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So, you're listening to this new song. Nice and springy, sounds like it's gonna be a fun little ditty. Then the lyrics start...

And the worst part is, the happy, upbeat music just keeps going. That's Lyrical Dissonance: when the music and the lyrics are going in opposite directions. Happy upbeat lyrics set to sad music also qualifies. This can also be used for comic effect, either by putting serious, dramatic music to silly lyrics, or by simply treating the subject manner as if it did fit the tune.

A rather old trope. One of the archetypical examples involves an evil chief of police plotting to blackmail a woman into having sex with him in order to save the man she loves, then having the man killed anyway, while all around him parishioners beg for God's mercy, all set to some of the most gorgeously beautiful music the composer ever wrote [1]. That's from Puccini's 1900 opera, Tosca. Not the oldest by any means — but one that can easily compete with most of the examples below.

May lead to Isnt It Ironic, if the song is used in a place where the people who selected it didn't listen to the lyrics very well. As one of the folders in this page shows, it might be related to The Cover Changes The Meaning.

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Examples

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• Al Duvall is known for singing light and happy songs about Crapsack Worlds.
• This song 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 while still keeping its absurdly happy tone.
• Pretty much all of the Wombats' repetoire. "School Uniforms" is about a lost childhood love, "Backfire at the Disco" is about a date gone wrong, "My First Wedding" is about a man attending the marriage of a girl he loves to another man, and "Here Comes the Anxiety" is about how his own self-doubt and loathing sabotage his relationships. And they're all pretty dancable.
• Mike Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow" sounds pretty upbeat, and tells us about how this girl's boyfriend is murdered.
  All she saw was a silhouette of a gun
  Far away on the other side.
  He was shot six times by a man on the run
  And she couldn't find how to push through
  • She later sees his ghost. Creepy indeed.
  • It is supposedly a Shout Out to the murder of John Lennon.
  • Even worse, there's the Speedy Techno Remake by Missing Heart.
  • Don't forget the version who managed to be included in one mix of Dance Dance Revolution.
• Nightwish has a few songs that come to mind. First is "Feel For You" off of 2002's Century Child. What ostensibly seems to be a love song, starts growing grim, and once you hear the male vocal, you realize it's about a murdered ex, an unhealthy obsession, or both.
  Barely cold in her grave
  Barely warm in my bed
  Settling for a draw tonight
  Puppet girl, your strings are mine
  • Another is 'Eramaan Viimeinen'. This is a very upbeat song with guest vocals from Jonsu, lead songer of cheery pop/rock band Indica- with depressing lyrics about wandering the wilderness alone.
• Andrew WK's song Get Ready To Die is an upbeat song about how somebody's going to get murdered. Granted, it's upbeat in a pretty rockin' way, but it's still not what you'd expect given the lyrics.
  • A lot of Andrew W.K. songs use this trope. He often sings like he's annoyed about something, but the lyrics are about fairly mundane things - partying, hot girls, enjoying yourself in various ways.
• Kansas' Song for America is about how humans have completely destroyed the beauty of America. You wouldn't know by the quick, jolly sound and peppily sung lyrics:
  Cross the sea there came a multitude, sailing ships upon the wave
  Filled with visions of Utopia, and the freedom that they crave
  Ravage, plunder, see no wonder, rape and kill and tear asunder
  Chop the forest, plow it under.....

  Highways scar the mountainsides, buildings to the sky, people all around
  Houses stand in endless rows, sea to shining sea, people all around
  So we rule this land, and here we stand upon our paradise,
  Dreaming of a place, our weary race is ready to arise.

• Granted, we all see love differently, but when you hear the title "Moments in Love", one thinks of a romantic song. Well, Art of Noise managed to turn it into one of the most depressing tunes I've ever heard. Okay, there's no lyrics ... but there sure is a dissonance.
• 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 cocophony 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.
• The Hill by the Legendary Pink Dots is a wonderfully cheerful little murder ballad.
• Used "Play with me" by Extreme. Rather than being upbeat with dark lyrics, it gives us some of the most ridiculously dark riffs in history, and puts it to lyrics like:
  Ring around the rosie//
  Hopscotch, Monopoly//
  Red light, green light//
  G.I. Joes and Barbies
• The Pixies' Black Francis and Kim Deal have this down to science. Whether the song is about mutilation ("Broken Face", "Break My Body"), violent Biblical stuff ("River Euphrates", "Dead", "Gouge Away"), voyeurism ("Gigantic"), psycho gay roommates ("Crackity Jones"), committing suicide by driving in the sea ("Wave of Mutilation"), earthquakes ("Here Comes Your Man"), aliens (refer to most of Bossanova) or surrealism ("Debaser"), the music will almost invariably be aggressive, catchy, twisted, pop-influenced grunge/alt-rock.
• 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.
• The Stone Temple Pilots song "Sour Girl" has a happy-sounding, upbeat tune, but the lyrics are about about a man whose wife took off because she's always hated him.
  • And not to forget their song "Plush", which is about a man who murdered his wife and is afraid the body will be found.
  • "Sex Type Thing' falls victim to this. The song is full of heavy piledriving riffage and misogynist, aggressive lyrics. They're supposed to be anti-rape. As one reviewer pointed out, they're that clumsy.
• "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" is one of Frank Sinatra's peppier covers, and is currently used in a body wash commercial. The commercial conveniently leaves out the lines "They fly so high, /Nearly reach the sky, /Then like my dreams, They fade and die. /Fortune's always hiding, /I've looked everywhere."
• One of the best examples of this is Heavenly's song "Me and My Madness". A relaxed, enjoyable melody is paired with lyrics like "Cut my hair/And then I cut my skin/Hurt myself instead of hurting him".
• California Babylon is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. It's essentially a song about the hell that is L.A., and how it's the modern Babylon, and its to the tune to a piano and guitar on the same chords, giving it a very vaudeville type of sound, similar to Killer Queen.
• Jim O'Rourke's "Halfway to a Threeway" is a parody of intimate love ballads, by being concerned with a man ready to involve his (literally) braindead girlfriend in a threesome with another woman.
• "Sunny Came Home" by Shawn Colvin tells the story of Sunny, who makes a few "repairs" to her gas stove before lighting a match.
• Uncle Kracker's "Follow Me" doesn't seem to have any meaning at first, but it's actually about the singer having an affair with a married woman.
  • "Swim through my veins/like a fish in the see"? It's about heroin.
    • "I'm not worried 'bout the ring you wear." "I'm not the reason that you go astray." Yeah, it's an affair.
• Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam" is a typical metal ballad, but the lyrics are about vagrancy and would fit more into a country song. Doesn't stop the song from being awesome, though.

  • It sounds to most like it talks of freedom but Word Of God says it's about home sickness.

  • "One" is this way as well, or at least at the beginning. It starts out so light and, to someone, even soothing. Guess what it's about?. At least it gets heavy near the end but the beginning can be misleading.
  • Metallica's cover of "Die Die My Darling" is a song most people can't help but rock out to, and then you hear the lyrics. At least the name gives you a hint about the song.
• Band Aid's world-hunger-awareness-raising anthem "Do They Know It's Christmas?" may or may not qualify... but The Echoing Green's bouncy techno cover version certainly does.
  • The original version qualifies when you consider that what was intended as a way to raise awareness of world hunger is now played annually as a festive, celebratory song.
• A One Hit Wonder song, "Timothy," is about miners trapped in a cave-in, two of whom eat the third guy (or a mule, if you believe the record company).
  • Songwriter Rupert Holmes has stated that the Timothy of the lyrics — the one who gets eaten — is indeed a human being, not a mule.
• The Reel Big Fish song "Brand New Hero" is in the usual style of Reel Big Fish, but is about a person "leaving" his friends and family because he doesn't believe in himself.
  • 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.
  • "My Imaginary Friend" seems at first to be a silly song about, well, his imaginary friend, but it's actually about God.
• Ween, anyone? One of the funnier examples is "Up On The Hill," which is essentially a Satanist gospel song — complete with Cream-esque reprise.
• "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.
• The repeated riff in "When Doves Cry" by Prince & The Revolution is an example.
• "No Children" by the Mountain Goats is kind of upbeat and perky — you could almost dance a jig to it — even though it has some of the nastiest, most spiteful lyrics ever committed to music. It got a lot of attention from an appearance on Moral Orel.
• Urinetown is all over this trope. They even hang a lampshade on it:
  Little Sally:What kind of musical is this? The good guys finally take over, and then everything starts falling apart?
  Officer Lockstock: Like I said Little Sally, this isn't a happy musical.
  Little Sally: But the music's so happy!
• 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.
• "Bye Bye Badman" by the Stone Roses, an upbeat pop-rock song about overthrowing an abusive government (inspired by the 1968 Paris riots) with the chorus "I'm throwing stones at you man/I want you black and blue and/I'm gonna make you bleed/Gonna bring you down to your knees/Bye bye badman".
  • Also "I Am the Resurrection", the lyrics of which consist of Take Thats directed at some unspecified person.
• Many interpret the folky harmonies of Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With" to mean that it's a song about communal love and appreciation for what we have around us. However, lines like "Concentration slip away, cause your baby is so far away" and "There�s a girl right next to you, and she�s just waitin� for something to do" suggest a darker meaning, that the song would seem to be celebrating unfaithfulness.
• Faith No More's "Edge of the World", a drunken but romantic-sounding barroom jazz tune about a pedophile luring his new victim. And, oh yeah, it comes right after a brilliant note-for-note rendition of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath.
  • Faith No More played with this at times. RV is a bubbly song (sounding suspiciously like the underwater theme from the original Super Mario Brothers) all about the musings of an abusive white-trash loser living in a trailer. Be Aggressive, adopted from the classic cheerleading song, is a positive-sounding song about swallowing cum.
• "Used to Love Her" by Guns N Roses. A cheerful, upbeat song about how the singer murdered his girlfriend and buried her in his backyard.
  • Wasn't it about his naggy mother and how he killed her, only to hear her continue to complain?
  • Other songs in the same vein by Guns N' Roses are "Street of Dreams" and "Catcher in the Rye". The former is a up-tempo piano and guitar melody talking about how much he now hates the person he once loved, and the latter is about his insanity in the eyes of others. Shit, a lot of Chinese Democracy can be seen as being way too cheerful and bright for the lyrics they spew.
• "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.
• Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" — a bouncy, happy tune about Iggy's life as a hard-living heroin addict. And going on the occasional Royal Caribbean Cruise, apparently.
• The Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band's "I'm The Urban Spaceman" is a catchy tune with an incredibly misanthropic lyric 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 implies having super powers as well). It could just as well be about a comic book character.
• "You Don't Know Me" by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor sounds like a vaguely upbeat, bittersweet breakup song at first, but on repeated listening, the song turns out to be an almost unhinged, extremely verbally abusive rant (possibly by an Unreliable Narrator) that is cut off by a shaky but defiant "Say it!" from Spektor's character, at which point the startled narrator simply trails off into the fadeout.
• Pretty much any song by Maroon Five qualifies. For instance "Wake Up Call" is happy, upbeat sounding song about a man catching his girl in bed with another man, then killing the man.
  • But "Makes Me Wonder" takes it to a completely different level. On the surface, it sounds like an upbeat Breakup Song, with the guy questioning why he'd ever fallen in love with the girl in the first place—and the first verse makes it almost certain that it is, at least partially, exactly that. But look a little harder at some of the later lyrics:
  Feels so good to be bad
  Not worth the aftermath, after that
  After that
  Try to get you back

  I still don't have a reason
  And you don't have the time
  And it really makes me wonder
  If I ever gave a fuck about you

  Give me something to believe in
  'Cause I don't believe in you
  Anymore, anymore
  I wonder if it even makes a difference to try
  Yeah, so this is goodbye

[[indent:40:And then later they add in the line "You caught me in a lie/I have no alibi/The words you say don't have a meaning". By the way, the "don't have the time" part was italicized because with this song being released in 2007, the subject was running out of time to fix his mistakes. Yes, it's at least in part a song about George W Bush and the War in Iraq, metaphorically comparing him to a bad ex.]]

• "Love Is Only A Feeling" by The Darkness. It sounds like an upbeat song, but it's really the cynical inverse of "I Believe In A Thing Called Love".
  • Except for the fact it sounds like a power ballad, and not upbeat at all.
  • "Growing On Me" is a very upbeat song about love, right? Nope...actually about having an STD.
  • "Holding My Own" is a downbeat song about a break up, right? Nope. Masturbation.
• The Eels' Mr. E's Beautiful Blues.
  • "Last Stop: This Town" is also very cheery-sounding and danceable for being about taking a final trip around the neighborhood you grew up in after you've died (although in the context of the album it's on, it kind of is a postive song).
  • Eels seem to use this trope a lot in general, mostly in the happy melody/bleak lyrics variety. Then there's "What Is This Note?", a noisy, angry-sounding punk-speed love song.
  • Hey Man (Now You're Really Living) is yet another song that uses this trope; a song that sounds like a musician's house party opens with the line "Do you know what it's like to fall on the floor, cry your guts out til you got no more" and "Do you know what it's like to care too much about someone that you're never gonna get to touch"
    • Although the song is more about how both your good and bad experiences affirm your life, and an upbeat accompaniment would probably fit in that respect.
• Rivers Cuomo's "Can't Stop Partying" has enough of this to feel like a case of The Cover Changes The Meaning, when in fact it isn't a cover (although it was co-written with Jermaine Dupri). The lyrics seem typical of an uptempo modern r and b/rap song that glorifies, well, partying ("I gotta have Patr�n, I gotta have the E, I gotta have a lot of pretty girls around me"). However, these lyrics are set to a downcast acoustic ballad, and as a result the narrator sounds remorseful about his indulgent lifestyle.
• The band Islands loves this trope. Examples include "Pieces of You" (a bouncy, upbeat tune where the title is very literal), "Volcanoes" (a rather blissful-sounding song about the end of the world), and "Humans" (another bouncy tune about the survivors of some disaster dying off).
  • What, no "Rough Gem?"
    The world beat you for the something nice
    You worked hard, died poor
    You mined what you died for
    Diamonds di di di di di uh
  Added bonus: The video was done in a super-kiddy sorta way, about the band being the first on the moon. Except the Cardigans beat them to it.
• "The Hot Dog Man is packing up..." Lampshaded in that as Tripod sing the song, in-character Gatesy is as unaware of the upcoming lyrical dissonance as the rest of us are, and reacts with increasing horror as the song turns sinister. And boy, does it turn sinister.
  • Also occured in the Tripod song 'Congo', which 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.
• The entire album "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel definitely applies to this trope. On first listen, it's clean folk music. Then you put the pieces together and you realize it's an entire album about Anne Frank.
• "There She Goes" by the La's is an upbeat-sounding folk-rock song ... which most people who have listened closely to the lyrics think is about heroin ("There she goes ... racing through my brain ... pulsing through my vein ... no one else could heal my pain"). Apparently the people who have not listened closely to the lyrics include the Christian band Sixpence None the Richer, who did a remake ... and the manufacturers of the Ortho-Tricyclen birth control pill, who used the song in a commercial.
• Masterpiece by Meg and Dia has an upbeat, catchy, bouncy melody, and the sisters' sweet soprano voices lend an innocent quality to the song. Then you listen a little closer...
  I am no masterpiece where innocence is painted green
  Isn't it strange to think that you created all of me?
  Done by the hands of a broken artist
  You painted black where my naked heart is
  I finally know what wrong is
  Now I finally know that you bleed for nothing
  Carved like a stone with your hands still shaking
  On display through a soul still breaking
  Aren't you proud you're the one that made me?
  • Not to mention "Cardigan Weather", which is about the narrator's boyfriend cheating on her, so she sews him into her mattress and hooks up with other guys on top of it.
  A mattress for a coffin suits you very fine...
• American Girls by Counting Crows is a sparkly, upbeat pop song — about realising your lover is insane yet being unable to leave them.
  • The song "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)" is similarly upbeat and cheerful-sounding, but it's about the guilt of being involved in the design of nuclear weapons.
  Einstein's down on the beach staring into the sand
  Cause everything he believes in is shattered
  What you fear in the night in the day comes to call anyway
• Assemblage 23 does this a lot. Most of their songs have a really upbeat tune that makes you want to dance, and then you listen to the lyrics:
  I hate my life I want to die
  I was just pretending all this time
  A mask I wear so I don't bare
  My soul to the cold, harsh world out there
  Try to prevail but only fail
  Each time on a grander and grander scale
  My life is worthless and so am I
  I hate my life I want to die
  • Even if you get past the lyrics about growing old and senile, society being lost in an eternal present, losing yourself and finding something unsettling in its place, and general psychic malaise, you still have to contend with Tom Shear's Depeche Mode-inspired near-monotone. Naturally, it's at its deadest during the following lyrics:
  Emotions I once kept concealed
  Now flow freely like a river
  Life's great mysteries revealed
  Love's great promises delivered
  • Go on, guess how the chorus goes.
  • "Old" is a power ballad about losing ones memories with age, but sung in a rather optimistic tone.
• Rick Springfield's Jessie's Girl is a bouncy, upbeat love song at first glance. It's got a great beat, snappy intelligent lyrics, the singer is pretty good, and you can dance to it! But then you realize what Rick is actually singing: that he's fallen in love with his best friend's girlfriend and wants to take her away from him. And its not even that the best friend and the girlfriend have a rocky relationship, either. There's every indication that Jesse and the unnamed girl are perfectly happy together, yet Rick wants to break that all up and take her for his own.
• Rod Stewart's Young Turks, is a power-driven dance tune that's easy to sing... as long as you don't mind singing about a paid of down-on-their-luck teenagers who ran away from home to live a hardscrabble life rather than allow their parents to break them up. Sure, it's romantic in a twisted way, but being teen parents with no marketable skills sucks.
• That Thing you Do by The Wonders is an upbeat, Beach Boys-esque song about a guy lamenting his girlfriend leaving him.
• Paul Simon did this in a few songs — "Mother and Child Reunion" is, depending on your perspective, a weirdly overwrought song about a custody battle or a gutwrenching story about a dying child (although Simon claims he wrote it about a chicken-and-egg dish he saw in a Chinese restaurant); "You Can Call Me Al" is essentially about loneliness and futile introspection with an anvilicious shot of "it could be a lot worse" in the third verse; "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard" is a rollicking happy tune about family rejection and unrest in poor neighborhoods.
• Virtually any song written or sung by Elvis Costello, either solo or with The Attractions, qualifies here. Certainly, all of his big hits include some form of lyrical dissonance, from "Alison" and "Radio, Radio" to "Veronica", "Everyday I Write the Book", "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", and his cover of the Burt Bacharach single, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." Elvis is the master of lyrical dissonance!
  • Some would argue that both the melody and lyrics of "Alison" are melancholy, though other examples would include "Goon Squad", "Two Little Hitlers", Oliver's Army", "I'm Not Angry" (one of the more obvious examples), and about 75% of the other songs not mentioned thus far on his first five albums.
• Elliott Smith's song "Memory Lane", is a horribly depressing song set to a cheerful, folky tune in a major key. As if that wasn't bad enough, his voice sounds so pervertedly hopeful while he's singing it.("Isolation pushes past self hatred, guilt and shame to a place where suffering is just a game.")
  • Any of Elliott Smith's more upbeat sounding songs, in general. See Also: "Say Yes," "Baby Britain."
• Jonah Lewie's Stop the Cavalry is a bouncy novelty pop song that gets frequent radio play at Christmas time because it happens to mention "Christmas" in the chorus. The song's protagonist represents the Unknown Soldier, and the lyrics consist of the woebegone trooper complaining of freezing cold, exhaustion, and missing his sweetheart at home.
  • It's because it was released at Christmas, like how Killing In The Name Of is technically a christmas song now.
• Atmosphere's "Nothing But Sunshine", set to an inspiring piano sample, begins with the lines: Now when my mother died/I had to take it in stride/There ain't no room for pride/In watching your father cry/And dad made it until/Maybe a year later/When they found his suicide/At the bottom of a grain elevator. The song continues in that vein, describing the rapper's dysfunctional upbringing, despite the happily-sung titular chorus.
• "Soldier's Poem" by Muse. It's a slow acoustic song in a major scale...about soldiers lamenting their distance from home and their dangerous situation. Notable lines include "How could you send us so far away from home", "And do you think you deserve your freedom?/No, I don't think you do", and the coup de grace, "There's no justice in the world/And there never was".
  • Equally, "Guiding Light" from The Resistance- another major-key song, with the chorus "But I'm lost, crushed, cold and confused with no guiding light left inside."
• "My Slow Descent into Alcoholism" by The New Pornographers has one of the most cheery and upbeat tunes ever. The lyrics, however, stick closely to the title.
• The "Super Energy Apocalypse Theme Song" is a hilarious example of this that is obviously done for laughs rather than seriously. The Game itself that is about a Super Energy Apocalypse involving rampaging zombie hordes in the future, is fairly serious, for the most part. it On the title screen here, enter the Konami Code to see the ending credits, where the song is played
• "Now She Knows She's Wrong" by Jellyfish is a cheery song set to vibraphone, harpsichord, and other happy instrumentation about a woman grieving after finding out her husband of twenty years was cheating on her. The final minute is particularly disturbing for having the entire band sing the chorus in a "We Are the World"-style harmony.
  • Jellyfish's "Bedspring Kiss" also qualifies, being a lounge, jazz-styled piece about a character, Jimmy, killing a prostitute in a drug-induced rage.
• Heavy metal band Wintersun has several of these. Most of the songs are speedy, energetic, and sound uplifting. Then you read the lyrics: "Nothing but blood so red and deceased / Nothing but pain, I fall on my knees / Tormenting demons, I suffer and bleed / Only way out is through window of dreams"
• While none of Evanescence's music could be called happy, their song "Anywhere" from their Origin album has a distinctly hopeful (if melancholy) sound. At first blush, it's a sweet song about starting a new life with a loved one. And then... That One Line kind of ruins it.
  Unlock your heart
  Drop your guard
  No one's left to stop you
  • The song itself isn't happy, but that Ominous Latin Chanting at the end of "Whisper" sounds really, really, um...ominous. Especially the one word most likely to be recognized, "maleficum". But the actual translation? "Deliver us from danger, deliver us from evil."
• If you had not read the title to Ned Luberecki's "Cabin of Death", you would toss it aside as stereotypical bluegrass song with plucky banjo and drawling country voice. Of course, this lasts only a few seconds until the first verses begin and goes on to tell the story of a family and their doctor dying from 'what we thought was the flu.'
  If you should ever go out to our cabin,
  Up among the pine trees on a hill,
  You'll find a rusty shovel in the graveyard,
  Dig a hole when you start feelin' ill!
• 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. The lyrics sound like the synopsis for a Twilight Zone episode. "But it stopped short / Never to go again / When the old man died."
  • Sounds like? It inspired a Twilight Zone episode!
• One of my favorites by filker Tom Smith is the cheery tune "Walking Along the Beach..." The chorus starts, "I'm singin' a walking along the beach while you're slitting your wrists song." He lampshaded this in one live performance by commenting before the song, "Somehow, this has become a sing-along. Which means that one of us is really weird, folks!"
• Dropkick Murphys definitely have songs which qualify:
  • "The State of Massachusetts" — pretty upbeat, but it's about a woman having her children taken by social services (A sweet banjo riff just makes it worse); "Sunshine Highway" — far more upbeat, but about alcoholism; "The Spicy McHaggis Jig" — about an attack of 'Beer goggles'; "I'm shipping up to Boston" — about someone who lost a leg; "Buried Alive" — about miners being trapped in a cave-in; "The Dirty Glass," a swinging Irish jig that turns out to be an Anti Love Song between a man and his siren of a pub; and many more.
• [3] "For Lovin' Me" is a cheerful, happy song about how the main character has broken someone's heart and will break it again "someday when your poor heart is on the mend," plus has done the same to many others. And it goes on and on.
• Sweets Time, a vocal cover of the song U.N. Owen Was Her?, features some very innocent lyrics, but . . . if interpreted properly, it quickly turns into a combination of Squick, Nightmare Fuel, and a healthy reminder why Flandre is so frightening.
  • Oh man...Now I'll never be able to listen to that song the same way again. At first, I only knew it as that fun earworm from those [[youtubepoop silly videos]] putting it to funny lines in cartoons, but then I got slightly creeped out when I realized "U.N. Owen" was the name of the killer in And Then There Were None...and when I downloaded the full version of the song, I noticed the maniacal laughter....but after reading this? I don't think I can think of it as anything but nightmare fuel.
• The song "The Violin", by Brian Dewan, is included on the album Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, notably a kid's show. It is set to decidedly upbeat, Irish-sounding music. The song's lyrics discuss a kid who is constantly trying to break away from his controlling parents' desire to make him learn the violin, getting snubbed by his crush for someone who does, and then ultimately drowning in a shipwreck. It's a children's album, fun for the whole family!
  • The titular song by Rockapella could qualify, as a peppy upbeat number about an impossible-to-catch criminal and her various misdeeds.
• "Bad Kids" by the Black Lips is an upbeat, catchy song about exactly what it sounds like. Did we mention the lyrics casually mention parental abandonment, dropping out of school, underage drinking, and is set to clips of riot footage?
• "Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress features the heroine describing how demure and bashful she is...while belting practically the entire song at the top of her lungs.
  • "Sensitivity," from the same musical, is the rather ironic song by the queen, who is anything but sensitive - but the off-kilter and jerky five-beat pattern is not very sensitive either.
• The lyrics to Snow Patrol's bright and upbeat "You're All I Have" are exactly as desperate as the title suggests.
• David Ford's "Have Yourself a Bitter Little Christmas" rather gives it away in the title; the jaunty banjo, mandolin and glockenspiel accompaniment would make for a great Christmas song if it weren't about leaving your wife on Christmas day.
• 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 breaks; I'm always way out of control
  Eleven times I day, I hear, "Hey, watch it asshole! (You fucking piece of shit!)
• "Gunpowder and Lead" by Miranda Lambert sounds like a normal country song... then you get to the chorus:
  I'm going home, gonna load my shotgun
  Wait by the door, light a cigarette
  He wants a fight — well now he's got one
  And he ain't seen me crazy yet
  Slapped my face and shook me like a rag doll
  Don't that sound like a real man?
  Well, I'm gonna show him what a little girl's made of
  Gunpowder and lead
  • Then, if you still haven't gotten the message, the song ends with a shotgun blast.
• South Park The Movie is built almost entirely on this trope:
  • Up There: A rousing Broadway showtune about loneliness and wanting to get out of a bad place. Sung by Satan.
  • La Resistance: "They'll cut your dick in half/ and serve it to a pig./ And though it hurts you'll laugh,/ and dance a dickless jig/ for that's the way it goes/ in war your shat upon/ though you die, La Resistance lives on." Sung by a choir of eight year olds.
  • Blame Canada: A rousing march about evading personal responsibility to the extent of going to war with Canada, a country that seems to go out of its way to be America's friend.
• Another example from a cartoon, namely Drawn Together, is Foxxy Love's touching ballad "Crashy Smashy Die Die Die."
• Many of Jack White's songs use this, but of special note is the song off of the Raconteur's second album, "Carolina Drama". A relatively upbeat bluegrassy tune about parental abandonment, murder (specifically patricide). Of course this is in keeping with the majority of bluegrass and old timey tunes, with upbeat fiddles and bangos about horrible, horrible things.
  • The White Stripes song "Apple Blossom" is a subtle example. The narrator figure sounds like a Dogged Nice Guy assuring his beloved that while other guys don't really care for her, he's different and will always take care of her. Uh-huh.
• Many of Old Crow Medicine Show's songs use this. As a old timey/bluegrass band, they play many incredibly upbeat sounding songs about pretty dark topics, including two songs about the wonders of cocaine, and one which has a chorus that consists of "Don't you ever let no woman, rule your mind/she'll leave you troubled and worried all the time". The majority of these are heavily based on traditionals however.
• Then there's the Matchbox Twenty song "How Far We've Come", which has a cheerful, summer-pop sound and seemingly upbeat title, while the lyrics actually describe, in detail, the singer and the rest of humanity's despairing reaction to the The End Of The World As We Know It.
• Rob Thomas (formerly of Matchbox 20) seems to be a master of this. His latest single "Her Diamonds" is very energetic and upbeat, as is his usual style. The lyrics are also in his usual style, in that it describes the subject's girlfriend breaking down and crying in her room, and he doesn't know how to make her feel better so he starts crying, too.
  And she says, "Ooh, I can't take no more."
  Her tears like diamonds on the floor
  And her diamonds bring me down
  'Cause I can't help her now.
  • More than that: the song's actually about Rob Thomas's wife trying to deal with her (real-life) auto-immune disease.
• ABBA songs occasionally fit this trope. Most notable is "Mamma Mia" (The Song), which is a cheerful tune about a woman who repeatedly re-enters a terrible relationship because she can't think of anything better to do. This is less true of "Waterloo", though the choice of metaphor did draw some criticism from some European interviewers asking how they could "sing an upbeat song about a battle where thousands of people were killed." Hilarity Ensues.
  • Heck, "Ring, Ring" catchy upbeat tune about someone waiting for a call they know isn't coming... Incidentally, Swedish music loves this trope.
  • "SOS" is very bouncy and catchy, but the lyrics are about a couple growing apart. "You seem so far away though you are standing near / You make me feel alive, but something's died, I fear...
  • On the other side of the coin (and obviously from the tail end of their career), "The Day Before You Came" tells the sweet tale of a woman who only came alive when her true love came into her life, to unbelievably mournful and depressing music.
• Imogean Heap's songs normally sound like nonsense unless you know how to interpret it. But there's nothing obscure about "Goodnight and Go," one of the sprightliest, happiest sounding songs that's actually about unrequited love for someone's who's just a friend, and wants to be just friends. She obsesses over "Why'd you have to be so cute? It's impossible to ignore you", comments that "we get on so well", and the second verse is about how she stalks the dude, watches him strip off (he left the curtains open), and watches him as he goes through his normal routine, which gets creepier, because from the lyrics, she's been doing this for a long time. And then she gets all hopeful about how one day he might miss his train, and then he'd have to stay with her, and she'd do anything to stay up talking and so on with him, and she mentions how there'd be no sex or anything "You'd sleep here, and I'd sleep there," but then mentions even more hopefully that "but then heating might be down again, at my convenience, we'd be great together," and says that "it's always say goodnight and go,". See what I mean?
  • And from Imogen we also have "Glittering Clouds", a fast-paced, tinkly-sounding tune with a very fun chorus ("Go, go, faster, wider, more, more, get it down, yeah, dance, dance, take me over glittering clouds"). A lot of people comment on how absolutely happy the song is. Except, um, the verses talk about a serial killer ("Don't blame me/Don't maim me/I can't help what I am/Ooooohh/Lord knows I've tried to") and said glittering clouds are actually LOCUSTS.
• Depending on your interpretation of the music, Icelanders Sigur Rós either play it straight or subvert the hell out of it. It doesn't help matters much that, for many of their songs throughout their career (and one album conveniently named "()" in particular), they created a language called Vonlenska/Hopelandic, of which its purpose is to mean what the listener thinks it should mean. Ain't it a kick in the head?
• The Strokes' pop-tastic "Barely Legal" is about an older man seducing a younger woman and then forcing her to hide what they've done.
• Count Zero wrote "Man, 27, Dies Sleepwalking." Really, if you've read to the end of this list, what more do I need to say? A soft, etheral song about a man jumping to his death while sleepwalking.
• Inverted in Eluveitie's "Inis Mona". Very heavy track that sounds like it's going to be about something negative — and they're singing about a Welsh island, Anglesey! Understandable if one knows that the Welsh for Anglesey is "Ynys Mon"
• "Black Bock" by the Melvins: a languid, summery folk-pop song full of "la la la's" that's apparently about slaughtering animals ("I cut the throat of a billy goat and let it bleed..."). It's really far afield from their usual musical style (the very fact that the lyrics are intelligible for once makes them stand out), which makes it come off as morbid humor, but then the music does eventually get a little eerie (though hazy and psychedelic, rather than agressive), and it ends with some strange distant synth warblings.
• Porcupine Tree's catalog consists almost entirely of dark depressing-sounding songs with dark lyrics, and happy or at least pleasant-sounding songs with dark lyrics (such that when one of the occasional songs with actual happy lyrics comes around, like "Rest Will Flow" it's hard not to look for some dark subtext). There are too many examples of happy or pretty sounding music with depressing lyrics to name them all, but "Mellotron Scratch", "Trains," "Lips of Ashes", "Stranger by the Minute", "Piano Lessons" are all good examples.
  • Bonus points are definitely included for Lips of Ashes. A gentle acoustic song featuring an amazing guitar solo... which is about necrophilia, judging by the lyrics.
  • And also Blackest Eyes, which is a bouncy rock song, about serial killers.
  • A particularly egregious example is Meantime, a folksy upbeat song which rather predictably has depressive (albeit stoic) lyrics. However, it contains the line "a poison spreads through * key change to major* fresh air". Lyrical Dissonance at its most subtle?
• Janet Jackson's "Together Again" is a light bouncy pop tune...about a friend who died of AIDS. The video looks like a version of Africa inspired by The Lion King, but could be interpreted as Heaven.
• 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 latter part.
• Opeth has plenty of examples of mellow-sounding parts with sad lyrics (although they're often dark-sounding mellow parts). The song Deliverance, though, has a really soothing soft section with lyrics which are, fairly unambiguously, about killing someone by holding their head under water.
• The Tiger Lillies are very good at this, though many of their songs have a more sarcastic/comedic than some of the examples here. Listen to "Bully Boys" and hear for yourself.
• Coheed and Cambria are pretty good at this. Let's see...
  • Pretty good at this? They might be the best at it. They've made a career totally out of songs about suicide and murder punctuated by catchy hooks and cries of "Hey! Hey!".
  • In "Second Stage Turbine Blade", we have:
    • Time Consumer, which sounds only kind of sad...until you realize that it's about a couple killing their youngest children (for the good of humanity, though, and it's mostly All There In The Manual)
    • Junesong Provision, which starts of sounding a bit upbeat, until the lyrics begin: "Good morning sunshine awake when the sun hits the sky/look up the sounds that surround the day you die".
  • On the second album, "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3":
    • Three Evils (Embodied by Love and Shadow) starts with a bouncy guitar hook and a graphic description of torture. It ends with the singer chirping over and over, "Pull the trigger and the nightmare stops!", with choral harmony on the "stops".
    • Don't forget about Blood Red Summer. "What did I do to deserve this?"
  • On the third album, "Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV: Volume 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness" we have:
    • Always & Never: Wait, that song was about KILLING?
    • Crossing the Frame: An upbeat pop song with lyrics including "if you decide to answer when my fist swings hello"
    • Once Upon Your Dead Body: "I hope you die right now, will you drink my chemical?"
    • Wake Up: "I'd do anything for you / Kill anyone for you"
    • The Willing Well II: Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness: That light bouncy riff with Claudio joyfully singing "You'll burn in hell while they're digging you out"
• Speaking of older bands, any negative emotions expressed in the lyrics to Electric Light Orchestra songs will inevitably be jarringly at odds with the music. It's like the band just didn't know how to write or play anything but upbeat pop.
• "White Punks On Dope" by The Tubes. Probably the most upbeat song to contain the line "I'll hang myself when I get enough rope".
• The band Creature Feature does this in all their songs. Most notably in "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..."
• Kids in America 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 with their significant other in their home, watching a massive party outside, and trying to explain their behavior, eventually issuing a warning about them.
  • Actually, if you look at they lyrics, they say:
  Looking out a dirty old window
  —> Down below the cars in the city go rushing by
  —> I sit here ''alone' and I wonder why

And that's even worse! ...Dangit Cascada.

• The The's song 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&Ms 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. Similarly, their song Perfect is quite upbeat and the chorus starts with "It's such a picture-perfect day..." but the lyrics describe sitting in a cemetary pondering the futility of existence.
• New Order does this semi-frequently — for instance, the song Perfect Kiss is about watching a mentally deranged friend commit suicide (possibly Joy Division drummer Ian Curtis). Sometimes they reverse it, though: a song called Regret is about falling in love and learning to put the past away.
  • Or perhaps their biggest hit, "Bizarre Love Triangle", which is extremely catchy and built for dancing even before you get to some of the remixes, in which a guy's self-doubts and darker impulses (the singer is providing two legs of said love triangle) have him wondering if the relationship will last. And most covers/remixes of the song are even peppier than the original.
  • "Blue Monday" is also a nod to the suicide of Ian Curtis.
  • "True Faith'', an upbeat number about drug addiction:
    I used to think that the day would never come, I'd spend my life in the shade of the morning sun/My morning sun is a drug that brings me here, to the child I lost, replaced by fear/I used to think that the day would never come, that my life would depend on the morning sun/
• "My Interpretation" by Mika is a break up song that is extremly catchy and cheery.
  • "Lollipop", the cheerful happy song of how much Love Hurts and will wreck your life, which honestly sounds like it's being sung by Norman Bates. Yay?
  • Erase, just - Erase.
  • Hell, half the songs Mika does are like this. "Love Today" is a song with the narator calling women despicable even imply some to be whores.
  Little Girl likes to kid for fun /Licks her lips like there's something on 'em /Tries to tell you life has just begun /When you know she's getting something other then love from another.
• Goldfrapp's 'A&E' is a lovely pop song that is also a break-up song. That would be fine, but for one minor thing: 'A&E' stands for 'Accident and Emergency', which the lyrics also reference. And there are too many references to medicine and hospitals for comfort.
• The band The Boy Least Likely To is a master at this, combining delicate, sweet pop melodies and twee instrumentation with dark themes.
  • "I Box Up All the Butterflies" sounds incredibly cheerful, and happy, and sweet, until you listen to the lyrics and realize that the singer spends his summers ripping up all the flowers, killing the birds and bees, and tearing all the butterflies apart before pinning them and packing them away.
• While it makes sense that a song entitled "I'll Go On Loving You" would be a ballad, Alan Jackson caused some disonance with that song by making its melody and arrangement very similar to "Suicide Is Painless".
• Not really lyrical dissonance, but the 1970s game show The New Treasure Hunt, a largely comedy-based game show not unlike Deal Or No Deal, had a somber, mellow ending theme.
• "Show Them To Me" by Rodney Carrington is a slow ballad... about asking a woman to flash her breasts at him.
• The Bellamy Brothers have a ballad entitled "Jesus Is Coming". You'd think it's a dead-serious commentary on the state of religion in the world, until they get to the line "...and boy, is he pissed." It sounds even funnier when the background choir sings those same words.
• 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 just leading him on.
• Moxy Fruvous' "Drinking Song" sounds just like a drinking song (and a song about drinking) that you might find in an average pub, albeit with a tinge of the melancholy - until you listen to the lyrics and realize it's about how the singer's drinkin' buddy dies of alcohol poisoning - "He passed out on the sundeck that morning / quietly singing goodbye"
  • Similarly, their song "Independance Day" seems to be a sad breakup song, but there's a definite undercurrent of "Boy, I'm glad she's gone and I can breathe again."
• 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 one that particularly bothers this church musician, singing "Rock of Ages" to the tune "Toplady," the tune most people (sadly) know. A cheerful, upbeat, happy tune about how Jesus is broken and how I want to "hide myself" in him.
  • "Car Crash/Dead Lover" was practically a genre of its own in the 50s and 60s, many examples of which are set to melodies that are actually quite cheerful. Last Kiss, Tell Laura I Love Her, Dead Man's Curve ...
• "Bonecracker," by Shocore, is probably the most light and cheerful hip-hop song about threats of assault and battery that you'll ever hear.
• "Jenny Again" by Tunng. Folksy guitar strumming in a minor, nontheless peaceful, key. The song's lyrics are in the imperative - a man giving instructions to the friend of him and his girlfriend. Advice about what to do after said friend has murdered the man singing the song over the girlfriend, Jenny. The chorus tells the perpetrator not to worry "because no-one saw [the victim] fall". The serene style of the music certainly doesn't bring stabbing to the forefront of your mind.
• 'Final Day' by UK postpunk band Young Marble Giants has a bright, catchy tune and is sung in an endearingly sweet schoolgirl-ish manner, but the lyric concerns 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.
• Axenstar's Northern Sky includes the lyrics

"The rain and thunder came crashing down from heaven
Storm winds are blowing like hurricans of madness
Earthquakes are shaking the core of the planet
Volcanoes erupting and fire spreads across the sky\\" he sings it like he's going on an evening stroll

• 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").
• "Khe Sahn" is regarded by many Australians as one of our many unofficial anthems. Many blast it at nightclubs and have generally happy connotations associated with it. The lyrics themselves are about a soldier suffering from PTSD. 'How there were no V-Day hero's, in 1973.' All in all it's really not a happy song. ... Though you are unaustralian if you don't know and love it.
  • Another example is Cheap Wine, which sounds like a badass heavy rock song, but the main character has essentially given up on everything except booze. Admittedly that's a fairly common ideal in Australia and it's kinda hard to tell what the lyrics are at any given moment.
• "It Depends on What You Pay" from The Fantasticks is an upbeat, Disneyesque number about rape. Unsurprisingly, it isn't normally included in productions of the show.
  • "It shouldn't ever have to end this way" means "the world shouldn't end like this". And "that kiss you give is never ever gonna fade away" refers to the long-term effects of the nuclear fallout.
• "Knights of The Island Counter" by Dave Melilo, according to the iTunes store review, is "simply a summery ode to being young and enjoying life". They seem to have missed the lyrics: "I've got some problems, but we've got ten dollars, that's enough to get use wasted..."
• "Foundations" by Kate Nash, a cheery sounding song about a woman who can't bring herself to leave a bad relationship that is turning worse. Although the last verse does seem to imply she'll leave someday...
• "Since Yesterday" by Strawberry Switchblade sounds like it'll be a cute, happy song. The chorus is: "And as we sit here alone looking for a reason to go on, it's so clear that all we have now are our thoughts of yesterday". And the melody of "Trees and Flowers" is straight out of a love song; it's about agoraphobia.
• "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.
• "South Side of the Sky" by Yes sounds fairly upbeat at first, until you listen to the lyrics - it's about a group of explorers who freeze to death in Antarctica.
• Illuminati by Malice Mizer is a catchy industrial/pop/rock/electronica/hybrid thing that sounds perfectly radio friendly- but if you look at the lyrics (or even watch the video) you will see that the song is about sex, orgasms and possibly cults. It's a great song, but Jesus, it's strange.
• Rhapsody's 'Rain of a Thousand Flames' has one of the most uplifting tunes one the band's repertory, it actually sounds like Theme Music Power Up material. Then along cames the chorus...
  Under the rain of a thousand flames
  We face the real pain falling in vain
  While the Dark Angel screams for vengeance
  In the dead shadow of falling stars
• Be Your Own Pet's poppy song "Becky" is about a girl whose best friend abandoned her, so she murdered the new friend.
  Now I'm going to juvie for teenage homicide
  It would all've been cool if you'd stayed by my side
  Then you know Becky wouldn't have had to die...
• Schoolyard Heroes bring us Kill 'Em All. Jonah sounds freaking ecstatic as he sings of his desire to go on a shooting rampage at his school. Even more cheerful sounding is Blood-Spattered Sundress, though you probably wouldn't be able to tell if you had only read the lyrics.
• 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 it that you don't love me, but you are my everything and I WON'T LET YOU LEAVE."
• Lampshaded in this Pictures For Sad Children webcomic with a song by fictional group Panic! Attack!
• White Rose Movement's "Girls in the Back" is a rather poppy song that most agree is either about sado-masochism or paedophilia whilst "Cruella", a song about a suffering drug addict, opens with the chant "Doh doh doh/ Doh doh doh doh"...
• 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.
• The Gaelic song Bean Phaidin is a pretty fun song about petty jealousy, then you get to the fourth verse: "May you break your legs, Paidin's wife/ May you break your legs, your legs/ May you break your legs and your bones". Wait, what?
• Take almost any love song: odds are, the subject of the song is a woman. Now, have it sung by a female performer for instant Les Yay.
• Weile Weile Waile by the Dubliners. Upbeat tune? Check. Happy children for the background vocals? Check. Infanticide and execution? Check.
  • It actually is a children's song from Dublin.
• Passion Pit's "Little Secrets" is made of this trope. You've got the ultra-happy glitch-pop backing, the soaring falsetto vocal, and a freaking children's choir on one side; on the other, you've got the horrifically depressing, disparaging lyrics.
• The Faint, especially tracks off of Dance Macabre, if you just listen to the backing it's a pretty cool new-wave dance band. The lyrics and some of the track names (Agenda Suicide for example) are much less upbeat (Working yourself to death? Never reaching your dreams because of work? Super-happy!)
• The majority of the music made by Get Set Go. A review for their CD Sunshine, Joy and Happiness says it best:
  (Reviewer) Blythe Tellefsen: "Get Set Go continues with this CD to combine �pop� sound (albeit with the unusual and haunting addition of a cello) with lyrics that usually remain just at the edge of a suicide note."
• Played for humor in The Vandals' "Get In Line" - an aggressive headbanging punk/metal song about... waiting in line for a rollercoaster. The closest thing to an angry sentiment in the whole song is "someone cuts the line/ they're adding to your time/ and that's not very nice/ kick 'em outta line!", and the chorus is a frantic shout of "Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, WHEE!".
• Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" is a cheerful song about people's apathy towards murder and poverty.
  • This is true of a lot of his songs, such as I Ain't Marching Anymore
• Tom Jones' "Delilah" is a bright, upbeat sounding song with a very catchy chorus. Then you sudden realise that you're singing about a man who stabbed his cheating girlfriend and is asking for forgiveness.
• The song "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" from the musical Hair has a verse that's an example of this. These words are sung to a cheery tune best described as "Dixieland". The meaning of the title? There were 3500 men in the first platoon of soldiers sent to Vietnam. Two out of every three were black. Offensive lyrics are spoilered:
  Pris'ners in Niggertown, it's a dirty little war
  Three-five-zero-zero
  Take weapons up and begin to kill
  Watch the long long armies drifting home
• The Eurobeat remix of Newton - Sky High (itself a cover of Jigsaw).
• 'Batty Rap' from FernGully: The Last Rainforest. It has a fast and springy beat and tune.....with the lyrics being about how Batty was used in animal testing laboratory, with strong implications that he was conscious throughout all the processes. Due to its 'adult' nature, quite a bit of the song was cut from the film, but was left in on the CD.
  "The Eye makup, when inserted rectally, has some effect...
  Remove the brain cap...
  If you notice, by dipping the bat in a series of paints...
  After 600 packs of cigarrettes, the animals seem to exhibit some carcinogenic tendancies..."
• "End of the World," by Armor for Sleep, is an energetic, fast-paced song...about a guy who decides to lay down and die as the world is destroyed around him.
• Double You's "Dancing with an Angel" is a fast-paced Euro-rave tune, and the chorus is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, but the verse lyrics are that of a downer "love done me wrong" type song.
• City High - What Would You Do. An upbeat mid-tempo major-key tune, which is about a mom having to turn to prostitution to support her child, while his dad goes off and does drugs etc.
• Frank Zappa's "Bobby Brown Goes Down" is a good example of this. Basically a cheerful song... about a preppy kinda jerk guy's descent into gay sexual activities. "With a spindle up my butt till it makes me scream!"
  • Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow!
• Blockbuster by The Sweet is an extremely cheery song about a young criminal who is proving difficult or impossible to catch. The Lyrical Dissonance is underlined further by the fact that the title is a pun - the thug's name is Buster, so the people are striving to "block Buster".
• Breakdown by The Alan Parsons Project. One of the most upbeat tunes on that album, but the lyric is Exactly What It Says On The Tin - the protagonist is suffering a mental breakdown.
• Runaway by Del Shannon; a bright, upbeat song (featuring an early synthesizer, no less), but the lyrics are about the protagonist's girlfriend dumping him.
• 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.
• Present in many Arrogant Worms songs, 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.
• 'Fake' by The Frames is a typical rock song, but the lyrics are about a guy whose ex repeatedly tries to get him to forget she ever existed, and he continues to point out how bad her new partner is.
  • The video adds a whole new layer of dissonance.
• Sweet Tangerine by the Hush Sound is an upbeat pop/rock song about a stalker creeping into his ex-lover's bedroom.
• Remember that song from Mean Girls? The one Cady thought was by the Spice Girls, and the one everyone remembers as the Mean Girls song? It's about girls in L.A. on meth. A lot of Katy Rose's songs are like this, reflecting her own troubled past.
• Dog Fashion Disco did this a bunch, most memorably on Pogo the Clown, a jazzy rock song about serial killer John Wayne Gacy. DFD's singer later wrote Chloroform Girl, and acoustic song about a kidnapped sex slave who's "only alive because I like you," and is working on a solo project dedicated exclusively to these kinds of songs.
• Zager And Evans followed up their much more well-known "In The Year 2525" with "Mr Turnkey", a bouncy harmony-filled folk rock song about a repentant rapist killing himself in jail by nailing his hand to the wall {"Mr Turnkey, there's been a rape in Wichita Falls / Mr Turnkey, I'm sitting here crying in my coveralls").
• The opening number for Phantom Of The Paradise, "Goodbye Eddie Goodbye," is about a singer who commits suicide in order to promote the sales of his upcoming album. The song is sung in catchy 50's style complete with "ya-ya-ya-yaahs" and the lead singer pantomiming Eddie's death throes.
  • The end credits song contains a bouncy piano breakdown along with the lyrics "Good for nothing / Bad in bed / Nobody likes you / You're better off dead / Goodbye."
• 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.
• "Amie" by Damien Rice. A cheerful song with swooping orchestrals...about a man trying to convince a young girl to sit on his garden wall and read him a pornographic novel.
  • Also arguable for "Me My Yoke + I", which is a desperate, dark song about the joys of discovering masturbation.
• "Relax, Enjoy Yourself" from Randy Newman's Faust. Has several sections: 1. Nice upbeat song about how no one ever succeeds; 2. Less upbeat interlude with a little girl singing about evil; 3. Nice upbeat song about how the man who shot her will go to heaven because he went to confession; 4. Hymn about how God works in mysterious ways, and that she should be happy for the man who shot her; 5. Nice upbeat song about how Satan will take over the world and it'll be a good thing.
• Probably intentionally invoked in Richard's de facto theme song, "Slaughter Your World", in the Looking For Group movie. It's all about him being a genocidal maniac, set to the tune of "Part Of Your World" from The Little Mermaid. Yes, seriously.
• 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/That I'm my own worst enemy!)
• This song is about a gruesome murder, wouldn't know it from the tune.
  • "I hate to ask, but Are Friends Electric? Mine's broke down, and now I've no one to love".
• "I Want More" from Lestat The Musical, Claudia's first song. Quite possibly the most cheerful song in the show, all about drinking people's blood..
• The Seatbelt's song "Flying Teapot" is a flighty, happy tune with questionably happy lyrics at best.
• Tim Minchin's Canvas Bags is an example not only of lyrical dissonance, but also of performance dissonance.
• Everybody's Got Aids by the Canadian Ska Band Me, Mom, & Morgentaler definitely fits this trope, for relatively obvious reasons.
• Many, many, many Short Stack songs.
• I'm not sure if it was the case with the original version, but Andrew W.K.'s cover of Soldiers of Sorrow Is, essentially, a cheery upbeat-sounding rock anthem about a soldier horrified at the fact that he's surrounded by death and only survived his battle by killing people just like him.
• Jeff Rosenstock has a tendency for this. Last on My List by the Arrogant Sons of Bitches is a generally upbeat tune about what seems to be a person who died in a car accident. 5 Funerals, by Bomb the Music Industry! is even more upbeat... and it is a song about becoming desensitized to the death of friends because he's had to go to so many funerals.
• The MGMT song "Time to Pretend". If you visit the You Tube page, the comments tend to fall along the lines of "yay drugs!" because the song has lyrics like "I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars", all while using a harmonic, upbeat melody. However, if you read the rest of the lyrics, you'll notice that the entire song is really a sarcastic, tragic tribute to people who live their lives as if there was nothing more important than feeling good, for example: "There's really nothing, nothing we can do / Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew" and "We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end / We were fated to pretend".
  • Also the MGMT song "Kids". It's quite an upbeat sounding melody, but the lyrics are about the sorrow of childhood fading and how depressingly natural it is.
  Memories fade like looking through a fogged mirror.
  Decisions to decisions are made and not bought.
  But I thought this wouldn't hurt a lot.
  I guess not.

  • And don't forget how the chorus points out how pointless childhood is in the end:

  Enjoy yourself.

  Take only what you need from it.

  A family of trees wanted

  To be haunted.
  • There's also "Congratulations", a breezy, vaguely tropical-sounding ballad that seems to be about how alienated the band's sudden success has made them feel.
• Jon Lajoie employs this in most of his songs, from Everyday Normal Guy (a gangsta rap about a boring 9-5 average Joe), Stay At Home Dad (a heavy metal piece about a house husband on paternity leave), and Sunday Afternoon (a techno dance mix about doing chores at the end of the weekend).
  • Jon Lajoie does this in almost all of his songs. "Show Me Your Genitals," "Show Me Your Genitals 2," and "I Kill People" are all vaugely parodic rap songs about, well, genitals and killing people.
• Garou's "Criminel" is probably the grooviest, most kickass song you'll ever hear about [[Squick ephebophilia]].
• As an example from a musical - The Lion King 2 has "My Lullaby," a brutal declaration of war and violence set to the tune of a children's lullaby.
  • On the other hand, it grows to be pretty creepy...
• The Frogs in general tend to use really jaunty melodies for their more Dead Baby Comedy lyrics. Perhaps the two best fitting examples are "Raped", an anthemic major key alt-rock song from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist ("What's the crime? I had fun!"), and "Bad Daddy", which sets dark comic lyrics about child abuse ("Bad daddy says your high chair 'accidentally' fell over/ now here comes Rover the pitbull...") to a gentle folk melody and almost cloyingly sweet synthesized orchestration.
• Eurobeat artist Daniel's "Frontal Impact" is about a Near Death Experience after a car accident.
• Psapp's The Monster Song has a really happy melody, but it's actually a song about a person who thinks that there is a monster who wants to eat him.It seems that the music video really catch the essence, using funny cartoons and lots of... blood and graphic violence.
• The Eurobeat tune "Street Boy" is about a gay prostitute.
• The obscure musical Fade Out Fade In has the song "You Mustn't Feel Discouraged," which sounds congenially cheerful, especially when it accompanies a playful tap-dance routine, but here's how the lyrics go:
  "When you think you've hit the bottom,
  And you're feeling mighty low,
  You mustn't feel discouraged—
  There's always one step further down you can go."
  • A video of it can be found here
• Music by Jody Gray are great examples of this trope. Both Arthur's Missing Pal and Clifford's Really Big Movie features upbeat music... with downer lyrics about the protagonist's lost dog?!? In the latter, the opposite also occurs on a tribute CD: the owner of said big red dog sings upbeat lyrics about her dog to a bitter-sounding tune.
• "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.

Heartbeat, Heartbreak is still a bit peppy for a song about a breakup.

• How is the best way to promote Roland Emmerich's latest film 2012? Give it a trailer tune sung by Idol Runner-up Adam Lambert, that's what! And the title of this song is "Miracle", of all things.
• The song What's Up by the 4 Non Blondes already sounds a bit upbeat for such a dark and desperate song. But then it got a catchy dance remix by Dj Miko, and became a veritable Ear Worm.
  • In fact, it's so upbeat, you can even sing Bobby Mc Farrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" to it.
• The children's movie The Brave Little Toaster contains a song near its end which the other wiki sums up perfectly: "Worthless is sung by the junkyard's broken down cars, each singing a few verses about their life before being smashed and killed by the compactor." However, they fail to mention the upbeat, cheerful music it's sung to.
• The Norwegian hard rock group TNT's song Desperate Night is a heavily epic sounding song that's pretty upbeat...about a soldier who basically is suffering from shell shock and is waiting to die "He'll wait for the light". It's considered one of the group's greatest songs ever.
• The fan-made christmas song "Merry Christmas Gotham City" is sung from the Joker's point of view. Standard commercial Christmas beat... with the lyrics describing him planning a rampage as a city wide christmas gift "decoration".
• Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers: "Goon Squad". Catchy happy tune, good for opening a set and warming up the audience. You could at first take it for a slightly joking tone - "Who let the goon squad in?" - until you get to lines like "There is no more beautiful world"
• The Records' "Starry Eyes" is a cheerfully sung jangly power pop song that's actually a Take That directed at a former manager who suddenly left to take a vacation while the band were still on tour in France.
• "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

• "Ferrets" by Film Cow. NSFW probably.
• An inversion of most of the examples on this page: In This Moment are known for Maria Brink's Metal Screams, and although she usually adopts clean vocals and softer tunes for her more upbeat songs, sometimes she doesn't. He Said Eternity sounds decidedly odd sung in a death growl.
• Poet Shel Silverstein wrote an album of catchy little tunes whose melodies sound like the typical happy, upbeat children's songs. But being Shel Silverstein... well... His most famous is "You're Always Welcome at Our House", where you'll be invited in, killed in an assortment of interesting and gruesome ways, and your body stuffed into the nearest convenient space. The best rendition being Marisa Berenson on The Muppet Show; who sang while flouncing around in a poofy cute-lolita dress (which added a dissonance all its own).
• "Look Out Sunshine!" by the Fratellis. It's ridiculously catchy, upbeat, and easy to sing along to. It also appears to be about someone whose friends have turned against him:
  "Tell my friends I'll be around
  Getting nowhere, sleeping somewhere"

  and
  "Look out sunshine, here's the punchline
  No one gets you any, no one needs you any
  No one gets you anymore."
  • Ditto "Everybody Knows You Cried Last Night", about a girl so desperate to please that she sleeps with a gang of boys and regrets it thoroughly.
    • "Ole Black 'n' Blue Eyes" fits this too. It's about this one girl that nobody wants to be with, and she knows it. The singer is trying to be a friend to her, but ends up not being able to because of his rock and roll lifestyle ("I'd help her out, but I've got somewhere to be/and that's the very thing when you're dealing with me")
• Cinderella's Revenge is happy and upbeat tune with Cinderella singing about seeing her sisters hang.
• TakeThat, of all bands, seem to manage this one in The Garden. Sounds like a swooshy, twinkly love song, seems to reference some kind of ecological disaster - 'we could hear the sound of sirens all around us, and the scent of burning oil was in the air' - and contains a gloriously stirring middle eight with these lyrics:
  Everyone, everyone
  Can you hear the soldiers coming?
  Everyone, everyone
  Every man and every woman
  We all fall in the end, we're just miracles of matter
• K. McCarty's cover of "Hate Song" by Daniel Johnston: The original already has a pretty chipper melody for being about leaving someone and hoping they'll commit suicide over it, but her version adds accordion, tuba, and an off-key group vocal, making it sound like a Drunken Song. There's something sort of disturbing about hearing a crowd of people gleefully singing lyrics like "You'll contemplate suicide with a knife one night", and "No one will shed a tear, no one will be there to find you dead".
• Vienna Teng
  • "Shasta", a nice cheerful upbeat song about a girl taking a wonderfully pleasant roadtrip up I-5 in order to visit an abortion clinic. Okie-dokey...
  • And on the other end of the spectrum is "Now Three" - By her own admission this song is an anxious and nervous happy song.
  • "Radio", in which a girl calmly and curiously imagines herself being mortally wounded in a suicide bombing in San Francisco.
• Paul Kelly's rock song "How to Make Gravy" is a regretful song that takes the form of a letter written by a man who's in prison, to his brother. The narrator talks about the assorted members of his family, throws in tips for making the gravy that he normally makes, but it's completely heartbreaking when he talks about how it's nearly Christmas, and he won't be there to see his family- especially with the the line "Won't you kiss my kids on Christmas Day? Please don't let them cry for me."
• Bourgeois Shangri-La, by Miss Li. It was used in a commercial for iPods. It's about a Stepford Smiler who desperately wants to escape her shallow life.
• "Chu Chu Lovely Muni Muni Mura Mura" is a really happy, peppy, j-poppy song about...rape.
• Jesuitmont by the Celtic band Kornog, is a bouncy, energetic number—about an evil stepmother and her cook murdering her stepdaughter and baking her into a pie for her father to eat. (Why they choose to do so is never explained.)
• "The Ash Grove", an English version of the Welsh air "Llwyn Onn", has a soothing melody but depressing lyrics.
• One of Harry Chapin's biggest crowd-pleasing numbers was 30,000 Pounds of Bananas, which tells, with jaunty high energy, the true story of a truck driver transporting the titular fruit to Scranton, Pennsylvania who crashes and dies horribly. He originally composed it at a more meditative piece, but when it emerged that the song was funny, he sped it up, and added a section where he riffed on his difficulties in writing a satisfactory end to the song. This didn't sit well with the trucker's widow, and it was agreed that Bananas would never be performed in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
• The song "Just a Little But" by Maria Mena is filled with this trope. It's a crazily bouncy number, as long as you don't listen too closely.
• Most of Motion City Soundtrack's music is lively and upbeat. Most of it also references chronic depression, struggles with alcoholism, and/or an inability to relate to people.
• Shiny Toy Guns' "When They Came For Us" is a rather cheery number about the loss of one's innocence in a war: "When they took the beach that day / They stole the children, took them away / And I miss everyone, but most of all, the little ones, and their shiny toy guns /" The title is also a possible reference to the Holocaust.
• This trope is common in Bluegrass, but you still can't beat I Am Weary by the Cox Family. Nice, soft country ballad in a major key, about a young woman who has totally screwed her life up and has come back home to die in her mother's arms. If there's a sadder topic, I don't want to hear it.
• Voltaire keeps up that cheerful tune all through this song.
  There's a pilot impaled to the wing
  and he's Dead!
  And all the passengers, they are missing
  'cause they're Dead!
  • it's catchy too.
• Busted's song "Crashed the Wedding", although the title sounds like it might be a metal song, is actually sung in a faintly cheerful style. The main Lyrical Dissonance is that, in this same cheerful tone, part of the last chorus goes "I might as well forget her and walk away, just glad I crashed the wedding." Not exactly major, but noticeable if you're actually listening to the lyrics, not the music.
• The title track from the little-known Australian CD Our Stolen Children by Peter Van de Voord is as justifiably angry as you'd expect, but the music is far more laid-back than the lyrics.
• Spoon's "The Underdog" has peppy Mexican-style trumpets, and lyrics like "that's why you will not survive." Cheery.

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Larynx Dissonance

Index Dissonance

Magnum Opus Dissonance

Lounge Lizard

Music Tropes

Lyrical Shoehorn

Losing The Team Spirit

Sadness Tropes

Mangst

Limp And Livid

Madness Tropes

Mad Eye

Loves My Alter Ego

Older Than Radio

Mad Scientist