one's pants in fear and throwing up.
  • "If Our Love was an Outhouse" is another love song, and it sounds kind of like a power ballad, but the lyrics are full of Toilet Humour (such as "If our love was an outhouse, it would be made of gold.") and absurdity (such as "I love you as long as a lizard stays dry").
  • "The Wheels on the Bus are Falling Off" is sung in a light hearted way, but it concerns a bus in which the engine is on fire, the wheels are falling off, there are hungry zombies, irate snakes, and the children are all screaming, and nobody knows where the first aid kit is.
  • "If You See Kay" is a slow song that sounds like an emotional ballad, but the song is a joke on how "If you see Kay" sounds like "F-U-C-K".
  • "A Very Sad Song" has sad-sounding music, but the lyrics aren't actually sad; they simply say that it's a sad song without describing anything sad.

Dark Cabaret

• The band Creature Feature does this in all their songs. The most notable example is "A Gorey Demise", which is a tribute to Edward Gorey's book The Gashlycrumb Tinies. It is a cheerful, upbeat, alphabet-themed song about twenty-six individuals dying horrible deaths.
  A is for Amber who drowned in a pool
  B is for Billy who was eaten by ghouls
• Voltaire's song "Death Death (Devil, Devil, Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil, Evil Evil Song)" is a very catchy, joyous song about a pessimist who spends his whole life playing songs about death and the devil, to the chagrin of all the people who ask him to sing something positive.

Emo

• The song "The Way She Feels" by the band Between the Trees is about a girl who cuts herself, but the song is way too cheerful and upbeat for such a topic (at least until the later part).
• Boys Night Out's entire Broken Bones and Bloody Kisses EP is extremely poppy and upbeat sounding, but the lyrical content is incredibly dark and macabre, playing with many suicide metaphors, and even one track about murdering an ex-lover. And the movie that is sampled to set the mood? Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
• Played with rather amusingly in the Say Anything... song "That Is Why". It comes off as a peppy faux show tune that's actually about him hating his ex and listing of reasons why she's a horrible bitch. Especially weird is that an earlier version of the song, "You Should Rock My World", has cheery lyrics set to the same melody.
• "You Know How I Do" from Taking Back Sunday is a driving upbeat track with a prominent sing-along line throughout that describes the deteriorating effects of drug addiction on someone and how people close to them may have to consider moving on without them.

Forties Music

• "Jingle Jangle Jingle" by Kay Kyser is extremely simple and catchy. But read between the lines (or just listen to the first one), and you realize it's about a guy running away from his wedding, and the sound of his spurs helping him to focus on his wandering.

Funk

• A fair number of Gnarls Barkley songs:
  • "Run (I'm A Natural Disaster)" is an immensely catchy and upbeat tune that the lyrics suggest is about the singer becoming a dangerous nutcase after doing drugs. Or a Zombie Apocalypse. Or even music.
  • "Neighbors" is dark... until you realize it's about a man getting annoyed at his neighbor and finally yelling at him. If you take it literally.
• Prince:
  • "Sister" is a catchy, upbeat, sugary pop song about a 14-year-old boy being molested by his middle-aged sister.
  • "1999" is a funky dance piece about partying during a nuclear holocaust or biblical apocalypse. "The sky was all purple, there were people running everywhere, trying to run from the destruction, you know I didn't even care".
• "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" by Sly and the Family Stone, a funky proto-disco song guaranteed to get you on the floor and boogie, despite the song being about Sly struggling with his inner demons.

Grunge

• Nirvana:
  • "Lithium" is a song about a guy who kills his girlfriend and goes out to commit suicide, only to join Christianity. This all happens while keeping the same mellow feel throughout the song. Adding to the dissonance is its energetic sing-along chorus.
  • "Polly" is a calm and mellow song about kidnapping and rape.
  • The melody of "Sliver" is cheerful, but the lyrics are about a boy having an awful night at his grandparentsä. The song is clearly comedic; Kurt Cobain's voice shows the boy's "suffering" often.
• "Tyler" by Toadies is quite optimistic and laid back, even after the part where the narrator breaks into his love interest's house through the kitchen window and gets drunk before going up to her room, where he then states that he hears the fear in her voice.

Hawaiian

• "Kaulana Nā Pua" sounds like a sweet romantic song, except that the lyrics are protesting the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii and its subsequent annexation by the United States. On the Mākaha Sons album Nā Pua o Hawaiʻi, the dissonance is reinforced by all the other songs generally being about romance or nature's beauty (notwithstanding deeper metaphors).

Industrial

• "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails. The beat and porn-esque bassline give the impression that it is a song about sexual gratification, but the lyrics are about a man that uses sex as a means to escape his crippling self-loathing. Still, to this day, many listeners ignore the actual lyrical content and instead focus on the "OMG he wants to f&$% me like an animal!"-factor.
• Rammstein:
  • The opening version of the chorus in "Amerika", song about American corporate/cultural dominance of the world, sounds like a Soviet anthem.
  • Speaking of Soviet anthems, "Moskau". The cheery female vocalist sings about Lenin and pioneers while the main lyrics praise the titular city... by comparing it to an old whore.

J-Pop

• Ado's "Domestic Violence" is a rather refreshing and upbeat jazz song... but the lyrics are Exactly What It Says on the Tin: An abusive, toxic relationship between a couple.
• While Ali Project songs tend to fit the pitch of the music according to what the lyrics are about, there are a few instances of this trope:
  • "Mitsubara Teien" (Honey Rose Garden) appears to be about a girl falling in love, getting lost and hurt as she plays in the rose garden with her lover, and eventually realising that they'll have to break up and the garden will fall to ruin with him. The instrumentals sound like something out of a Disney song.
  • "Bianca" is about a girl who loves her toy doll, finds a lover, eventually abandons the doll, and sadly reminisces about her childhood.
  • "Nanashi no Mori" (Nameless Forest) is pretty upbeat for a song about a quest for something that may or may not exist, and about the Nameless Forest from Through The Looking Glass.
  • "Gokushoku Ichidai Onna" (Woman of a Colourful Lifetime) is very upbeat and jazzy for a woman who has experienced so many things in life, only to find them overrated and become nihilistic and suicidal, and preaching her experiences to others.
• GACKT:
  • "Kono Dare mo Inai Heya de" (In This Empty Room) slowly builds to ninety seconds of cheerful humming reminiscent of "Hey, Jude"... as the increasingly angsty lyrics make it clear that the singer is losing his mind after his lover's murder. Just to drive it home, the cheery music ends in a few ominous-sounding violin measures.
  • "Kalmia". While it has a rather soft melodic rock sound to it with some minor and basic guitar solos that don't really hint at anything evil, the translated lyrics depict hearing (and apparently seeing) headless dolls laughing while staring at an otherwise destroyed town from afar, and a recalling of an apocalypse of sorts wherein everything vanishes and gets sucked up into the sky in what sounds like a killer tornado/hurricane. All while Gackt sings along, his voice giving no hint of terror of the situation or any hint for that matter that this isn't just another one of his kooky rock ballads. However, a botanist or even a seasoned gardener could tell you that the kalmia is a beautiful yet extremely poisonous flower.
• Happened a lot with Ayumi Hamasaki via Executive Meddling. Her gimmick is that she writes her own lyrics (often based on the angsty experiences she had), but she rarely composes the music. To give some more specific examples:
  • While in the studio albums this trope is hardly noticeable, it becomes notorious in the Eurodance and Trance remixes of her first albums, where angsty songs about abandonment were given extremely happy new melodies. Memorable offenders are the remixes from "Trauma" and "Kanariya".
  • One example from an actual album is "Memorial Address", a song about a sudden abandonment (implied to be because of the other person's death), which begins with a sweet and sad melody... and suddenly the music switches into an energetic rock tune. While keeping the Tear Jerker lyrics.
• "Chu Chu Lovely Muni Muni Mura Mura" by Maximum the Hormone is a really happy, peppy, j-poppy song about rape, paedophilia, masturbation, etc.
• Japanese folk-pop artist Miyuki Nakajima has a few:
  • "Usotsuki ga Suki yo" ("I Like Liars"), a happy party tune about a woman chatting up guys while drunk and lying to them even though she'll be betrayed by them.
  • The original version of "Yokorembo" ("Unrequited Love") is an upbeat, bouncy pop ditty about what the title implies.
  • Also of note is the original version of "Awase Kagami" ("Self-Portrait in Two Mirrors"): Rage Against the Reflection set to a pleasant jazzy tune.
• "Guchi" by Ataru Nakamura sounds like a traditional Japanese folk ballad, but it's about people complaining and the singer being extremely fed up.
• Onyanko Club's "Sailorfuku wo Nugasanai de" is a catchy, upbeat song... about a girl who wants to have sex. The lyrics include such lines as "Mama and Papa won't know", "It's a bit scary but / being a virgin is boring" and "I want to try having sex." Oh, and the title translates to "Don't Take Off My Sailor Uniform".
• Puncolle Voice Actresses Legendary Punk Songs Collection is an album of female J-Pop singers covering various punk rock classics. Pretty much every single song falls into this category, like Rie Tanaka's cover of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.". The melody and rhythm wouldn't seem out of place in a walk on the beach at sundown.
• The 1963 song "Ue o muite aruko" by Kyu Sakamoto (better known to English speakers as "Sukiyaki") has a cheerful-sounding tune, but is in fact about a man whose heart is broken, and who walks in the rain looking upwards so that his tears are disguised by the rainwater running down his face.
• "Oh My Juliet!" by Fujii Takashi is such a catchy dance song that one could be forgiven for thinking that it's yet another Silly Love Song that namedrops Romeo and Juliet for romantic comparison and misses the point about their deaths at the end. But the ending lyrics allude to exactly that, talking about how the singer and his love interest will fake their deaths by poison and then implying they indeed kill themselves:
  Oh Juliet, why are you crying?
  Even though we soon should have freedom in our hands
  Believe in love, call my name
  Wake up, because it's a bad dream
  So darling, call my name
  You've gotten cold
  Embrace me
• "Phone Lament" (携帯哀歌, Keitai Aika) by Tokyo Pudding sounds like a grandiose ballad, but the lyrics are about the lament of a man who rarely hears his phone ring, gets cut off every time it rings, regrets buying it, and even hates Thomas Edison for inventing it.
• Hikaru Utada does this a lot on her English-language albums, including:
  • "Hotel Lobby", upbeat and groovy but about a prostitute and how miserable her life is.
  • "Wonder 'Bout", a dancey number about daydreaming about what one's ex is up to, including the line "rather be out in the rain; now I understand why my mother ran away".
  • "Me Muero", which has a funk-influenced beat and is about sinking into suicidal depression after being left by a lover.
• Most Yaen songs are like this. For example, their 2004 song "HEAVEN'S RULE" might be best surmised as a song about a world of crime with victims and witnesses too afraid to do anything but look the other way — sung from the point of view of the criminal, all to a synth-laden V6-worthy noise-pop beat.
  I'm certainly not among the angels
  Yeah, I'm just a plain old rat
  No matter who does what
  It's the rule to pretend you don't see
  This is the paradise where we enjoy that freedom
  WELCOME TO THE HEAVEN
  This isn't a place for you to come to
  NEVER COME BACK AGAIN
• YOASOBI's song "Yoru ni Kakeru" is quite danceable and upbeat, and its PV is littered with pastel pink, but its lyrics are based on the short story The Seduction of Thanatos, which is about someone's lover being influenced by Thanatos (the god of death) and thus constantly attempting suicide. They've been stopping their lover the entire time, since every time they were about to, they would text them. However, this time they finally understand that their lover doesn't want to do it alone anymore. Another interpretation, based on how the story this song was based on mentions that the person's lover is their Thanatos, is that their lover doesn't even exist in the first place and they're just suicidal, which is further suggested in the MV, where the lover survives the fall completely intact while the man does not. This trope was invoked according to the songwriter:
  Q: Why is the song's melody so upbeat?
  A: I figured if I were to write a gloomy tune to express [the short story], it would just become unbearably bleak, so I made it catchy and pop on purpose. I wanted to express the grotesque that resides within beauty and cuteness.

J-Rock

• 403 Forbiddena's "Go West" sounds pretty optimistic, but the first thing said is "Humans should die".
• L'arc-en-Ciel:
  • "Feeling Fine". While an upbeat song musically, judging by the lyrics it is likely about a couple after a breakup.
  • "Dive to Blue" has a nice, calming, if not exceptionally cheerful tune, and has nice lyrics about flying. The music video shows the sinister aspect of those lyrics since it starts with a man jumping off the top of a building to commit suicide and seems to imply him changing his mind about halfway down. Then it really screws with you by making you think he was saved (even if it wasn't quite logical, but this is a music video after all). A final shot after the music fades reveals something of a twisted Brick Joke.
• This is a major theme of the Japanese rock band Bump of Chicken. Most Bump songs are rather sad but come across as happy. It's usually a shock to an English speaker who learns what the lyrics actually are. For example, "Wheel Song" is about someone leaving and possibly never seeing them again.
• The hit track of the Japanese J-rock band Chatmonchy is "Hana No Yume", an upbeat bouncy song with a music video full of bright happy colors. Its lyrics, however, are full of sad, violent imagery, as in the refrain:
  I cut my finger on a thin piece of paper
  And red, red blood oozed out
  Such a small blade, but it hurt, really hurt my fingertip
• J-rock band Flow did a mostly upbeat ska cover of "Okuro Kotoba", roughly meaning "Words of Farewell", which is a song about painful goodbyes.
• The JAM Project cover of "Okkusenman". They rearranged Dr. Wily's castle's stage 1 BGM from Mega Man 2, turned it a song about losing one's childhood... and play it with all their usual Hot-Blooded gusto.
• Akari Nanawo's first song, titled "I want to be Happy", is a cheerful-sounding J-Rock tune... but the lyrics are about someone suffering from depression (and, based on the MV, commits suicide at the end). As a bonus, Neru wrote them, and this is a Vocaloid producer known for making depressing songs.
• Shiina Ringo:
  • "Queen of Kabukicho" is a delightful song about a girl whose prostitute mother abandons her and who subsequently becomes a prostitute herself.
  • "Zettai Zetsumei". The "Bon Voyage" tour turns it into full-on disco. However, the literal translation of the title is Absolute Despair.

Jazz

• Made famous by Louis Armstrong, "When the Saints Go Marching In" is often performed in an upbeat and rousing tone. However, the traditional lyrics detail the apocalypse as described in the Book of Revelation. (It was originally a gospel hymn. Indeed, the reason Armstrong translated it to jazz was that his sister had suggested the traditional version was inappropriate and irreligious.)
• "Koop Island Blues" by Ane Brun and Koop sounds relaxed and carefree, but the lyrics are about a woman lamenting the loss of her lover.
• Bobby Darin:
  • "Artificial Flowers" is a Perry Como-esque upbeat jazz song, with lyrics about an orphan making flowers in a tenement and then freezing to death.
  • "Mack the Knife" is a swinging, catchy, toe-tapping pop standard about a murderer, kidnapper, arsonist, thief, rapist, etc., who can't be beat.
• "Stone Cold Dead in the Market" by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan is a jaunty, catchy tune about a wife who kills her violently abusive husband.
• Florence K did an upbeat Latin-sounding version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", which would seem about right... except that she's using the original lyrics from Meet Me in St. Louis, which are somewhat more depressing than the version most commonly sung, being sung by two characters who are sad that they have to move away. Considering the "common" version has Lyrical Dissonance in itself, it's quite jarring.
• Halie Loren's "Maybe I'll Fly" is a very cheerful song that starts with the words "I'm getting buried underneath a crumbling castle..." and gets worse from there. Turns out it's being sung by a girl with major dependency issues whose boyfriend just left.
• Jason Mraz's "Butterfly" is a classy song, all about sex. It's not innuendo based either, besides the title (which refers to a slang term for "vagina" by the way). It's a very explicit and sexy song.
• Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" is a jazz standard which is usually performed in a cheery and upbeat manner, but is actually a fairly dark and cynical song about prostitution.
• The Puppini Sisters love this trope. Their covers of modern songs such as "Heart of Glass", "Spooky", "Walk Like an Egyptian", "I Will Survive", and "Crazy in Love" are performed in swing-era fashion, with sweet girl-trio harmonies.
• Nina Simone's "Go To Hell", a soft jazzy tune about how you better shape up or guess what, you'll roast in hell for eternity. That includes your children if you don't raise them right.

Latin

• The late Colombian salsa singer and songwriter Joe Arroyo has a song about how in colonial Cartagena de Indias a black slave rose against (and probably killed) his owner because the latter mistreated the slave's wife. Said song, "Rebelión" is incredibly catchy and upbeat sounding.
• Rubén Blades can be very political and philosophical in his songwriting and has lyrics which need and inspire reflection, attached to music who gets in the way of that. For example, "Plastico" is a discoesque song about the plastic superficiality of people.
• "Tropicana" by Italian band Gruppo Italiano (a name which, incidentally, means exactly that) is an upbeat calypso number... about a dream wherein a tropical island is destroyed by atomic explosions, hurricanes, fires and so on.
• Merengue singer and songwriter Juan Luis Guerra:
  • Guerra tends to include a song about social issues in each album he releases... and those songs also tend to be very catchy and upbeat, leading to dancers everywhere happily dancing to songs about people applying for an American visa as their last hope ("Visa para un sueño"), being confronted with high prices, higher corruption, and lack of essential items ("El Costo de la vida"), being victims of an truly awful health care system ("El Niágara en bicicleta"), or bribing their way out of being arrested by the police ("Acompañeme civil").
  • When Guerra made his Christian album, the only song from it that made onto the radio was "Las Avispas" ("The Wasps"), a very upbeat song which, between the usual claims of "I love the Lord and he loves me back", has a chorus in which the singer assures you that you don't have to worry about the "enemy" trying to corrupt you, since Jesus himself promised to punish them by sending wasps to sting them.
• Javiera y los Imposibles's song "Te amo tanto" ("I love you so") has super child-like and poppy beats... and lyrics about a girl who laments the suicide of her boyfriend.
• Juanes's "La Paga" (The Pay) sounds pretty upbeat for a song about a guy who has just found out that, despite his efforts to make his girlfriend happy, she never really loved him.
• "El cantante" by Héctor Lavoe is The melancholy of being an entertainer in salsa version.
• The infamous nineties song "Macarena" by Los del Río is a catchy dance tune about the town's Good Bad Girl. Who is planning to cheat on her boyfriend the minute he puts a foot out of the town. In the original Spanish lyrics, it explicitly says that she went on to cheat on him with two dudes the day he got drafted, and her life aspiration is to move out of her town and dump the guy.
• "Where Do You Go" by No Mercy is a bouncy bubblegum dance track with mournful lyrics about a breakup:
  You left without a word, no message, no number
  And now my head is pounding like it were thunder
  You left me with a heartbreak deep inside
  Girl, you should see me cry all night as I wonder
• The Brazilian group Os Paralamas do Sucesso has songs depicting the poverty and hopelessness of Brazilian low-class people with happy, upbeat melodies. An example is "Alagados" (lit. "Flooded", named after a slum), which speaks about the hard life conditions in the favelas ("The city, with its open arms in the postcards and its tightened fist in real life, denies you opportunities and shows you the face of evil"). And the Spanish version keeps the message.
• Los Prisioneros was extremely good at this before their Audience-Alienating Era and separation. Some of their best examples are:
  • "We Are Sudamerican Rockers", a song about beleaguered and unsuccessful rock singers, set to upbeat rhythms.
  • "Latinoamérica es un pueblo al sur de Estados Unidos", cheerful ska tunes about Latin America's dependence on the USA.
  • "¿Por qué los ricos?", cheery beats describing the complaints of poor people about the rich.
  • "Maldito sudaca", a rockish song that denounces the xenophobia towards Latin Americans — sudaca is a very offensive Spaniard term to refer to people coming from Latin America.
  • "Sexo", a cheerful-sounding but very sarcastic song about media and sexuality.
  • "Nunca quedas mal con nadie", an upbeat ska-like song about supposedly progressive singers that sell themselves to the mainstream (apparently inspired by a specific Chilean singer of The '80s, but don't ask whom).
  • "El baile de los que sobran", rock song with Tear Jerker lyrics about lower-class people who can't go to college and ascend socially due to lack of money and opportunities.
  • "Paramar", which has an unusually poppy sound for this group... and is all about how much Love Hurts.
• Santana and Maná's joint-effort song "Corazon Espinado", a smooth salsa/guitar jam about a really painful break-up, as the "Spanglish" version makes somewhat clearer for English speakers:
  Como me duele el olvido (How it hurts to be forgotten)
  How it hurts el corazón
  Como me duele estar vivo (How it hurts to be alive)
  Coz I can't stand this pain no more

New Wave

• a-ha's 1986 album Scoundrel Days has several cases:
  • The eponymous song has an energetic, rock-ish beat. Its lyrics talk about a madman who cuts his wrists open, has severe hallucinations, and finally throws himself off a cliff in front of his neighbors. Mind Screw to the max.
  • "I've Been Losing You" is a rock song with gorgeous rhythm and effects... talking about a man who reflects about how, during a fight, he shot his girlfriend to death.
  • The poppy, almost cute song named "Maybe Maybe" is about a messy break-up that reaches its peak when the girl kills the guy by hitting him with her Rover.
  • A subtle example happens with "Soft Rains of April", a melancholic song about a lonely English man calling home in a rainy day. The last verses of the song reveal that he's a prison inmate, and it's implied that his family has all but disowned him.
• "Big in Japan" by Alphaville, a fairly upbeat song with lyrics about a couple who share a heroin addiction imagining if their life would be easier elsewhere.
• Blondie:
  • "The Attack of the Giant Ants". Lyrics concerning humanity being wiped out by a Horde of Alien Locusts? Check. Upbeat salsa/pop melody? Check. Enough said.
  • Ever really listen to the lyrics of "One Way or Another"? The melody is somewhat less cheery than the standard, but it's still fairly upbeat for a song where a woman pretty much swears to stalk the guy she likes forever.
• The Boomtown Rats:
  • "Diamond Smiles" is an upbeat song about a woman who goes to a party and hangs herself.
  • "I Don't Like Mondays" is an upbeat, peppy song... about a school shooting. To be fair, the song doesn't sound that upbeat, and the last verse is a dead giveaway of the subject matter.
• "Smalltown Boy" by Bronski Beat, a driving dancy new wave/Hi-NRG number, is about a teen being bullied and forced to leave town and his family because of his homosexuality.
• Depeche Mode almost always has angsty lyrics, and these are almost always paired with appropriately angsty or at least rougher-than-standard-pop music. And then there's "A Photograph of You", which is bouncy, happy, and sweet, almost like an old-school Beach Boys track on synths... but it's about a guy too torn up about his breakup to throw away the photo he keeps of his girlfriend.
• "Girls on Film" by Duran Duran. A catchy, poppy tune about porn stars. To be fair, if you don't think too hard about the lyrics it's easy to assume it's about modeling, a (mis)interpretation further bolstered by the video.
• Erasure has several of these:
  • People get up and dance to the killer beat and shiny, poppy synth of "Oh L'amour", only to hear verses like this:
    No emotional ties
    You don't remember my name
    I lay down and die
    I'm only to blame
  • "Victim of Love" is a song about somebody who's been hurt so much by the people he loved that he's becoming apprehensive about entering another relationship. Not such a happy subject, but the song sounds so optimistic and, quite honestly, danceable.
  • "Leave Me To Bleed" is actually quite danceable, but is about someone whose partner cheated on and breaks up with him.
• Falco's "Jeanny" seems to be about a Dogged Nice Guy who desperately wants a girl named Jeannie to notice him. The song is actually about a Serial Killer, and Jeannie is his next victim. Not helped by how the song is in German save for the chorus, and people only pay attention to the English chorus... totally missing the last spoken part that offers details about Jeannie and other girls being missing.
• You can't really get much more horrific than Paul Hardcastle's "19". "The Vietnam War was an unspeakable tragedy for everyone involved. Let's dance!"
• Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" is an energetic new wave song... about life within a Police State. The dissonance would have been greater had it not been for Executive Meddling giving it a romantic subtext.
• Haysi Fantayzee's "Shiny Shiny", a ludicrously peppy new wave polka rap hit that's at least partially about the pending threat of nuclear war ("The child spoke 'we ain't got hope' / Press a button, press a button / It's all remote").
• Industry's "State of the Nation" is an upbeat dance track with cool synth chords, yet the lyrics are all about war. One version of the music video tries to imply this by taking place around and inside a navy vessel full of (dancing) ensigns, but the party atmosphere and the fact that everybody's dancing only makes it look silly.
• Intaferon's "Steamhammer Sam" is an upbeat honky-tonk/rock fusion song about the plight of the many blue-collar workers in Britain left unemployed in the '80s by Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. "Steamhammer Sam sits in the park all day and he gets drunk, watching the children play, he's very sad, no happy ending 'cause he went mad..."
• Joe Jackson's "Be My Number Two" is a tender love-ballad melody with lyrics about how he wants a pliable girlfriend to comfort him after breaking up with a Tsundere. "Every time I look at you / You'll be who I want you to." At least the singer admits that "it's really not fair of me."
• Not really creepy per se, but "My Sharona" by The Knack is an incredibly upbeat song... about a guy who is attracted to an underage girl and, in his seemingly paranoid mind, is wondering if she feels the same or is just leading him on.
• "Always Something There To Remind Me" by Naked Eyes is a very upbeat song about a man tormented by memories of his ex-girlfriend.
• It takes effort to find an Oingo Boingo song that doesn't make extensive use of lyrical dissonance. Upbeat music with dark themes is one of their specialties. For example, "Little Girls", written and sung by none other than Danny Elfman, it is an insanely catchy, peppy rock song sung from the point of view of a pedophile.
• Pet Shop Boys' "It's a Sin" is a very hammy and loud song about a man who's tormented by guilt and his inner demons, inspired by Neil Tennant's own bad experiences in the past.
• "Maniac" by Michael Sembello sounds pretty ominous (in a cheesy 80's slasher movie theme music sort of way) for just being about a girl who loves to dance. As it turns out, this is because it was substantially rewritten for the Flashdance soundtrack: The original lyrics were inspired by the horror film Maniac!, and featured the refrain "He's a maniac, maniac, that's for sure, he will kill your cat and nail him to the door". A somewhat garbled copy of the song (which was written for personal giggles) was accidentally included on Sembello's demo tape for the producers of Flashdance, and it was the only one they liked.
• Eighties legends Talking Heads did a lot of these. Their lyrical style usually leads the careless listener to assume that the band is trying to put across a positive message; one must pay close attention to the lyrics to see the songs' true nature.
  • The cheerful melody of "Don't Worry About the Government" counterpoints the lyrics, which sound similarly cheerful -– until you realize how intentionally, sarcastically inane they are.
  • "Psycho Killer", which dramatizes the title character's neuroses amid chunky guitar riffs. Not your typical pop song material.
  • "Life During Wartime", a song about a cynical secret agent living during a violent revolution, set to a very funky beat.
  • "Once in a Lifetime" is from the perspective of a man who's fully imbursed himself in The American Dream, only to realize it's not all it's cracked up to be, until the pressure (represented by water) pulling down on him makes him shout, "My God, What Have I Done?"
  • "Road to Nowhere", which implies that the inevitable death of everybody who's ever been born isn't such a depressing thing after all.
• Tears for Fears:
  • "Mad World" is an upbeat-sounding song about depression.
  • "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" has a relaxed, radio-friendly sound. However, the lyrics are actually about the Cold War.
    There's a room where the light won't find you
    Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
  • "Woman in Chains" is a sweet-sounding ballad — about a woman who's a victim of Domestic Abuse.
• The The:
  • "This is the Day" has a catchy tune and a chorus that says: "This is the day your life will surely change / This is the day when things fall into place." Great, right? They even used it in an M&M's commercial. Except that the verse lyrics describe someone who has wasted his entire life and tells himself things will change every day, without ever making a move to actually do so.
  • "Perfect" is quite upbeat and the chorus starts with: "It's such a picture-perfect day..." But the lyrics describe sitting in a cemetery pondering the futility of existence.
• "Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday is a fairly upbeat song about an abusive relationship.
• Ultravox's "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" is an upbeat New Wave dance tune about one's last moments during a nuclear power station meltdown.
• "Kids in America" by Kim Wilde is a cheery tune about having fun in the city... until you see the original music video, and realize the song is about a paranoid agoraphobic who has holed up alone, watching a massive party outside, and trying to explain their behavior, eventually issuing a warning about them.
  Looking out a dirty old window
  Down below the cars in the city go rushing by
  I sit here alone and I wonder why

Pasillo

• Julio Jaramillo is an Ecuadorian "pasillo" performer who has a wonderful song called "Bodas Negras". It doesn't start happy, but as the music advances, it gets more cheerful. It's a wonderful love song to dance to... except when you realize that it talks about a guy that pulls out his ex-lover's skeleton out of the grave and dances, kisses it, and finally marries it.

Post-Industrial

• "Worlock" by Skinny Puppy. The song is one of Skinny Puppy's most accessible songs and is essentially a pop song with heavy drums. The strings in the chorus are particularly beautiful. But the lyrics are the usual insane, demented, weird incomprehensibility that Skinny Puppy revels in.

Post-Punk

• Chumbawamba embodies this trope, with cheery pop-synth beats, and female soprano vocals... that are rather depressing (and often either critiquing society or politics). For example, their song "Smalltown", an airy, breezy number containing these lyrics:
  Cafes full of people dressed as spies
  And all I know is guilt for being different
  It's always raining stones
  There's a killer in the home
• Half of the musically cheery tunes of The Cure have extremely dark or creepy lyrics. On the other hand, Robert Smith's declaration of love to his wife (albeit being a beautiful song and probably one of the most sincere love songs ever), aptly named "Lovesong", does not have a happy tune. At all.
• This was Joy Division's stock-in-trade. Most of their songs are fast and catchy... with some of the most wretchedly depressing lyrics ever committed to paper. Chillingly enough, the lyrics frontman Ian Curtis wrote for the band started to become more and more personal in the months leading up to May 18, 1980, but it was only after he hanged himself that day that everyone came to realize that he had essentially been writing suicide notes. For example:
  • "Isolation" is a nice little bouncy synthpop song about the singer hating himself.
  • "Love Will Tear Us Apart":
    When routine bites hard
    And ambitions are low
    And resentment rides high
    But emotions won't grow
    And we're changing our ways
    Taking different roads
    
    Then love, love will tear us apart again
    Love, love will tear us apart again
    
    Why is the bedroom so cold?
    You've turned away on your side
    Is my timing that flawed?
    Our respect runs so dry
    Yet there's still this appeal
    That we've kept through our lives
    
    But love, love will tear us apart again
    Love, love will tear us apart again
    
    You cry out in your sleep
    All my failings exposed
    And there's a taste in my mouth
    As desperation takes hold
    Just that something so good
    Just can't function no more
    
    But love, love will tear us apart again
    Love, love will tear us apart again
• The Louis XIV song "A Letter To Dominique" is one of their more upbeat tracks. It is in fact all about a suicidal young woman whose death was probably helped along by the narrator.
• New Order does this semi-frequently, what with them being comprised of the surviving members of Joy Division plus the drummer's girlfriend:
  • "Love Vigilantes", sung from the point of view of a soldier fighting in The Falklands War, whose chorus returns to his desire to get home and see his family again. It's upbeat and even features a harmonica, an instrument New Order never used in any other song. But then in the last verse, the singer returns home, only to see his wife break out in tears as she reads the Army's letter telling her that he died in battle.
  • Their biggest hit, "Bizarre Love Triangle", which is extremely catchy and built for dancing even before you get to some of the remixes, is about a guy's self-doubts and darker impulses (the singer is providing two legs of said love triangle) having him wondering if the relationship will last. And most covers/remixes of the song are even peppier than the original.
  • "True Faith", an upbeat number about drug addiction:
    I used to think that the day would never come
    I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun
    My morning sun is the drug that brings me near
    To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear
    I used to think that the day would never come
    That my life would depend on the morning sun
  • "1963", the B-side to "True Faith", was once described by producer Stephen Hague as the only song about domestic violence you could dance to. And for good reason — despite its catchy (if comparatively sparse) instrumentals and melody, the lyrics are written from the perspective of a woman whose husband murders her to elope with another woman with whom he'd been having an affair.
• White Rose Movement:
  • "Girls in the Back" is a rather poppy song that most agree is either about sadomasochism or paedophilia.
  • "Cruella", a song about a suffering drug addict, opens with the chant "Doh doh doh / Doh doh doh doh"...
• Wire love putting bizarre or sinister lyrics to otherwise upbeat songs, with their '80s run being a boon for this trope. Here are some of the better examples:
  • "Outdoor Miner" is a sweet, chiming harmony-laden pop tune about a kind of inchworm that eats chlorophyll. Or so they say.
  • "Ahead" is about being deceived and manipulated. It is also an unbelievably catchy dance number.
  • "Kidney Bingos" is, lyrically, faintly creepy and borderline incomprehensible, but this is easily ignored in favor of the utterly beautiful melody.
  • "German Shepherds" is a quirky little ditty delicately laced with jazzy arpeggios and Scenery Gorn, with one of the prettiest moments detailing, in passing, the narrator's inability to break a dying bird's neck.
• "Final Day" by Young Marble Giants has a bright, catchy tune and is sung in an endearingly sweet schoolgirl-ish manner, but the lyrics concern a nuclear holocaust. Cast in this setting, lines like "There is so much noise, there is too much heat/And the living floor throws you off your feet" carry an eerily poignant resonance no similarly-themed heavy metal song could match.

Post-Rock

• Stereolab's "Ping Pong" is a happy-sounding little song about wars depleting the global economy.

R&B

• The song played at many a cookout, family reunion, and block party, "Before I Let Go" by Frankie Beverly, is a song about being uncertain if leaving the woman he loves is what he really wants to do. Most people wouldn't notice this, however, due to the groovy and upbeat arrangement.
• Black Box's "Everybody Everybody" is an upbeat and cheery-sounding song about a woman lamenting leaving a cheating partner who cared less about her than she him. It's exemplified best in the spirited "Sad and free!" she sings at the end of each verse.
• "Butcher Pete" by Roy Brown is a bouncy jazz number about a guy who's either a serial killer who targets women or a philandering cad. As Cracked.com puts it, "This is a rare example where hiding the sexual content behind double entendres and innuendo somehow made the song a thousand times more offensive."
• "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" by Blu Cantrell is a bouncy number about taking revenge on a cheating boyfriend by running up his credit cards and selling his stuff.
• Ray Charles's version of "Bye Bye Love". The more well-known version by The Everly Brothers is in a major key already, but Ray's version is positively bouncy. The song is about a man who has fallen into a deep depression due to his lover leaving him.
• City High's "What Would You Do" is an upbeat mid-tempo major-key tune about a mom having to turn to prostitution to support her child, while his dad goes off and does drugs, etc.
• D-Train's cover of Dionne Warwick's "Walk On By", a Break-Up Song about how the singer is unable to prevent herself from crying whenever she comes across her ex-lover, whom she tells to pretend not to notice him crying should they ever meet again, is done in their signature bouncy post-disco style, falling squarely into this trope. Warwick's original is a bit upbeat for the subject matter, as well.
• Al Duvall, a blues musician In the Style of 1920s-era and older artists, is (while it isn't all he does) well known for light, happy, and wit-laden ditties that could all be set in a Crapsack World à la The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. There's "Poppycock and Tommyrot", about a traveling salesman who packs up and leaves before his customers realize he's scammed them, "Mary Mack", about a shopkeeper who falls in love with the thief who's been raiding his store, "Slick Hamtree", which closes with a song about a man who can't do his job (farming chickens) while turning a profit, and "Dark Inside", a song about (among other things) binge drinking, work accidents, stalkers, wartime, and gambling oneself broke.
• "I Put a Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins turned out this way by happy accident. It was originally penned and composed as an ordinary love ballad. However, one case of wine later, and Hawkins and his entire band decided to record the song while stone drunk. The resulting cacophony of roaring, howling and snorting is somewhere on the line between Nightmare Fuel and comedy gold. The otherwise innocuous lyrics become something out of an insane stalker's mind, and then, of course, there's the demonic laughter.
• Janet Jackson's "Together Again" is a cheery, upbeat song... about her friend who died of AIDS. The song was originally intended to be a ballad, but was changed to a dance song in order to celebrate that friend's life instead of death.
• "The Whole World Should Revolve Around Me" by Little Jackie is a cheerful, upbeat song about a woman who's too self-absorbed to keep up a relationship.
• The Miracles:
  • Most people think "I Second That Emotion" is a happy song. It's actually about a man leaving an unfaithful woman, and telling her that if she wants to commit, he'll take her back.
  • "The Tears of a Clown" is about a man hurt by a lover who left him comparing himself to the characters in the opera Pagliacci, comedians/clowns who hide their hurt and anger behind empty smiles, complete with a distinctive circus calliope riff. (Notably, the circusesque melody was written — by Stevie Wonder — long before the lyrics; songwriter Smokey Robinson went with the Lyrical Dissonance intentionally after being reminded of the characters in Pagliacci.)
• "Dilemma" by Nelly is not an innocent love song. It's very clearly about Nelly trying to break up a couple so he can get with a woman. Even worse, she has a kid with her current significant other.
• The Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" is a happy, bouncy '80s number about trying to keep yourself together while things around you are falling apart. "I don't want to take it anymore / I'll just stay here locked behind the door / Just no time to stop and get away / 'Cause I work so hard to make it every day". Yeah. And to further heighten the dissonance, this song was featured in a Minnie Mouse cartoon special.
• Rihanna:
  • "Disturbia" is an upbeat pop/dance number with lyrics about a descent into madness.
  • "Take a Bow" is a scathingly sarcastic "screw you" to an ex wanting forgiveness... set to a touching piano arrangement.
• "Snap Your Fingers" by Teena Marie is a peppy-sounding New Jack Swing song about a rich man who can't get into a lasting relationship because he scores girlfriends through his wealth alone.
• "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by The Temptations is about a man getting dumped and all the demeaning things he would do to get her back. It would be so sad if it wasn't so damn catchy and easy to dance to.
• Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" (featuring Pharrell Williams and T.I.) is a catchy, upbeat-sounding pop song with extremely explicit and predatory lyrics, like T.I.'s infamous line "I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two!" Thicke himself described it as a Misogyny Song (though he denied personally being a misogynist in Real Life).
• The slow groove, funky rhythm, and horn accents of TLC's signature song "Waterfalls" contrast with gritty, realistic lyrics about the toll of urban gang violence and AIDS. Even Lisa Lopez's genuinely upbeat rap in the bridge is tempered by knowing that she was let out of rehab to record it and the awareness of her later death in a car accident.

Reggae

• Aswad's version of "Don't Turn Around": An upbeat song about a relationship break-up.
• "Boom Bye Bye" by Buju Banton is a notorious song with a quite catchy and happy beat, with lyrics about the execution of gays.
• "Vietnam" by Jimmy Cliff is a happy-sounding reggae song with a sobering political theme: The music sort of fits the mood of the first verse, where the narrator receives a letter from his friend, who is fighting in the Vietnam war but is happy to be returning home soon. However, the second verse is about the soldier's mother receiving a telegram informing her of his death the very next day.
• Serge Gainsbourg's reggae cover of "La Marseillaise" (The French national anthem) called "Aux Armes, etc". As if a reggae tune for the national anthem of a European country wasn't strange enough, anyone who's read the lyrics of the song knows they are extremely violent and gory.
• I-Wayne's "Can't Satisfy Her". At first, it seems like a nice song to dance to, until you sit down and contemplate the lyrics, realizing it's about a CSA victim turned prostitute in what're likely the final throes of her long, ruined life. And then it just gets depressing.
• One of Bob Marley's earliest hits with The Wailers is "Simmer Down", which, despite sounding like he's talking to misbehaving children, is actually a plea for gangs to stop killing each other.
• "Wild World", the most well-known song done by British-born reggae singer Maxi Priest, has a bouncy rhythm and uplifting, jazzy-sounding saxophone music throughout; yet the lyrics depict a man simultaneously pleading with his girlfriend not to leave him and resigning himself to the fact that it's happening anyway.
• Mighty Sparrow:
  • "Jean and Dinah" has a cheery calypso beat; however, the song discusses how American military bases in Trinidad supported prostitution and how, after the military bases were closed down, the prostitutes became desperate.
  • "Congo Man" is an upbeat-sounding little ditty about a cannibal in Darkest Africa.
• UB40's version of "Red Red Wine": The melody is a somewhat upbeat spin on a song about a man who turns to the bottle to forget a lost love.
• "One by One" by The Black Seeds, known for its appearance in Breaking Bad, has a fun, lively and laid-back tune; its lyrics sound like someone challenging their worst enemy, and even up against an army, is sure they can win.

Ska

• Venezuelan Ska band Desorden Publico lives and breathes this trope, as best shown in their 1997 album Plomo Revienta (slang which roughly translates to "buttload of gunshots"), which is a long view on how dangerous it is to live in Caracas (violence, crime, governmental indolence, bad love life...), and the perpetual state of alert the city inhabitants are in because of it. All in the form of bouncy ska songs. The most memorable is "Alla Cayo", a bouncy song with witty rhymes whose lyrics tell the story of three "normal" slum deaths: a petty murder of a thug because of his expensive Air Jordan shoes, a drug-related crime, and an innocent high schooler killed by a stray bullet during a gang fight. The last verse is at a funeral, with a mother loudly crying for her dead boy, but we don't know whose mother it is. The chorus is so catchy that you don't realize until later how cruel and detached it really is:
  He fell there, he fell there, fell there, fell there
  He fell there, he fell there, fell there, fell there
  And they painted his Chalk Outline on the sidewalk (how pity!)
  And they painted his chalk outline on the sidewalk (how pity!)
  And they painted his chalk outline on the sidewalk
• Los Fabulosos Cadillacs:
  • "Mal Bicho" is a danceable song that's a long call out to a shameless racist, openly insulting and mocking his beliefs. It has a controversial video featuring blood everywhere, torture victims, the band being killed during a "live" show, and an effeminate dancing Hitler-lookalike ^note In truth a Captain Ersatz of former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as the torturer.
  • The song "Matador" (prominently featured in the closing credits to Grosse Pointe Blank) is another very danceable song about political assassinations in Latin America.
  • A "lighter" example is "El Satanico Dr. Cadillac", a danceable and rhythmic song where the narrator laments how an old friend fucked up his own life.
• "Embarrassment" from Madness's Absolutely is made of this trope. An upbeat, cheery tune alongside a dark and depressing story about a girl being disowned by her racist family for having a baby with a black man. Even worse, it's based on a true story.
• "Riot Squad" by New Zealand ska group The Newmatics explores themes of Police Brutality and was a favourite of protesters who opposed the 1981 Springbok Tour. The very colourful music video with dance moves and fashions evoking The Wiggles adds to the dissonance.
• Just about everything by The Specials counts. For example, "Hey, Little Rich Girl" has a fast and upbeat accompaniment but describes the titular rich girl going to London and becoming a prostitute and adult movie star.

Ska Punk

• The Aquabats!:
  • "The Story of Nothing!" is a bouncy, energetic ska tune about the sting of unrequited love.
    True love, the birds would sing
    And trees would call her name as she walked by
    Love was grand, until the magic day
    She turned me into...
    
    Nothing! Let's talk about something else
    I'm starting not to see myself
    She went so far away
    But I still see her every day
  • "Chemical Bomb!" has a very calm and relaxing sound to it, but the lyrics are about the narrator thinking about death, human extinction, hunger, etc. after getting frustrated with people's behavior at the grocery store.
    Chemical bomb, chemical bomb
    Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody's dead
    It won't be long, it won't be long
    People gonna run around losing their heads
  • "Hello, Good Night!" is a Surprisingly Gentle Song... about coping with disaster, misfortune, and the fact that you and everyone you know and love will someday be dead, and people might forget that you even existed.
    And with each passing day
    So goes another life
    Everybody wants to live
    Some people wanna die
    So close your eyes, 'cause it's alright
    To say hello, good night
  • "Radiation Song!" is a peppy show-tune about living in a Fallout-esque post-nuclear apocalypse.
    The radiation in the ground
    Makes a lovely bubbly sound
    The men in suits who don't eat fruit
    Can't comprehend the one-legged newt
    That was caused from disaster at reactor's core
    A meltdown expected to start a war
    Now I bought myself a lead ascot
    It looks good, but I'm startin' to rot
• I Voted For Kodos's "Please Die in a Fire" is a bouncy song that focuses on a band being screwed by their managers and label.
• Less Than Jake have a time with this now and again. The song "The Science of Selling Yourself Short" is bouncy and upbeat... and sings about being a self-defeating depressive, drinking his problems down the drain and alienating his friends in the process.
  I'll sing along
  Yeah, with every emergency
  Just sing along
  I'm the king of catastrophes
  I'm so far gone
  That deep down inside I think it's fine by me
  I'm my own worst enemy
• "Spiderwebs" by No Doubt has an upbeat, catchy tune, but it's about a girl who keeps getting called by a stalkerish guy so much that she has to screen her phone calls.
• Reel Big Fish's best songs are depressing songs to the tune of cheery ska-punk. Frontman Aaron Barrett has said in interviews that they invoke this trope intentionally, stating that he was once called into a record executive's office and asked why their lyrics were so depressing and/or angry. He proceeded to pick up his guitar and play one of their happy, bouncy tunes but changing the lyrics to be happy and bouncy as well. The executive told him to stop and said he understood now. To name some specific examples:
  • Their big hit "Beer" is, as the name implies, a catchy, danceable, upbeat song where the narrator drinks himself into a stupor because he's been dumped.
  • "Sell Out" is about a singer who signed on with a record company and starting to doubt if he did the right thing.
  • "She Has A Girlfriend Now", in which the singer's girlfriend realises that she's a lesbian and leaves him for a woman.
  • "She's Famous Now" is about a man reflecting that his ex-girlfriend is now a celebrity.
  • "Brand New Hero" is in the usual style, but is about a person "leaving" his friends and family because he doesn't believe in himself.
  • "My Imaginary Friend" seems at first to be a silly song about, well, his imaginary friend, but it's actually about God and how the singer is renouncing his religion because he feels his prayers went ignored.
• Streetlight Manifesto (and its predecessors):
  • "A Better Place, A Better Time" is full of bouncy horns and bass in their usual style, but is sung from the point of view of someone desperately trying to talk a friend out of committing suicide.
    And when you wake up
    Everything is going to be fine
    I guarantee that you wake up in a better place
    In a better time
    So you're tired of living
    And you feel like you might give in
    Well, don't
    It's not your time
  • "The Saddest Song" is entirely peppy, with lyrics like:
    And it's the saddest song you'll ever hear
    The most pain you will ever feel
    But you grit your teeth because it don't get better than this
  • "As the Footsteps Die Out Forever" (by Catch 22 before their lead singer left and formed Streetlight Manifesto) is an upbeat and happy song about the singer's mother getting sick and dying.
  • Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution, pretty much the same band, has "It's a Wonderful Life", titled and performed happily, about an unhappy conscript coming to terms with the fact that he's much more likely to die at war than ever see his wife again. Somewhat subverted in that he decides that it was all worth it anyway.
    I was told boy prepare for war
    But they failed to mention what I'd be fighting for
    So I fought for this
    That as I passed away I'd feel her kiss
    And I smile, what a wonderful life

Soul

• The solemn instrumentation and raspy voice of Louis Armstrong make "What a Wonderful World" feel very sad, but it's actually about the many good and beautiful things that exist in the world. It's made even more dissonant when the song is used in media to portray sad or harsh scenes. He makes it sound like he is dying, but he is happy and content with the good things in life he has remembered. Made even more tearjerking in that he died 4 years after the song was released.
• The Foundations' two big hits are both bouncy, sweet-sounding songs about disturbingly obsessive love. The basic message of "Build Me Up Buttercup" is "Don't you see that we belong together? You shameless cocktease?", while "Baby, Now That I've Found You" goes more for "You're breaking up with me? Yeah... I won't allow that. I get that you don't love me, but you are my everything and I won't let you leave."
• If you heard it without hearing the name you'd think this of "Fuck You" by Cee Lo Green. It's a Cluster F-Bomb soul song.

Traditional

• "The Tennessee Waltz" is one of four official states song of Tennessee, set in the generally upbeat key of G-major. However, the entire song is about a man (or woman, depending on who is singing) losing his girlfriend during the eponymous waltz. The full lyrics are not usually sung, but this particular line is the most heartbreaking and hopeless-sounding:
  Now I wonder how a dance like the Tennessee Waltz
  Could have broken my heart so complete
  Well I couldn't blame my darlin', and who could help fallin'
  In love with my darlin' so sweet
• "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" is usually sung in an upbeat fashion. It is actually a scathing satire of... well... the specific target has changed over the years, but seems to generally be police state tactics and the use of informers in general.
• "God Save Ireland" is generally a fast-paced song beloved by Irish Republicans. It's about three men who are being hanged and their last defiant words to their executioners.
• "The Minstrel Boy" can be performed in an uptempo fashion (e.g. Enter the Haggis, Young Dubliners). The eponymous Minstrel goes off to war, gets thrown in prison, and breaks his harp because its songs were "meant for the pure and free / they shall never sound in slavery." The dissonance isn't quite as stealthy in many other examples, but it still fits.
• "Whiskey in the Jar" is certainly a fast, bouncy song that is a great one to sing along to. It is about a thief who is betrayed by his wife and thrown in prison.
• The traditional French song "Alouette", often taught to children, is actually about removing a lark's feathers in order to cook the bird.
• There is a children's song from the Philippines that describes the sighting, shooting and eating of a bird in both Tagalog and English.
• Puerto Rico has at least two Christmas carols that have to do with roasting pigs on a spit. One of them begins "You get the pig, you kill it, you skin it..."
• The happy French song that often produces spontaneous can-canning. You know? The one about Hell and damnation?
• Several folk songs about love and death; such as "Frankie and Johnny", "Molly Malone", and "Oh My Darling, Clementine"; have upbeat tunes.
• The traditional song "Listen to the Mockingbird" is a trilling, bouncy ditty lamenting the singer's dead sweetheart in lyrical tones. (However, one children's beginning piano book had a Bowdlerised version of the refrain, substituting "singing all the way" for "singing o'er her grave.")
• The nursery song "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" is in happy, happy ¾ time about a man whose girlfriend is taken by a circus performer. Then, after being trained by said circus performer, she, depending on how you look at the line "thus my love is stolen from me", has finally left the man singing for good, or dies attempting her first trapeze act.
• Depending on the singer, the Civil War-era ballad "Lorena" can be sung quite cheerfully, and even in its slower forms just sounds like a sweet love ballad... until you realize that it's about a soldier who not only knows he's likely to die but already gave up on the woman he loved when he left for war... 100 months ago. Folk legend has it that entire regiments during the war on both sides were banned from singing the song, because though it had the cheery sound of more positive ballads, the lyrics themselves were so heartbreaking to the soldiers (many who actually lived what the song was about) that it was causing detriment to the war effort by harming morale and making soldiers inconsolably homesick.
• A lot of nursery rhymes are quite violent in nature once you pay attention to the lyrics. For example, "Rock-a-bye baby" is about a baby put in a treetop, where the child and cradle will fall down when the wind blows. This was lampshaded in "Good Night", the very first The Simpsons short on The Tracey Ullman Show, in which Marge sings it to Maggie, who visualizes exactly what the lyrics describe.
• "Hush-a-bye"/"All the Pretty Little Horses" is another nursery rhyme that's sad and even gruesome, although the offending stanza isn't often sung anymore; apparently, it was originally sung by a slave mother to her master's child, which she was forced to nurse while neglecting her own.
  Way down yonder, in the meadow
  There's a poor wee little lamby
  The birds and butterflies peckin' at its eyes
  The poor little thing cried "mammy"
• "You Are My Sunshine" — a cheery children's tune, or so it seems. The chorus is nice enough, but the verses are very downbeat and depressing. The song is actually about depression following a harsh breakup. Some versions do change the lyrics to be happier (especially versions meant to be sung by parents to their children), but the original...
  The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping
  I dreamed I held you in my arms
  When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken
  And I hung my head and cried
• "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" sounds incredibly depressing and ominous for a song about the cheerful celebration of a returning soldier. This may have something to do with how the song's tune originally came from the Irish ballad "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye", which tells the story of the return of a horribly maimed soldier to his family and love. He's so badly injured they hardly recognise him, and he won't be able to work. "You've lost an arm, you've lost a leg / You'll have to be put with a bowl out to beg." Another version goes, "You haven't an arm, you haven't a leg / You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg / You'll have to be put in a bowl to beg."
• There's an English folk song called "The Recruited Collier", in which a young girl sings about her sorrow and shock at seeing her sweetheart go off to war where she knows he'll probably be killed, although he thinks it's a bit of fun. It has a terrifically upbeat, bouncy tune. One folksinger insisted on setting it to a different tune, precisely because of the Lyrical Dissonance, which she thought was inappropriate — but really, the contrast between the jolly tune and the ominous words only made it sadder and creepier.
• On a more general level, pick any extremist movement with lyrics that have a markedly different effect on you than on its members. For an example that's obscure enough to be safe, Finnish hardliner communist tunes from the 1970s are catchy, uplifting, and energizing calls for determination and solidarity, both of which will be needed to restart the civil war and slaughter the bourgeoisie, clergy, police, government and everyone else involved in the upper classes' worldwide plot that previously started World War II to destroy the Soviet Union. Trust no one.
• Christmas carols:
  • One might note that the original words to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" are somewhat... depressing, (including the line "We all will muddle through somehow") and that the retouching to make the song acceptable to modern audiences has left a melancholy tune with much more pleasant lyrics.
  • "I'll Be Home For Christmas" is a lovely crooner's ballad about being deployed overseas at the holidays, and only able to pretend you're at home celebrating with your family.
  • Even "Jingle Bells", as cheery a carol as they come, has its one-horse open sleigh wipe out in a snowdrift, a type of accident which seriously endangers the horse as well as the passengers. "We got upsot" is also a pun that implies they'd been sleigh-driving drunk. In the seldom-heard third verse, the singer falls on his butt on slippery ice and a passing sleigh-rider mocks his misfortune.
  • On the other end, "Carol of the Bells" sounds very sinister but the lyrics are cheery, explaining that Christmas bells are ringing and everyone in town is happy.
• Older Than Radio: The song "My Grandfather's Clock", written in 1876 and regarded as a "children's favorite" in the '50s and '60s (and maybe afterward, too). Very bouncy tune, but it actually inspired an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959).
  But it stopped short
  Never to go again
  When the old man died
• For a historical example or two, check your local church's hymnals. Sometimes, because hymns (i.e. the words) can be set to multiple tunes, and because congregations only know so many tunes, you can get some very bizarre combinations. For example, "Rock of Ages", has been known to be sung to the tune "Toplady", the tune most people know. A cheerful, upbeat, happy tune about how Jesus is broken and how you want to "hide [yourself]" in him.
• The fan-made Christmas song "Merry Christmas Gotham City" is sung from the Joker's point of view. Standard commercial Christmas beat... with lyrics describing him planning a rampage as a city-wide Christmas gift "decoration".
• The Italian song "Teorema" basically teaches that you have to treat a woman bad to have her love you ("Take a woman, treat her badly" are the opening lyrics) in a sarcastic take of "all girls love bad boys" with quiet music. The chorus says "I'll never tell her that I live for her / I'll treat her badly, and she'll love me".
• The French oldie "Je t'attendrai a la porte du garage" (I'll wait for you at the garage door), a supposedly funny song with a very light-hearted tune... that tells the story of a woman who has to raise her kids alone because her husband left. The title refers to what she writes to him: She'll wait for him at the garage door, and one day he'll finally come back home and everything will be alright. He does come back. Forty years later.
• The French song "Gentiment je t'immole", meaning "I immolate you gently," sounds like a soft ballad, until you listen to the lyrics, which include things like "you scream like a whore, your skin comes off".
• A popular song from 1913 titled "And The Green Grass Grew All Around" (not to be confused with a similarly titled children's song) is a very cheerful, upbeat tune that deals with dark subject matter. In the first verse it's implied that one of the two lovers may ultimately be a gold digger, the second verse deals with a deadly accident (implied to be a hit and run) with an early "Ford machine" car crashing into a butcher cart, describing in detail the gruesome death, and the third verse dies with contaminated food. Double-subverted in the final chorus, which takes a somewhat somber tone followed by the opening bars of the Funeral March, but then resumes the cheerfulness in the final "And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around".
• "Katyusha" is a very catchy, cheerful Russian song about a women yearning for her lover who is away fighting a war. It doesn't help that this song is often sung by cheerful children.
• "Ten men rowing on a river, ten men rowing on a stream, ten men rowing on a river, then in a flash, a great big splash, now there's only nine." Repeat until the boat is empty. Sung to a cheerful, peaceful little tune.
• Sarah Brightman's "Once in a Lifetime" is a soft, gentle song about a woman experimenting with S&M.
• You can find children from seven onwards singing "Lord of the Dance" by English songwriter Sydney Carter at Catholic schools and churches. Enthusiastic renditions of lyrics like:
  I danced on the Sabbath
  And I cured the lame
  The holy people
  Said it was a shame
  They whipped and they stripped
  And they hung me on high
  And they left me there
  On a Cross to die
• "Waltzing Matilda" by Banjo Paterson is a cheerful-sounding song, the kind you want to sing along to, but the main character, who steals sheep and camps under trees, eventually commits suicide. Added bonus: Many Aussies consider this to be their national anthem, unofficially. Makes sense, given the historical context...
• "Little Brown Jug" by Joseph Winner, a drinking song whose lyrics are about a man and his wife experiencing a hard, alcoholic life. The tone and melody of the song, however, are bright and cheerful.

Visual Kei

• Dir en grey's song "embryo". While it contains creepy whispering verses and almost an emo chorus, overall it sounds like a perfectly tender ballad, and the chorus can also be considered rather warming. However, the lyrics (sung from a daughter's perspective) reveal that the singer's mother has hung herself to save herself from an abusive relationship with her husband, who has now turned to raping his daughter. She ends up eventually killing her father during another rape, and yet manages to not abort the baby she is now carrying. It should be noted that the song's lyrics were understandably changed to the singer's desire to join his mother in the afterlife for its release as a single.

World Fusion

• Asa's "Fire on the Mountain" pairs the sweet, cheery kind of melody you'd find on an iPod commercial with lyrics from a '60s protest song.
• Manu Chao:
  • Before he went solo, he and his group Mano Negra made the song "Mala Vida" ("Bad life"), which talks about a Henpecked Husband who's heavily abused by his bitchy wife and threatens to leave her if she doesn't stop... with a rocky, upbeat tune. And a musical video that thrives on black comedy.
  • Even after going solo, he still kept the dissonance alive. For example, his song "Clandestino" ("Clandestine") from Proxima Estación: Esperanza has a reggae rhythm... and is about the misadventures and difficulties that immigrants face in Europe.
• "Sweet Lullaby" is Deep Forest's biggest hit song. It's a pleasant and catchy sing-a-long that definitely sounds like a lullaby. And it is, but the context is gravely different once translated. The sampled lyrics come from a lullaby from the Soloman Islands called "Rorogwela", in which an older brother comforts his younger brother and helps him sleep after they just lost their parents.
• "Arthur McBride" is basically a big Take That! at military recruiters. The Enter the Haggis version is a fast-paced, crowd sing-along number.

Other

• The whole genre of neofolk qualifies, with occult, militaristic, or ambiguously Far-right lyrics and mellow, folk-inspired instrumentation.
• Boney M.'s "Rivers of Babylon" sounds rather rhythmic and a bit cheerful at first listening. It's actually based on Psalms 137, which is about the lamentations of the Jewish people imprisoned in Babylon.
• Dr. Bombay's "S.O.S." easily comes across as this without the music video. A catchy upbeat song about how a tiger took his family.
• "Moskau" by Dschinghis Khan is an upbeat disco piece, but a botched search on Google for the lyrics might leave you with the impression that it portrays Moscow, Russia as a Crapsack World.
• "Sleepytown Train" by the novelty group Optiganally Yours combines this with Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick. The song is essentially a lullaby, possibly sung to a lover. And then we get this line out of nowhere:
  Your teeth fall out in the sink
  And I'm trying to help
  You've been gut-shot in the rain
• Roberto Vecchioni's "Samarcanda" has an upbeat tune. If you don't know Italian, it's the story of a soldier who's celebrating the end of a war, only to notice that Death is looking at him with apparently bad intentions. He gets a horse from his lord and escapes to the city of Samarcanda, where he encounters Death, who explains to him that she wasn't looking at him with bad intentions but worry that he couldn't make it in time to their date in Samarcanda, but he did manage to arrive in time.
• Wesley Willis used the upbeat demo tracks on his keyboard as his backing music, often using major keys for happy songs and minor keys for sad songs. In addition to singing songs about bands he'd seen, friends of his and praising various companies, he'd also sing songs about criminals, murdering people, and his schizophrenia demons. Much of the time he'd pair happy music with negative lyrics.

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