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She got a new apartment out on the escarpment
And in her glove compartment are my songs
She hasn't even heard them since she found out what the words meant
She decided she preferred them all wrong
Kind of like the last time, with a bunch of really fast rhymes
If we're living in the past I'm
Soon gone
— Barenaked Ladies, "Testing 1, 2, 3"
So, you're listening to this new song you just acquired legally. 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.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please, please make sure that the example you're about to add isn't already on the page. Yes, it's a very long page, but please make the effort. Ctrl/Command-F is your friend.
Examples
- "Girls on Film" by Duran Duran. A catchy, poppy tune about porn stars.
- "White Winter Hymnal" by Fleet Foxes. It's a beautiful little ditty about decapitation.
- "Face Down", by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, is a bright, cheery song about relationship violence.
- "We Will Become Silhouettes", by the Postal Service, is a bright, cheery song about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The video features bandmembers Ben Gibbard, Jimmy Tamberello and Jenny Lewis bicycling around a spookily empty suburban neighborhood in the aforementioned aftermath on a bright happy sunny day.
- Barry Manilow's Copacabana. Peppy little ditty about a woman losing her boyfriend in a bar brawl and becoming an alcoholic.
- Particularly peculiar was when the song was acted out by muppets on The Muppet Show when Liza Manelli was the guest star.
- While there are many specific instances of this below, most ska-punk is based around lyrical dissonance.
- 'Garbage's' incredibly bouncy song "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)": the first verse is about a pretty but airheaded girl who runs when things get tough and the second verse is about a young male transvestite who's mistaken for an actual girl. Given it was apparently based on two incredibly depressing books about child abuse, prostitution and rape (Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things) you can pretty much put a ring around that, despite Shirley Manson (the band's vocalist) describing it as "an adrenaline rush" and "probably the most celebratory song we've ever written". Yeah, right.
- "Only Happy When it Rains" is something of a subversion: a upbeat, catchy song about being depressed... but enjoying it. So Yeah.
- Don't forget the ridiculously catchy Push It (Mind Screw music video notwithstanding) and Why Do You Love Me.
- The lyrics in the trope entry are a real song; "Komm, Süßer Tod" (in German, "Come, Sweet Death"), from the Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack. And yes, it's every bit as disturbing as you'd think — appropriate, given the series, and when the song is played: during the Third Impact sequence in Evangelion. Doubly ironic, the film synchs the line, "my world is ending" with apocalyptic imagery of the The End Of The World As We Know It, in the literal sense of the words.
- The Speedy Techno Remake (link) doesn't help things.
- Nor the fact that the entire song is suspiciously similar to Hey Jude.
- Interestingly, the Bach piece from which it takes its title is is not an example of this trope; it's as calm as its lyrics suggest.
- Voltaire's "Come, Sweet Death" is an equally upbeat song dedicated to Death of the Endless from the Sandman comics. But it is completely in-character for Death, of course.
- Most of Voltaire's songs are like this. BRAINS! Is a swing-type music about a kid gathering brains for an evil meteor. And it was awesome.
- The song from The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy? Hell yeah it was awesome!
- He even has a bouncy song about this trope, called "Death, Death (Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil)"
- When You're Evil, anyone? It's basically a song about how much he loves to do evil things, set to a tango.
- And The Headless Waltz which is about... um... pretty much exactly what you'd expect
- "Die die die di-die die"
- You know those tunes that just sound like they were written so that the American government could inspire patriotism? Set to one of those lyrics about how much he hates the place and wishes someone would Bomb New Jersey.
- Guess what the gospel-esque Hell in a Handbasket is about.
- Aqualung's song Strange and Beautiful sounds like a nice romantic ballad, but then you listen to the lyrics.
I've been watching your world from afar,
I've been trying to be where you are,
And I've been secretly falling apart,
I'll see.
To me, you're strange and you're beautiful,
You'd be so perfect with me but you just can't see,
You turn every head but you don't see me.
I'll put a spell on you,
You'll fall asleep and I'll put a spell on you.
And when I wake you,
I'll be the first thing you see,
And you'll realise that you love me.
- The song for the Mercenaries 2 commercial "Oh No You Didn't" is a light hip hop/barbershop chorus set to an upbeat piano tune that wouldn't be out of place at an amateur recital or off-Broadway muscial. The lyrics are about getting revenge after getting shot in the arse by your employer. And it's totally awesome.
- This song was orginally in the Jerry Springer opera, so perhaps that's not suprising. I am not making this up.
- The listing for the Jerry Springer opera does not list it, and all signs point to the Wojahn brothers writing this specifically for the game's commercial. The long version was created after the 30-sec commercial became so popular.
- Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera includes an example of this in the perfectly happy-sounding tune of "Masquerade". Once you realise what it's actually talking about (pay attention to the words, not the tune), you can get rather depressed.
'Masquerade! Paper faces on parade! Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you!'
- "I'm On a Boat" by The Lonely Island, is an angry and confrontational sound rap in pure "gangsta rap" style... about being on a boat.
- It's a rap parody.
- And what makes it a parody is the fact that it's specifically this trope.
- Many songs by Steely Dan are good examples of this trope. (Examples: "Peg," "My Old School," "Reelin' in the Years," and so on.) The most stunning example in a Dan song is "Chain Lightning." It is a 6/8 jazz shuffle. The lyrics invoke a sense of Orwell. A good formula is, the happier the song, the more twisted the lyrics.
- On the same record as "Chain Lightning" is "Everyone's Gone to the Movies", in which a man known as Mr. La Page shows pornographic films in his living room to neighbourhood children, while the parents are none the wiser and happy that their children are out of the house.
- In contrast, Donald Fagen's solo work largely subverts this — at least up until Morph the Cat, and even that has exceptions ("Mary Shut the Garden Door", "Security Joan").
- "Kid Charlemagne" is an upbeat jazz-funk-rock song about an LSD dealer and his eventual arrest. "... Your low-rent friends are dead ..."
- 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.
- This happens frequently with political songs, particularly of a satirical nature. Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" and John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son" were mistaken for proud, jingoistic rock songs by those who listened only to their melodies and choruses, and not their verses.
- Pretty much every song ever written by The Shins, but especially the songs on their album Wincing the Night Away.
- B-52's "Legal Tender". A song about counterfeiting in the typical tune of the B-52s.
- Bruce Springsteen often employs this.
- "Born in the USA" sounds like it should be about how great being a U.S. citizen is... but it's about a man who's been beat down all his life, gets sent off to Vietnam, loses his brother, and ends up unemployed when he gets back. Some people who should have known better (George Will and Ronald Reagan among them) apparently didn't bother to listen to the rest of the song before talking about it.
- Similarly, "Born to Run" is all about how horrible New Jersey is and how badly Springsteen wanted to get out of there as a kid. Naturally, it's been nominated as New Jersey's official state song by politicians who haven't listened too closely to it.
- It's not like New Jersey has problems attracting residents.
- Though those of us who were born in New Jersey and did get out wonder if perhaps the politicians did listen closely and are just wistfully thinking of when they had the same dream.
- On Ryoko Asakura's character album from Suzumiya Haruhi, she has her own version of "Hare Hare Yukai", replacing all the happy lyrics from the original with depressing ones while keeping the exact same tune and instruments. This might lead to some confusion about the point of the song to people who don't know Japanese and haven't read the translated lyrics.
Even if we could map out all of Earth's mysteries,
I still wouldn't be able to go anywhere.
I spent my life with anticipations and hopes,
But no one is there to grant them.
With a warp, this looping feeling
Swirls everything together and destroys them.
- "Every Breath You Take" written by Sting, performed by The Police, is often taken as a love song, but the lyrics are about a scorned man's stalker-like obsession with his ex. It's truly disturbing how many couples dance to this song at their wedding receptions.
- Which has not gone unnoticed by its author. "People tell me 'Oh, we got married to "Every Breath You Take"'. Good luck."
- Heck, it ended up in Wii Music.
- P-Diddy's "I'll Be Missing You" is a lyrically dissonant tribute to the late Notorious BIG that samples EBYT's bassline. Sunny upbeat melody, dark lyrics.
- Likewise, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" is about an affair between a teacher and his student. Most people get that one, however, due to a Lolita Shout Out in one verse. ("Just like the/Old man in/That book by Nabokov".) This one's even more disturbing when you recall that songwriter Sting was a kindergarten teacher before hitting it big with the Police.
- "La Belle Dame Sans Regret" (The Beautiful Woman with No Regrets) sounds like Caribbean-flavored bossa nova, the kind of stuff you'd hear at a poolside bar in Key West. Translate the lyrics, though, and it's about a woman who basically gets off on abusing the men who are entranced by her beauty, as sung by her current victim.
- The origin of that song is explained here. (Ctrl+F is your friend.) It's based in mythology. So Yeah...
- "Can't Stand Losing You" by The Police is catchy and cheerful— and about a guy who's planning to commit spiteful suicide after a breakup. The Subdued Section near the middle drops the dissonance for a bit, and makes the verse that much more powerful.
- Gee, the fun little ditty "Do-do-do-do Da-da-da-da" contains the lyrics "Their logic ties you up and rapes you." Crikey.
- Sting's "Brand New Day" is a bright, shiny, upbeat song about people mindlessly embracing bright, shiny things without examining whether or not they possess any real substance. Naturally, it's the current title song of The Early Show and is constantly used in commercials for "The Next Big Thing™".
- You're confusing the song with the music video.
- It was also used in a promotional video for Compaq not long before the HP merger. "I'll sell the stock, we'll spend all the money" indeed.
- "Shiver" by Coldplay is similar to the above example, very obviously being the account of a man with a stalker-like obsession.
- "Married with Children" by Oasis sounds like a carefree acoustic number, which is actually about how much the singer despises the person he is now stuck with for the rest of his life.
- "Woman in Chains", by Tears for Fears. A very romantic tune about an abusive relationship. The name of the song itself shows it.
- Finnish folk-pop group Värttinä sometimes exemplify this trope, especially on their earlier albums, which feature dizzyingly chipper songs about unhappy marriages, villages full of idiots, and the general wretchedness of life.
- "Matalii ja Mustii" is about a town where the girls are ugly, the boys are stupid, and the children are presumably below average. The lazy, experienced, alcoholic narrator is not impressed. This song was featured on the Arthur cartoon.
- "Marilaulu" is about pouring boiling lead into gossiping old women's mouths, after cutting out their tongues.
- "Kivutar" is about an evil goddess, and the black magic she is preparing to unleash on the world.
- "Iro" tells the story of a girl who never ever found a lover...the list goes on.
- 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.")
- Bad Religion has a fun time with this:
- Played with the song "Slumber" from Stranger Than Fiction. It starts out somberly, tries to give hope to the listener, then tells the listener that we're killing the world.
- The upbeat song "Sorrow" is all about the Book of Job, which is basically a story of Job playing the Butt Monkey to God and the Devil.
- The incredibly catchy "Television" is all about a kid who relies on his TV as a babysitter, parent, and information source exclusively.
- "Infected". People dedicate this song to their boyfriends and girlfriends.... but it has the lyrics "you and me have a disease. You affect me, you infect me. I'm afflicted, you're addicted. You and me. You and me."
- The traditional French song "Alouette", often taught to children, actually is about removing a lark's feathers in order to cook the bird.
- There is a children's song from the Phillipines 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 . . ."
- "Waltzing Matilda" 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...
- The band Of Montreal employs this trope to an extreme level in their latest 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. (The lead songwriter was going through a nervous breakdown and marital troubles at the time.)
- The first hint that Dai Mahou Touge is not a normal Magical Girl series is when the opening Theme Tune, while remaining traditionally bubbly in harmony, suddenly mentions death and destruction halfway through the first verse — and goes on in that vein for the next forty seconds.
- The animetal version of (the Sailor Moon opening) Moonlight Densetsu,while brilliant,is just a bit hard to take seriously when they're singing about a miracle romance.
- The song "One Tin Soldier" (occasionally misattributed to Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, but best known in a version by the band Coven from the soundtrack to Billy Jack) uses an upbeat, triumphant tune to tell the story of a nation committing genocide for a "treasure" of no material value.
- A lot of stuff from Tom Lehrer is like this ("So Long Mom," "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park," et cetera).
- Especially "We Will All Go Together When We Go", a cheery melody with lyrics saying there won't be any funerals after World War III because everyone will be dead.
- Watch the song performed by Tom Lehrer himself in glorious black-and-white here.
- Because it's comedy. Bill Oddie of The Goodies stole a lot of tropes from 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).
- In Ar Tonelico all of the hymns sung are used to interface with the Tower and use it to undergo some task. EXEC_VIENA/. is one of the most cheery and upbeat songs in existence. Its purpose is to create a path up to the sattelite Sol Marta while destroying a third of the floating continent because otherwise there would not be enough power to create the pathway up. The general game atmosphere doesn't help, what with everyone's mood in the game essentially being "YES, THEY'RE FINALLY DOING IT!!", even some of the people who were forced to move out because they have lived their entire lives on the part of the continent that's about to fall in.
- Despite its lyrics telling you to have a very merry Christmas, "The Carol of the Bells" has a pretty creepy tune. However, the lyrics are often incomprehensible when sung, so the only real dissonance you hear is with the fact that it's supposed to be a Christmas carol. Home Alone used this one while managing to avoid Isnt It Ironic — it was used for a creepy Christmas scene. Though there weren't any bells involved.
- Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, similar to Dai Mahou Touge, has a cutesy, upbeat J-Pop tune. Then it gets to the parts where Dokuro starts singing about extreme violence and body mutilation before ending it with "but that's just how I show my love for you".
- Type O Negative loves to do this, from "We Hate Everyone" being sung deliberately in a dispassionate way to the upbeatness of "Dead Again."
- A hallmark of Randy Newman's songs. "Sail Away" for example, is a rousing paean to America, meant to be sung by a slave trader.
- "I Can't Decide" by the Scissor Sisters, made famous to geeks everywhere by its recent use in Doctor Who, is an excellent example. The bouncy, upbeat song's chorus actually starts, "I can't decide whether you should live or die..." and the middle eight describes various methods of murder.
- "Intermission" by the Scissor Sisters (with Elton John) is a vaudevillesque tune cautioning the listener to make something of himself as soon as possible, since "not everyone has lambs to slaughter" and "we were born to die."
- "She's My Man" off the same album is arguably an example of this. And "Kiss You Off". And... pretty much every song on that album.
- And on their debut album, they did a disco version of "Comfortably Numb". The most disturbing part of the effect is how freakishly right it sounds.
- The Pogues are occasionally fond of this. "Rake at the Gates of Hell" is an energetic Irish jig featuring a very nasty narrator, and "Fairytale of New York" is a sweet-sounding Christmas song about a bitter couple whose dreams are all dead.
- "99 Luftballoons" / "99 Red Balloons" by Nena is a (mostly) perky-sounding pop song about the titular 99 balloons accidentally starting World War III.
- "The Future's so Bright, I've Got to Wear Shades" fits too, due to singing about an impending nuclear holocaust.
- "Better the Devil You Know" by Kylie Minogue is a Family Unfriendly Aesop about going back to the guy who treated you badly because "better the devil you know" (than the devil you don't). Nick Cave called it the most disturbing song he had heard, in part because of Kylie's innocent image.
- While we're on the subject, those two collaborated on a duet called "Where The Wild Roses Grow". Not until the end of the song do we realize that it isn't a nice love song, because Nick's character bashes Kylie's character to death with a rock.
- Not really lyrical dissonance, even if that were true - that'd be more Mood Whiplash or Twist Ending. The song has a sad, mournful tone, and sad, mournful lyrics - no dissonance. Also, it's pretty clear from the beginning that something's up - Kylie refers to herself in past tense in the chorus.
- Of course, Nick Cave is known for dark subject matter, and the song was part of the album "Murder Ballads", so it shouldn't be a complete surprise.
- Plus, Kylie is dead in a river — and still singing — in the video.
- Tom Waits has a song called "Table Top Joe", that starts out with a relaxed, jazzy piano line. Once the words start, you learn that the titular Joe is a circus freak with no body below the waist. Even stranger is the fact that he was a real guy. Although, with a voice like Tom Waits', it may be difficult to trick people into thinking you're just being happy.
- There's a reason They Might Be Giants are mentioned in the second page quote. They have countless songs like this, including (Wild Mass Guessing ahoy!):
- "Four of Two" is a delightful polka song written for children, about a man who wastes his entire life waiting for a girl who stood him up.
- The unrecorded version actually ended with the guy committing suicide in order to help pass the time.
- "I Palindrome I", a bright, cheery rock song about matricide.
- "No One Knows My Plan", a vibrant Latin Jazz piece about a convict plotting his revenge.
- "The Statue Got Me High", about a statue that hypnotizes you and then causes you to explode.
- This song is (or can be interpreted without much difficulty as) a direct reference to the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the transcendence it forces upon the character David Bowman at the end of the novel when it destroys his body in the process of turning him into something approaching God.
- Alternatively, this can be interpreted as a retelling of the classic Don Juan tale, in which a Casanova is dragged to hell by a vengeful statue.
- "Mink Car", about being run over by said car.
- "The Shadow Government", a bright rock song about a meth dealer having a bad day and then getting killed by a corrupt government official.
- "I'm Your Boyfriend Now", a soft rock ballad from the perspective of a stalker. It helps that the song title was originally a Freddy Krueger quote.
- "Turn Around", a song in the style of a 1950s crooner, but about zombies and things.
- "Sketchy Galore" could be mistaken for a sad love song. It's about a creepy neighbor.
- "Twisting", a catchy pop tune about the torments a random guy endures after his breakup; he can't even get his ex-girlfriend to care about him enough to want him to give her albums back.
- "Lucky Ball and Chain", an up-tempo song about a guy whose fiancée walked out on him at the altar.
- "Bastard Wants To Hit Me" is deceptively mellow for a song about a guy randomly threatened by a total stranger for no reason (or, depending on how you interpret the song, running in blind paranoid terror from someone they don't recognize).
- "They'll Need a Crane", a bright rock song about a tragic breakup, related largely in Buffy Speak.
- Their breakout hit "Don't Let's Start" has the words "No one in the world ever get what they want, and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful," sung to one of the most cheery tunes ever composed.
- "Kiss Me, Son of God", a perky little number that sounds like it belongs at the Happy Ending of a musical — about a totalitarian, theocratic regime. ("I built a little empire / Out of some crazy garbage / Called the blood of the exploited working class...")
- "Spiraling Shape" is a rather cheery tune about the pointlessness of using drugs to make someone happier, which was used further for Soundtrack Dissonance in the movie Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy
- "Everything Right is Wrong Again"'s lyrics describe... well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It's the song referred to in said pagequote.
- Even songs that aren't about depressing subjects have moments of this. Any performance of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" will have concertgoers hopping gleefully while John Linnell sings about the possible death of "countless screaming Argonauts".
- And then we have "Damn Good Times" which is a happy, upbeat song about a girl who is a "natural dancer". So of course the music video involves the girl being stalked by vampires who look like Orlok.
- Don't forget "The Bells Are Ringing" which at first hearing sounds like a positive, jolly, Christmas song but is actually about mind control:
''The bells are ringing and everyone's walking
With arms extended in a trance
Forgetting their washing
Neglecting the children
They're dropping all businesses at hand
A voice is telling them to act a different way
They tilt their heads so they won't miss what it will say''
- "Bed Bed Bed" is slightly more comedic than the other TMBG examples: it's a noisy, rocking song with irritating sound effects thrown in about going to sleep.
- "Skullivan" combines creepy distorted music and vocals and an ominous chorus repeating the line "When the Skullivan walks in the moonlit night" with banal lyrics about making tea and going to the video store to rent Tootsie.
- Eighties legends Talking Heads also 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.
- "Road To Nowhere," which implies that the inevitable death of everybody who's ever been born isn't such a depressing thing after all.
- "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 cynic living during a violent revolution against the U.S., set to a very funky beat.
- The opening song of Disgaea 2, "Sinful Rose", is a cheerful, upbeat song about betrayal and slaughter. This is what happens when we let demons sing theme tunes.
- Disgaea 3's opening song, "Maritsu Evil Academy", has about the same content, being the theme song of a school for demons. However, what with the A Nightmare Before Christmas vibe the music has, it's probably less of an example.
- The Weird Al Yankovic song "Do I Creep You Out" sounds like (and is a parody of) a thoughtless power ballad, whereas it describes the tendencies of a stalker in a humorously over-the-top fashion.
- Many other Weird Al songs use this technique as part of their humor, as well. "Christmas at Ground Zero," about celebrating Christmas in the middle of a nuclear war, is probably the most blatant example, as it manages to use this trope within the lyrics themselves:
"We can dodge debris
While we trim the tree
Underneath a mushroom cloud!"
- And "The Night Santa Went Crazy", arguably his darkest song to date.
- The entire song of "I Remember Larry" is a contender, since it's a fast-paced, upbeat song about a horribly abusive neighbour that made the singer's life miserable, with the last verse not breaking step where, according to these snippets: "broke in Larry's house", "tied his mouth with a rag", "stuffed him in a big plastic bag", "If the cops ever find him". 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".
- "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.
"I remember sweet Michelle
She was my high school romance
...
I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair
And I left her in the desert all alone
Sometimes in my dreams I can still hear her screams
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 paranoid.
- "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.
- And then there's "Bohemian Polka", Weird Al's cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" sung as a goofy polka song.
- Hell, all of his polka medleys fall into this. Popular songs about sex, rape, masturbation, murder, and suicide all done to a cheery polka beat.
- "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."
- "Such A Groovy Guy" does this as well. The song sounds like '80's pop fluff, and then you listen to the lyrics...
- "Bad Moon Rising", by Creedence Clearwater Revival, is a rather famous example. It's a peppy, upbeat little ditty that purports to prophesy Armageddon from portents in the sky.
- John Fogerty seems to like the whole thing as "Vanz Kant Dance" off "Centerfield" has an upbeat backing to lyrics that are rather unflattering to Saul Zaentz, owner of Fantasy Records, who sued John Fogerty for plagarising himelf.
- The true subject matter of "Steal My Sunshine" by Len is debatable, but most suggestions certainly don't match the bouncy tune.
- "Walking On Broken Glass", by Annie Lennox, is a cheerful song about the suffering that follows a bad breakup.
- Barenaked Ladies have done quite a few of these, including but not limited to:
- "The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel" is surprisingly bouncy, considering that it's about exactly what the title implies and the narrator is dead before the last verse.
- And the narrator? Ed Robertson's late brother Doug, killed in a motorcycle crash in 1993. The song is based on Robertson's curiosity about what his brother was thinking in his last moments.
- "Pinch Me", described in the liner notes for All Their Greatest Hits as "Another one of our happy little songs about chronic depression."
- "The Old Apartment" is a hard, high-energy rock song about a guy breaking into the apartment where he and his girlfriend used to live and trashing the place while speculating on its new owners.
- "Fun & Games" has lyrics cynically describing the politics behind the Iraq war ("We knew your sons and daughters would be blown in half") set to a poppy, catchy tune.
- "Alcohol", which is a poppy little ditty about, well, rampant alcoholism and with lyrics like "While I cannot love myself, I'll use something else".
- "Angry People" is a pretty bare-bones version; a catchy, cheerful tune about people being jackasses for no apparent reason.
- "Jane" mixes a sweet melody and a catchy chorus with some beautiful harmonies, and adds in some wistful lyrics in which the narrator remembers his romance with a free-spirited woman that unfortunately didn't work out. That is, until you pay closer attention to the words and realize that he's actually portraying Jane as a self-absorbed drama queen and he's still really bitter about the whole breakup.
- They even hung a lampshade on it in "Testing 1, 2, 3"; see the quote at the top of the page.
- "Everything Old is New Again" — sounds like a nice song about rebirth and seeing things in a new light, right? Well, no. It's a nice song about a guy whose girlfriend is a suicidal self-harming anorexic, who commits suicide, and he's losing his memories and going mad as the song ends. Thanks, guys.
- "I Live With It Every Day" is a relatively upbeat song with a nice little synthesizer melody. Too bad the lyrics deal with accidentally killing his best friend, attempting suicide, moving away to try to forget about these things, and dealing the guilt and depression every day.
- "Have You Seen My Love" is a sweet ballad about a guy who falls out of love with his childhood sweetheart after realising that she's really not the woman of his dreams.
There is a dream that we both used to share
And we swore we would never wake
Now the dream's a nightmare, and the truth to be fair
Is that dreaming was the first mistake
- Smokey Robinson, in "Tears of a Clown", sings of 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; Robinson went with the Lyrical Dissonance intentionally after being reminded of the characters in Pagliacci.)
- Used by Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" — the lyrics seem innocuous enough, but the tune is strange, and the singer sounds kind of stoned. The music video is borderline Nightmare Fuel with such images as the singer standing up to his chin in a hole while a huge spider crawls towards him and two men tearing apart a woman's dresser. It ends with the singer being pushed to the ground, uttering the final lyric "Mama, this must be my dream" as green blood oozes out from under him. According to Word Of God, the song and music videos were intended to be about someone having a wet dream.
- Jonathan Coulton has produced a number of songs that combine soft rock tunes with lyrics about things people don't usually combine with soft rock.
- "Skullcrusher Mountain" is about an Evil Overlord in love.
- "Re: Your Brains" is a song about a zombified office worker trying to negotiate with his still-human co-workers ("All we want to do is eat your brains / We're not unreasonable, I mean, no one's gonna eat your eyes").
- "Chiron Beta Prime" is a Christmas song set in the aftermath of a Robot War
- "Shop Vac" is about post-suburban marital problems. Seriously.
- "I Crush Everything", an extremely sad tune about the loneliness suffered by... a giant squid. Who hates dolphins.
- Coulton also penned the lyrics and tune to "Still Alive", the ending song to the game Portal. It's a cheery little pop tune sung by the insane AI GLaDOS, with lyrics congratulating Chell in a very passive aggressive manner, as well as implying things are much, much worse on the outside of the Enrichment Center. ("While you're dying I'll be still alive / And when you're dead I will be still alive...")
- And let's not forget Coulton's tender, romantic ballad rendition of "Baby Got Back".
- Nor should you forget "The Future Soon", about someone dreaming of a future where he can build a robot army on a space station to conquer the earth and force the love of his life to be his bride...
- A case of this done deliberately is "I Feel Fantastic". Coulton wrote the song after reading a Scientific American article about mood-altering medication. The song is a cheery tune about how great life is, but it quickly becomes clear the singer doesn't feel a genuine emotional state at any point in the song, instead letting medication control all of his moods.
- Another rather deliberate instance is his song "Not About You", in which he insists that he's over his previous relationship and that he doesn't obsess over his ex, even though it's obviously not true.
- Slashdot's unofficial anthem, "Code Monkey", is about a programmer who doesn't leave his crap job only to have a chance to see and chat with a secretary girl who won't even look at him. It's also an another fine example of Coulton's love to shift the focus back and forth to screw with people's minds.
- "Blue Sunny Day" was written after Jonathan decided, just once, to make a song that was "kind of bouncy and happy". However, as he says, "once I had decided to use the phrase "blue sunny day," it was hard not to notice that the word "blue" can have another meaning. From there it’s only a quick jump to vampire suicide." Notably, he tried hard not to make it about a sad vampire.
- How about "Make You Cry?" If you don't listen to what he says, it sounds nice and peaceful...with lyrics like:
The love I hate
The hate I need
The pain that pulls me through
I can't wait
To watch you bleed
Your heart's broken too
- "Betty and Me" is a very fast bluegrass sort of tune about how the narrator's relationship with his wife is getting better since they're having a baby, except for the many, many clues within the song that it's not his baby. Slightly subverted, since it's abundantly clear the singer is totally unaware of this and is genuinely happy about how "Betty says he'll be taller, and Betty says he'll be smarter, and Betty says that our baby will be better than me."
- Tim Burton is a master of mixing the macabre and the lighthearted, so it's no surprise that the music in his movies are the same. The best example is "Remains Of The Day" from Corpse Bride, a swinging jazzy tune about death and murder. Even while you're tapping your feet to the beat, you probably don't miss the extremely dark chorus:
"Die, die, we all pass away, but don't wear a frown, cause it's really ok! You might try to hide, and you might try to pray, but we all end up the remains of the day!"
- Merengue singer and songwriter Juan Luis 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"), or being victims of an truly awful medic care system ("El Niagara en bicicleta").
- He's not the only one, either! The Brazilian group Paralamas has songs like that as well, depicting the poverty and hopelesness of Brazilian low class people with happy, upbeat melodies. An example is "Alagados", which speaks about the hard life conditions in Rio ("The city, with its open arms in the postcards and its tightened fist in real life, denies you opporunities and shows you the face of evil.").
- The 1967 song "Sunday Will Never Be The Same" by Spanky and Our Gang has a upbeat tune with beautiful harmonies, but the lyrics describe how breaking up with her lover has forever destroyed the singer's enjoyment of Sunday morning walks in the park.
- Johnny Cash seemed to have had a fondness for toe-tapping up-tempo tunes for his dark and lonesome lyrics. Just think of "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Cocaine Blues".
- Also how many times have you seen a demonic scene were the upbeat love song Ring Of Fire is playing.
- "Cocaine Blues" is a traditional song, so it wasn't really his fondness to create such moments there.
- The 1948 country hit version of "Cocaine Blues" by Roy Hogsed (one of the all time great country music names) from which Cash picked up the song is even more dissonant than Cash's: Hogsed sings it in very clean-cut, singing cowboy-type voice, and the lead instrument in his band is a perky, bouncy accordion!
- Kris Kristofferson. 'Billy Dee' has an upbeat tune, but when you listen to the lyrics it's about a young man who gets lost in addiction and eventually O Ds.
- The 2005 [The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy film opens with "So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish", a catchy showtune about how the dolphins are leaving because Earth is about to be blown up:
The world's about to be destroyed
There's no point getting all annoyed
Lie back and let the planet dissolve around you
So long, so long, and thanks for all the fish!
- The "Share and Enjoy" song from the Radio series is a cheerful little ballad, sung out of tune by a badly-programmed choir of robots. The lyrics are about how, when malfunctioning Sirius Cybernetics robots tear off doors and rape cats, the company's complaints department won't give a fig.
"Go stick your head in a pig!"
- Disaster Area's song "Only the End of the World Again" can be heard on the now-rare Hitchhiker's Guide EP (with the rubber duck on the sleeve). It's a heavy rock ballad about a guy who kills his best friend to be with his girlfriend, takes her for a crash in her daddy's car, and then makes out with her as the moon explodes for no readily explored reason.
- The Def Leppard album-only song "Gravity" is a great example of this, with rather sinister-sounding lyrics ("I can't sleep at night / The darkness enslaves me")...and it's an upbeat song in a spritely major key. This may be more understandable with the knowledge that the song was originally incarnated as a rather formulaic and forgettable pop-rock piece called "Perfect Girl," as revealed by bootleg recordings of the demo.
- "LDN" by Lily Allen borders on a Lampshade Hanging. It's an upbeat song about how the back alleys in London are nowhere near as nice as the rest of the city...
- "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse.
- Outkast's "Hey Ya!" sounds like a happy, upbeat hip-hop song — there's a famous YouTube video of the Peanuts characters dancing joyfully to it — but the lyrics are a moody meditation on whether it's worth staying in an failing relationship:
"If what they say is that nothing is forever, then what makes love the exception? Why are we so in denial when we know we're not happy here?" (Yall' don't wanna hear me, you just wanna dance...)
- Speaking of Outkast, the song "The Rooster" is also an upbeat hip-hop song in terms of instrumental, but the lyrics tell the story of a married couple on the verge of divorce.
- Warren Zevon liked to use this. Examples are "Excitable Boy", an upbeat song with electric guitar solos that tells the story of a mad killer who is apparently "just an excitable boy", and "Werewolves of London", a bright little tune about, well, werewolves. Not to mention "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", which about...Roland...the...you get the idea.
- And Mr. Bad example, a bouncy almost carnival tune about a man who "opened up an agency somewhere down the line/To hire aboiginals to work the opal mines/But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut/And whisked away their workman's comp and pauperized the lot" This is not the only horrible thing the main character does.
- Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" has a nice, upbeat pop-rocky tune, yet it's about a guy struggling with crystal meth addiction. Even more disturbing is the original (not recorded) version, wherein the chorus went, "I want nothing else," rather than "I want something else," implying that the protagonist doesn't even want out of his addiction.
- The Clash's "Somebody Got Murdered" is about... well, somebody getting murdered. While the tone of the singer himself is pretty somber, the music sounds more like peppy new wave than punk rock.
- This goes for a lot of their songs. "Clampdown", which is similarly peppy, is either about the Nazis or just fascist regimes in general ("Taking off his turban they say is this man a Jew"). "London Calling" (about the city's destruction and the end of the world), "Train in Vain" (their only love song, which is a break-up song) and "Julie's Been Working For The Drug Squad". "Rock the Casbah" is frequently requested in the Middle East by armed forces members, despite it being about revolution via rock and not inciting American bombing of Middle Eastern countries.
- To be fair, it is notoriously difficult to actually understand what they are saying in Rock The Casbah. Various mishearings of the title are Rob The Cash Bar and Lock The Cat Box. And that's just the title.
- Let's not forget "Spanish Bombs", which is an upbeat, poppy rock song about the horrors of the Spanish civil war.
- The upbeat rock song "Hey Sandy" by Polaris is the theme song to The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, and is also originally about the Kent State shootings.
- There was another song called "Hey Sandy" about the Kent State Shootings, done by Harvey Andrews. While the two "Hey Sandy" songs are by different artists and have different lyrics, they are both about the same event.
- Honestly, no one really knows exactly what the Polaris version is about. There are about three or so lines in the first verse that are somewhat unintelligible, and it doesn't help that the band itself refuses to clarify on some of the official lyrics.
- The Decemberists' song "Sons and Daughters" is Squee-level happy, in mood and most of the lyrics. However, a few phrases scattered around the song as well as the repeated last line make it clear that it's being sung in a bomb shelter, presumably to cheer up the survivors.
- Alternatively the song’s about a group of settlers escaping a war and arriving on a new land, doomed to failure because they have no idea what they’re doing.
- While another of their songs, "O Valencia!" sounds rather upbeat, the chorus mentions the blood of the singer's lover being 'still warm on the ground' and burning the city down. The last verse has the lover being shot in the singer's arm, 'and an oath of love was your dying cry.'
- Their song "You'll Not Feel the Drowning" sounds like pretty, soothing lullaby, complete with a beautiful instrumental in the middle, but it's about a pirate about to drown a girl he kidnapped.
Go to sleep now, little ugly
Go to sleep now, you little fool
Forty-winking in the belfry
You'll not feel the drowning
You'll not feel the drowning
- "The Rake's Song" is way, way too catchy and upbeat for a song about the titular widowed rake murdering his three children so he could continue enjoying his life unattached, and saying proudly that he regrets nothing.
- Although The Beautiful South have a rep for this, most of their songs actually have pretty wistful tunes, but there are definitely some which combine bouncy tunes and depressing lyrics. "You Keep It All In" is about a violent domestic argument, "My Book" is about the singer's entire life being a disaster. "We Are Each Other" is a particularly nasty example, since on a casual glance the lyrics appear to be about a perfect couple (it's actually about a couple whose co-dependency is destroying them).
- Subverted in "Happy" by Liam Lynch, a uber-upbeat song which is occasionally broken in with things like "I can't do this, man, I'm not happy".
I'm special, I'm happy
I am gonna heave
Welcome to my happy world
Now get your $#!+ and leave!
- Five Iron Frenzy's "Blue Comb '78" puts humorous lyrics (eulogizing a comb that singer Reese Roper lost when he was five years old) to dramatically overwrought music (dramatically overwrought for a ska-punk band, at least). Subverted in that the song is actually a metaphor for his parent's divorce and his own lost innocence: Reese has stated that the lost comb incident was the last memory he has of his parents prior to the divorce. He chose to write indirectly to avoid falling into Wangst.
- Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You" sounds like an empowering chick-ish ballad... but its words reflect someone emotionally scarred from a horrible relationship.
- This trope is the entire basis for the comedy act "Richard Cheese and Lounge Against The Machine." They take songs such as "Baby Got Back" and "Closer" and perform them in the style of Frank Sinatra.
- The Hangover has a band playing 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" in lounge style as well.
- Stephen Lynch bases his entire career around this trope as well, 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.
- Freddy Cole once sang an upbeat version of "Send in the Clowns," telling a radio interviewer that no one else had done it. He didn't seem to understand why no one else had done it.
- Dead Or Alive (yes, the "You Spin Me Round" guys) had a more minor hit back in 1986 called "Brand New Lover". It's a joyful, dancey, Hi-NRG tune... about the singer telling his girl/boy/whatever (with Pete Burns it's hard to tell) that he's bored with her/him and wants to leave.
- Pearl Jam's done this a couple times:
- "Even Flow" is a very intense-sounding song...about life through the eyes of a homeless person, who sleeps on the streets ("Freezing / Rests his head on a pillow made of concrete"), is illiterate (Even / Looking through the paper though he doesn't know how to read) and possibly mentally ill, as he "looks insane" when he smiles and struggles to keep coherent thoughts (Even Flow / Thoughts arrive like butterflies / He don't know / So he chases them away)
- "Alive" sounds like a rousing anthem about life but is about a mother falling in love with her son, who looks just like his dead father, and sexually abusing him.
- Subverted: Word Of God states that the positive fan response has changed the meaning of the song into a rousing anthem about life.
- "Jeremy" comes off as a fairly upbeat song but is about a kid who killed himself in front of his high school English class (made even more disturbing by the video for it).
- "Better Man", another song grievously misinterpreted by its listeners (as a love song), is actually a song about abusive relationships from the woman's point of view, and Eddie Vedder himself said it's "dedicated to the bastard that married my Momma".
- And, in an inversion, "Spin the Black Circle" sounds very dark and the vocals in it border on screaming at parts, but it's actually about vinyl records.
- The first few lines of that song also seem specifically written to mislead the listener into thinking it's going to be about heroin ("See this needle, see my hand, drop-drop-droppin' it down, oh so gently")
- The opening lyrics of one of the happiest-sounding songs of The Nineties, "Mmm Bop", by tow-headed, teenaged Oklahoma trio Hanson:
You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back, and they're gone so fast...
- Some songs by DragonForce arguably fall under this in a weird way: not only does the music (generally upbeat, fast, and even uplifting) disagree with the lyrics, but the lyrics don't always agree amongst themselves. "My Spirit Will Go On", in particular, has both a catchy tune and extremely depressing lyrics that suddenly get contradicted by the final line of the chorus. See also: "Black Winter Night", which is a triumphant-sounding tune (complete with brass section) about sailing on endless seas of sadness as the world ends and all of humanity dies out. Then again, the band has implied that they write their lyrics based on the Rule Of Cool, so...
- "My Spirit Will Go On" has the darkest intro of any of their songs.
- "Disciples of Babylon" is their only song that doesn't directly imply the inevitable death (usually in a war that apparently lasts forever) of the protagonists. What the song is about instead is a matter of heated debate.
- In a less severe version of this trope, all of their songs are set in winter, usually during a snowstorm, despite their style being summery. They also tend to be set at night, and usually while waiting for a "brighter day" that never seems to come.
- "Shooting Star" by Bad Company is an up-tempo rock song that tells a story about a rock star's fame, loneliness, and, eventually, suicide. The song may be a tribute to all the real rock musicians who died too young—which doesn't make the tune any less cheerful and does make the lyrics even more tragic.
- "Christmastime Is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. It has lyrics that describe how wonderful Christmas is ("Fun for all that children call their favorite time of year") but has a very slow, almost melancholy feel to it. This makes it memorable.
- Elsewhere in the Downer Christmas Carols department, we have "I'll Be Home For Christmas" — 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.
- On the opposite end of the Christmas carol spectrum, there's "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." The militaristic minor-key melody is more likely to inspire a vague sense of unease than the "tidings of comfort and joy" prescribed by the lyrics.
- Happened a lot with Ayumi Hamasaki via Executive Meddling. Her gimmick is that she writes her own lyrics (often based in the angsty experiences she had), but she rarely composes the music. While in the studio albums this trope is hardly noticeable, it become notorious in the Eurodance and Trance remixes of her first albums, where angsty songs about abandonment where given extremely happy new melodies. Memorable offenders are the remixes from "Trauma" and "Kanariya".
- One example from an album is "Memorial Address", a song about a sudden abandonment (probably because of the other person's death), who begins with a sweet and sad melody... and suddenly the music switch into a energetic rock tune.
- Except for some oddly haunting bits, the melody of "Uninstall", the OP to ''Bokurano, could pass for an upbeat, soaring mecha series theme. The lyrics discuss how all human life is insignificant, and the main characters' plight of being trapped in a meaningless battle where the only escape from the pointlessness of their efforts is self-delusion or their inevitable deaths.
- 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 told 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."
- The version I know is worse — "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.
- Several folk songs about love and death, such as Frankie and Johnny, Molly Malone and Oh My Darling, Clementine have upbeat tunes.
- The opening credits music from Rurouni Kenshin, entitled (in English) "Freckles," is frantically happy and bouncy, but features lyrics such as "all the memories that I have are beautiful in my mind, but they can't hide the sorrow deep inside my soul." Here's an excerpt:
I brush against the freckles that I hated so,
But life goes on and I heave a little sigh for you.
It's heavy, the love that I would share with you,
Then it dissolved like it was just a sugar cube.
Now the little pain sittin' in my heart,
Has shrunk in a bit, but it really does hurt me now.
Those silly horoscopes I,
Guess I can't trust them after all.
- The Dance Dance Revolution version of this song has different English lyrics but the exact same meaning, and ups the ante by removing the heavy guitar riffs in favor of a whimsical toy piano sound.
- ALL of JUDY&MARY's songs are incredibly ubpeat and catchy, their lyrics notwithstanding. But with Sobakasu it's little bit more complicated — an anime version is, as usual, shortened to just one stanza to fit into the episode. The full version has a second stanza with exactly opposite meaning, somewhat balancing it out.
- The Tool song "Die Eier Von Satan" ("The Eggs of Satan") features snarling German vocals making triumphant declarations to a cheering crowd while heavy guitars and industrial noises grind in the background. The result sounds disturbingly like a satanic Nazi rally nightmare. However, the lyrics turn out to be a recipe for hash cookies. The recipe's name, "The Eggs of Satan" is also a juvenile pun, since "eggs" is a slang term for testicals in German. The singer repeatedly screams, "Und keine Eier!", meaning "And no eggs!", to explain that the recipe lacks literal eggs.
- This is pretty much the entire gimmick of Dethklok on Metalocalypse, as they render everything, from the blues to a jingle for a coffee shop to a birthday song, as over-the-top death metal.
- Whose Line Is It Anyway's "Irish Drinking Songs", "Hoedowns", and "Scenes to Rap" usually have this. Bizarre, funny, sometimes bleak lyrics to the tune of a cheerful (you guessed it) drinking songs.
- Better yet, these seem to have become the utter bane of the series' regulars, with some excerpts floating around where Drew Carey has his rhyme taken by Greg Proops and threatens on the next verse to "saw his ass in half." There's also another good one where Ryan Stiles finishes a hoedown with "If we do another hoedown, I'll slit my fucking wrists" - prompting the rest of the case to join in unison: "SLIT MY FUCKING WRIIIIIIISTS!"
- 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.
- "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones has a tune that swings in Jones' usual manner, but tells the story of a man with an unrequited love who suffers jealousy when he sees the woman he desires with other men.
- Well, he does say "I wanna die", which clues a few people in.
- "Vide Infra" by Killswitch Engage is a loud aggressive metalcore song that is filled with harshly screamed vocals and thick and pounding guitars. But lyrically the song is about preaching equality, tolerance and respect to people different then you.
- Alanis Morissette once did a cover of "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas... in her usual style. It was calculated to cause exactly this effect, and succeeded to a both horrifying and hilarious degree.
- Really, anything by Alanis Morissette qualifies to some degree.
- The Japanese "Song of Ashley" from Wario Ware intentionally used this, having an ominous melody, but fluffy pop lyrics about how wonderful Ashley is.
- The US version substituted mock-sinister lyrics to match the melody... then ran into this trope itself when a more upbeat remix was done for Super Smash Bros Brawl.
- Another Nintendo example is Ai no Uta. It has a cute melody, with a happy tone... but the lyrics are about the Pikmin's eternal love for the player, who only sees them as a Red Shirt Army. And they are painfully aware of it. Ouch.
Today once again we'll carry, fight, grow and then be eaten
Dug up, we'll meet again and be thrown around
But we'll you follow forever...
- "Luka" by Suzanne Vega is a peppy little song... about an abused little boy.
- The similarly-themed "What's the Matter Here" by 10,000 Maniacs is disconcertingly cheerful; thus the maximum creepy points during the line sung from the father's point of view.
- Venerable English songwriter Richard Thompson has done this on occasion. The best example is probably "Read About Love," an innocent-seeming upbeat dance tune with lyrics about a little boy who learns what "making love" is from magazines because his father won't talk to him about it; he ends up raping a girl because he thinks it's "supposed to feel nice" and doesn't know any better.
- His song 'Bad Monkey' on his recent Sweet Warrior album is a ridiculously catchy song about drug addiction.
- And there's 'Shane and Dixie', a peppy, dancable tune about the (unsuccessful) murder/suicide of the eponymous bank-robbing couple.
- "Little Brown Jug" by Jospeh 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.
- Though they have a reputation for songs of the sort, Simple Plan's "I'm Just a Kid" is a somewhat angsty song sung by a unpopular school-age loser. Most people seem to fixate on that and not notice that the song's actual music is suprisingly upbeat and cheerful.
- Stone Sour's "Through Glass" provides the listener with a light acoustic rock song with a good vocal melody and little aggression. Of course, the song is actually a scathing lashout on the plastic nature of the world of pop music.
- Flight Of The Conchords semi-parodies it with 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 Ramones wrote several songs about Joey Ramone's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. However, they had the same upbeat power chord sequences as every other Ramones song. For example, the peppy "I Wanna Be Sedated" is about a nervous breakdown right before a show in England.
Just get me to the airport, put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry, before I go insane
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain
Oh no no no no no!
- That song is about the fact that London goes on lockdown when it's Christmas Eve, and the band was stuck in the hotel for the entire day when they got there for a concert on Christmas Day; hence, the opening lines:
Twenty, twenty, 24 hours to go
I want to be sedated
Nothing to do, nowhere to go
I want to be sedated
- The Ramones were made of this. Beat on the Brat, anyone?
- Belle and Sebastian often have wistful songs to wistful music, but "Stay Loose" is almost ridiculously singable, though the lyrics are about the fragile relationship between a boy with depression and a girl who won't discuss anything serious. With creepy results.
"The lights are out in the house tonight
Gonna creep around, gonna creep into your head..."
- Also, one of their most serene instrumentals (from the Storytelling soundtrack), complete with lovely violin, is called Fuck This Shit. Title Dissonance?
- Same thing goes for nearly every song on Thao Nguyen's latest album. With her gleeful, indie-folk style, loss and uncertainty never sounded so fun.
- 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.
- In a similar vein, Garth Brooks' song "Good Ride Cowboy" is an up-beat cowboy twang tune memorializing his late friend, singer and rodeo rider Chris LeDoux.
- "Lullaby" by The Cure. If you've seen the music video, you know the creepy and satirical lyrics are intentional.
- Hell, half of the musically cheery tunes of The Cure have extremely dark or creepy lyrics.
- To make matters worse, his 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.
- "Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife" — especially the Bobby Darin version. A swinging, catchy, toe-tapping pop standard about a murderer, kidnapper, arsonist, thief, rapist, etc., who can't be beat. That said, the lyrics were often sanitized in some translations... it is much nastier in the original German version, generally, than say the Blitzstein lyrics. That said, "Mack the Knife" is still an awesome song.
- Among other things, you can blame Ella Fitzgerald (or credit her) for toning down the song; she admitted that she forgot half the lyrics and scatted the missing portions.
- Several other songs from The Threepenny Opera have similar lyrical dissonances. There is one song where the frequent refrain of "Yay! Hooray!" is performed in as deadpan and monotone a manner possible.
- "Hoch sollen sie leben! Hoch hoch hoch!"
- Brecht in general depended on Lyrical Dissonance in his music in other plays. For instance, in Mother Courage and Her Children, there is a lullaby that Mother Courage sings over her daughter Kattrin's dead body, with lyrics of an obviously materialistic nature. This sort of thing is key to verfremdungseffekt of the Epic Theatre.
- The Beatles did this with "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", about a nice young man who, halfway through the first stanza, turns out to be a serial killer who clubs people to death with the titular hammer. It's a fun song.
- Sonata Arctica has its fair share of melancholic love songs played to the fast, upbeat bombast of power metal.
- It also has "The End of This Chapter" which sounds mostly like a powerballad, has most of the lyrics of a melancholic love song, but is actually about a stalker.
- Probably the most impressive is "White Pearl, Black Oceans", another song that's mostly a powerballad, about a lighthouse attendant hooking up with a girl at a party the night before she sails away, getting knocked unconscious by her jealous husband, and then her ship crashing and everybody on board dying because he wasn't there to work the lighthouse.
- Without filling three screens full of examples it's easy to say most of Sonata Arctic's pre-Unia stuff is actually pretty creepy if you listen to the lyrics but on the surface is the audible equivalent of an explosion in a skittle factory.
- The Feeling. Cheerful, unashamedly cheesy pop music with lyrics about loneliness, loss and frustration. Although it's then used in the reverse form by their songs "Strange" (a downbeat song with a positive message that can be summarized as "don't let the bastards grind you down just because you're different, because there are people who will always love you.") and "Same Old Stuff" (equally downbeat song addressing a fretful partner who's worried about the people who say their relationship won't work out). So Yeah.
- The song "Without You" is about the Virginia Tech massacre. This is not self-evident.
- Good Charlotte's My Bloody Valentine is a cheery pop-punk song about a stalker murdering the boyfriend of his crush. Until the last line("All I know is that I love you tonight"), where the vocals turn into a scream and the tune crashes hard into a minor key.
- Reel Big Fish's best songs are depressing songs over cheery ska-punk including "She Has A Girlfriend Now", "She's Famous Now", and "Sell Out".
- Subverted by Nirvana's "You know You're Right" which switches between a melancholic and edgy feel and an introspective and contemplative mood. The lyrics seem at first to be a calm admission of fault and how great things are going, but in typical Nirvana fashion, there is a underlying angst in them. Justified: This song is about someone getting dumped, admitting defeat and trying to hide the fact that they are totally devastated, so the Lyrical Dissonance is fueled by Mood Dissonance.
- "Sliver" plays it more straight: the melody is cheerful, but the lyrics are about a boy having an awful night at his grandparent's. The song is clearly comedic; Cobain's voice shows the boy's "suffering" often.
- Does "Polly", a calm and mellow song about rape, count?
- Gilbert And Sullivan are all over this.
- Trial by Jury — This one's about a trial, so when the plaintiff arrives to the tune of "Comes the cheated flower / Comes the broken maid", it's made catchy, upbeat and fun, to make it thoroughly clear that despite said lyrics, this is all part of a grand scam.
- The Sorcerer has a bawdy drinking song about tea, then later we get the song "Oh joyous boon / Oh mad delight" — which is appropriately upbeat — and continues upbeat through lyrics like "Alas! that lovers thus should meet:/ Oh, pity, pity me!"
- 'H.M.S. Pinafore: As the protagonist works himself up to suicide in the Act I finale, all sorts of cheery and patriotic tunes get thrown in, even while Ralph sings, "The maiden treats my suit with scorn,/Rejects my humble gift, my lady;/She says I am ignobly born,/And cuts my hopes adrift, my lady." Of course, it eventually turns appropriately sombre, just in time for Josephine to rush in and admit she loves him after all.
- The Pirates of Penzance: The loudest song in the entire operetta is the one about sneaking quietly into the Stanley home: "With Catlike Tread/Upon our prey we steal/In silence dread/Our cautious way we feel/No sound at all/We never speak a word/A fly's foot-fall/Would be distinctly heard." Sung fortissimo with heavy use of cymbals and brass in the accompaniment.
- Iolanthe: Parts of the Act I finale, but also "In vain to us you plead", which is a flirty little song about how much the women hate the men they're singing it to.
- Part of the joke is that they're in love with the men, but have to do their duty in telling them to buzz off. Lelia's line before the song is: "But we can’t stop him now. (Aside to Celia.) Aren’t they lovely! (Aloud.) Oh, why did you go and defy us, you great geese!"
- Princess Ida: "When Anger spreads its wing" is about going off to war, but sounds kind of like it should be about Bertie Wooster and his smashing adventures.
- The Mikado. Beheadings, descriptions of grisly executions, lists of people to kill off — all fodder for a cheery little operetta. The first song in the second half, "Brightly dawns our wedding day/Joyous hour we give thee greeting" ends with everyone in tears (though there is a good reason for that).
- Ruddigore: "I shipped d'ye see" is a cheery patriotic naval ballad about fleeing from the French. "Happily coupled are we" has a cheery melody befitting a song by a sailor about his forthcoming marital bliss. It keeps this melody when Rose comes in with her verse, about him sailing off and having affairs with women in every port, while she's left behind to wait for him. Oh, and another cheery song about upcoming death, this time the rapid-fire patter song, "My eyes are fully open" (First verse ends "But I have to die tomorrow, so it really doesn't matter!") Oh, and I'm not sure if it counts, but the lyrics of "You understand? I think I do" is about how horrible it is to have to betray Robin's secret identity, but duty requires it. However, doing so lets one of them steal back a woman from Robin, and gets the other out of the family curse, so the cheery, bouncy music is actually highly appropriate.
- The Yeomen of the Guard: "How say you maiden, will you wed/A man about to lose his head?" is, as you should guess by now, one of the most upbeat, fun, cheery numbers. Meanwhile, "Oh, a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon", of course, turns out to be about how the jester's being torn apart and has to remain cheerful throughout it all. Later, "When a wooer goes a wooing"'s most heartbreaking line is "Oh the happy days of wooing" — sung in emotionless monotone by the person that the plot has set out to break, taking everything from him. Oh, and it ends on a grand, energetic chorus while that person dies.
- Utopia, Limited: "First you're born" is about how a character's life is one big joke played on him by the universe. It's done as a comic number. "A tenor, all singers above" is a classic tenor ballad — about how the tenor can't sing, complete with intentionally flubbed high notes. Oh, and "It's understood, I think all round" and "In every mental lore" are both cheery songs with lines about about grisly deaths (by duelling and being blown up by dynamite, respectively), but do I really need to mention that at this point?
- The Grand Duke: "Won't it be a pretty wedding" savages the bride's taste and sense of fashion, and then everyone goes on to savage the groom in "Pretty Lisa, fair and tasty". Several other examples, which would take too long to explain.
- Sullivan also tends to drop down to a lower note for words like "high", "top", "above" and so on, and vice-versa for words like "bottom" and "low". And, by the way, all of these were Victorian, so this is Older Than Radio.
- That might have something to do with the fact that G&S's genre is called "Topsy-Turvy" (also the title of a movie about them.)
- "Batti, batti o bel Masetto" ("Beat me, oh lovely Masetto") from Mozart's Don Giovanni is a calm and tender love song in which a woman begs her fiance to beat her.
- Mozart is also responsible for a quite beautiful, six part canon entitled "Lick Me in the Arse."
- Pulp: Their best-known songs are "Common People" and "Disco 2000", both textbook examples of this trope, and they've provided countless others.
- Britpop in general has quite a few of these. Other famous examples are "Cigarettes and Alcohol" by Oasis and "Country House" by Blur.
- The cover band Ten Masked Men specialize in destroying pop classics by interpreting them all as straightforward no frills Death Metal regardless of the origin, so this trope is to be expected from them.
- J-rock band Flow did a mostly upbeat ska cover of "Okuro Kotoba"... which is a song about painful goodbyes.
- Gnarls Barkley's Charity Case and A Little Better are both like this (on the same album). The former about a lonely man confessing to an equally lonely woman, and the latter... about feeling a bit better after a massive bout of sadness. There's also Who Cares? on the previous album about a man talking contradictorily upbeatly, but given its content, it's unsurprising.
- You wouldn't tell just by listening to the music (it's all Foreign Sounding Gibberish), but if the music video is any indication, The Real Tuesday Weld's cheery song "Bathtime in Clerkenwell" is about Nazis taking over England.
- Bah, those birds were much too cute to represent Nazis. Even though they were wearing Nazi symbols.
- A Majority of The Real Tuesdat Weld's songs can fall into this. They all start off reminiscent of Older songs with happy-go-lucky tunes, then they all turn out to be around breakup (See: Kix). They're so upbeat you don't realize you're singing along to talking about how Drugs and Whores are more meaningful to you than your Ex.
- Used for comedic value by Psychostick whose metal-tinged modern hardcore sound is used as a vehicle for them to bitch about (as well as other things) very mundane and silly topics such as itchy balls (Scrotal Torment), a piece of shit car (Two Ton Paperweight), and how much they hate doing laundry (I Hate Doing Laundry).
- The ending to Protest The Heroes "Turn Soonest To The Sea" has a Disneyesque sing-song group chorus with the following lyrics:
Maybe someday when, when this bloody skull has dried
(I'll) know our city is in ruins
When our greatest source of pride
(is) a monument of dicks and ribs and the gender crown we wore
Where underneath, a plaque will read, a plaque will read, "No woman is a whore"
- Martina McBride's "Beautiful Again" has a cheerful melody, but the verses tell about a girl's rough childhood and teenage pregnancy. Then the chorus is about optimism in the face of everything else:
"But when it rains
The past gets washed away and then
She smiles 'cause she knows in the end
The world gets beautiful
Beautiful again"
- "Independence Day" has a triumphantly patriotic-sounding chorus, and it is a favorite among conservative pundits and politicians. The song is about a girl whose parents' abusive relationship ended in arson/murder/suicide on the titular holiday.
- Aqua, oddly enough, has some fairly depressing lyrics in some of their upbeat synthpop songs:
Misery deep in the royal heart
crying at night, I wanna be a part
Prince, oh, prince, are you really sincere
that you one day are gonna disappear
- The lyrics to Hoobastank's Born To Lead demonstrate that the person singing is most emphatically not born to lead.
- The Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl". It's got a reputation for being, well, 'empowering', but seriously. Listen to it while paying no attention to the lyrics. Then listen again. The titular Earl is an abusive deadbeat, and as the narrator relates with alarming relish, he just had to die. Fairly typical for a vengeful country song, but the fact that the most joyous chorus is the part describing his wife murdering him, wrapping him in a tarp and keeping him around for kicks and giggles.
- The second chorus does involve them getting rid of the body...
- The music video ensures no viewer can miss the lyrical dissonance. Stars (Dennis Franz, Jane Krakowski, Lauren Holly, Adrian Pasdar [Nathan on Heroes]) act out the verses and everybody dances happily during the chorus, including "undead Earl". Subtle it ain't, but darkly comedic, sure.
- 'We need a break~ Let's go out to the lake Earl~ We'll take a lunch~ And stuff you in the trunk, Earl~'
- "Chemical Bomb" by The Aquabats is a delightful, lighthearted tune in which the narrator expresses his lack of objection to his visions of world hunger, war, and Biblical apocalypse.
- Sublime's "Wrong Way" is about a teenage prostitute. Although it's pretty blatent what the song is about, the cheery beat contrasts with the dark lyrics.
- "Santeria", a cheerful song about a jealous ex-boyfriend attempting to reclaim his girlfriend, promising to kill the guy who took her ("and I won't think twice to stick that barrel straight down Sancho's throat") and possibly "slap her dead", applies.
- And of course there's "Date Rape," a bouncy ska ditty about the titular crime that culminates with the perpetrator being convicted and having what he did to his victim done repeatedly to him by his cellmates.
- The meaning of Rammstein's biggest hit depends on its spelling. If it's "Du Hasst Mich" (You Hate Me), then the song is suitably angry. However, it's also been spelled, "Du Hast Mich" (You Have Me), making it a love song. The lyrics work either way.
- Taken as part of the larger sentence "Du hast mich gefragt und ich hab nichts gesagt" ("You have asked me and I have said nothing.")it's definitely NOT a love song. The song's chorus is a shouted "Nein" to a German wedding vow. (Made quite starkly apparent in meaning in the video) However, the progressing nature of the lyrics probably mean "du hast mich" is a doubled hate/have leading up to the rest. To muddy the waters the english translation takes the "hate" meaning only and alters all the rest, leading to idiots on youtube "correcting" the accurate tranlation.
- There's another pun in said German wedding vow: read as Willst du bis der Tod, der scheide . . . ? it means "Do you want, until the death which would separate . . . ?" Read it as . . . bis der Tod der Scheide and it becomes "until the death of the vagina," since Scheide (literally "separation") is German for "vagina." Rammstein loves its wordplay.
- Rammstein also makes sure to prevent Lyrical Dissonance in their song "Amerika", by pointing out in English that "this is not a love song... I don't speak my mother tongue/no this is not a love song."
- And yet some people still take it as such.
- They played it straight, for irony value earlier in the same song. Listen to the opening version of the chorus — in this song about American corporate/cultural dominance of the world — and tell me it doesn't sound 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.
- Gackt's "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 having 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.
- Miyavi has this with Papamama Nozomare nu Baby. It sounds deceptively like un upbeat victory-inspiring rebel anthem...here are the lyrics.
- The controversial "Read A Book" Video by T*Mite gained a lot of attention on BET for it's supposedly racist and stereotypical depiction of black culture, claiming it should be censored for children. Of course while the beat, rhythm and style of the song is modeled after dirty south (or crunk) rappers like Lil Jon, the lyrics tell positive messages and promote healthy lifestyle choices as well as a rejection of mainstream hip-hop excess in favor of reading, cleanliness, drinking water, parental responsibility and such.
- ''Omoide was Okkusenman!'' ("Memories are 110,000,000") is a song made of Japanese lyrics fitted to the Mega Man 2 Wily Castle theme and originally with that set as the background. The lyrics are of a man reminiscing about his childhood, wondering where his friends are, lamenting that all the seasons have passed him by, and continually nostalgizing about his childhood hero.
- Pikmin's "Ai no Uta" (Song of Love) sounds a cute J-pop song. Then he saw what the lyrics translated into. Turns out that it's about the Pikmin loving Olimar despite doing his dirty work and probably getting eaten in the end.
- Which makes a lot of sense really. The game itself is a version of this trope. Cutsey characters, a horrible dog eat dog world. Pikmin 2 rams this home with it's oddly bittersweet feel and depressing back story shown in Olimar's letters. It's pretty much Miyamato's take on Darkerand Edgier.
- Several songs from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album are beautifully composed AntiLoveSongs, particularly "God Only Knows" ("The world could show nothing to me / So what good would living do me? / God only knows what I'd be without you"), "Here Today" ("Well you know I hate to be a downer / But I'm the guy she left before you found her"). Additionally, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" is a rather upbeat tune about not fitting in with the rest of the world. Outside that album, there's the song Rhonda which, in a chirpy, catchy style, tells Rhonda that the singer is really wrapped up with this girl who dumped him, but would she like to be his rebound?
- To chip in another $.02, since "Wendy" is on the same record, it seems like "Wendy left [him] alone," and thus he turned to help from Rhonda. There were owls pooping in his bed, after all.
- And don't forget their cover of "Sloop John B" on that album, possibly the most upbeat music on the whole album (and from the Beach Boys, that's saying something), with lyrics about a really bad boat trip ("This is the worst trip I've ever been on.")
- Joe Jackson's Be My Number Two is similar — tender love-ballad melody, 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."
- Then there's Never Learn Not To Love, which is a relatively inoffensive ditty in its own right, but turns several shades of creepy once you realize the lyrics were written by Charles Manson.
- "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" by Monty Python could be taken either as disguised sarcasm (as in Life of Brian, where it's sung by guys who are being crucified), or as a slightly fractured inspirational song (as in Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python And The Holy Grail).
- Add to that "Brave Sir Robin" from Monty Python And The Holy Grail and the musical Spamalot, in which Sir Robin's bard sings a cheery, Renaissance-sounding tune about Sir Robin getting horribly mutilated in battle. "His nostrils raped and his bottom burned off", indeed.
- Judas Priest's "Painkiller" is an immensely heavy metal song which could rival the very dark "Master of Puppets"... and it talks about a savior who helps mankind survives and basically ensures a happy ending. Halford screaming the vocals in a pretty insane tone probably doesn't help.
- The odd drone/monotone voice (er, it's better than it sounds) of The Magnetic Fields' lead vocalist makes everything sound dissonant, from "I Wish I Had an Evil Twin" (exactly what it sounds like) to "I Don't Want to Get Over You" (listing all of the things he could do to forget a lover).
- Avenue Q. All of it. The musical styles you loved on Sesame Street, applied to topics like racism and pornography!
- Sugar Ray poke fun at this with an album intro called New Direction. The track's hard metal sound stands against lyrics like "Don't play ball in the house. Don't run with scissors. Be nice to cops."
- Blink-182's "Adam's Song" is practically a suicide letter (except the last verse, in which the boy appears to have given up killing himself).
- Most people think "I Second That Emotion" by The Miracles 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 first few verses of "Sort of Haunted House" by Too Much Joy seems like a wistful love song, with an upbeat, albeit slightly creepy, tempo. Then we find out that it's about a man who killed his girlfriend and her lover, and then hangs himself. Puts a whole new spin on the chorus.
- Queen's song "I Want To Break Free." Good beat, upbeat melody ... then we get to the lyrics, which describe leaving one lover for another even though "I can't get over the way you [the dumpee] love me like you do."
- " '39 " : the music is skiffle — a genre closely related to and occasionally overlapping with jug band music — where the lyrics are, upon closer inspection, about astronauts going on what is to them a year-long trip only to return home to discover that thanks to the Time Dilation effect one hundred years have passed on Earth. The use of such an intentionally low tech genre of music with space travel is probably part of why many people miss the clues in the lyrics.
- Speaking of Queen, there's Somebody to Love. The music is an upbeat, sweeping rock opera...about a man so lonely that he can barely get through his day without suffering and is begging for someone to love him.
- There's more... like "Tie Your Mother Down": frustrated lyrics advocating extreme measures to avoid family interference with a date, sung in big massed choruses to an incredibly upbeat guitar riff.
- Then there's "Who Needs You" which is about breaking up with someone who is a 'spoilt thing", with a catchy, upbeat tune.
- And yet even more from Queen: Don't Try Suicide. It's a swinging jazz tune with a cheery refrain all about the pointlessness of suicide.
- The jaunty, upbeat Red Dwarf theme: "It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, I'm all alone, more or less..."
- While most of their songs are played straightly depressing, the song that launched AFI into mainstream stardom Girl's Not Grey has one of their most poppy and upbeat tunes... and is about a guy contemplating his death/suicide/dark fate that very night.
- While not a single, Davey and Jade's side project Blaqk Audio pulled it off again with Snuff on Digital. The chorus may seem pretty romantic at first... until you realize the best interpretation is that of a guy jumping off a building and taking his girl/fan down with him.
- "Dead!" by My Chemical Romance. On its own, a spiteful song telling someone they deserve the painful death they're experiencing, in the context of the The Black Parade story; it's the main character spitefully telling himself he deserves the painful death he's experiencing. And it's easily the most upbeat and catchy melody they've ever done, aside from maybe "Teenagers" though it's more upbeat in a punkish way that fits the lyrics.
- Come to mention it, a good cross-section of "The Black Parade" concept album is like this.
- Headfirst for Halos is really peppy too. It's about suicide. Pretty graphic suicide, at that.
- My Chemical Romance could dominate this examples section if we let them. "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)", "Teenagers", "Welcome To The Black Parade", "Thank you For The Venom", "Dead!", "Headfirst For Halos", "Drowning Lessons", "Early Sunsets Over Monroeville"...
- You can add Cancer to this list too, specifically it's happy-hardcore remix. A more peppy song about cancer has never been heard!
- "Blood" is a rather dark, gory, and actually a little frightening, song to an upbeat, cheerful, and lovely tune.
- At least half of Spring Awakening, although "My Junk" is a really cute upbeat song about masturbation. The fact that it's sung by twenty-year-olds playing fourteen-year-olds makes this even creepier.
- "My Junk" is less about masturbation and more about comparing teenage crushes to drug addiction, which is arguably even more lyrically dissonant.
- A fair number of Gnarls Barkley songs. Take, for example, "Run (I'm A Natural Disaster)", 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.
- Does that make him craaaaa-zy? Possibleeeee-eeey.
- "Neighbors" is dark... until you realized it's about a man getting annoyed at his neighbor and finally yells at him. If you take it literally.
- 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.
- The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Dani California" has an alt rock feel to it, despite them singing about a girl that lived a life of crime and was murdered for it.
- Ben Folds' mellow, crooning cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit." Enough said.
- "Bitch Went Nuts". A cheerful song about psycho exes!
- Not to mention Dynamite Hack's indie-rock version of "Boys-n-the-Hood." Or Mat Weddle's interpretation of "Hey Ya" as a folk song. Not to forget Nina Gordon covering "Straight Outta Compton" as if it were a torch song.
- Ben Folds is great at this. Take, for example, Fair, an upbeat song about: a wife accidentally killing her husband by hitting him with her car after a vicious argument - when she just wanted to apologize; and a guy who has never been able to get over an ex-girlfriend and ends up committing suicide in public just to show her how hurt he is. But all is fair in love. Or Regrets, another fast-paced, upbeat song about a person on his deathbed, thinking about how he wasted his life and never did anything he wanted to, and can't blame people he knows if they don't bother coming to see him before he dies. Or how about Carrying Cathy, which sounds like a love song, but is actually about a chronically depressed girl who always latched onto people to help get her through life, until finally breaking down and committing suicide. Sung at her funeral. Ben Folds is a masterful lyricist.
- Meant sarcastically or not, Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is a catchy ditty sung by a Spoiled Brat who not only intends to steal another girl's boyfriend, but have him "wrapped around her finger" because said girl is "like, whatever". And your 13 year old niece has probably been dancing to this all day.
- And her method of stealing said boyfriend? Being a better lay.
- Elton John has written a few of these by putting dissonant music with the lyrics given him. "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting," for instance, has an upbeat melody that dares you to sing along, but is about someone who is in a dead-end life and knows it.
- And "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" has lyrics of defiance, of choosing to walk out on a Svengali. But musically, it's one of the saddest songs on record. And the video includes a clip of the song being performed in The Muppet Show...
- Wordof God says it has to do with Bernie being tired of the rock star lifestyle, the rich people he and Elton encountered who made their lives miserable (including the rich publishers who wanted bubblegum hits from them in their early years, and pickle heiress portrayed in "Someone Saved My Life Tonight") and the big city, and preferring the simpler life in the country, where he grew up. "Mongrels who ain't got a penny, sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground" refers to the droppings the heiress' dogs left behind constantly!
- Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to "Since God Invented Girls" expecting it to be an upbeat rock song full of macho swagger; instead the song ended up being an ethereal ballad.
- "I Think I'm Going to Kill Myself" has a tap-dance solo in it.
- "Crocodile Rock", set to an organ-driven upbeat bubblegum rock tune with "la la la la la" refrain, is about a man reminiscing about his happy teenage life, dancing to rock 'n' roll with his beautiful girlfriend, driving an "old gold Chevy" and "having a place of (his) own". Suddenly, the girl dumps him for "some foreign guy", "rock just died" on him, he gets older and all he has to cling to are his memories.
- Alice In Chains' "No Excuses" fits into this. A light, upbeat, acoustic song that makes the listener want to sing along due to the whole campfire-ish vibe it gives off... but then when you listen to the lyrics and know about the band, you realize that it's about the singer's heroin addiction, and how his friend, the guitarist, is coming to terms with it, and how he can't change it. The circumstances of the singer's death only serve to make it more depressing.
- Unless you realize that most of AIC's songs are not what you think. Almost every AIC song is assumed to be about Layne's Herion addiction, but if you ask Jerry Cantrell, he'll say it isn't so.
- Though Jerry has confirmed that "No Excuses" is one of their songs that's about Layne's addiction.
- "Boozehounds" by Captain Dangerous is an upbeat and insanely catchy song about someone having a traumatic break-up and turning to drink.
- The HP Lovecraft Historical Society has created a pair of CD collections of holiday music with the lyrics replaced by references to a wide variety of Lovecraft's horror stories. 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, or "Joy to the World" parodied as "Death to the World."
- They also did the Carol of the Old Ones based on the Carol of the Bells, but at lest the music is suitably creepy.
- On a related note, there's Eben Brooks's ''Hey There Cthulhu''. It's a parody of Hey There Delilah.
- Several songs by Sparks fall into this category, notably "Here in Heaven", which is sung from the point of view of the successful half of a broken suicide pact. Think about it...
- Also of note is their 1974 single 'Something For The Girl With Everything', a deceptively frothy and upbeat glam rock song which is actually about being blackmailed.
- "Take A Letter, Maria" by R. B. Greaves is about a businessman telling his secretary to write a Dear John (er, Jane) letter to his wife, while seducing her at the same time.
- Though to be fair to him, it's clear his wife cheated on him first (and to be fair to her, he was an admitted workaholic).
- cali=gari. All of it. Mama ga boku o sutete papa ga boku o okashita hi — "The day mama abandoned and papa raped me".
- 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!"
- Stephen Sondheim loves this trope about as much as Gilbert and Sullivan did. Assassins in particular has "Unworthy of Your Love" (what sounds like a tender love duet... except that the singers are Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley, Jr., talking about how they will prove their love for (repsectively) Charles Manson and Jodie Foster by shooting the president), and "The Ballad of Czolgosz" (an upbeat, patriotic-sounding turn-of-the-century style song about how you can "move to the head of the line" in the US — as Leon Czolgosz is waiting in a line of people to shake McKinley's hand, ending with Czolgosz shooting him).
- Don't forget "The Ballad of Guiteau", which is not only a happy song about a guy who shoots the President (featuring tap-dancing on the gallows, no less), but it was written by the actual assassin. Creepy.
- Especially creepy considering that before he read it to the crowd at the gallows, he said this about his words: "If set to music, they may be rendered very effective."
- "Everybody's Got the Right" from Assassins is another fantastic example. The lyrics read almost like something that might be read in an elementary school classroom, that everyone has the right to find happiness- except the song is about madmen defending their right to kill the president.
- "A Little Priest", from Sweeney Todd. It's a fun, showstopping, and, especially in the original stage musical, humorous number...about cannibalism.
- Ah yes, Sweeney Todd. With such numbers as "A Little Priest" above and the reprise of "Johanna", a rather upbeat number in major key about how the Villainous Protagonist is too busy killing people to think about his own daughter.
- The Boomtown Rats's "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. However, Diamond Smiles, from the same album, is an upbeat song about a woman who goes to a party and hangs herself.
- As part of its overall Mind Screw, the Anime Paranoia Agent has an uptempo opening theme with these lyrics, accompanied by images of the characters laughing hysterically, often in devastated surroundings.
- Suffice to say that it mentiones "magnificent mushroom cloud in the sky".
- Emerson Lake And Palmer's "Karn Evil 9: First Impression" has a melancholy beginning, but later becomes a cheerful upbeat song about the "greatest show on Earth" — ie, human evil and cruelty.
- The Offspring, "Come Out and Play", a catchy punk song with a singalong chorus... and lyrics about school violence.
- It's "sister song" (both were off the same album, and released to radio at the same time), "Self Esteem", is an equally-catchy power-punk tune about a guy who is being used sexually by his girlfriend, who treats him like crap and cheats on him, but he goes along with the relationship anyway because he's afraid people will see him as a "dweeb" if he breaks it off with her.
- Let's not forget "Why Don't You Get A Job", with its Caribbean melody (reminiscent of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da") and lyrics that basically say "You're a worthless fucking leech, so fuck off!". Or "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)", laughing at wiggers over a good punk/alt-rock riff. Or "Special Delivery": catchy riff, lyrics about stalker with voices in his head. Or "Walla Walla", another fast tune about how you, the subject of the song, are going to prison and it's a good thing.
- There's also "The End of the Line" which is a really fast song about mourning someone who died. Or "Jennifer Lost the War," which is also really fast but about the suffering of girls caught up in a war. Or "Hit That," which is cheerful and bouncy-sounding and all about unplanned pregnancy(!)
- Die Toten Hosen's "Weihnachtsmann vom Dach" (Santa from the Roof) is a cheerful holiday tune with child-like, giddy vocals...about a child finding Santa Claus dead and swinging from a noose, along with a note saying he (Santa Claus) hopes he has not spoiled their Christmas with his suicide. It is, however, clearly intended as comedy.
- Most Billy Joel songs are happy, with the words being horrible. A good example would be "Moving Out (Anthony's Song)", about wasting life working hard to obtain things they cannot enjoy. "You can pay Uncle Sam with the overtime/ Is that all you get for your money?"
- "She's Always a Woman to Me" sounds like it should be a romantic love song, but the person it's describing is actually pretty horrible. To the point where the song has been accused of being misogynistic.
- "Miami 2017" is an upbeat, exciting rock song about, apparently, some kind of apocalyptic event destroying New York City.
- "All for Leyna" is another upbeat, exuberant track about a teenager pining away for a girl he hooked up with who never wants to see him again.
- And then there's "Allentown", a rather peppy little number in which the narrator talks about how the place is full of crushed dreams and dying factories. Depending on your interpretation of the lyrics, the last verse possibly ends with the narrator either dying or killing himself.
Well, I'm living here in Allentown
And it's hard to keep a good man down
But I won't be getting up today.
- "The Entertainer", about the frustrations of being an artist and having to sell out in order to have any sort of success.
- This trope probably applies in several ways to all of MC Hawking's canon, which consists of a vocal synthesizer rapping about science.
- Not just rapping, gangsta rapping.
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
- For that matter, most nerd rap probably applies, from Weird Al's White and Nerdy to the Deckard Cain Rap.
- "Photograph," as sung by Ringo Starr, has lyrics about losing a loved one forever, but is performed almost cheerfully and in such a way as to encourage singing along, complete with dramatic string crescendo at the end.
- "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin. This song relates the story of a dad who was too busy to spend time with his son. Despite making promises to do so later, he never follows through. Years pass and the dad is old and retired while the son becomes a family man with a job. When the dad asks the son to spend time together, the son tells him that he's too busy. The irony is not lost on the dad. Luckily, this is one case where the meaning of the lyrics is never lost.
- Someone didn't get the memo. There is no way anyone could listen to the music of Cat's in the Cradle and think it's a Happy Fun Time song; it's the exact opposite of Lyrical Dissonance.
- "Bus Stop" by The Hollies. The melody is in a minor key and comes across as gloomy, brooding, and bleak. Lyrically, it's a pleasant and optimistic song about a random act of kindness leading to a happy romance and future marriage.
- "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" is commonly sung at the beery, cheery end of parties and ceilidhs, oblivious to the gloomy interpretation of the words.
- 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 hooked on smack/on your back/face the fact/you're gonna end up smoking crack/and then you're gonna DIIIIIE!" 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.
- See also: the appropriately-titled "I'm an Asshole."
- Christian rock band Newsboys has a song titled "Breakfast" a very cheery song with quirky lyrics...describing the death of a beloved member of a literal breakfast club. "Ah, rise up, Fruit Loop lovers, sing out Sweet and Low/With spoons held high we bid our brother Cheerio/When the toast is burned/And all the milk has turned/And Cap'n Crunch is waving farewell/When the big one finds you/May the song remind you/That they don't serve breakfast in Hell." The over-all message of the song isn't completely depressing—the Christian view that those who trust in God will be reunited in Heaven—but it's still a pretty cheery song for a song about death.
- Want a better example? The group Go Fish has "What Mary Didn't Know", an amazingly peppy song about a girl whom the narrator had the opportunity to lead to Christ but didn't before she died, and his angst over whether she's in Hell because of him.
"I knew the things to say, I knew the things to do
I knew the people to know, but God, I didn't know you..."
[Someday I'll answer for] What Mary didn't know was the answer I was holding
I didn't think she'd change, so I never even tried
How was I to know? I wish I would've told her
Now I'll have to live in doubt, with what Mary didn't know...
- Ok Go's song "Don't Ask Me" is another up-beat pop rock song about a break-up. "Don't be so damn begine/and don't waste my fucking time."
- Catherine Wheel has a slow, gentle song... which is titled "Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck".
- Another song by them, "Car", is also slow and gentle, but its chorus lyrics are about stealing a car and driving it off a cliff.
- George Harrison's "All Those Years Ago" is happy and poppy, but its lyrics are bittersweet, nostalgic lyrics about how much the world will miss the recently-murdered John Lennon.
- And his other song "When We Were Fab" done at the same time, about the same subject. Very similar to the above
- Danial Powter's "Bad Day" starts off slow and thoughtful, sure, but then he's all upbeat and happy as he sings about how terribly bad the day's turned out to be.
- Let The New Day Begin by the Swedish death/power metal band Therion from their early (before they shifted to powermetal) album Lepaca Kliffoth. The music is fairly typical death metal with a bit of early power metal, while the lyrics basically amount to a message of perseverance and greatness of Man. The final verse goes like this:
Join with the fallen ones/Open your eyes and see/There is no pain to fear/Your strength will carry you/And when the sky turns black/Gaze through eternity/To stars so far away/But trust me, they can be reached/
- German Punk Rockers "Die Ärzte" seem to enjoy this trope immensely, as they are known for their satiric and sometimes plain weird songs. A very noteworthy example is "Baby", a song that appears to be an empowering ballad for vegetarians at the start... And then goes on for several verses with suggestions to eat people, instead of animals.
- Just one album later, the highly-upbeat song "Breit" has the protagonist praise the joys of doing drugs — clearly including the fact that he's wasting his life and slowly loses control of his bodily functions.
Now I'm almost thirty and still alive / I'm still the coolest in this room / I drool a little and smell badly / Because I'm hanging around on this couch for years / Social contacts, I don't need / I'm stoned seven days a week (Translated)
- The structure of Skunk Anansi's "Glorious Pop Song" sounds like just what the title suggets — Complete with clapping parts and "nanana"'s... And the chorus goes "You're still a fucker/ You're still a fucker/ You're still a fucker/ To me". And that's not even indicating half the anger and bitterness of the rest of the lyrics.
- The ever-popular Dragostea Din Tei by Romanian boy band O-Zone (better known as the Numa Numa song and accompanying dance) is quite upbeat, happy, and danceable. However, the lyrics to the famous chorus basically translate to "You want to leave but you don't want to take, don't want to take me, don't want to take, don't want to take me, don't want to take, don't want to take, don't want to take me." The song is really all about his ex-girlfriend who won't take him back. Its "sequel", Despre Tine, is of a similar vein, being happy and upbeat and yet complaining of how she won't answer his text messages.
- De ce Plang Chitarele is a song summed up pretty good with the title which translates roughly to Why the Guitars Cry. But of course, being O-Zone, it's happy, upbeat and danceable.
- "Hey Big Spender," from Sweet Charity, sounds like an erotic come on ("Good lookin', so refined/So wouldn't you like to know what's goin' on in my mind?"), but is sung by a group of bored taxi dance girls who can barely summon up the energy to go through the motions of their job.
- The chirpy Ending Theme from Captain Scarlet: "They crash him, and his body may burn. They smash him, but they know he'll return... to live again". Accompanied by images of a terrified Captain Scarlet in a variety of perilous and painful-looking situations.
- Stereophonics do this a lot — most effectively in "Local Boy In The Photograph" — an uptempo rock song... about the anniversary of a friend's death, who committed suicide by standing in the path of a train. Ouch.
- Sarah Brightman's "Once in a Lifetime" is a soft, gentle song about a woman experimenting with S&M.
- Oingo Boingo's "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.
- It takes effort to find a Boingo song that DOESN'T make extensive use of lyrical dissonance. Upbeat music with dark themes is one of their specialities.
- The Flaming Lips have an example of this, as the song "Pompeii am Gotterdamerung" is about lovers who commit suicide by leaping into an erupting volcano.
- Fall Out Boy does this a lot. "7 Minutes In Heaven" and "Hum Hallelujah" are both upbeat tunes about bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz's suicide attempt. Dance Dance was possibly their most popular and happy tune to date, bearing the lyric "If they knew how misery loved me..."
- The song 'Lamette' ('Razor Blades') by Italian singer Donatella Rettore, is a cheery, danceable song about... cutting your wrists with razor blades, complete with 'plop plop' sounds, intended to be the blood coming out of the wounds.
- I Heard It Through The Grapevine is a cheery, upbeat song... about a guy who's 'heard through the grapevine' (the gossip) that his girlfriend is going to leave him for another man, is angry with her for having had to find it out this way and begs her to stay with him ('because you mean that much to me').
- 'You Spin Me Right Round' by '80s group Dead Or Alive is an upbeat dance song about... a guy obsessed with someone because 'they look like they're lots of fun'.
- 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'.
- In Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" the angel of the title is not a loved one or a celestial being as one might think; it's heroin.
- Actually, it's not really about heroin but was inspired by the real life overdoses of several other musicians. Word Of God coming straight from her Storytellers appearance, as she said there she was watching MTV and heard about someone overdosing and the song is basically rationalizing why someone would turn to drugs for comfort, when you know how much harm it can do to you.
- A fact which added many, many levels of wrong to a commercial for an animal shelter which featured the song "Angel" and Sarah herself asking the audience to become some sweet little puppy's angel.
- Though your mileage may vary depending on interpretation, but Bon Jovi do this with surprising regularity.
- 'Living on a Prayer' is a rock anthem about surviving against the odds and being together no matter what... Or, if heard another way, it's about a desperate couple existing in poverty; living on a 'prayer' instead of a proper wage, or having no foreseeable future and just hoping something turns up.
- 'Someday I'll Be Saturday Night' has a similar theme; all the characters mentioned within are either desperate, suicidal, abused, or all three, but eventually they will be like a Saturday Night. This could either mean they they will be jubilant and free of oppression (indicated by the bouncy and joyous tune and vocals), or it could mean that they'll be like Saturday Night in terms of it being at the end of the week, all the bad stuff having happened and no more is going to come. These people are essentially looking forward to the sweet release of death!
- 'Always' is a love song with the singer declaring his ever lasting dedication to his one true love. The release video, along with the correct interpretation of the lyrics, makes it perfectly clear that he has been abandoned and is pining for someone he can never have again.
- 'One Wild Night' seems like a description of a great night out partying. Listen carefully, and it turns out that the singer is actually some kind of lecherous predator slipping into a crowd with the express intent of fleecing rubes for their money ("Take 'im for a coupla weeks pay") suggesting sexual favours from their victims' girlfriend in lieu of an unaffordable monetary debt ("If ya lose this roll/ I'll take ya girlfriend home/ Well, alright!"). One could even go so far as to make a link between the lines "Blinded by the moonlight/ Twenty-four hours of midnight/ I stepped into the Twilight Zone" and being rendered blind and mindless by a drug or alcohol induced fugue...
- Shiina Ringo's Queen of Kabukicho is a delightful song about a girl whose prostitute mother abandons her and who subsequently becomes a prostitute herself.
- Moonflower, sung by Tomokazu Seki, is a cheerful little number about being soul-crushingly isolated and hiding it.
- Ben Folds' "Zak and Sara" is a deliriously chirpy little ballad about a puppy love between a drug-addict guitarist and a paranoid schizophrenic.
- The Delgados' joyous anti-anthem "All you need is hate."
Hate is all around find it in your heart in every waking sound
On your way to school, work or church you’ll find that it’s the only rule
Build a different world, hate will help you find what you’ve been looking for
Hate is everywhere, inside your mother’s heart and you will find it there
- The Fine Print has one of these, "1995 Penny", which is, in the lead singer's words: "a bouncy, poppy song with lyrics that concern blind acceptance of abuse, sexual harassment, and complicity in one's own annihilation."
- "Get Rid Of That Girl" by The Donnas. It's a fast paced and catchy song about a girl beating up and killing the girlfriend of a boy she likes. The song even ends with the background singers chanting, "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"
- The Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" is a happy, bouncy 80's number about trying to keep yourself together while things around you are falling apart. And I quote: "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 everyday". Yeah. And to further heighten the dissonance, this song was featured in a Minnie Mouse cartoon special.
- Emilie Autumn's song "Miss Lucy Had Some Leeches", which is about Victorian Lunatic Asylums... sung in the style of Miss Suzy Had A Steamboat.
- She also has "Marry me", who to a sweet waltzy tune, narrates in first person the story of a woman who copes with being trapped in an arranged marriage with an rich older man by indulging in alcohol and having a lover (while denying her husband his "marital rights"). All of this, while waiting for her own death. But hey, at least she has quite the pretty clothes!
- Emilie Autumn does this fairly often. "The Art of Suicide" comes to mind, a cheery tune about, well, suicide. "Thank God I'm Pretty" also qualifies, a happy-sounding song about being judged solely on looks.
- The theme song for Tenchi Muyo! (Tenchi Universe to some) is a happy, hoppy, techno song about how someone (presumably Tenchi himself) isn't quite ready for love. The English version of the song even starts with the words "Get ready/love will leave you crying". The song ends with the lyrics, "You are a broken man".
- The ending theme for the show is also similar in that it's a high-energy rock song that ends up being a big "screw you" to either Ayeka or Ryoko (depending on the episode, it switched every other one). The English lyrics start with "When you go fishing/You catch a boot/or some other trash/When you play at cards/you lose all your cash/you're so pathetic/you never win/and you never will/not the kind of girl/who'd make any guy/feel a thrill".
- The Canadian band The Pettit Project, known for their happy love songs such as "99 Lives" (about a guy who is trying to get the girl of his dreams but just can't get it right, but keeps trying because he knows he will succeed), made an album called "6 Week Summer Vacation in Hell". The entire album is about six weeks of the summer of 2004 when "the angels of heartbreak, loss, and death simultaneously swooped down on The Pettit Project campsite, trapped us in our cozy sleeping bags, and swung us as hard as they could into a nearby tree". The liner notes then go on to say "We promise that on our next album we'll sing about Free Trade, or Bush or something equally as uninteresting". The notes end with a sentence that makes fun of this very trope, saying "Now go and listen to our sad songs that sound happy, baby".
- Another Canadian band called McKenna is an Irish rock band known for their rousing songs about drinking and songs that were written while drunk (like all Irish rock bands). Two songs in particular are quite happy in tune but sad in lyrics, however. The song Guinness For Two sounds like a love song, especially when heard in concert. The song, however, is about the death of a loved one (possibly a girlfriend) and how the narrator will have to drink by himself. It does end on a hopeful note, though, with the lyrics "Though I miss you like burning/I don't wish your returning/for you have gone on to joy evermore./And I'll follow you soon/for a life is a tune/and together we'll sing the encore". The other song is a little more obvious, as it's title is "The Accident Song". Just listening to it absentmindedly, it sounds like the narrator is trying to get home to his sweetheart. However, a closer listen reveals that he is traveling by the scene of a fatal accident and that he is thankful he can see his girlfriend and other loved ones, unlike the people in the car.
- "We Will Become Silhouettes" by the Postal Service is about the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The titular silhouettes refer to the shadows left on concrete by the people vaporized in a nuclear explosion.
- Radiohead. "Let Down" = ethereal background, depressing lyrics about being "crushed like a bug on the ground"; "No Surprises" = lullaby-ish melodies, lyrics about suicide.
- The song Morning Bell was even considered by Thom Yorke himself to be extremely violent. The song is very calm, beautiful, and peaceful. But it has lyrics such as "Couldn't find the killer" and "Cut the kids in half''.
- Of course, the most obvious Radiohead example is You And Whose Army. The lyrics mostly consist of the narrator taunting someone else, with phrases like "Come on, come on. Come on if you think, come on if you think, you can take us on, you can take us on" and "You and whose army? You and your cronies?" However, the song is very mellow and gentle, with the melody played by quiet acoustic guitar, and sung in a downcast, defeated tone of voice. Hmmm.
- Coldplay's Viva la Vida has a upbeat melody, despite being a somber song about a king that was destroyed by his own people.
- "I'm Calm" from the musical A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.
- In a round of One Song to the Tune of Another on radio comedy show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, in which Tony Hawks was given The Smiths' Girlfriend In a Coma to sing to the tune of Tiptoe Through the Tulips. He made the rendition as upbeat and bouncy as possible, the result being hilarious. (This was reprised by Tim Brooke-Taylor in the live stage show.)
- Most rounds of One Song to the Tune of Another fit this trope, because it's funnier that way.
- "Windmill in Old Amsterdam" to the tune of "Land of Hope and Glory" is another memorable one.
- The flagship song for this trope would have to be anti-war song Billy Don't Be a Hero by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods. It has a cheery, Partridge Family-esque melody but is about a woman begging her fiance to just lay low once he gets to the front so he'll come home safe to her instead of doing something that will get him killed. Guess which venue Billy chose.
- An even stronger contender would be "Won't You Come over to My House?", best known from the famous short One Froggy Evening. If your memory's a bit hazy, here's the cartoon, and here are the full lyrics.
- Everyone remember that popular spring song from childhood "Ring around the Rosie"? The original song from England is said to be about the black plague. As the lyrics to the English version are
"Ring-o-ring-o-roses" — the rashes the victims would get.
"A pocket full of posies" — the people infected with the plague would smell bad so it was not uncommon for them to used scented oils and flowers to mask the smell.
"A-tishoo, A-tishoo" — Violent sneezing associated with the plague.
"We all fall down" — the victim dies.
- As discussed over at Ironic Nursery Tune, though, this is totally apocryphal.
- "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" is another nursery song that should be on here. A song in happy, happy 3/4 time about a man who's 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.
- Rock-a-bye baby the famous nursery rhyme also falls under this category. Just listen to lyrics closely and think about it.
- In fact a lot of nursery rhymes are quite violent in nature once you pay attention to the lyrics.
- This is probably because Mommy's REALLY tired when she sings them. I like to refer to them as "Mommy's Ready To Snap songs".
- This was lampshaded in "Good Night," the very fist 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 especially 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."
- She Hates me from Puddle Of Mudd a pretty upbeats song about disillusionment in a relationship
- "L'il Ark Angel" from Cats Dont Dance starts with Darla singing about the world being destroyed in a flood and people and animals drowning in exactly the same cheerful tone she later sings about the various animals she's rescuing. If you hadn't already realized she'd be the Big Bad of the film, it's hard to miss it after that.
- Soundgarden's "My Wave" is an example of in-song dissonance. The verses are basically an exhortation to do whatever you want ("if it feels alright"), and then the chorus suddenly switches out of nowhere to a fuck-off-leave-me-alone sentiment ("Don't come over here/Piss on my gate/Save it just keep it/off my wave"). The verses are anchored by a grungy heavy-metal riff, but as is Soundgarden's wont, the song takes a left-field twist with bright, psychedelic-influenced choruses and coda.
- Intaferon's "Steamhammer Sam" is an upbeat honkytonk/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..."
- Nellie McKay's song "Won't You Please B Nice" is a cheerful, perky love song being sung by a Yandere to the object of her deadly affection.
"If you would sit
Oh so close to me
That would be nice
Like it's supposed to be
If you don't, I'll slit your throat
So won't u please b nice?"
- Rihanna's "Take a Bow" is a scathingly sarcastic "screw you" to an ex wanting forgiveness...set to a touching piano arrangement. It's a little strange when Americas Best Dance Crew uses the chorus as its "goodbye" theme. The chorus sounds fine out of context—the only outright hurtful stuff is in the verses. Still, it's strange to hear them congratulating a crew on how far they've gotten when you know the lyrics in their entirety:
How about a round of applause?
Standing ovation.
You look so dumb right now
Standing outside my house
Trying to apologize, you're so ugly when you cry
Please.
Just cut it out
Don't tell me you're sorry, 'cause you're not
Baby when I know you're only sorry you got caught
But you put on quite a show
Really had me going
- By contast, her next single, "Disturbia", is an upbeat pop/dance number with lyrics about a descent into madness.
- "Detroit Rock City" by Kiss is an upbeat rock anthem about a fan who was killed in an auto wreck while driving to a concert.
- Keroro Gunsou plays with this a great deal. What sounds like funeral marches and burning courage is really about failing to do the household chores and the joys of building Gundam models.
- Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog- most of the songs in it, really.
It's a brand new day
And the sun is high
All the birds are singin'
That you're gonna die
- Or:
- And we can't forget "Everyone's A Hero" as sung by Nathan Fillion in full Large Ham mode:
Everyone's a hero in their own way
I'm poverty's new sheriff
And I'm bashing in the slums
A hero doesn't care if you're a bunch of scary, alcoholic bums!
- Flogging Molly's songs often turn out this way. Almost all of them are in major keys with happy, fast-paced fiddle or pipe tunes as the melody. A recurring theme lyrically, on the other hand, is grief for lost youth, lost love and/or the generally crappy lot in life of the Irish. See "Light of a Fading Star"; "Tomorrow Comes a Day Too Soon"; "My Sweet Roisin Dubh"; "The Rare Ould Times"; "Tobacco Island"; and "What's Left of the Flag". "Screaming at the Wailing Wall" is one of their few songs not about these things, but remains a chipper-tuned downer.
- The ending of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei called Absolute Beauty is about lover's suicide — set to a catchy tune with jazz-like instrumentals.
- "I Saw Her Again" by the Mamas & the Papas sounds pretty happy and light, but the lyrics...are about an affair that happened within the band.
- Pretty much everything ever written by Alkaline Trio who have monopolised the lyrically dissonant dark pop punk genre. And written some damn good lyrics while they're at it.
- 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."
- Black Sabbath's "NIB" subverts this — it starts off sounding awfully sinister for an apparent love song... but once you get to the lines that imply mind control and reveal that the singer's character is Lucifer, it all comes together.
- Every song by Andrew Jackson Jihad.
- "Spiderwebs" by No Doubt has a upbeat, catchy tune, but it's about a girl who keeps getting called by a guy so much that she has to screen her phone calls (sounds like a stalker to me).
- Real Life Writes The Song.
- "Castles Made of Sand" by Jimi Hendrix has a lively rock backing for lyrics that are a collection of separate stories about failures — an abusive boyfriend, a promising young man who dies in a war and a crippled girl who commits suicide by drowning.
- Similarly, his cover of "Hey Joe", a nice psychedelic song about a guy who kills his cheating girlfriend and flees to Mexico.
- U2 usually avoids this, but their song "A Day Without Me" is a rather cheery song about someone contemplating suicide.
- Country Joe and the Fish have the "Feel-like-I'm-fixing-to-die rag" which is an upbeat carnival-style pitch... about the Vietnam War with satirical lyrics to boot. It's considered one of the greatest satirical songs of the '60's.
- The Monkees' big hit, Last Train to Clarksville. Upbeat tune, guy wants to get together with his girlfriend... "and I don't know if I'm ever coming home": he's been drafted.
- Pleasant Valley Sunday is also a very upbeat song about the emptiness of modern (well, modern in the 1960s) suburbia: "And Mr. Green, he's so serene, he's got a TV in every room..."
- Chris Isaak's I Believe is about a guy who broke up with his girl, and is now kind of sad about it. (So what else is new.) The tune, however, is only one step removed from I'm Walkin' on Sunshine.
- The Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey" is pretty much about how we have to deal with all the depressing crap in our lives, but is set to a cheery, light tune.
- Kaizers Orchestra are extremly fond of this trope. Not too weird, considering that TOM WAITS are their biggest inspiration and all.
- The best example in the Kaizers song catalouge is probably "Tokyo Ice Til Clementine". The song is probably their poppiest song (almost veering into bubblegum territory) and has an irresisteble sing-along chorus. But the song itself is about a man who kills another guy because he took a look at his girlfriend.
- Min Kvite Russer seems to be a little cheery ditty about a man confessing his love to someone.In this case the "someone" is a bottle of white russian and he's actually lamenting about taking his own life.
- In the Elfen Lied manga, Lucy/Nyuu/Kaede starts singing "Elfenlied" in what is apparently a very sad voice. However, the lyrics are rather childish and innocent — a far cry from what's happening at that moment.
- David Bowie's Young Americans is a poppy, R&B type tune, with very cynical lyrics about American events.
- Almost every single one of the All American Rejects songs is upbeat. Almost every single one of their songs is about breakups.
- Streetlight Manifesto's "The Saddest Song" fits this. Entirely peppy, with lyrics along the lines of
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" (also by Streetlight Manifesto) is a upbeat and happy song about the singer's mother getting sick and dying.
- Eminem's "Superman" has a nice soft beat and sounds like a standard romance ballad and the lyrics lead you to believe that at first
Eminem: I know what you wanna hear...
'Cuz I know you want me baby I think I want you too...
Girl: I think I love you baby...
Eminem: I think I love you too...
I'm here to save you girl
Come be in shady's world
I wanna grow together
Let's let our love unfurl
You know you want me baby
You know I want you too
They call me Superman
I'm here to rescue you
I wanna save you girl
come be in Shady's world...
Girl: oh boy you drive me crazy...
Eminem: Bitch, you make me hurl
- Also includes such wonderful lines like
Superman aint savin shit, girl you can jump on shady's dick
Bitch if you died, wouldn't buy you life
But I do know one thing though
Bitches they come, they go/Saturday through sunday monday/Monday through sunday yo/Maybe i'll love you one day/Maybe we'll someday grow/Till then just sit your drunk ass on that fuckin runway hoe...
- And let's not forget "My Name Is", also by Eminem. It has an upbeat tune, and Eminem begins it in a friendly, somewhat silly voice...while talking about things like sticking nails through his eyelids and trying acid. Not to mention either stapling his teacher's nuts to a sheet of paper, or assaulting said teacher to get a better grade (depends if it's the clean version or the original).
- Big Fun's ''Handfull of Promises''. You think the poppy and catchy song these three dance and sing in the rain is a cheery one? Check out the lyrics, where a guy complains about how he didn't know better his ex-girlfriend was cheating on him... while everyone else knew but didn't tell him.
Should've been running
I know it sounds funny
I was such a fool
Cause I couldn't see it coming.
Just a handfull of promises
You gave me
A pocketfull of dreams
That just won't do
How can I go on
With nothing to live on
But a handfull of promises?
- 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.
- 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.
- The more recent "Bye Bye Beautiful" from Nightwish's Dark Passion Play is a somewhat more standard variation on the trope. Peppy, upbeat, and alternately talking about betrayal and slamming their old lead singer.
It's not the tree that forsakes the flower
But the flower that forsakes the tree
Someday I'll learn to love these scars
Still fresh from the red hot blade of your words
- It's worth noting the chorus lyrics: Did you ever hear what I told you?/Did you ever read what I wrote you?/Did you ever listen to what we played?/Did you ever let in what the world said?/Did we get this far just to feel your hate?/Did we play to become only pawns in the game?/How blind can you be, don't you see?/You chose the long road, but we'll be waiting.
- The well-known Australian folk song 'And the band played Waltzing Matilda', despite the cheery tone and happy lyrics at the start, is in fact a ferociously anti-war song, mercilessly attacking the Gallipolli campaign for its bloodyminded futility. And yet, it is often played on Anzac Day. Either nobody in charge noticed, or the man responsible for the setlist is a brilliant satirist.
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped to bury the slain
And as we buried ours
All the turks buried theirs
And we started all over again
- John Williamson's cover of it is even more so.
- ANZAC Day is just as much about the futility and tragedy of war as commemorating the Australian fighting spirit.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
That is the Ode of Remembrance, and it screams of tragedy to ME.
- 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 invert 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.
- "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret is an upbeat, inspirational song...used as a Nazi rallying cry.
- This song is, from the point of view of the people singing it, about how Our Side Is Gonna Win set to a fairly cheerful if slightly militaristic melody. It's no more lyrically dissonant than Over There and The Marines' Hymn.
- The Rolling Stones loved doing this. To cite two notorious examples:
- "Sympathy For The Devil" is an erudite, brooding meditation of the dark side of human nature, using 2,000 years of human history as a backdrop...set to a fun uptempo samba beat, complete with an infectious "woo woo" chant.
- "Brown Sugar" is a rousing rocker about, um, sexual exploitation of slaves in the pre-Civil War South.
- 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.
- Morrissey's "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" sounds romantic in a vaguely melancholic way, but even the title of the song alludes to the stalkerish nature of it. It is rather jarring if you've only heard the tune before in the vastly less sinister Bill Nye The Science Guy version.
- Wordof God says "Shiny Happy People" is about the Tiananmen Square massacre, and it's really from the point of view of the Chinese Government with a Stepford Smiler tone. Naturally, they failed miserably, but Michael Moore got the tone right in Fahrenheit 9/11 when the song was played to scenes of Bush shaking hands with the Saudis.
- I believe the song's name came from Chinese propaganda that called the Tiananmen Square massacre "Shiny happy people holding hands." Yeah.
- There is a Russian pop song by Natasha Korolyova, called "Malenkaya Strana" (The Little Country). Then somebody made a remix with different lyrics, and the song became "Yadernaya Voina" (The Nuclear War), about nukes, mutants, ash and death... sung in a little girl's voice to the same cutesy tune.
- "Skinned" by Blind Melon is an upbeat bluegrass-influenced number featuring banjo and kazoo from the perspective of Ed Gein, a serial killer infamous for fashioning furniture out of corpses ("I'll make a shoehorn out of your shin/ I'll make a lampshade of durable skin"). And of course their hit "No Rain" is so bouncy and mellow you might not even pick up on the fact that it's about depression; later they'd record a much slower arrangement called "No Rain (Ripped Away Version)" that effectively eliminated the lyrical dissonance aspect.
- Besides the aforementioned Tosca, how about the rather sweet lullaby Mariya sings at the end of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa? It would be quite beautiful if she wasn't A. completely mad, B. holding and rocking a dying man who she thinks is a child, who dies half-way through, and C. about to freeze to death. As it is, the scene's pretty good Nightmare Fuel.
- How has Garth Brooks' song "Papa Loved Mama" not made it on here? An upbeat country song that you could listen to on a good day... that's about a woman cheating on her trucker husband and his deadly revenge on her. "Papas rig was buried in the local motel/The desk clerk said he saw it all real clear/He never hit the brakes and he was shifting gears."..."Mama's in the graveyard/Papa's in the pen"
- Everything But The Girl's "Hatfield 1980," a catchy trip-hop tune about a girl living in a seedy neighborhood. The title refers to the first time she was mugged and stabbed on the way home, and presumably it's happened several more times since ("Hatfield, 1980, I've seen my first knife, my first ambulance ride"). Off the same album is "Downhill Racer," another more house-ish sounding song about a famous artist on the decline.
- The Carpenters' "Superstar" is clearly about a naive young girl running into the musician she had a fling with, only to have the musician not know who she is. Someone forgot to give Luther Vandross (and Ruben Stoddard) the memo.
- 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.
- Japanese rock band L'Arc~en~Ciel's song "Feeling Fine": while an upbeat song musically, a translation of the lyrics point that it is likely about a couple after a breakup.
- A-Ha's album Scoundrel Days had at least three HUGE lyrical dissonance 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.
- The album also has also a poppy, almost cute song named Maybe Maybe... about a messy break-up that reaches its peak when the female kills the male by hitting him with her Rover.
- And the first single that came out, I've been losing you. 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 French-Spanish group "Mano Negra" has a song named "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.
- Their singer Manu Chao later went as a solist, and maintained the disonance alive.
- 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
- To be fair, it does have a line that says "kill the guy with the ball", but thats the only line that really fits the style.
- To be doubly fair, "Kill the Man with the Ball" was a term we used to use for a particular drill from (American-style) football practice, to give people likely to be ball carriers a chance to work on their broken-field running abilities.
- 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".
- The song 'House of Fun' by Madness was a jolly upbeat song about trying to buy condoms for the first time.
- And what's not jolly and upbeat about that?
- A more accurate example is Cardiac Arrest; major key, saxophones, xylophones and lyrics that seem humorous until you realise the songs is about Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- 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.
- Though not exactly lyrical, this falls under "style" dissonance. Sounds like circus music, huh? Wrong; that's AdolfHitler's favorite march and theme music.
- 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.
- 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 atleast 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.
- Bouncy stalker song "Jenny (867-5309)". Subverted in Zayra Alvarez's cover on Rockstar: Supernova, where she made the creepiness explicit, bringing the performance into the headspace of the lyrics.
- Ween, anyone? One of the funnier examples is "Up On The Hill," which is essentially a Satanist gospel song — complete with Cream-esque reprise.
- So, you have this catchy funk-metal song. What do you do? If you answered "write lyrics about standing in the shower, thinking and pissing yourself", congratulations, you're Perry Farrell.
- 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.
- "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!
- Macross Frontier has one as an in-show Executive Meddling — Ranka's sweet, soothing love song "Aimo", set to a lullaby-like tune, the only thing that she remembers from her past, has had its lyrics rewritten by her manager Grace O'Connor. She managed to make it a victory anthem — one more step to The Reveal, and certainly not a good thing in context.
- Its opening, Triangular, also qualifies, as it's a cheery upbeat J-Pop song with a lyrics about (quite obviously) a Love Triangle and all the uncertainities it brings.
- 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.
- "Wonderful" by Everclear is, both by title and music, a funky, happy song — but the words describe the absolutely heartbreaking thought process of a child whose parents are breaking up:
I don't want to meet your friends
And I don't want to start over again
I just want my life to be the same, just like it used to be
Some days I hate everything
Everyone and everything
Please don't tell me everything is wonderful now
- Everclear seems to do this sort of thing quite often. "Father Of Mine" is about a father who abuses his wife and abandons his child, but you'd never guess it from the tune alone.
- "Amphetamine" is an upbeat song about a depressed addict in California ("Yeah, you just take your pill, and everything will be alright").
- "Blood Religion" by Gamma Ray is a song about a vampire. It starts out with dark sounding music while Kai Hansen sings about his soul being in Hell for eternity. Then he screams "Yeah! Bite me!" and the music becomes upbeat (for metal) and catchy, but the lyrics are still creepy, if pretty cheesy. When performed live, it ends with an audience sing-along about "screaming for blood red vengeance."
- 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.
- "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 here continue to complain.
- "A Good Idea" by Sugar is an uptempo pop-rock song about a man drowning his girlfriend in a river, seemingly at her own request. Made even creepier when the lyrics jump from third person to first person for the last verse, and the narrator, who claims to have witnessed it all, cryptically confesses "sometimes I'm best left alone, and sometimes I see you in the water at night". It's performed in a similar style to the Pixies' "Debaser", and might even be an homage to that band's fondness for the trope.
- "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.
- 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:
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
Why is the bedroom so cold turned away on your side?
Is my timing that flawed, our respect run so dry?
Yet there's still this appeal that we've kept through our lives
Love, love will tear us apart again
Do you cry out in your sleep, all my failings exposed?
Get a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold
Is it something so good just can't function no more?
When love, love will tear us apart again
- Even their name is a bit of a joke. In the novel, The House of Dolls by Yehiel De-Nur, joy divisions were groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps who were kept to sexually service Nazi guards.
- Some other wonderful numbers include "Isolation", a nice little bouncy synthpop song about the singer hating himself, and "Transmission", which seems upbeat and nice... until you look at the lyrics closely.
- The Killers write lots of bright-sounding tunes... with lyrics that may or may not match that tone. "Mr. Brightside" sounds like the name implies... but the lyrics are about a guy watching as the girl he likes is getting ready to sleep with another man. As a more recent example, "Spaceman" is an awfully cheery tune for a song about an alien abduction.
- The French punk song "Manu Chao" by Les Wampas sounds like a happy, upbeat, Ramones-like punk song. Then you look up a translation of the lyrics, and find it's a song lamenting that the members aren't rich, especially compared to certain other French "punk" artists.
- 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.
- To clarify, 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.
- Speaking of Regina Spektor, her song "Two Birds" could also count. It may sound upbeat, even cute, until you realize it's describing a relationship wherein one person seems to be afraid of commitment and continuously lies/makes excuses. What's more heartbreaking is that the other is oblivious to the lies and promises to never leave the other. The only thing keeping it from being a total downer is the last line, "One tries to fly away, and the other..." which implies that he might "fly away" too, but the outcome is never known.
- 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
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.]]
- "Just Dance", by Lady Gaga. It has an upbeat, really catchy, really danceable sound. The narrator of the song is a woman in a club who is so completely and totally disoriented with drunkenness that she can't see straight, or remember where she is. Later in the song, she gets hit on by (and possibly, has casual sex with) a sleezy-sounding guy.
- "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".
- 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.
- 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 Patrón, 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
- The Argentinian band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs has explored this trope with the song "Matador" (prominently featured in the closing credits to Grosse Pointe Blank), which is a very danceable song about political assassinations in Latin America.
- Before that, they released "Mal Bicho", who is another danceable song who is 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 a effeminate dancing Hitler as the torturer.
- A "lighter" example is El Satánico Dr. Cadillac, a danceable and rhythmic song where the narrator laments how an old friend fucked up his own life.
- "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.
- 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.
- Motley Crue's You're All I Need. A sensitive, slow metal ballad, which tells the endearing story of a young man and his girlfriend... and how he murders her out of jealousy. "Laid out cold, now we're both alone, but killing you helped me keep you at home."
- "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 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
- 'Crash Into Me' by Dave Mathews Band. It sounds like a beautiful, southern-style acoustic love song, but according to Dave Mathews the narrator is either a peeping Tom, a fifteen-year old boy having a sexual fantasy, or both.
- Aozora from AIR is a rare inversion; the song is probably one of the most distressing melodies ever composed, but the lyrics are all happy and uplifting. If you read the lyrics and never heard the song, you would never suspect that it's used during the infamous "GOAL" scene in which Misuzu dies.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- "Domino Dancing" by the Pet Shop Boys. It's about AIDS. Yeah.
- 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
- Queen's "We Are The Champions" has always had a very dirge-like cadence to me. For me, the song is about fighting a fight that cannot be won, and suffering heavy casualties.
- I'd call it your opinion, but actually, Freddie did actually refer to it as something similar what you were saying.
- Very clever song. Subtle but telling is the last rendition of the title phrase in each chorus as a mocking 'na-na na-na-na...' (as in 'I'm the king of the cas-tle...').
- 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.
- "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"
- Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" seems at first to be a love story (slightly drawn out and oddly described, but never mind) but changes fairly suddenly from the singer promising to "love you to the end of time" to regretting that promise ("so now I'm praying for the end of time...").
- Specifically, it's about a teenage boy cajoling his girl to have sex with him, with her only promising to do so if he stays with her forever. The last verse, quite upbeat and high tempo, is the two some time later realizing what a mistake that was.
- 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
- 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."
- 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; "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; and many more.
- [2] "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.
- Jumping Jack Flash is a song by the Rolling Stones about how the singer's life was terrible, such as losing his parents and instead being raised by "a toothless bearded hag", but that it's "all right now". Now listen to it in Elite Beat Agents.
- Amanda Palmer (of the Dresden Dolls) released "Oasis" as the first single off her solo album. It's a happy bouncy hi-energy crowd-singy little number about... uh... rape, abortions and backstabby friends. Oh, and writing a letter to a certain British band...
- Palmer pointed out her blog that the Lyrical Dissonance is a big part of what makes it offensive, and if she were to sing the same words to a slow mournful tune it probably wouldn't have been banned from the radio.
- The video is even better.
- 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.
- Franz Ferdinand's bouncy hit "Take Me Out" is based on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
- And "The Fallen" is a rather chaotic song about the second coming of Christ, and how he would be lower middle class.
- "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!)
- "I Am a Rock" by Simon And Garfunkel sounds upbeat, but is about a recluse locking himself away.
- "The Boxer" is also up there in terms of this trope. The "Lai-la-lai!" in the chorus just adds to it.
- "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.
- Venezuelan Ska band Desorden Público lives and breathes this trope, but where shows more is in their 1997 album "Plomo Revienta" (slang who would -rougly- translate as "buttload of gunshots"), which is an long view on how dangerous is living in Caracas (violence, crime, governmental indolence, bad love life...), and the perpetual alert state the city inhabitants live on because of it. All in the form of bouncy ska songs. The most memorable is "Allá Cayó", 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 a innocent high schooler killed by a lost bullet during a gang battle. The last verse is in a funeral, with a mother loudly crying for her dead boy, but we don't know whose mother is this. The chorus it's so catchy you don't realize until later how cruel and detached 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...
- 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.
- 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..."
- Green Day's "Good Riddance/Time of Your Life" is an absolutely vicious breakup song, with a gentle guitar rhythm going on in the background. It was actually written by the lead vocalist/guitarist when he and his girlfriend broke up. The 'Good Riddance' part was added to the title when the situation became even worse.
- Another Green Day song, "Misery", has an upbeat tune, but as the title suggests it's about misery.
- Green Day's Having A Blast is a catchy pop song about blowing up one's neighbors.
- Imogen 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?
- 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?
- R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" is an insanely upbeat and cheery song about, well, the end of the world.
- Stipe's lyrics are usually laden with irony somewhere: "The One I Love" seems to be a straightforward rock love song, except for the fact that the lover in question is referred to constantly as "A simple prop / To occupy my time", replaced in the final verse with "Another prop".
- "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" is an upbeat song dealing with suicide.
- The Supremes 'Baby Love'. Gorgeous melody, beautiful production, lovingly sung by Diana Ross, with lyrics that are basically about an abusive relationship.
- An interesting inversion of the usual pattern happens with Skillet's "Whispers in the Dark" which is ostensibly supposed to be about how God is always watching you and protecting you. However, the tone of the song and lyrics such as "My love is an all consuming fire" make it sound more like a stalker than an uplifting religious song. Someone clearly missed something...
- 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.
- "Further" by VNV Nation is an incredibly catchy and uplifting song... about how nothing we've ever done will make the slightest bit of difference because we all die in the end.
- Several VNV Nation songs fall under this trope. "Genesis" attacks Man's dependence on God and the Old World desire to claim things in God's name, all while sampling a reading of the book of Genesis by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission over a happy trance progression.
- In an inversion, "Fragments" features positive lyrics about a glorious future, set to an abrasive and menacing industrial dance track.
- 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"
- LA punk band X's song "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" sounds cheerful (and is certainly catchy), but the lyrics (and the title) show that the song is actually a protest song seething with irony and sarcasm towards the atmosphere of fear and anxiety in the Reagan years.
- "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.
- 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.
- 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 UK. The melody and rhythm wouldn't seem out of place in a walk on the beach at sundown.
- "EVERYONE HAS AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS!" Etcetera.
- 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.
- "Schlaflied" by the German band Die Ärzte might qualify. It starts out all mellow and soothing and sweet and cute. Unfortunately, it's about an Eldritch Abomination that comes to you in the night, gouges out your eyes, rips out your throat and drinks your blood.
- 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?"
- The Crowing: "God bless the hour that holds your fall, I will kill you all."
- The Velorium Camper III: Al The Killer: "When I kill her, I'll have her...Die white girls, die white girls."
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni's both opening themes fit. While the first one does use Mood Dissonance, it's a generally cheery song about an Ax Crazy protagonist luring his friends to the woods to
play be killed. The second one is about trying to cheer up the main character, who is stuck in a Fate Worse Than Death where she and her friends go Ax Crazy again and again.
- You really thought "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" (the actual name of the first series' opening song) was generally cheerful?! It starts off sounding like a demonic African chant, and then the horribly dissonant bass riff kicks up...
- On that note, you thought the second season's opening was cheerful? Are you missing the point of both songs? Presumably you are missing the symbolism of the first song.
- A few of the character songs are like this, too. Have you ever heard the translation for "Futari no Birthday"?
- The other songs are usually subversions of this though. Nano Desu stays very fitting for the tune (and especially the character) the whole way through, while Nii-Nii Suki does have Satako slip into depression that doesn't fit the tune in a few spots, only to have her forcefully pull herself out. One scene in particular has her say how much she misses Satoshi, at which point the background music stops until she turns cheerful again.
- The first of Ludwig/Germany's two image songs in Axis Powers Hetalia has a song that sounds rather scary, but it's really just about sausages and beer.
- His version of the ending song as well. Especially scary after hearing the original version by Italy.
- Jethro Tull's famous song Aqualung from the eponymous has a catchy, upbeat tune, after a catchy, though less-upbeat, introduction. It's about a pedophilic hobo with creepy, raspy breath that sounds like scuba gear. It also happens to be probably their most famous song of all time. Everyone is horrified when they first hear what the lyrics actually are.
Sitting on a park bench
Eying little girls with bad intent
[lecherous sniggering]
- 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.
- 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. 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 Mondauy" is about the suicide of Ian Curtis.
- 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.
- 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.
- Lemon Demon's 'Atomic Copper Claw' is a hyper song is sung by a paranoid person who believes he's being stalked by someone wanting to kill him, with the instrument the song is named after hiding under his long sleeves.
- Lemon Demon does this a lot. A few other examples:
- 'Dead Sea Monkeys,' a cheerful, upbeat song about... dead sea monkeys.
- 'Gonna Dig Up Alec Guinness,' 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 to you put him out of his misery by skipping the track.
- 'Eyewishes,' a catchy rock song with a great guitar riff about committing suicide.
- 'I Know Your Name,' a catchy surfer-rock melody about an insane man who accosts random people and burns down a supermarket.
- 'Action Movie Hero Boy,' a song about a dynamite-obsessed moron who blows himself up.
- '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."
- '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.
- 'Bill Watterson,' a song about stalking Bill Watterson.
- MichaelJackson's "Smooth Criminal" is an upbeat song with a nice rhythm and a cool video, about a woman being murdered in her apartment by a criminal she was in a relationship with.
- The lines "Annie are you okay" and "mouth to mouth resuscitation" sound like they're talking to a "Resusci-Anne" CPR training dummy. And of course, she's not okay, she's dead.
- 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 disonance, but the 1970s game show 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.
- J Pop singer Utada had a song called "Hotel Lobby" that kinda runs into this trope. The melody is kinda upbeat, but when you listen to the lyrics, it's all about a prostitute and how much her life sucks. Yay.
- 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.
- "Last Kiss" only has one version (the Pearl Jam cover) that wasn't upbeat... despite the fact that the song is about teenagers dying in auto accidents.
- "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.
- Sting's "Love is Stronger than Justice" sounds like it's about The Power Of Love, and the chorus leans that way too - but in the verses you're treated to vigilantism, polygamy, and siblicide. (Specifically, the seven brothers fight some bandits in return for brides, but there's only one girl for them to marry; they all marry her, then the narrator murders the other six)
- '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.
- 'Ai Senshi' from Mobile Suit Gundam does this very intentionally. It sounds like an uplifting, inspiring song, but the 'Ai' means 'Sorrowful', and the uplifting music is accompanied about lyrics about a soldier's fear of the 'blazing God of Death', and his survivor's guilt, and finally, asking about if those left behind by the dead will give up their lives too...
- The song Godzilla by the Blue Oyster Cult certainly counts. It's got a rather upbeat tune, but the lyrics are about the titular giant monster destroying Tokyo as people flee in terror.
- The French song Gentiment je t'immole sounds like a soft ballad, until you listen to the lyrics, which include things like 'you scream like a whore, your skin comes off'
- 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").
- "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd. There are some who think of it as a great song about rebelling against teachers, while it is a part of the story of how the author went mad, how everything was 'just another brick in the wall.'
- ...except Another Brick in the Wall pt. 2 IS about rebelling against teachers. In context of the album, it's just another thing that helped the main character (Pink Floyd) to build the "wall" that isolated him from reality. In the context of the song, there's no real dissonance - WYSIWYG.
- Better example might be the cover album, "Rebuild the Wall" by Luther Wright and the Wrongs. All the content of the original album, but twice as fast and with country accents.
- "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.
- Shakira's Estoy Aquí fits. This lighthearted, poppish tune fools many English-speaking listeners into thinking that it's a happy song... that is, until they look up the translation and discover that it's actually... an incredibly sad break-up song.
- She used to do some of those during her early career. From the same album, "Pies Descalzos" is a direct complain about moral hypocrisy, and "Se quiere, se mata" music is too upbeat for a song about an aborting teenager.
- Europe's "The Final Countdown" is a very upbeat pop/rock song about... well, less upbeat things.
- "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.
- "Enola Gay" by OMD is a bouncy electropop dancefloor filler, with an incredibly catchy synth hook - and lyrics about the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, in case the title wasn't a giveaway.
- "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.
- "1985" by Bowling for Soup. An upbeat song that is actually about a girl who was a teenager in 1985, and the big plans she had never came to pass, certainly not the 80s tribute the video makes it out to be.
- on a similar note, their song "99 Biker Friends", the catchiest song about abusive boyfriends ever (though the end of the song has the singer planning on attacking the abuser, with the help of chuck norris, 50 cent, the A-team, and obscure 80s hair band Danger Danger)
- "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- "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."
- 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.
- 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"...
- France Gall and Serge Gainsbourg's "Les sucettes" is NOT a song about a girl who like's lollipops.
- 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 Pháidín is a pretty fun song about petty jealousy, then you get to the fourth verse: "May you break your legs, Páidín'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.
- 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!)
- PDA by Interpol has this written throughout the song. It's a cheery song about a psychopathic rapist/killer running a hotel who goes to jail after raping one of his tenants
- 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."
- Stroke 9's catchy 'Little Black Backpack.' I think I'm gonna bash his head in!
- This Vocaloid Kaito song sounds sweet and happy, assuming you ignore the title; even the look on Kaito's face is joyous! Then read the lyrics. Despite that, it's becoming a fan favorite for being so hilarious.
- 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.
- Tom Jone's "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
- A lot of the remixes in The Idolm@ster are like this, most notably the remix of My Best Friend, which is a song about having a close friendship with a person the singer has a crush on put to deathmetal.
- 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!"
- P!nk (or 'Pink', if you prefer) has a bouncy, upbeat Top 40 song all over the radio now. It's called "Please Don't Leave Me". Wait, it gets worse. The song is about a violently abusive relationship - as sung from the point of view of the abuser.
you're my perfect little punching bag...
- Band On The Run by Wings is a perky, cheerful song... about a rock band who were imprisoned for some unstated reason (though one verse implies that the reason might be robbery) and have escaped. It's thus also an example of Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- 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.
- Dream Theater has utilized the "death growl" vocal effect exactly once: on A Nightmare To Remember, it occurs after the HAPPIEST part of the story where it is revealed that everyone survived a car accident. This part is, for some strange reason, very angrily shouted.
It's a miracle he lived
It's a blessing no one died
By the grace of God above
Everyone survived
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAHHHHH!
- Weezer did this quite a bit back in the 90s. One example is No One Else, a catchy pop song about an obsessive, controlling boyfriend. Another is Devotion, a lovely Beach Boys-esque love song about a girl the guy doesn't really love - he's just falling back on her because he can't have the girl he wants.
You never gave up devotion
Waiting for me, you'll always be my girlfriend
I, too, am waiting for you
I'll always be your friend
- What about the more recent Beverly Hills? It's a snazzy tune with a heavy amount of synth for a pop song, but the lyrics seem to be about a guy who feels out of place in Beverly Hills and sarcastically comments on his situation.
No I don't
I'm just a no-class beat down fool
And I will always be that way
I might as well enjoy my life
And watch the stars play
- Paper Planes by MIA seems pretty cheery going by the tune, but the lyrics seem to be sung from the point of view of a violent, drug-addled gangster.
- Ironically, the position is supported by the artist. It appears to be a typical "hustle" song about the artist's illegal operations and monetary gains. It's really about inner-city taxi drivers who have to drive annoying people around in violent areas, but all they really care about is the fare.
- And the tune is sampled from "Straight To Hell" by The Clash, who, as noted way, way, further up on the page, use this trope a lot (the aformentioned song is another example).
- The lyrics of many songs of the German band Blutjungs are a good example of Lyrical Dissonance unless you are a sick, sick person. The music of their songs is happy-sounding upbeat stuff while their lyrics are about killing children with poisoned candy on playgrounds, shooting your 15-year-old pregnant ex with a shotgun, eating the flesh off drowned bodies, brutally beating a skater to a horrible death because he made you drop your beer, slowly killing an elderly lady just to inherit her Porsche convertible, etc.
- Metro Station's "Shake It" is a nu-wave rocker that at first sounds like it's about dancing, but a closer listen reveals the lyrics are really about Intercourse With You.
- Beck's "Girl" is a happy tune that sounds like it is about summer love, but is actually probably about a sniper tracking his next victim.
- The Birthday Massacre's Looking Glass, which is a cheery and up beat song about schoolgirls being raped by their teacher.
- Similarly, their song Happy Birthday is a bright number about—you guessed it—a birthday massacre, containing lyrics like: I think my friend said, "Stick it in the back of her head"/I think my friend said, "Two of them are sisters"/"I'm a murder tramp, birthday boy," I think I said/"I'm gonna bash them in, bash them in," I think he said.
- Blue swings wildly around, music-wise- it begins with heavy bass and some strange high notes, before turning into a bright song with Chibi singing sweetly about how she appears to have been stood up by someone... until the song moves into the chorus and she starts the demonic growling.
- Video Kid sounds sweet, but it appears to be sung by a woman who uses men, breaks their hearts and ditches them.
- And then there's Kill The Lights, which is about how people never really live Happily Ever After, but that it's important that they pretend to because the truth would drive them to suicide.
- And Nevermind, which is a catchy dance song about an intoxicated party girl being raped.
- To Die For is an epic song that is about a relationship that's falling apart.
- And Under The Stairs, a sweet song which is about someone who has been abused and is planning to get revenge on their tormentor, possibly by committing suicide.
- The song Goodnight may also fall under this trope. It sounds fairly upbeat while having negative-sounding lyrics. The video suggests it's about an illicit relationship between a teacher and student.
- Wait... what video?
- I think the above post is confusing Goodnight with Looking Glass (see above).
- Play Dead sounds like the narrator is attempting to convince someone to run away with her. All good and fine, until she gets to the line 'I'll cast you a spell/a magic where everyone plays dead forever/ and after tonight/ they'll never remind you.' Which doesn't sound so good.
- Falling Down appears to be about an abusive ex partner/ ex friend and their various faults.
- Red Stars sounds quite rockish, and is about stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own (the chorus) while the verses are a lament about how education today is going to hell.
- Horror Show sounds vaguely peppy, but whoever TBM are talking about do not sound nice at all.
- It's about self-absorbed teenagers who "have everything" but still insist that "they're sick and all alone," with the singer lamenting that "they will never look the same."
- "Sister" a rather unknown song by Prince (Yes, that Prince) would fall well into this category. A catchy, upbeat, sugary pop song about a 14 year old boy being molested by his middle aged sister.
- 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.
- 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."
- Dir en grey's song "embryo". While sounding like a perfectly tender ballad with a warming chorus, 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.
- 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.
- Tarantula by the Smashing Pumpkins: a dark song about being in love.
- "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.
- "Guchi" by Nakamura Ataru sounds like a traditional Japanese folk ballad, but it's about people complaining and the singer being extremely fed up.
- "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.
- "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 fuck me like an animal!"-factor.
- "Down In The Park" by Gary Numan. A poppy and light song with nice warm synth pads. And it's about a dystopian future where the robots have taken over and kill and rape human beings on a regular basis.
- "I hate to ask, but Are Friends Electric? Mine's broke down, and now I've no one to love".
- "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 revel in (and the music video for the song is Nightmare Fuel Unleaded ).
- "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.
- "Cup of Coffee" by Garbage. By the sound of it, it's a soft song about a couple breaking up, nothing out of the ordinary. Until the lyrics show that the singer is completely obsessed with their ex, and stare in their window at night, have stopped eating, wished they were never born, etc, etc.
- 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.
- Julio Jarmillo is an Ecuadorian "pasillo" performer who has a wonderfull song called "Bodas Negras" it doesn't starts happy, but as the music advances it gets more cheerfull. It's a wonderfull love song to dance with...Except when you realize it talks about a guy that pulls out his ex-lovers skelleton out of the grave and dances, kisses it and finally marries it.
- The Reign of Kindo song "Breathe Again" is a very soothing soft rock song... until you listen closely and realize three verses in that it's about a father who takes revenge on a man who broke into his house on Christmas Eve and stole the presents. It's hard to relax to a song when the singer swears that he "won't stop tearing him limb from limb [so] he'll never breathe again". It ends with him dumping the thief's body in the river and gaining immense relief from the murder.
- The song "Inori" ("prayer"), a character song from the anime Hunter X Hunter, sounds cheerful and even triumphant...but if you read the translation of the lyrics—well, it starts with "A smile stolen from the eyes I watched / That distant night when blood was shed...". And the refrain's mention of "bringing home the flame-colored eyes" is a lot squickier if you know from the anime that said eyes are entirely literal. Oh, and the the prayer from the the title? That he'd never stop being angry.
- Everybody's Got Aids by the Canadian Ska Band Me, Mom, & Morgentaler definitely fits this trope, for relatively obvious reasons.
- To a degree, all of the songs by Peter Chiykowski... except "Rock, Paper, Cynic" and "Sansregret", which are instrumental. As of September 2009, we've got the awesome
- "Raising Cain", a melancholy, saxophone-heavy ditty whose message is basically, "we've got nothing to do, so let's go out and party",
- "The Black Ship Batrachian", another sad tune with lyrics about the freedom that the people who live on the titular ship have,
- "One Shell, Two Shell", a war-protest song about Mario Kart,
- "Zombie Apocalypse Blues": It's hilarious, but at the end the singer gets eaten by zombies, which, in case you hadn't noticed, is creepy, and
- "A Love Song For the Post-Apocalypse", which is a happy song that just happens to be set in a post-apocalyptal world.
- 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".
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Dance Dance Revolution: The song "Destiny", a 160-BPM Eurobeat-style tune, with very sad lyrics, eg "You were my destiny, I was clearly for eternity, something came and took you away from me".
- Similarly, "Broken My Heart".
- At first, "Sweet Sweet Magic" sounds like a typical happy hardcore tune, but when it gets to the bridge, the lyrics turn darker and sadder.
- Brian Mcknight's "Back at One": "4: Repeat steps one through three, 5: make you fall in love with me, if ever I believe my work is done, I start back at one". Which means he will never get her to fall in love with him.
- Eurobeat Lovers' "Yozora no Muko" (Over The Time) is a fast, bouncy, Engrish Eurobeat Remake of a sorrowful J-Pop ballad. By the same guys who did the Eurobeat cover of Hot Limit, although the translation is somewhat better.
- Bob Dylan uses this from time to time. The most famous instance, however, is "Like a Rolling Stone," in which happy (or at least happy-ish) and bright music contrasts with Dylan's incredibly cynical tirade against a girl who finds herself on the street after living a life of privilege. Please note that this is often considered the best rock song of all time.
- And there is also "Tangled Up in Blue", which is one of his happiest, catchiest tunes, although the lyrics tell the story of a breakup.
- 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.
- Kimi no Kioku, the credits music from Persona 3, is an upbeat J-Pop song about the death of a friend.
Because you protected this ephemerally floating world by your own hand
Now simply fold your wings and sleep restfully
Be wrapped up in an eternal tranquility, and love through all eternity
- 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.
- Listen to Fumaza by Los Pinguos. Doesn't it just make you want to dance? Read this translation of the lyrics. Doesn't it just make you want to cry?
- "Attack of the Giant Ants," by Blondie. Lyrics concerning humanity being wiped out by a Horde Of Alien Locusts? Check. Upbeat salsa/pop melody? Check. Enough said.
- 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 Corrs have more than a few, including:
- Give Me A Reason, is about a relationship that was ended and the dumpee has no clue as to why.
- All In A Day, an intense song about how bad someone's life can get in one day.
- 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".
- Some stuff by The Specials counts. Notably, we have Hey Little Rich Girl, which has a fast and upbeat accompaniment but describes the titular rich girl finding herself completely out of her depth when she moves to London and becoming a prostitute and adult movie star.
- 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 power pop song that's actually a Take That directed at a former manager, who left them stranded in France during a tour.
- "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.
- Another inversion: Ten Masked Men cover pop songs in death metal style as a joke and so practically live off this trope. Despite the humourous intent, some of their covers are surprisingly good.
- Sunscreem - Looking At You. Bright, major-keyed, Europop tune about being haunted to death by the images of an ex-lover:
Still I try
To get by
But i know I'll di-i-ie
Looking at you
- Hello Project shuffle group SALT 5 released only one song, GET UP RAPPER, which is obviously a rap song. However, the lyrics are about such things as eating potato chips and being sexy.
- 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).
- This Is Spinal Tap had fun with this one while parodying some of the more overblown conventions of the Heavy Metal genre.
- "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" seems to be a fairly straightforward parody of sexually-charged, self-promoting Rock and Roll anthems directed at adoring female fans; until you realize it's talking specifically about pre-pubescent female fans.
- At one point in the film, guitarist Nigel Tufnel plays a short piano piece. It's a hauntingly beautiful excerpt from a trilogy he's composing in D-minor, "The saddest of all keys", inspired by his love of Mendelsson and Bach. The name of this melancholy tune? Lick My Love Pump.
- In a deleted scene (available on the DVD), after the breakup of Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins discusses his long-time desire to create an classic, upbeat-style musical a la ''Oliver!'' titled Saucy Jack; based on the life of Jack The Ripper.
- "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."
- Don "It Means I Never Have To Work Again" McLean's "Primetime". The music sounds pretty upbeat. The lyrics...
We had to burn the city 'cause they wouldn't agree
That things go better with democracy
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