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alt title(s): Ironic Nursery Rhyme
"If I die before you wake
Don't you cry, don't you ache
Nothing's ever yours to keep
Close your eyes, go to sleep"
Tom Waits, "Lullaby"

A nursery rhyme used to convey an underlying sadness and/or creepiness, sometimes made into a theme tune that sounds like a music box that's slightly off key. It's mainly used to indicate someone with a Squicky past, a child molester or other psychosis. Ironically, due to this trope, it's very uncommon for anyone to use nursery music to indicate anything positive anymore, making it a common theme of Grimmification.

Occasionally the writers want to be more poetic with it, and a character will sing the lyrics to some bedtime song. This is sometimes handwaved as being learned from a nanny or grandmother, since they tend to be rhymes no one has used in the last century.

"Ring Around the Rosey" (or "Ring-a-Ring-of-Roses" as its known in some parts of the world) is especially prone to this, due to the misconception that a cute little children's song was written about The Black Plague. It wasn't, but because so many people think it was, its use is supposed to be very symbolic.

Oldtime songs like the works of Frank Sinatra are quickly becoming part of this trope. If you enter an ancient dilapidated mansion and a song whose original listeners are either senile or dead from old age plays over and over and over, you're in trouble. Also the famous "Hush Little Baby" (also called "Mockingbird") lullaby seems to be the top icon of this trope, it's simple enough for parents (or some creepy unseen killer) to ad-lib further verses as required.

Overlaps with the Ominous Music Box Tune.

Often goes with the Creepy Child. See also Soundtrack Dissonance. The opposite, where the music box is used positively, is Nostalgic Musicbox.

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Film: Coraline - In the parallel world of the Other Mother, Coraline visits a lively theater where the other world's version of Mrs. Spink and Forcible (two of her elderly house mates) perform a show and sing the song "Sirens of the Sea" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuJXsBqLRA&feature=related. Later, to retrieve the soul of one of the Other Mother's victims, she returns to the theater, now dark and abandoned. While she walks causiously towards the center stage, first a disjointed music-box version of the song is heard, which is then accompanied by Spink and Forcible's faint singing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ybo3Z8k3aE&feature=related