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Soundtrack Dissonance
Asuka: Shinji, you suck.
Shinji: Yeah? Well, let's see how you feel after I strangle you. Cue the light, happy jazz-pop!
— Toastyfrog's End of Evangelion: Thumbnail Theatre

So you're a big-time Hollywood director. (Congrats on that, by the way.) You've got a dynamite action movie you're about to start shooting. It won't win you an Oscar, but hey, you've got two of those, and any way, your mortgage payments are becoming somewhat uncomfortable.

Keanu Reeves has signed on to be your hero/messiah figure, and Seth Green will be the annoying/lovable comic relief. Best of all, Scarlett Johansson has signed on to be the love interest. She won't do the simulated sex scene on page 42 of the script, but she's OK with frequent scenes in swimming pools.

There's just one problem: the movie is supposed to end with a bloody firefight, and your stupid conscience is acting up again. You went to the NYU film school, dammit, you can't just have 13 minutes of blood and bullets.

But wait. What if you overlay the horrific carnage with beautiful music? Then, you're not indulging your audience's bloodlust, you're making a deep philosophical point about the duality of human nature. What says, "Mankind is both glorious and murderous" better than a faceless mook getting shot in the head at close range while Schubert's "Ave Maria" plays in the background?

You're taking advantage of a tactic used countless times over the years to heighten the sadness of a scene. Your dissonant music doesn't have to be played over a violent scene, of course. Happy, upbeat music at a funeral of a beloved character can also work. It can be used to excellent effect, especially if the song is somewhat silly, but if you use "Ave Maria" (Schubert's version or Gounod's version) or Ode To Joy, you'll almost certainly degenerate into What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic territory of the most generic kind. Handel's "Messiah", too.

Pretty much any anime with a happy Ending Theme will achieve this trope with its first serious Cliff Hanger, intentionally or otherwise. Same for a happy Opening Theme and any stressful teaser.

A subtrope of Mood Dissonance. Compare Lyrical Dissonance.

Examples

What A Wonderful World
  • Almost no TV program or film has ever used Louis Armstrong's version of "What A Wonderful World" as anything but a cruel, mocking, and bitterly ironic counterpoint to the horrific action on screen.
    • Most egregious use: Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, which uses both Louis Armstrong's and Joey Ramone's versions.
    • Second most egregious use: Played by Adrian Cronauer, as portrayed by Robin Williams, on his radio show in Good Morning Vietnam; the song runs over a montage of troops fighting in the field, officers at base looking reflective, and a village being carpet bombed.
    • Third most egregious use: The trailer for the film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. "What a wonderful..." Kablam!!!
      • Hitchhiker's has a long history of abusing "What a Wonderful World." It replaced "Journey of the Sorcerer" as the music over the credits at the end of the first radio series, where Ford and Arthur, displaced in time, wonder at how beautiful the prehistoric Earth is, conscious that it'll be gone in two million years. The same scene appears in the TV adaptation, shifting into a readout on the Guide, floating through space, to explicitly remind us that in the show's "present", the Earth is destroyed.
    • Even anime gets in on the act here. The Whole Episode Flashback exploring Meia's tragic Back Story in the first season of Vandread featured this song extensively. Then they subvert Soundtrack Dissonance by playing it completely straight at the end of the episode. Turns out, it really is A Wonderful World.
    • The Fan Vid "Satchmo's Lie" combined "What a Wonderful World" and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
    • Not even animated family films are immune. Madagascar uses it when Alex runs away after realizing that he might eat his friends. To hammer the point home, the others see a progression of cute little animals get eaten while the song plays. Wonderful world indeed.
    • Spitting Image used a parody version called "We've Ruined the World", sung by a weeping puppet caricature of Armstrong. The lyrics would fit the original tune, but for legal reasons the show was forced to use a different one.
    • 12 Monkeys used the song extensively to highlight the beauty of the soon-to-be-ruined world.
  • Exceptions:
    • An episode of Moonlighting focused on the unborn child of Dave and Maddie being prepared for birth by his guardian angel. When asked why he should ever leave the womb for the big scary outside, the angel shows him a completely straight "Wonderful World" montage of all the good things to look forward to in life.
    • Used straight at the end of Madeline.
    • Was used as the first Opening Theme to Family Matters.
    • A TV ad for Ratchet And Clank: Future Tools of Destruction had it playing while Ratchet is blasting the crap out of some Space Invaders as a bunch more are coming. Though, given the actual game, this is something that you do take lightly, so it's actually kinda appropriate.
    • As mentioned above, Vandread both subverted it and played it straight.
    • Used straight in "What is and What Should Never Be", Supernatural, when Dean is mowing for the first time in his life with a dorkily joyful look on his face.
    • Scrubs presents an odd example in "My Butterfly". The first half of the episode had been a series of things going wrong, ending in a patient's death and time resetting itself. Near the end, a montage to this song underscores that this time, all those things have gone right... and then the patient dies anyway. However, it is an exception since the music only plays until the depressing part kicks in, then suddenly stops.
    • An instrumental version is played during the birthday party for Mr. Parrish in Meet Joe Black. Parrish knows that he is going to die this evening but he has had a good, meaningful life and he spends his last hours with friends and family and the party is grand, the evening lovely... It's a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.

Yakety Sax
  • Watch anything at all with "Yakety Sax" by Boots Randolph playing in the background. Gorefests, rape scenes, 9/11 footage, Armageddon; doesn't matter. I dare you not to laugh.
    • Don't forget, the video in question must be sped up to at least 200% while keeping the music at normal speed. This is a law. Otherwise, Benny Hill will appear in your room and punch you in the balls. It doesn't matter if you're female. They'll be there when he punches you. And they won't go away...
  • Behold, the BennyHillifier! Just type any You Tube ID (the part following v=) into the box.

Anime
  • As Stellar dies in Shinn's arms in Gundam SEED Destiny, the typical happy, semi-romantic country music end theme starts up, growing more upbeat as Shinn begins sobbing, and cutting to the credits just as Shinn lets loose a rather convincing scream of pure, inarticulate rage and grief. The credits, of course, are shown over a pleasant, pastoral scene apparently depicting an Elseworld where everyone in the cast is alive and together with loved ones... This writer cried. Profusely.
    • The lyrics to the song themselves qualify as Lyrical Dissonance; the climax goes "Is it really okay?/It's never going to be".
    • Also note that the climactic arc of the series was prefaced by the mind-boggling new opening song: The Earth, Wind & Fire-inspired "Wings of Words."
  • Similarly, an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion ends on a blood-curdling shriek of horror, desperation, no small amount of fury... and promptly cuts, as every episode does, into a cover version of "Fly Me To The Moon." The effect is disastrous, but intentionally so: The ending music was always rather out of place, and becomes ever more ironic as the show turns darker.
    • Special mention goes to the scene where Asuka gets mind raped by an angel with the Hallelujah chorus playing in the background.
    • The fourth movement to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony plays while Kaworu begs Shinji to crush him. Whatever relevance the lyrics may have to Shinji's fighting on behalf of all mankind, they are anything but applicable to Shinji himself.
    • Then there's Komm, Süßer Tod's use in The Movie, another example of Soundtrack Dissonance using a song with Lyrical Dissonance.
    • You know what? Let's just say that any song with lyrics qualifies.
  • One of the original Bubblegum Crisis OVA episodes closes out at a graveyard, with a wide shot of many gravestones and mourners... then immediately kicks in the upbeat '80s anime pop music. Not quite putting The Fun In Funeral, but...
    • BGC is a repeat offender. In fact, whenever you hear some upbeat song, something dramatic is gonna happen. Just look at the scene where Priss' friend was killed and she's gearing up for some serious ass-kicking... despite the Knight Sabers explicit ban on personal revenge. Other Sabers show up just in time to make it a team mission.
  • Bokurano's second closing theme has a fairly upbeat sound with depressing lyrics, while the animation that goes with it depicts most of the dead or soon to be dead kids smiling, holding hands amongst the stars.
  • In Divergence Eve, the series is extremely creepy and dramatic, and sometimes the episodes end with horrible, horrible scenes... yet the end credits are an incredibly peppy J-Pop tune to pictures of the main character in incredibly Fanservicey outfits and revealing poses. It's akin to replacing the ending credits of Schindler's List with The Powerpuff Girls.
  • The Soul Society arc episodes of Bleach features the main characters being stabbed, cut up and bloodied. Then the credits are fun scenes with the song "Happy People".
    • Even more jarring example from earlier in the same arc: One episode ends with Momo, Captain Aizen's lieutenant, seeing Aizen's impaled corpse stuck to a building, and the last line in the episode is her screaming his name at the top of her lungs. Cut to the closing credits, set to a peppy, upbeat tune. Each of the credit reels for that song featured a different pair of shinigami; this one uses the dead guy and the person who was screaming ten seconds ago...
    • The 13th ending theme is the happy-sounding "Tane wo Maku Hibi", a song whose video shows Ichigo's family happily frolicking. Except that ending starts off the Hueco Mundo arc, which may well be the most violent one yet.
    • It keeps on rolling with ending 14, "Kansha", where the singer is singing about how thankful he is for his friends, and whose video is happy. Still the same arc.
  • At the end of the film Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, Rock blows up the Ziggurat as Kenichi struggles to save the power-dizzy Tima. Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Lovin' You" plays instead of sound effects. This editor wept. Her father did, too. This clip is from the Spanish dub, but it'll give you the picture.
    • The original Japanese version of the film (with English Dub) can be found here for those curious. It also bears mentioning that, while the mood of the song is an excellent example of the trope, the song may also be somewhat applicable under Lyrical Dissonance, as Ray Charles is cheerfully describing that he has decided to refuse to move on, and will instead live in an escapist fantasy in lieu of reality: interesting, considering that both of the antagonists in the movie are motivated primarily by a refusal to let go of people they love, but don't/can't love them back. Which only makes the final effect of the trope more pronounced.
  • In another Tezuka example, the 1980s Astro Boy anime had a few moments like this. The scene where Atlas first appears after his upgrade & massacres a squad of policemen is set to a rather upbeat, almost triumphant piece of classical music, probably to symbolize Atlas' view of himself as a hero, defending robotkind from the evils of humanity.
  • Variation: The non-canonical and deliberately poorly animated Omake of the .hack series, .hack//GIFT, plays the anime's dramatic and haunting music during scenes of slap-stick comedy.
  • As Mai-HiME has an overly optimistic and light-hearted opening, as well as the practice of ending nearly every episode either with a Cliff Hanger or at least on the most dramatic note, it just begs for Soundtrack Dissonance. Add the show's fondness for The Teaser, and you know the drill. A character is shown to have been quite unambiguously stomped into the dirt and rolled over with a road-roller; there are multiple battles between former friends going all over the place, and there has just been an explosion somewhere. Cut to the opening credits, with its shots of the blue sky with seagulls, characters glomping each other and smiling, and most unbearably, the upbeat "Shining Days". Aaah!
  • When Kafuka Fuura of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei offers her ridiculously positive point of view on a decidedly dismal situation, the negative imagery is accompanied by her serene theme or other cheerful music. For example, her memories of her mother's demonic possession are paired with an upbeat accordion waltz.
  • Elfen Lied also has a rather upbeat ending theme and a tendency to end episodes on a Cliff Hanger, or at least by showing us something unpleasant, and cue upbeat j-pop song. The naked, fetal-positioned Lucy/Nyu doesn't make it any less disconcerting at all.
  • While the openings and endings in Death Note fit the mood of the series, a clear example of Soundtrack Dissonance appears in one episode, where Misa walks through Tokyo singing gently, with the lyrics in sharp contrast to the continuous shots of people dying from her writing their names down.
  • Downer Endings sometimes get a separate Ending Theme just to avoid this, but when they don't... well, if knowing about the upcoming sequel series didn't spoil the effect of Futari Wa Pretty Cure's Downer Ending for you, the sudden cut to "LET'S GO! GET YOU! L! O! V! E! LOVE! LOVE! GET YOU!" probably did.
  • The light, happy bubblegum J-pop tune "Ai No Tenshi" underscores the gruesome carnage in Perfect Blue.
  • Despite its gradual progression into more depressing territory, Code Geass manages to avert this trope. By the time most of the sadder episodes hit, the Ending Theme is a slow song with sad but hopeful lyrics.
    • It seems to fall into it at the season finale, where they play the peppy, upbeat original opening theme as an ending, but the director has said that the song is meant to be encouraging for the protagonist. Additionally, after the credits is a scene where the Mysterious Waif gives a hopeful soliloquy as an insert song that matches her mood plays in the background.
      • The current opening theme is basically mocking Lelouch at this point, with cheery music and lyrics explaining how "kindness can't heal everything" and how "everything is light/bright/fabulous" playing over images of all the characters on both sides dancing about happily, with smiles on their faces: including several loved characters who have either betrayed and now hate Lelouch, as well as one cheerful looking unrepentant murderer... or are currently dead. Yeah, "everything is bright" indeed.
  • Mai-Otome follows the above examples, yet at the same time subverts it. The series' major Wham Episode ends with Erstin dead, Nina deranged, Arika angry, and an explosion appearing over Garderobe. The Ending Theme plays its "Mellow Version". That is to say the beginning of the song is slower and more melancholy...then goes right into the usual pop music and continues with Arika running across a field of stars.
  • In Cowboy Bebop, the seamless blending of Jazz and sci-fi action-drama elements was the entire premise of the anime.
  • In Welcome To The NHK, the main character goes on a wild, disturbing hallucinatory fantasy with his neighbor blasting a sickeningly cute anime theme song in the background. Eventually the vocals alone accompany his visions, with an effect similar to an Ironic Nursery Rhyme.
  • Neither of Sailor Moon's opening songs go well with the seasons' final episodes, which are always dark. Especially disturbing in episodes that have a recap of some dramatic event before the opening sequence. Eyecatchers also provide a similar effect, particularly in Sailor Stars.
    • In fact, many Magical Girl anime series with typical love-themed soundtracks suffer from this when it comes to the multi-episode final fights. Tokyo Mew Mew, with its two extremely cheerful theme songs, is a good example. Pretear, while cutting the opening theme in the final two episodes, keeps the ending — in episode 12, it comes up right after Sasame sacrifices himself to save Takako, and even though it is slower than the opening, it still doesn't fit the mood.
    • I'd disagree with "Sailor Star Song" not matching the final episodes of Sailor Stars. If Sailor Moon didn't remain optimistic in the face of chaos, she'd cease to be Sailor Moon.
  • Black Lagoon puts "The World of Midnight", a beautifully sung ballade, right on top of the fade-out of a scene where a young boy has just bled to death on the ground after having had his hand shot off. The song is reused during the ending credits just after his sister is shot in the head on-screen, killing her in an an almost as gruesome a manner. The fact doesn't get better by the fact that, considering just how badly they had been messed up by what they had lived through, this was probably the best thing that could happen to them.
  • Eureka Seven has this, too, cutting to the happy, upbeat Fly Away immediately after Renton brutally slaughters an army of enemy units, only realising that he had been killing human beings when he discovers a bloody, severed arm stuck to his mech's fist.
    • A bloody, severed arm with a wedding ring on its finger.
  • The English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh GX suffers from this with it's opening theme. The happy rock song about school and card games may have worked in the first season, but in the third season when characters are trapped in another world and are 'being sent to the stars' almost every episode, the opening jars so much.
    • There is also the Fourth Season duel between Yami and Weevil in the Japansese version where heroic music starts playing as Yami wins. One problem. Yami is using his monster to beat the everlasting Shit out of Weavil again and again even after Weevil's life points have hit zero in revenge for playing a cruel prank on him'.
  • Narutaru has one of the more unsettling instances of this trope in the opening. The song is an upbeat tune, played to a variety of images that looked drawn by little kids. It seems cute enough. Then watch the first few episodes. The cute opening suddenly becomes a major point of Mood Whiplash...
    • You think comparing the OP to the first few episodes is bad? Try comparing it to the last few, which place such events as Hiroko's kidnapping into frightening context. Or even worse, compare the OP to later volumes of the original manga...
    • This Troper found the intro and the dissonance it created to be the best thing about the whole anime.
  • Steam Detectives has Amazing Grace play during particularly poignant scenes where somebody falls from a high place, speaks their last, or an epic fight at the top of someplace high.
  • So far down the list, without mention of Super Dimension Fortress Macross? In The Movie, Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love, the entire final battle is set to the titular song, a soft and melodic love ballad supposedly taken from the ruins of a Protoculture outpost discovered by the Macross. It is one of the most iconic scenes in anime history, contrasting the message of the song with images of space warfare, swarms of beams and missiles flying everywhere, and, more particularly, Hikaru's final assault into Boddol Zer's inner sanctum. On the one hand, all of this drives home how the allied forces are fighting for the survival of "culture" —that is, the unique feelings and emotions that can create such a song in the first place— but then the audience is treated to a man being beheaded messily and graphically by falling debris, and the dissonance sets in.
    • Macross Frontier also uses the titular song from the movie in slow ballad form — for an inverted purpose, sung by Ranka Lee under the influence of Grace O'Connor to counteract Sheryl Nome and turn the Vajra back against the Frontier fleet. This results in the perception of betrayal on the part of the protagonists and causes classic Macross Wholesale RedShirt Slaughter. Later in the battle after Ranka is freed, the song comes up again in quick form as one of the many mixed with Lion ... not to mention how nearly every song in every Macross series has to do with love somehow, and are often used as backdrops and/or weapons in combat.
  • In one of the last episodes of Black Cat, Saya's song is played over scenes of Creed being abused as a child.
  • Keroro Gunsou subverts this with most of its opening and ending songs. While they may sound like martial anthems and typical shounen pop, the lyrics are usually about failing at household chores and being lazy. The sheer upbeat attitude shoots it right into What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome.
  • Averted in Full Metal Alchemist. Most of the songs attached to the ending credits are really cheery. When Hughes dies, his funeral and the appropriate dirge are played instead.
    • There is Bratja though. This beautiful quiet music, whose lyrics are partly sung by a choral of children, is almost always played during a scene of massive destruction. But the lyrics (in Russian) are completely in harmony with the events of the anime.
  • In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Kamina's death at the end of episode eight suddenly cuts to the quite upbeat closing song.
  • Detective Conan likes to occasionally end episodes with people sobbing with regret for their actions... and then launches right into the lighthearted rock ending song.
  • Arguably, the second Strawberry Panic ED. Just as the series is taking a turn for the dramatic the original ED is replaced by a very happy go lucky song filled with Les Yay overtones in which the singers are two dimensional paper dolls in several colourful settings. At one point the contrast is nothing short of appalling, after Nagisa breaks down crying in a very emotional moment the episode comes to an end with her sobbing and then Extreme Sugariness follows.
  • Simoun has a light-hearted accordion piece that likes to play every single time that the titular lesbian-powered airplanes draw a particularly effective Ri Maajon in the sky. This normally wouldn't be so bad except that, since they're at war, the prayers are usually "BLOW THE S*** UP NOW." Also, they played it when one of the main characters (a teenager girl) is busy cutting the cold dead fingers of an enemy pilot loose from her simoun, which he had died trying to hijack. He even apologized to them beforehand, and was shown to have a sympathetic background. Hell the main character got blood in her eye and yelled at her even younger partner to hide while she was cutting the dude's fingers off.
  • The Starship Troopers OVA mixes peppy, cheesy 80's music with two separate bar brawls, amongst other things.
  • The opening song of Xamd Lost Memories involves a heavy rock song descriptively titled "Shut up and Explode" accompanying many explosions, while implying that the series is all about fighting monsters with the power of xam'd. The series itself is pretty melancholy, and focuses much more on setting and characters than combat.
  • Played with in Darker Than Black. "Now i lose it i know i can kill" intro sounds relaxing and almost "glamour", as characters are obviously "Card Carrying Villain" posers pretending they don't give a damn even when they are obviously concerned. But "romantic" outro after DtB action looks like minefield covered with flowers.
  • Scrapped Princess keeps the same upbeat sound for the commercial break bumpers as the series itself becomes more and more serious/dramatic — by about 2/3 of the way through, This Troper 's anime club would go into uncontrollable laughter at the sheer inappropriateness whenever it played.
  • In its original version, the first Digimon movie set a fight scene between kaiju to the tune of Boléro, a ballet piece.
  • The opening theme of Mahoromatic has your sweet music and female vocalist typical of a seinen series. The dissonance comes when it intersperses scenes of chibi Mahoro doing maid stuff and cast shots of her happy friends, with scenes of her dodging missiles and blasting stuff with her big fraggin' pistol.

Film
  • Lampshaded twice in Shaun Of The Dead, as the jukebox in the pub starts up and plays an unwanted song at the worst possible moment — a depressing love song as the protagonist ponders the loss of his girlfriend, and more germanely, Queen's chirpy "Don't Stop Me Now" as the characters are under deadly threat. The characters take note both times.
  • This seems to be fairly common in older live-action Japanese movies as well. The Japanese version of Godzilla 1985 features the cheesy pop song "I Was Afraid To Love You" over footage of Godzilla thrashing the hell out of Tokyo.
    • An even more egregious example can be found in The Legend of the Dinosaurs, which has an equally inane love song playing over the film's climax, which involves the film's heroes being burned to death by molten lava.
  • At the end of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, the doomsday switches have been flipped and mushroom clouds are erupting, all to the tune of the optimistic "We'll Meet Again." This was no accident; the entire movie is satire, so why not the closing montage?
    • Plus, "We'll Meet Again" was often played to boost morale during World War II, and this sequence demonstrates that things won't be quite the same during World War III.
    • Though the fact it's about soldiers going off to war and hoping to see their loved ones again when about 14 million soldiers died on the Allied side, where do you think they'll meet?
  • Quest for Camelot overlays a terrifying chase scene with the soft, loving voice of Celine Dion singing "The Prayer". It was this editor's instant impression that someone had decided that the chase scene with appropriate music would be too scary for the little ones.
    • Since when is Celine Dion not scary?
  • There are two instances of this in the fourth Harry Potter movie: first in the Forbidden Forest, when Harry's friends sing the cheerful Hogwarts school song in the background while an ominous BG score plays and Harry discovers the body of Barty Crouch, Sr. The scene is recalled later after Harry returns from the Little Hangleton graveyard and the scene of Voldemort's return to the sound of a cheering Hogwarts crowd and the band playing the school song.
  • Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs has two such instances: the use of "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel for the infamous scene where Mr. Blonde tortures a cop, and the use of Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" in the closing credits immediately following the bloody finale where just about everybody dies.
    • The "Stuck In The Middle" scene was intended by Tarantino as an homage to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist sings "Singin' In The Rain" while beating the crap out of an old man whose home he's just invaded.
  • Speaking of Tarantino, for Pulp Fiction, he originally wanted to use The Knack's "My Sharona" during the scene when Butch decided to rescue Marsellus as he was beaten and raped by the pawn shop clerk and his security guard friend. He felt that the song had a "good sodomy beat to it". Since the song was already licensed to "Reality Bites", Tarantino used "Comanche" by The Revels.
  • A climactic scene in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing involves an enormous shootout to the strains of "Danny Boy".
  • John Woo's Face/Off, where the song "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" plays during a silent gunfight.
  • "Que Sera Sera" was written for Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much remake; its upbeat tune and lyrics were intended as an ironic counterpoint to a story about kidnapping.
  • The Proposition opens with a small child singing a song called "Happy Land" while old-timey family photographs fly by. Some of the photos are of burnt-out houses, and labeled "The Site of the Hopkins Massacre". When the music stops, we are then plunged into the middle of a vicious gunfight.
    • Another example from The Proposition is the calm, melancholy "Peggy Gordon", which is sung while a character is being brutally flogged. It is also sung again at the climax, when a rape is occurring, although the singing is appropriately strained.
  • And let's not forget the basement scene in The Evil Dead, with the cheerful jazz music and the bleeding lightbulb and slide projector.
  • Turned all around as early as 1932's Freaks, whose title card is accompanied by some deeply chilling, Circus Of Fear type music and stylized, nightmarish images of most of the titular characters. Yet the majority of the film's one-hour run time is spent with them just hanging out, and it's pretty much a Sit Com with a mostly-deformed cast... up to the point that the freaks start stalking a woman who married one of their own for money and then tried to murder him. That scene, however, had no music.
  • In the trailer for the video game movie Hitman, the titular character is shown killing large numbers of Mooks... while Schubert's "Ave Maria" plays in the background.
    • Something similar happens in the ending of Hitman Blood Money, when the title character kills everyone attending his own funeral, including the bastard who set him up.
  • The trailer for the Death Note live-action film has the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" in the background.
  • Uwe Boll, unsurprisingly, seems fond of this. For example, the sex scene in Alone In The Dark has a song about slavery and torture in Africa as background. This may be more of a case of Isnt It Ironic, though.
  • Battle Royale. Students killing each other left and right... to the accompaniment of various soothing classical pieces played over a loudspeaker on the island on which they're fighting.
  • Blue Velvet. Full stop.
  • In the movie adaptation of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, Hellboy's father-figure resigns himself to his murder while "We'll Meet Again" plays on a phonograph across the room.
  • A Clockwork Orange. The beating set to "Singing in the Rain" comes to mind, as does the use of the Ninth symphony by Ludwig van.
  • And Die Hard famously uses "Ode to Joy" as the villain's theme song. That song doesn't fare much better than "What a Wonderful World".
  • In Schindler's List, a Nazi plays Mozart on the piano while the other SS members are massacring the Krakow Ghetto.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas opens with file footage of various unpleasant incidents from the '60s while "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music plays. The off-kilter effect suits a movie about a massive drug trip rather well.
  • The original trailer for Blade Runner featured prominent use of "If I Didn't Care" by the Ink Spots. The song quite blatantly clashes with the imagery.
  • A case could be made for The Third Man, with its happy zither music.
  • This trope wouldn't be complete without the scene in American Psycho in which Serial Killer Patrick Bateman is committing axe murder to the tune of "Hip to be Square".
  • The Silence of the Lambs has a few of these, including Buffalo Bill's disturbing dance to the tune of "Goodbye Horses" while his victim screams in the background, and Hannibal killing and cannibalizing two guards while wistfully listening to Bach's "Goldberg Variations".
  • Kill Bill. The Bride slices up the Crazy 88s to jazz and J-pop.
    • And, conversely, having O-Ren and The Bride square off against each other to the incredibly loud and energetic "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", only to have it stop immediately when first blood is drawn.
  • The film Happiness is the king of this trope, playing upbeat jazzy music/happily melodramatic music to scenes involving mass murder, ejaculation, and pedophilia. Of course, this is to be expected of such a disturbing black comedy.
  • Director Cameron Crowe does this a lot. Examples that come to mind include Almost Famous, in which Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" plays while the protagonist's love interest overdoses in a hotel bathroom. In Vanilla Sky, Todd Rundgren's breakup anthem "Can We Still Be Friends" plays after the main character has killed his lover, or her duplicitous double, or something, and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" booms out awesomely as his mind starts to unravel and he sort of starts to figure out how very wrong he is about everything.
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian features the Crucifixion, with all the crucified singing Eric Idle's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life".
    • Truth In Television: When Graham Chapman died in 1989, the five remaining members of Monty Python reunited at his funeral to sing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" after John Cleese's eulogy. In 2005, a survey by Music Choice showed that it was the third most popular song Britons would like played at their funerals.
    • Monty Python is quite good for this. For example, in The Meaning Of Life, where "The Galaxy Song", a cheery, happy-go-lucky tune with vaguely upbeat lyrics that ends on a big downer, plays after a scene wherein a man has his organs harvested while he's still alive. Immediately after the song finishes, the wife agrees to undergo the process herself.
      • Semi-subverted, as the whole point of the song is to get the woman to stop feeling bad about her husband's death by illustrating just how insignificant they are compared to the immensity of the Universe.
  • In The Night Of The Hunter, the truly nightmarish villain goes around singing gospel.
  • After the Tear Jerker ending of The World According To Garp (Garp gets shot and dies), they could have just run the ending credits in silence after the appropriate "There Will Never Be Another You". No, they had to reuse the bouncy "When I'm Sixty-Four" from the opening credits. This may have been on purpose, though. It certainly turned that song into a Tear Jerker.
  • Of course, the iconic christening scene in The Godfather .
  • Confessions of a Dangerous Mind has a scene of Chuck Barris doing his CIA work... with a hilarious "If I Had a Hammer" rendition in the background.
  • Needful Things couples this with Sorry I Left The BGM On. Two characters hack and slash at each other in typically King gore fashion to the tune of Ave Maria. It then cuts to the movie's antagonist listening to a record of this song.
  • National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Okay, it's a comedy, but the juxtaposition of the bright and cheerful Here Comes Santa Claus with the images of SWAT teams surrounding the Griswold residence is a classic example of using this trope for deliberate humorous effect.
  • In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured film The Crawling Hand, our hero, possessed by something from an arm that fell from space, strangles the malt shop owner nearly to death while "The Bird's The Word" plays.
  • In House, Betty Everett's "You're No Good" plays while Roger chops up the corpse of a witch and buries her in the backyard.
  • Partially subverted in the end of On Her Majestys Secret Service, which features Bond cradling his dead wife in his arms. We immediately cut to the Closing Credits as the normally upbeat James Bond theme plays... but it's a version of the theme that sounds brittle and almost manic.
  • In the film version of Silent Hill, the heroine finds herself surrounded by screeching burnt baby things, and they're slowly advancing on her...and she's trapped in a back-alley. She collapses, and then wakes up, babies gone, with Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" playing on a jukebox nearby.
  • In the Outkast musical Idlewild, the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" plays over a radio in a garage while Rooster watches Deceptive Disciple Trumpy off Spats and Sunshine Ace.
  • In Goodfellas, the brutal, gory beating of Billy Batts is accompanied by the strains of Donovan's romantic, hippie-fied psychedelic pop-folk song "Atlantis," which is playing on the jukebox at the time.
  • Stanley Kubrick seems to have been quite fond of this trope. In addition to the A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove examples mentioned above, there's also the classic scene in Full Metal Jacket setting gritty Vietnam War realism to the tune of "Surfin' Bird".
    • "Hey there, hi there, ho there, you're as welcome as can be. M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E." Sounds a lot more disturbing when it's sung by soldiers marching through a warfield — though perhaps not more so than soldiers using "Green Eggs and Ham" as a marching cadence.
  • Brazil's main Leitmotif, is a happy song in a movie about a soul crushing, bureaucratic, dystopia
  • WALL-E opens with "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", a chipper little tune from Hello Dolly!...which plays during a somewhat depressing sequence depicting the title character, lonely and going through his daily duties in a deserted, trash-covered Earth.
    • This contrast is made even more intense by the first images during the song being beautiful starscapes and whirling galaxies. This troper's father cried when the same song came on in Hello Dolly!
  • Grosse Pointe Blank opens with the main character assasinating citizens to "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash, a cheery, upbeat little number.
  • "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" in the Michael Moore documentary Roger And Me.
  • At the end of The Devil's Rejects, the titular family commit Suicide by Cop to the tune of "Freebird", with the freeze frame of their deaths, as well as all of the gunshots occurring during the upbeat and frenzied solo.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: while having creepy mannequin-filled suburban homes was vaguely justified by it being a nuclear test, what purpose could setting up a bunch of TV sets to play Howdy Doody possibly serve?!
    • That scene was based directly on a real nuclear test that was actually conducted in 1957. The TV sets and radios were on because the entire purpose of the test was to determine the effects of a distant airburst on a typical suburban neighbourhood.
  • In Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, after the penguins begin stealing vans to rebuild their plane, they manage to run over an old woman. After realizing she's still alive they turn on the music and procede to hit her again while Boston's "More Than a Feeling" blasts from the speakers.
  • An usual sort of Soundtrack Dissonance occurrs in A Beautiful Mind: in the car chase scene, in which John Nash and his boss are pursued and shot at by two Soviet agents, the musical score avoids an action theme and opts instead for a dark and surprisingly lonely piano theme as the two cars exchange fire. However, the music becomes somewhat more appropriate when Nash is found to be suffering from schizophrenia, and imagined the entire scenario. The music — a particular theme involved specifically with Nash's delusions of Soviet conspiracies — is meant to symbolize his continuing breakdown.
  • The clock radio which counts down the protagonist's final hour in 1408 repeatedly (and autonomously) breaks into The Carpenter's "We've Only Just Begun." The cumulative effect is terrifying.
  • The final scenes of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz all involve wildly dissonant music, ranging from "Bye Bye Love" (performed while Joe Gideon's heart finally gives out) to "There's No Business Like Show Business" (which kicks in when Gideon is zipped into a body bag).
  • In The Bad Seed, Rhoda sets fire to Leroy's bedding while he sleeps, then goes upstairs and plays "Au Clair de la Lune" on the piano at increasing speed as Leroy screams in agony.

Live Action TV
  • The new series of Doctor Who really loves this one.
    • It started in the second episode. Rose in trouble, the Doctor in trouble, the villain getting their way, and the soundtrack was Britney Spears' "Toxic".
    • In "The Age of Steel", people are getting ripped apart and converted into Cybermen. The music? "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", playing over the sounds of whirring and screaming.
    • In "Family of Blood", the boys killing the scarecrows is set to "To Be A Pilgrim". This is particularly poignant because the episode is set in 1913, a year before World War One.
    • In "The Sound of Drums", an army of six billion Toclafane fly down to Earth under orders to murder one-tenth of the world's population, and "Voodoo Child" pounds in the background — here come the drums, here come the drums... The 2nd part of the finale confirmed that the Master had brought along his own soundtrack to the apocalypse, when he regaled his fortress of slaves and the decimated Earth with "Track 3", a Scissor Sisters song called "I Can't Decide". The actual lyrics fit the Master quite well, but the fact that it's a rather catchy tune that the Master dances to creates the dissonance.
      • "I Can't Decide" is track 3 of the Scissor Sisters' album Tah-Da, so maybe that album has become mandatory listening on the Crapsack World the Master created. Either that, or Russell T Davies created the strangest Author Avatar ever.
    • "Love Don't Roam" is a happy, upbeat, peppy orchestral pop songs about being separated from your loved one forever.
    • And "The Impossible Planet" is hauntingly beautiful violin piece played over a scene of demonic possession and murder.
  • The X Files did this in the episode "Home", where the family of mutants beat the sheriff and his wife to death to the strains of Johnny Mathis' "Wonderful, Wonderful".
    • In another episode, a possessed child's doll puts "Hokey Pokey" on an old lady's record player, then smashes another record and slashes the lady's throat while the music cheerfully plays.
  • According to Professional Wrestler Mick Foley's first autobiography, Have a Nice Day!, when he was brought into the WWF as the deranged monster Mankind, he requested a beautiful piano sonata as his exit music, specifically for the Soundtrack Dissonance when compared to the match that had preceded it.
  • In Veronica Mars, Aaron Echolls beats the crap out of his daughter Trina's abusive boyfriend to the dulcet strains of "That's Amore."
  • And the requisite Buffy The Vampire Slayer example: Buffy is washing dishes, crying her eyes out in the dark while the radio plays cheery Latin dance music.
    • Not to mention the end of "Conversations with Dead People." A devastated Willow and Dawn, the death of Jonathan, and Spike beginning to kill again, all set to whimsical, beautiful "Blue" by Angie Hart.
  • Averted in one episode of The Nanny, where Fran is depressed at not being pregnant. Instead of cueing the overtly upbeat theme tune, we just fade to a still from the opening.
  • Firefly does this in "Safe". As Mal and Jayne get into a gun fight with the law, River is a fair distance away dancing at a local fair. For the first few cuts, the music in the fair sequence cuts off when we go back to the gunfight, but then it just keeps playing — so we have cheery music over people shooting at each other.
  • Used in the season 3 finale of The West Wing, with a hardy, uplifting song proclaiming the glory of England playing over a scene of American special forces assassinating a foreign leader.
    • Actually, since the end music to each episode was so brisk and cheerful, used in every west wing episode with a dark or cliffhanging ending, starting with the second.
  • The finale from the second season of The OC involves a scene of a gunshot and its effect, in slow motion, set to the rather calm tune of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek."
    • This was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch titled "The Shooting", also known by the name "Dear Sister," in which every character in the scene gets shot by some other character, with that very same song starting up each time. And in turn, this has spawned countless fan parodies, featuring scenes of violence from all manner of media all slowed down and set to "Hide and Seek"...
    • This is SPARTA!
    • A Death Note clip (3:58) in AMV Hell 4 used this song and the scene where Matsuda shoots Light several times, with the song clip starting from the beginning each time.
    • And let's not forget, again in AMV Hell 4, the song pops up again, during a clip of Cowboy Bebop's final episode, in which Spike points at the camera and says, "Bang." followed immediately by a slow-motion shot of someone who was watching said clip falling out of his chair, playing dead.
      • That's a Running Gag. An earlier Hell features the same song to another scene from Cowboy Bebop, if I'm not mistaken, at two different times.
  • The Babylon 5 episode "And The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place" is one of the better known examples of this, in which an upbeat gospel hymn of the same title is played over a scene of a particularly vicious Centauri war criminal being hunted down and beaten to death by Narns.
  • This editor has long maintained that whoever does the soundtrack for NUMB3RS needs a new job. The most egregious example: at the beginning of one episode, the song "Drift Away" plays in the background as a woman is driving home... and continues playing as she pulls into the garage and is killed by an unseen gunman.
  • The Prisoner's final episode, "Fall Out", prominently features The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" played first as Number Six is being brought in to be exonerated as The Village's new paragon, and a second time — far less appropriately — as Number Six escapes from The Village in a bloody shootout. In a similar vein, this troper will never be able to hear "Dem Bones" quite the same way again.
  • Dexter often includes all manner of cheery background music while the eponymous serial killer is slicing up one of his victims.
  • The Sarah Connor Chronicles uses Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around for a scene where Cromartie slaughters an entire SWAT team off-camera and tosses their corpses, one by one, into an apartment swimming pool.
    • This troper feels that as the song in question is about the coming of the Antichrist and apocalypse, it's actually quite appropriate. The full song ends with the words "and Hell followed with him".
  • The British comedy anthology series The Comic Strip Presents had an episode called "Mr Jolly Lives Next Door". The eponymous and misnamed Mr Jolly was a hit man who would invite his victims to his flat and then play upbeat Tom Jones records very loudly — to drown out the sound of their screams.
  • On one episode of Lost, Michael tearfully pinned a suicide note to his chest and attempted to kill himself by driving into a shipping crate while "It's Getting Better" by Cass Elliot played over his car radio.
  • The Mork And Mindy episode "Mork Meets Robin Williams" ends with Mork explaining the downside of fame to Orson, and ends by listing off people who became victims of their own fame: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Bruce, Freddie Prinze, and the recently assassinated John Lennon. You can hear Mork's voice shaking as he says this. The show fades out without a wisecrack or a "Nanu nanu", just the sound of a cold wind blowing in the background. And then, cue the happy, upbeat theme music!
  • In the lonelygirl15 episode "Home Invasion", Rachmaninov's "Praise the Lord from the Heavens" plays in the background as some Order mooks attack Jonas and his family.
  • Done in the Title Sequence to Rome, where the bouncy, upbeat Instrumental Theme Tune is contrasted with the animated graffiti on the walls reenacting gory and/or erotic scenes from Roman mythology.
  • A less-overt version, where the music's general upbeatness fits the scene but is way over the top in tone, occurs in Far Scape: The Peacekeeper Wars. The birth of Aeryn and Crichton's child is met with music like that child was the 3rd coming of Christ; the song, called We Have A Son on the soundtrack, is rife with chimes, choir, crashing cymbals, trumpets, and so on. A good piece of music, it is perhaps over-the-top compared with the music most commonly suited to birthing scenes. Semi-justified in that this was a pregnancy that had to overcome three years of tension, two wildly different cultures, a case of potential mistaken babydaddy, 4 deaths split between the 2 people involved, torture, a nuclear explosion, accidental implantation in another species, a galaxy-spanning war, and the kid was had in the midst of a battle after birthing problems. And his parents had gotten married quite literally a moment before. He deserves an overture after all that, let alone surviving what happened after he was born.
  • The Daily Show had Jon Stewart using this to show that soft guitar music can make anything sound nice after hearing some in a Barack Obama ad. He had the same music playing while giving a graphic description of the effects of Mad Cow Disease.
    • And earlier, after a graphic demonstrating his idea of what Rudi Giuliani dreams about:
      Jon: I just wanna point out that we had 9/11 f***ing on a bed. I'm not even sure what that means, but boy, you can put porn music to anything.
  • Somewhat unusual example from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: in "The Siege of AR-558", the crew is on a planet helping a squad of marooned Starfleet officers defend an outpost that they captured from the Dominion. After a few battles take place, their only hope for survival is to take a fairly brutal Dominion weapon that has killed many members of Starfleet and use it on the Dominion soldiers. Nog, while in recovery from having his leg amputated due to injuries, becomes obsessed with a recording of the relaxing lounge jazz song "I'll Be Seeing You". This is already a fair amount of Soundtrack Dissonance, considering the fact that the show takes place in the 24th century, but it becomes even more dissonant when the song plays while the Starfleet officers hear explosions and screams of anguish as the Dominion soldiers are killed by the weapon, and see bright flashes in the sky. The dissonance is also commented on by some of the characters.
  • So "Fire Of Unknown Origin" (by Blue Oyster Cult) sounds like a cute song, right? Perfect for a light-hearted/pranky episode of Supernatural. But just listen to it all the way through, especially the line "Fire of unknown origin/Took my baby awaaaay" and you start to wonder how the hell Sam and Dean can listen to it, let alone Dean turning up the volume and singing along with it to wake Sam up.
  • Unintentional example: The BBC has been using the perky, quirky song "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn and John for its trailers for the 5th season of Who Do You Think You Are?, a series in which celebrities investigate their family history. With lyrics like "talking about me and you" it works well with the basically optimistic theme that everyone has an interesting history worth exploring. But it does not sound right at all over footage of a man wiping away tears as he walks through the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Even if that man is Jerry Springer.
  • To round out the Whedon trifecta, a pivotal episode of Angel features Angel boarding what he's pretty sure is a literal elevator to Hell in the company of the walking corpse of his nemesis who is taunting him about how futile his struggle is...with typical schmaltzy elevator music chirping away in the background.
  • The opening to It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a cheery public domain number called "Temptation Sensation" which is accompanied by a series of shots of the titular city from a car. Of course the show itself features an almost exclusivly jerkass cast all of which are selfish, moraly twisted and at times downright antagonistic people. Each episode following their twisted exploits all of which end in abstract failure and often ruining the lives of anyone caught in the middle.
  • On one episode of Malcolm In The Middle, the boys in the family get into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a group of clowns after one of the clowns insults Lois. Lois, who has been angry with her family for forgetting her birthday, watches the sequence with a loving smile as "You Decorated My Life" by Kenny Rogers plays.
  • Dead Set features a scene where Davina McCall is chased by a zombie, attacked, has her throat bitten out, and is then left to die alone gasping for air... all to the light-pop stylings of Mika with "Grace Kelly".
  • One of the darkest episodes of Las Vegas ended on a cliffhanger. Several, actually. By the end of The Teaser of the next episode, Sam Marquez had been kidnapped, nearly raped, and killed her attacker by opening the door of his jet. In flight. Mary may have killed her father who abused her as a child, and Danny, Ed, and Mary herself are all suspects, with Danny being caught on cell-phone cam at the scene arranging Mary's escape and taking the gun from her. Oh, and a shell-shocked Marine commits suicide with an IED-which he mentions is "easier to make than you thing"-in order to keep from being redeployed to Iraq, possibly killing Danny's pregnant Love Intrest in the process. And the casino gets robbed, with several members of the security team killed. The millions of bucks in back-taxes the casino owes is actually reduced to a subplot by all the GRIMDARK. The episode right after the cliffhanger used the standard theme song; Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation". This troper was watching The Teaser, just hoping they'd use the regular theme so he could make an entry on TV Tropes.
  • Someone needs to explain to this troper why the epic, dramatic music that plays over sea battles in Pirates Of The Caribbean movies was borrowed and used as incidental music for VTs on The X Factor. Because it really, really doesn't work.
  • One episode of M*A*S*H (it was either Season 3's "O.R." or Season 4's "Deluge") had newsreel footage of a swing dancing competition back in the States, with the accompanying music. The video would switch back and forth between the dancers and Hawkeye, surrounded by wounded, doing triage in the compound, while the audio stayed with the dance music.
  • The "Fun Fun Fun in the Sun Sun Sun" ending theme of Red Dwarf occasionally fell into this.

Video Games
  • The Nintendo Hard bramble levels of Donkey Kong Country 2 are backed with the most insanely relaxing music in the history of gaming. Just have a listen. WARNING: THE SONG IS EXTREMELY ADDICTIVE AND WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE.
    • The last bramble level was an exception. It was a race against an evil parrot that used intense music for a good portion of the level. However, the music still played during the rest of the level, and to make up for this brief period of fitting music, this was the last level before the epic battle to save DK. That means that if you go straight into the next area, ignoring the map screen's music, you go straight from the above song to ''THIS''.
  • The original Fallout begins with a close-up on a TV flashing classic 1950s images and icons, while The Inkspots' "Maybe" plays. Slowly, the "camera" pulls out to reveal the TV set is in the midst of a landscape utterly devastated by warfare.
    • To make it worse, "Maybe" is played again in the ending. Yannow, as the hero is exiled from Vault 13, and marches depressingly into the wastes. Alone.
    • Fallout 2 goes the same route; "A Kiss To Build A Dream On" by Louis Armstrong is played over a slightly humorous instructional video about leaving the Vaults, which ends with the people doing so... and running smack into the Enclave soldiers waiting for them at the entrance. The folks wave "hello" to the Enclave, then are torn apart by miniguns.
    • The recently released teaser trailer for Fallout 3 opens similarly, with "I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire" by the Inkspots.
      • "I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire" was, appropriately, the first choice of music for the first Fallout, but had to be dropped due to confusion over the rights of the song. For many fans, seeing the teaser trailer for Fallout 3 is a pretty amusing taste of what would have been.
    • For the second