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Lyrical Dissonance
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...

''So with sadness in my heart
Feel the best thing I could do
Is end it all and leave forever
What's done is done, it feels so bad
What once was happy, now is sad
I'll never love again, my world is ending...''

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 a gorgeously beautiful Te Deum. 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-F is your friend.

Examples

  • 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.
    • Ben Gibbard loves this trope. In between writing TearJerkers and ObsessionSongs, he writes songs like "No Sunlight" from Narrow Stairs, a beach tune type song about losing you innocence as you grow up...
      With every year,
      That came to pass,
      More clouds appeared,
      'Til the sky went black.
      And there was no sunlight,
      No sunlight anymore.
    • or "The Sound of Settling", a cheery indie pop crowd song about being unable to say what you really mean to people.
    • Which is seen as hilarious and silly by some fans, but Your Mileage May Vary
  • 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.
    • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "Don't Fear The Reaper". Somber but fast music, lyrics about not fearing death because death is inevitable and fearing it is unnatural.
  • Many songs by Steely Dan are good examples of this trope. (Examples: "Peg," "My Old School," "Reeling 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.
    • 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").
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Ryoko also sings an upbeat, inspiring song called COOL EDITION.
  • "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.
    • 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.
    • "Synchronicity II" sounds like a pretty typically energetic '80s pop ditty, but the lyrics are about a dysfunctional family (insane/senile grandmother, depressed mom, dad working a job he hates and kids caught in the middle), along with environmental pollution and an otherwise-unidentified "something" that emerges from "a dark Scottish lake."
      "Every single meeting with his so-called superior
      Is a humiliating kick in the crotch"
      "Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
      Contestants in a suicidal race."
    • "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...
    • "I Can't Stand Losing You" is catchy and cheerful— and about a guy who's planning to commit spiteful suicide after a breakup.
    • 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™".
  • "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.
  • 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."
      • Please, those lyrics are tame. Have you forgotten near the end?
        "I wanna bathe you
        In holy water
        I wanna kill you
        Upon the altar"?
  • 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.)
    • This troper wouldn't call "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" or "She's A Rejecter" upbeat, but yeah, point made.
  • 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 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.
  • They Might Be Giants have countless songs like this, including (Wild Mass Guessing ahoy!):
    • "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.
    • "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.
      • The song itself is about a pessimist telling his daughter how crappy the world is.
    • "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
    • 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 Linnell sings about the death of "countless screaming Argonauts".
      • Not quite. The verse in question is referring to the titular personified nightlight admiring a picture of a lighthouse, suggesting that it's not bright enough to do that job, and if it tried, it would have resulted in the crashing of Jason's ship. It's... pretty silly.
    • 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.
    • 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.
      • Probably slightly more comedic as it's from one of thier childern's albums.
    • "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.
  • 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 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 final verse of "I Remember Larry" is another contender, with 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...
      "Baby, are you in the mood for a little romance
      Well, for starters I could pour some chocolate pudding down your pants
      And then attach electrodes to your brain and watch you dance
      Well, golly, wouldn't that be fun \\
  • "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.
    • "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.
  • 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!
  • 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.
    • 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. This editor rather likes the dissonant version better.
  • "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...
    • The music video lampshades the lampshade. In it, everything is all bright and perky and cheery as Lily goes skipping along— at least until she's out of range, when everything reverts to its normal twisted self.
    • Quite a few of Lily Allen's songs are like that. "Smile" is about a girl getting revenge on her boyfriend, "Alfie" is about her brother doing drugs...
      • Perhaps most disturbingly, "The Fear" seems to contain references to her miscarriage.
    • "Not Fair" is a rather upbeat, country-style song about how she is in a relationship with a man who is quite nice but unable to satisfy her sexually.
  • "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...)
  • 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.
  • 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.
      “We’re make our home on the water /we’ll build our walls aluminum/ we’ll fill our mouths with cinnamon.”
    • 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.'
      • The Decemberists use this all the time. Another notable example is their song "You'll Not Feel the Drowning." It 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
      • This troper always thought that one song in particular was unrelated to "The Landlord's Daughter" (which is pretty damn upbeat and danceable for a song about raping a rich girl at swordpoint) but was about a young sailor being reassured by an older one. The elder tells him basically to relax, to forget his parents and his sweetheart, because they don't care, and if he's afraid to die, to simply curl up and go to sleep, because then he, well, won't feel it if he drowns. On another note, "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.
    "This one is for the ladies! Rape me / Rape me, my friend..."
  • 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.
  • "Bleed it Out" by Linkin Park has a uptempo beat and catchy groove to it featuring uplifting rapping during the verses. About suicide and self mutilation as a method getting attention for one's problems. Including opening wounds, blowing your head off and using grenades. They often use dark themes in their music, but it's usually not so catchy.
    • I'm fairly sure this song is actually about the proccess of songwriting; it's metaphorical. That's why the lyrics directly reference the chorus, among other things.
  • "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.
  • 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.
  • Used by the Tool song "Die Eier Von Satan" ("The Eggs of Satan"), a song whose heavy industrial guitar grinding and angry german vocals makes it sound like it would fit right into a German Satanist heavy rocker Nazi rally... The lyrics turn out to be a recipe for hash cookies. Without eggs.
    • Additionally, "Die Eier Von Satan" can also mean "The Balls of Satan", which obscures the true meaning even more.
  • 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.
    • This troper thinks it's more a case of thematic dissonance rather than lyrical. The lyrics are still pretty hardcore, because apparently when you're Dethklok, "I hate you" means "I love you" and "Many years ago, something grew inside of your mother...that thing was YOU!" means "Happy birthday!"
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • The folks at Newgrounds gave us this nifty disturbing video.
    • The Beatles song "Lady Madonna" is an incredibly cheery song...about a family so poor they don't even know how they're going to pay for the food they need.
      • The singer does know how momma is paying the bills. She's turning tricks. And it definitely fits the trope.
    • Another Beatles song: "Run For Your Life" is a happy, peppy tune whose lyrics are, in essence, "BITCH IMA CUT YOU IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME!"
      • The opening line of "Run For Your Life" ("I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man") is taken verbatim from Elvis Presley's "Baby Let's Play House". Not only is that song also a peppy rockabilly number, but the rest of the lyrics just focus on the narrator wanting the girl to get back together with him, with no other implied threats, so that one line kind of comes from out of nowhere.
    • The original "Day Tripper" (try listening to the Type O Negative cover, and you'll see).
      "Got a good reason
      For taking the easy way out
      Got a good reason
      For taking the easy way out, yeah..."
    • "Eleanor Rigby" — this song has been done in so many musical moods that some of them must be technically wrong.
    • "Misery" is a cheerful, bouncy song about a guy who's deeply depressed because his girlfriend dumped him.
    • "I'll Follow the Sun" is a break-up song set to a sweet, upbeat melody. "Someday you'll know I was the one..."
    • "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" is another one about a guy who's just been dumped, but this one has been drinking and is now out looking for his ex to tell her that he still loves her.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Oku Sen Man ("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.
  • When this editor first heard Pikmin's "Ai no Uta" (Song of Love), he thought it was just 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. That they don't ask for Olimar's love in return puts this song in a whole new light for this editor.
    • 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.
  • 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. Still, this troper is of the opinion that this only makes the song better.
    • Considering that the chorus says that the “savior” is “Faster than a lazer bullet/Louder than an atom bomb/Chromium plated boiling metal/Brighter than a thousand suns”, I don’t think he’s a savior at all. The rest of the lyrics can be found here
    • What about the "With Mankind resurrected/Forever to survive" bit?
    • Clearly, the titular Painkiller only came to Earth to have fun and blow shit up, and only happened to destroy mankind's mysterious enemy by mistake.
  • 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!
    • Lampshaded in "It Sucks To Be Me":
      Christmas Eve: Why you all so happy? [sic]
      Nicky: Because our lives suck!
  • 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.
  • Del Amitri much?
    • A friend of this troper's, who has had to endure years of listening to Del Amitri songs in the car with me and random "listen to this" prompts online, only just now realized they don't have any proper boy-gets-girl songs. I can't help but wonder what he used to think "Sleep Instead of Teardrops" or "Might As Well Be You" were originally about...
  • 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."
    • This editor had always heard that the song was about Freddie Mercury coming out, which made him wonder what on Earth Coca-Cola was thinking when they used it for a Diet Coke ad a few years back.
      • The song was written by John Deacon. It wasn't about coming out of the closet.
    • It recently struck this troper as she was listening to a Queen album, that the song "Fat-Bottomed Girls" is about preferring fat prostitutes over other women. Yes, this actually came as a surprise.
      • Worse, it's about preferring fat women due to the singer being abused by his fat nanny when young O_o
    • Or one of this troper's favorites " '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.
  • The jaunty, upbeat Red Dwarf theme: "It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, I'm all alone, more or less..."
  • "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.
    • Are you kidding? My Chemical Romance could dominate this examples section if we let them. They are made of this trope. "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 this troper has never 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.
  • 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.
    • 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 H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has created a pair of CD collections of holiday music with the lyrics replaced by references to a wide variety of 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 atlest the music is suitably creepy.
      • This troper absolutely loves these songs (as well as lyrical dissonance in general) and likes to replace the normal christmas song CD with "Scary Solstice" and se how long it takes until people notice (usually very long as nobody actually listens to the songs)
      • 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.
  • cali=gari. All of it. This troper was especially freaked out by 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."
    • "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.
  • 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. This troper can't exactly remember why, but a good example would be "Moving Out (Anthony's Song)", in which a lot of people work hard and die. At least to this troper's understanding.
    • Working hard, yes. Dying, not so much—it's more along the lines of 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.
      • This troper heard that "She's Always A Woman To Me" was supposedly written about his mother. Which... doesn't help, really.
      • Joel has stated that "She's Always a Woman" is about his first wife. You might be thinking of "Rosalinda's Eyes".
    • The troper always thought "Piano Man" was a cheery ditty (the harmonica helps a lot), until actually listening to the lyrics properly, whereby it appears to be a song about miserable patrons in a bar. Sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who is himself unhappy with his job, but is able to give the customers a distraction from their unfulfilled dreams.
    • "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.
  • "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.
  • "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow. This upbeat song talks about how a bartender named Tony fell in love with a showgirl named Lola while working at the Copacabana night club. One night Tony is shot trying to defend her from a pervert. She becomes an alcoholic from depression.
    • For some reason, the recent remake has the last line of the chorus stay the same instead of it becoming more depressing with every repetition.
  • In the video game Mother 3, the "Love Theme of Mother 3" is a touching and sweet tune played for the first time just after Flint discovers his wife Hinawa has died, and he remembers the times he's spent with her. It continues to play as he lashes out at the others in town in his grief, and he's knocked out and thrown in jail for the night to cool down.
  • 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".
  • 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.
  • No one has yet to mention Danial Powter's "Bad Day"? It 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.
    • The key to understanding this song, as this troper explained it to a friend: whenever the singer says "Allo? Allo?", he's calling his girlfriend and she's not answering.
    • 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. This troper liked the music, but now has trouble listening to it knowing the actual meaning.
    • Aside from the inherent weirdness of Flaming Lips songs, didn't the words "Pompeii" and "Gotterdammerung" imply some sort of less-than-optimistic meaning to you?
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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!
  • 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.
    • This troper was under the impression that it was a metaphor for Chris Martin's dissatisfaction with fame and specifically things like the British tabloids (as he and Gwyneth are notoriously press-shy).
  • "I'm Calm" from the musical A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.
  • This troper recalls a round of One Song to the Tune of Another (it would take too long to explain) on radio comedy show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, 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.
  • 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.
    • This Troper heard a different version for the "A-tishoo" lines. He grew up knowing it as "ashes" and was told that that was because they had to burn the bodies so that no one else would catch it from them. Still fits.
    • 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".
    • "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
    • I disagree... that one turns darn close to metal. Though, this one...
      "Here lies everything
      The world I wanted at my feet
      My victory's complete
      So hail to the king..."
  • 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, in this troper's opinion, 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.
  • 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.
    • "Mann Mot Mann" (Man On Man) are a good example here. The song is characterized by a catchy and upbeat melody that almost veers into "bubblegum" territory, but the song itself is about a whorehouse where you "can get everything you want". Kinky.
    • 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.
  • 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.
      • This (Australian) Troper would like to say that, for him at least, that 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 a Nazi rallying cry.
  • 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 was rather jarring to this troper, who'd 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.
  • 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" comes to this troper's mind. 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 dissonsnce cases
    • The eponymous song has an energetic, rock-ish beat. Its lyrics talk about a madman who slashes his wrists open, has severe hallucinations and finally throws himself off a cliff in front of his neighbors.
    • The album also has also a poppy, almost cute song named Maybe Maybe... with lyrics 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.
  • 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.
  • How has the Stone Temple Pilots song "Sour Girl" not been mentioned yet? It 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.
  • This troper thought that 'Young Hearts' by Candi Station was a song celebrating the joys of being young; until he read them and discovered it was about a woman trapped at home with children whilst her husband is out philandering.A
  • 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.
  • Copacabana. The recent remake is sanitized a little...emphasis on "little."
  • 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.
  • Don McLean's "American Pie". Srsly. Maybe not on the surface, but once you find out what the lyrics really mean it's impossible to associate that song with anything happy ever again. "The day the music died" doesn't even begin to describe it.
    Oh, and there we were all in one place,
    A generation lost in space
    With no time left to start again.
    So come on: Jack be nimble, Jack be quick!
    Jack flash sat on a candlestick
    'Cause fire is the devil's only friend.
    Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
    My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
    No angel born in Hell
    Could break that Satan's spell.
    And as the flames climbed high into the night
    To light the sacrificial rite,
    I saw Satan laughing with delight
    The day the music died!
    • To go into more detail, many view the song as a description of the important events in rock and roll and American history up to the point when the song was written. For instance, the above verse almost certainly describes the Altamont concert, where a young man was killed (the "sacrificial rite") by Hell's Angels who had been hired for security ("no angel born in Hell"). If this interpretation is correct, "Satan's spell" refers to the song "Sympathy for the Devil," which was claimed in the popular media to have incited some of the concert goers to violence.
    • The title itself is a reference to February 3, 1959, the day musicians Buddy Holly, Giles "Big Bopper" Richardson, Jr. and Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash.
    • Word Of God is that most of the Fanon song meanings are false, and that we'd all be disappointed if we knew what it was actually written about.
  • "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.
    • Factor in the line near the end "Carved upon my stone / My body lies, but still I roam," and the song sounds like it refers to a restless ghost.
  • This Troper isn't sure if Band Aid's world-hunger-awareness-raising anthem "Do They Know It's Christmas?" qualifies... 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.
  • Really? No one's even mentioned bouncy stalker song "Jenny (867-5309)"? Subverted, I guess, 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.
    • Upbeat and catchy? This troper already thought the song was one of the most depressing things ever made before she learnt english.
  • 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." This troper has no idea what to make of the "oh yeah, love me" at the end, other than that Kai Hansen is really weird.
  • 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.
  • "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 Carribean 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.
  • 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.
  • Pretty much any song by Maroon Five qualifies. For instance "Wake Up Call" is happy, upbeat sounding song about a man catching his girl in bed with another man, then killing the man.
    • But "Makes Me Wonder" takes it to a completely different level. On the surface, it sounds like an upbeat Breakup Song, with the guy questioning why he'd ever fallen in love with the girl in the first place—and the first verse makes it almost certain that it is, at least partially, exactly that. But look a little harder at some of the later lyrics:
    Feels so good to be bad
    Not worth the aftermath, after that
    After that
    Try to get you back

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

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

  • "Just Dance", by Lady Gaga. It has an upbeat, really catchy, really danceable sound, indeed it's been all over this troper's local top 40 station recently. 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
    Added bonus: The video was done in a super-kiddy sorta way, about the band being the first on the moon. Except the Cardigans beat them to it.
  • The 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.
  • "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?
  • 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. (This Troper always figured that "Me and Julio" were teenage gay boyfriends; TOW indicates that Simon would probably agree but never explicitly decided what they were up to.)
    • This Troper would disagree about 'You Can Call Me Al' which he has always seen as an essentially optimistic and autobiographical song about Paul Simon's own redemption. (He is suffering from a broken marriage to Carrie Fisher and declining album sales, until he visits South Africa 'A street in a third world' and is revitalised to use South African Music in Graceland).
  • 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.")
  • 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".
  • "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, Freddy 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:
    • "Kanashimi Warai" ("sad Laughter"), an upbeat, vaguely inspiraitonal-sounding song about laughing to try to get over failed relationships.
    • "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/Adultery") is an upbeat, bouncy pop ditty about an affair that ends up discovered and subsequently falls apart.
  • "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 (the musical style remains the same, hence this troper didn't realise the first time he heard it) 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.
  • [1] "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...
  • Nobody's going to mention 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.
  • 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..."
  • How is it that Green Day's "Good Riddance/Time of Your Life" has not been mentioned? It's an absolutely vicious breakup song, with a gentle guitar rhythm going on in the background.
    • Or it could be about a very sarcastic Take That to fans who abandoned them because they went mainstream. Different interpretation, same result.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Mirah's "Archipelago" is one of the most beautiful songs this troper has ever heard, and it's a bloody depressing breakup song. Thanks for that.
  • "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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Artze 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."
  • 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 playbe 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.
    • 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.
  • Inversion: 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 would be an inversion 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]
    • The song directly after it on the same album, Cross-Eyed Mary, is about a little girl who actively seeks out pedophiles like Aqualung. After a minute-long flute introduction, slides rockily into a growling, proto-metal tune that is possibly the most rock-out-inducing tune in the band's repertoire.
      Laughing in the playground
      Gets no kicks from little boys
      Would rather make it with a leching grey
      Or maybe her attention
      Is drawn by Aqualung
      Who watches through the railings as they play
  • 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 there 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.
  • Don't Try Suicide by Queen is an awfully upbeat sounding song, considering the subject matter.
  • 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?
  • 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 this troper to relax.
  • 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.
  • The Cure and their song, "Pictures of You." This troper listened to it and found the music great, then she looked up the lyrics... And the lyrics are sad.
  • 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 band The Boy Least Likely To is a master at this, combining delicate, sweet pop melodies and twee instrumentation with dark themes.
  • 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.
  • Duffy's "Mercy" is an upbeat pop song (probably her most famous), where the whole idea is basically Intercourse With You and, although this troper loves the song, the lyrics tend to unnerve me quite a bit, especially the repeated line, "You got me beggin' you for mercy/Why don't you release me?"
  • Not really creepy, persay, 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 in this tropers opinion, 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.
  • What..."Last Kiss" isn't on this page? This troper has only heard one version (the Pearl Jam cover) that wasn't upbeat...despite the fact that the song is about teenagers dying in auto accidents.
  • "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.
  • "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.
  • "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 serial killer who targets women.
  • 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 "TH Ei DOLM@STER Idolmaster" remixes are like this, most notably the remix of My Best Friend, which is about having a close friendship with a person the singer has a crush on.
  • 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.

Lounge Lizard
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