Narm / Music

In case you can't tell, the 90s were weird.

"I think rock and roll is really funny when it's serious."

— Bowling for Soup, "I'm Gay"

Some songs are just meant to be easy to listen to. Others try to tell a story. The story to some of these seems to be: "Why are you laughing or groaning? This is Serious Business, damn it!"

Remember that this is YMMV; more so than usual because music is arguably the most subjective medium. One person's font of Glurge is another's genuine Tear Jerker. Please, please, please don't start an Edit War if your favorite artist/song/genre of songs is listed here.

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Examples:

Country

• Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses". Meant to be a heartwarming tale of a father's thoughts watching his daughter prepare for her wedding, but delivered by such a Large Ham that it rapidly turns into, well, a font of Glurge. The song thus becomes all ye know or need know of Narm. As a bonus, it's (unintentionally) Hilarious in Hindsight if you know about the site by that name that was basically a lesbian version of NAMBLA. However, the song can be done "right" — the Raybon Brothers' version was far more subdued and heartfelt.
• This goes triple for NewSong's "The Christmas Shoes." The song is the... er... heartwarming tale of a little boy asking our narrator, who's a little cranky at Christmastime, to buy a pair of fancy shoes for his dying mom to wear to her own funeral. Thank Heaven for Patton Oswalt, who pointed out the Glurge and the implications that God Is Evil. The Nostalgia Chick combined her bashing with an Nightmare Fuel impression of The Joker.
• Rather similar, but less popular, is Skip Ewing's "Christmas Carol". In it, the singer, who is playing a store Santa, meets an orphan "of three or four" who asks for a family. He ends up being the one to adopt her. The chorus alone will make your teeth ache:
  "My name is Christmas Carol, I was born on Christmas Day.
  I don't know who my daddy is, and Mommy's gone away.
  All I want for Christmas is someone to take me home,
  Does anybody want a Christmas Carol of their own?"
• Rascal Flatts, and how:
  • Many of their ballads are like this. They have the lyrical depth of a Dixie cup, but are presented as larger-than-life ballads with loads and loads of strings and screaming guitars (seems it is possible for a song to be a Large Ham). They are (over)sung as if the guy's life is over because his lover has left him (as in "Here Comes Goodbye"), or because he's so amazingly happy that he's found his lover (as in "Here"). Really, he's singing lyrics like "There's a place I've been looking for / That took me in and out of buildings / Behind windows, walls and doors" as if they were big, revealing truths.
  • "What Hurts The Most"? Watch the video... especially the framing story acting. Narmtastic! The song itself shows that a good amount of the blame can go to lead singer Gary Levox. His rather nasal, whiny voice and tendency to warble all over the song make them sound bloated and overblown. Case in point: "What Hurts the Most" has been covered several times (the first artist to sing it was Mark Wills). Jo O'Meara released her own, somewhat more subdued version in 2005, and it was arguably much better.
  • Even their novelty songs are Narmtastic because of the overproduction and oversinging. "Bob That Head," anyone?
  • "Skin (Sarabeth)" is about a girl who has cancer and loses all her hair. Her boyfriend shaves his own head to match her. Gagging ensues.
• Ferlin Husky's "Drunken Driver" retired the Country Narm Cup way back in 1954. Granted, it gets points for being ahead of its time on the subject matter, but...uh...yeah. Don't miss the legendary closing line. Its spirit lives on in Red Sovine's Narmtacular "I'm Only 17."
• Johnny Cash's version of "Personal Jesus." Not that the original was any less Narmy—see below.
• Billy Gilman's "One Voice." The song is Narmtastic on its own with its whining about all the violence in the world; it's made ten times worse because Gilman was twelve when he sang it.

• Martina McBride:
  • Almost anything she released in the 2000s. "Concrete Angel" (about an abused girl who dies), "God's Will" (about a crippled kid who inspires the narrator), "In My Daughter's Eyes" (childlike sugary vision of the world) and "This One's for the Girls" (ditto). The slick pop production and overwrought belting don't help.
  • "God's Will" has one of the best unintentionally funny lines in all of country music:
  "I met God's Will on a Halloween night
  He was dressed as a bag of leaves...
• The country standard "Green Green Grass of Home". The protagonist is about to be executed, yet the melody is very brisk and joyful - one of the most clear-cut cases of Lyrical Dissonance. The lyrics about returning back to home - just to be buried - are pure Narm blended with Glurge.
• Craig Morgan's "This Ain't Nothin'", in which a man's just lost his house in a tornado and is being asked about it by a TV reporter on the scene, is so over the top, it almost seems like satire. It's not.
  He said, "I lost my daddy, when I was eight years old,
  That cave-in at the Kincaid mine left a big old hole,
  And I lost my baby brother, my best friend and my left hand
  In a no-win situation in a place called Vietnam
  And last year I watched my loving wife, of fifty years waste away and die
  We were holding hands when her heart of gold stopped pumping
  So this ain't nothin'."
• The Tammy Wynette song "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" sounds like it belongs in a Sesame Street special about why your parents are no longer together.
• Most of the song "If I Die Young" by The Band Perry is very nice and somewhat poetic, until you get to this forced rhyme:
  A penny for your thoughts, oh no, I'll sell 'em for a dollar
  They're worth so much more after I'm a goner.
  • Do not use the word "goner" in a serious song about dying young, especially if it's at the end of a verse and doesn't rhyme!
  • Also...
  Lord make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother
  She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors
• The horns on Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" sound funny for some reason, despite the song's serious lyrics. This is probably why it's used in a lot of comedies.
• Most of the Don Williams catalog. His voice is just so sugary sweet to the point of aural sugar-shock, and his tendency toward equally syrupy lyrics (keep in mind he's not usually a songwriter) don't help.^However... many people think his songs fall under Narm Charm instead due to the his gentle and effective handling of song material (often ballads) that in less capable hands could come across as sappy. A great part of his appeal in this regard is due to his ultra-smooth voice and relaxed delivery style. Witness this gem from "Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good":
  You've been the King since the dawn of time
  All that I'm asking is a little less cryin'
  It might be hard for the devil to do
  But it would be easy for you.
• Much of Lonestar's repertoire from "Amazed" onward. They were basically doing 10 years ago what Rascal Flatts is doing now: lightweight, formulaic Power Ballad fluff with ridiculously over-the-top vocals and bombastic production — however, they sang about family and home instead of love, and Richie McDonald's voice was far less whiny. Witness such gems as...
  • "There's a carrot top who can barely walk / With a sippy cup of milk" in "My Front Porch Looking In".
  • The big one, "Them dang ol' hills will get you every time" in "Mountains". This line is particularly narmy because the rest of the song isn't terrible other than a line about an IHOP waitress who deals with "bacon, eggs, and tears".
  • McDonald left the band for a solo career, and continued to do the same thing he was doing in Lonestar. One of his first solo singles was titled "Six-Foot Teddy Bear". It's about an over-the-top manly man who enjoys over-the-top childish things when he comes home to meet his kids.
• Carrie Underwood:
  • "Before He Cheats" is a Narm/Fridge Logic sandwich. It's a great revenge song if you're into that sort of thing; but, in her vandalism of her (ex)boyfriend's truck — and she is quite thorough — she carves her name in the bucket seats. Yes, she wants her boyfriend to know she did it ("maybe next time he'll think before he cheats"), but that would also let the authorities know...^note She can claim the real vandal carved her name into the seat in order to frame her, but then why would she do something specifically to say "I did this to punish you for cheating on me" if she's just going to say "someone tried to frame me" later? The overwrought singing doesn't help. She's just too enthusiastic about this vandalism. Vandalism as retribution for adultery that she has no evidence he committed! Even the singer herself isn't sure; she keeps saying, "He's probably (insert PG-13-rated infidelity here)" and presents no hard evidence that he did anything wrong to begin with.
  • "Jesus, Take the Wheel." It's a story song: the narrator loses control of her car on a patch of ice and asks Jesus to steer for a minute. It's Christmas Eve and her baby is in the back seat, making this really important. They're saved from certain death. She vows then and there to turn from her path of (unspecified) sin and let Jesus take the metaphorical wheel in all aspects of her life. Hey, the Lord does know to turn in the direction of the skid!
• "Accidental Racist" by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J, for most of the song but especially "If you don't judge my gold chains, I'll forget the iron chains." Parodied by Stephen Colbert with "Oopsie-Daisy Homophobe"
• Brad Paisley's "I'm Still a Guy" is a song about how manly Paisley is compared to his wife, in which no matter how he may comfort her and let her do her own thing, he's "still a guy" and thus has a reputation to live up to, because God forbid any man ever show any emotion. He later criticizes men that get facials, botox, and other makeovers, saying that he "still has a pair". All of this is played to a sad, emotional sounding melody, complete with music box at the end, which betrays everything Paisley had been setting up.
• The beginning of Skeeter Davis' "The End of the World", especially if you interpret the song as being about a break-up. The singer complains about the fact that nature goes on as usual, as if it would fall apart or stop or something because some guy doesn't love her anymore. The hyperbole when she describes the end of the love as "the end of the world" doesn't help.
  Why does the sun go on shining
  Why does the sea rush to shore
  Don't they know it's the end of the world
  'Cause you don't love me any more
• Just about all of Luke Bryan's stuff from Tailgates and Tanlines onward, with gems like "Girl you make my speakers go boom-boom" from "Drunk on You" and the chorus of "Play It Again".
• In 2008, Alabama lead singer Randy Owen released a solo single titled "Braid My Hair", about a Littlest Cancer Patient who has lost her hair to chemotherapy and dreams of being able to braid it. Lines like "She could be the first female president / Or be the doctor whose experiment / Finds the cure to what she's in here for" and a name-drop of Locks for Love make it sound more like an advertisement for the latter.

Electronic

• While Rob Swire of Pendulum has a typically good voice, there are times where his Aussie accent creeps in. For some songs it works (like "Showdown" and "Different", which would classify as Narm Charm), for others it's pure Narm:
  • "What are yeh WEETING FOOH?" (The Island)
  • "I'm looking for your hand in the roof, yoh coat in the wire..." (Witchcraft)
  • "Fo everathing that kewdive beeun..." (Encoder)
  • The entirety of The Tempest is a big Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping moment for Swire. Doesn't help that because of the accent slippage makes the line "Acting like it wouldn't happen" sound like "Acting like a wooden apple..."
  • "YYEEEEH IT'S NINE THOOOOOOOWWWWWWSAAAAANNNNDDD MIIIIIILLLLLESSSSS BACK TO YOOOOOOOOOUUUU." Seriously, Rob, chill out, there. The fact that the line is reminiscent of the "over 9000" meme doesn't help.
  • Comprachicos is good until the line "Well I could fight this, but I might die, and all I want is to be the apple in your eye". Seriously?! Apple?!
  • The Vulture suffers because of Ben Mount's British accent. "THE RISE OF THE VUL-CHA!!!!!")
• Depeche Mode:
  • "Yeeeer oooown. Poooisaannall. Jeeeesuuusss." It's the drawn-out style of nearly all the lyrics that make this song so narmy. Marilyn Manson's version of the song is much more Narmtastic because his voice doesn't suit singing Depeche Mode. At that volume, he might be BRIAN BLESSED!
    "Just one carrreessssssss, from you and I'm BLEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSEDDDDDDDD".
  • This line from "More Than A Party".
    "THEY TAKE ALL THE ICE-CREAM SO WE'VE GOT NONE!!"
  • "Blasphemous Rumors", which tells a glurge story about girl who tries to kill herself, finds Jesus afterwards, and soon after dies from injuries she received in a car accident.
  • "See You" has very creepy, stalker-ish lyrics ("I'll try not to kiss you, and I won't even touch you", really?) but is sung so earnestly by Dave it's hard not to laugh a little.
  • "Satellite...of hateeeeeee....", which sounds like an attempt by three white British boys to make a synth-reggae song. The results are as painful as you'd expect.
  • "The Meaning Of Love". Yes, the whole song.
  • "The Landscape Is Changing", the composition and melody are good, but the lyrics sound like something out of Captain Planet.
  • Any of the Vince Clarke-penned songs, especially "What's Your Name?" and "Just Can't Get Enough".

• Japanese techno-pop artist Aira Mitsuki's ode to global warming.
  "Amerikan! Japaniizu! Ah, Chaaaiii-niii-iii-zuuuuu!!"
  • Not even the video can save it:
  "Papa tooooo mama no baaaBAAAAAAAYYY!"
  • Even better is when she sings "sayonara technopolis" the vocoder/autotone is so strong it sounds like she's saying "techno piss".
• Zombie Nation: "Kernkraft 400." (Not the other way around.) Sample lyrics: "Zombie, zombie, zombie, zombie nation". One of the remixes repeats "Munich, Zombie Nation. Paris, Zombie Nation. Geneva, Zombie Nation, My Parents, Zombie Nation." ad nauseam.
• Cascada:
  • "Everytime We Touch" is narmy enough with its Cliché Storm lyrics, but it's passable as a dance song. Remake that song with a piano ballad spin, and you've got an endless barrel of narm.
  • Also "Miracle". It's loaded with painful rhymes, meaningless lyrics, and it's basically about how she broke up with a guy who "cheated on her from behind because she was blind" or whatever and now she's begging for him to take her back. All set to a very catchy tune. Oh yeah... and it was also remade into a piano ballad.
• S4 League brings us Super Sonic (Mr. Funky Remix), which takes a great song and copy-pastes "SUPERSONIC!" about five million times.
• Dubstep. Many unnecessary Dubstep remixes do things like leaving the verses of an emotional song mostly unchanged, and then randomly repeating a syllable to the point where it sounds like a Broken Record and becomes reminiscent of a Voice Clip Song... cue the bass drop, after which the over-the-top instrumentation takes over the song for a while. Songs that were originally dubstep can frequently be prone to similar problems as well.
  WUBWUBWUBWUBWUB
• IAMX's song 'I-Polaroids' is fantastic, but at the end, Chris sings 'And she knows how she kills me with the polaroids' repeatedly. This would be fine, except that the last few times, he sings it in a ridiculously high falsetto that comes out of nowhere.
• "My Name Is Skrillex" is quite narmy in the beginning. "Skrillex" seems to only look good on paper and sound good when you say it in your head. As soon as someone says it aloud, it seems to end up sounding completely narmy. It doesn't help that he gets a canned computer voice to do that part. Or that the beat is apparently provided by Donald Duck.
• Daft Punk: And it was YOOOOOOOOOUUUU! That's not even going into the humming solo.
• "Elektronik, supersonik. Supersonik, elektronik."
• "Minibar" by Cursor Miner tells the story of an island tribe who worshipped a minibar that washed up from a shipwrecked ocean liner, with them chanting the following lines, and then some:
  Rent yourself a minibar
  Rent yourself a minibar
  Minibar dot-com
  Minibar dot-com
  Stock up a minibar
  Uptake a minibar
  Stock up a minibar
  Ice in the wine cooler
• While the majority of "Mortal Kombat: The Album" skirts the border of Narm Charm, there's no way to take Scorpion (Lost Soul Bent on Revenge) seriously. One does not typically associate Hellfire McNinjas with falsetto singing.
  AAAA-AAAA-AAAH-AAAA! (x2)
  LOST SOUL BENT ON REVENGE! (x3)
• Noah Cyrus's "Make Me (Cry)":
  • For whatever reason, the chorus uses a drip sound effect in place of the word "cry". It's probably supposed to sound like a tear falling into water, but it's too loud and makes it easy to visualize a heavier object like a small stone thrown into a puddle by some bored kid... or a turd dropping into a toilet.
  • The "yeah" in the first verse seems to be accompanied with a random train sound effect that comes out of nowhere.
  • The line "Love, lovin' you could make Jesus cry", both because of the hyperbole and because "make baby Jesus cry" is a meme in some circles.

Emo

• The All-American Rejects' "Someday's Gone" would be a good song had it not thrown in a "wopwopwopwopwop" at the end.
• Marianas Trench's video for "Fallout" is just rife with narm - from the singer's reactions to the explosions going off around him (making a face that looks... interesting), to the odd slow motion runs away from said explosions, to his habit of dropping to the ground melodramatically.
• Tokio Hotel has a video for "Spring Nicht" that is hilarious. Perhaps it's all the slow-motion stairs-running. Or Bill's face. That there's three Bills, at least, running around in the film clip doesn't help. Running Gag?
• From First To Last: "Kiss Me, I'm Contagious" has the wonderful line "Bang, bang, guns go bang!"

• Dashboard Confessional:
  • The video for "Screaming Infidelities" (a cautionary tale about ignoring your girlfriend) is unfortunately hilarious, and not just because of a scene where a grown man plays with a toy racetrack set while his girlfriend leaves in disgust. No, it's ruined by the incompetent acting of the woman (the director's fiancee) playing lead singer Chris Carabba's girlfriend. In a serious moment when the woman looks at her boyfriend in disgust, the actress's expression makes it look like she's seriously thinking about going to the washroom.
    "Your hair/It's everywhere"
  • The name "Dashboard Confessional" itself is a ball of narm.
• The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' "Face Down" attempts to tackle the serious social issue of abusive relationships: The lines "Do you feel like a man/when you push her around" is sung in the most smarmy, narmy voice possible. And at the break of the song, the singer screams the lyrics in a fiery rage.
• Fall Out Boy:
  • "Young and Menace". The song starts off fairly well... that us, until the chorus happens. Suffice to say, it's basically vocals put through a YouTube Poop filter, set to a brostep drop, and it's one of the most hilarious things you will ever hear. And even before the chorus, it has the line "Kill me twice like my name is Nikki Sixx".
• Panic! at the Disco:
  • "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies":
    • The music video is about a bride who cheats on her husband at their own wedding. At one point, Brendon Urie gives the groom a look of purest poison and drags him out to force reality into his face. The narm-tastic part is that it's not a look of purest poison born of hatred and disgust, as the situation would suggest; it's a look of purest poison born of the fact that the situation calls for one. Instead of being a poignant moment, it looks like he's goofing around and only pretending to be angry.
    • While the music video is unambiguous, in the song itself all the groom has to go on is that he overhears his bride's "friend" calling the bride a whore, and that's apparently enough to end everything with no indication he even asks the "friend" for more details let alone confronts his fiancee. The bride probably dodged a bullet.
    • The fact that the censored radio edit blanks out the "god" part of "goddamn" in the chorus.
  • "Northern Downpour" is an otherwise lovely song, but...the line "through playful lips made of yarn" is kinda incongruous...
• In "The End is the Beginning" by Forgive Durden, "Adakias," a.k.a. Thomas Dutton, shrieks "BROTHER NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" in a completely narmy fashion around the middle of the song.
• Chiodos' Expired In Goreville gets Narmtastic towards the end.
  "I love youuu.. I'LL - LOVE - YOUUUUU! UNTIL MY LAST BREEEEEEEEAAAAAATH TAKES YOU FROM MEEEEEEE... FROM - MEEEEE!"
• AFI:
  • "Love Like Winter" would be a good song if it weren't for Davey Havok's poor, poor attempts at sounding British...
  • "I Hope You Suffer" may be one of the most melodramatically over the top songs ever written.
• 30 Seconds To Mars' "This Is War" is only modestly narm-ish in of itself. Then, you start seeing the recent flood of AMVs made using it, and the song starts becoming wince-worthy.
• The entirety of Aiden's Nightmare Anatomy album is ridiculous. Just by listening to the first three songs, it becomes apparent that they like the word "nightmare" so much that it's in every single song even if it makes absolutely no sense in context. The fact that the "hidden track" on the album is the dictionary definition of "nightmare" doesn't help. Thinking about how fast one would become wasted if they made a drinking game out of the mention of the word "nightmare" makes the album all the more narmtastic.
  "We pass through like a NIGHTMAAAAAAREEEE fallliiiinnnggg doooowwwwwnnn."
• Evanescence
  • "The Only One" is, admittedly, a nice song. But wouldn't it have been more effective if they had left out the duck quacking in the opening?
  • Amy Lee's voice when she hits that low note in "Lithium".
  • Evanescence in general can be very narmy, with how overdramatic some of their lyrics can seem, especially in their best known song, "Bring Me to Life."
  • The music video of "Bring Me to Life" is a bit silly as well mostly when Amy Lee and Paul McCoy keep singing as the former is about to fall off a building (yet McCoy is the one saying "Save me!" ) while the rest of the band keep playing.
• The climax of "Happy" by The Wrens. The first half of the song is a gradual, dramatic buildup, but it's hard to take seriously when Charles Bissell launches into full-on whine mode in the second half.
  "I WAS WROOOOOOOOOOONG..."
• A Day to Remember:
  • In the beginning of "The Downfall of Us All", the backing vocals all chant "DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA!", imitating the guitar.
  • "If It Means a Lot to You" is supposed to romantic and heart-warming, but the emo enunciation really get in the way- for both the girl and the boy singing.
    And heeeey darleeeng!
    If you can't wait till I get HOOOOME!
  • "All Signs Point to Lauderdale". Really hammers in the whole "Pop Punk Bands Hate Their Hometowns" trope, doesn't it?
    I hate this town, it's so washed up, and all my friends don't give fuuuuhck
  • "Mr. Highway's Thinking About the End" is cringe-inducing for the 'disrespect your surroundings' lyric alone. It's so unintentionally funny that it underwent Memetic Mutation.

Folk

• "Whiskey in the Jar". Okay, the subject is serious (a highwayman stealing a Captain's money, getting betrayed and arrested), and Thin Lizzy and Metallica's versions take it even further (he shoots the Captain and laments being in prison). But just hear it (the Irish accents make it even more hilarious if you're not Irish). The vocalization just before the chorus has lyrics. It's "musha ring dum-a-doo dum-a-dah", indeed.^Explanation It's called Lilting, and it's actually fairly common in Traditional Irish music, used in a similar way to scatting in Jazz. What most people miss out on, however, is that the next line is also gibberish, and originally went something like "whack foll the dally oh". Thin Lizzy changed this to "what for my Daddy-o" as a tongue in cheek "update", which walks a very fine line between badass and Jive Turkey from Phil Lynott, but tips significantly towards the latter when being sung by your average pasty Irishman. Metallica's version is sometimes funny, since James is clearly enjoying himself at parts.
• Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is mostly superb — until it gets to "I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley." Literal Sad Clown = instant Narm.
  • Another example would be "Blowin' in the Wind," because although the lyrics are "The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind," what it sounds like is "The ants are my friends, blowing in the wind."
• "ANI-MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHLLLLL!!!!!!!"
• "Eulalia" by Celtic folk band Syr. It's based on the Redwall series. I repeat: The song is based on a series of kids' books, and they expect people to take it seriously!
• A good majority of Korpiklaani's most popular songs - especially "Wooden Pints" when you add in the video. It consists of them playing a song about partying while trying to look badass, but just end up looking angry. The third verse in particular is silly because it randomly brings up war in glorious, borderline You No Take Candle English:
  Long war is now past
  Only good men have lasted
  They need women, meat, beer and rum
  Fight battle full of blood no thoughts
  About god they just slaughtered killed and tormented
• Chile-based Uaral. The music is fine and sometimes moving; but the vocals are horrendously jarring, and then you hear a grown man crying...
• "Willie O' Winsbury". The daughter apparently would rather get naked than just say she's pregnant; the father consequently comes across as a Pervert Dad; there is Ho Yay between the dad and his son-in-law; and the idiotic young couple has no reason not to get married. There is basically no conflict other than that these kids need her father breathing down their neck so they'll get around to getting hitched. Neither one seems reluctant; they just... didn't bother.
• The Hollies' "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" is both this and Glurge because narrator simultaneously "carries his brother" and insisting that "he would not encumber me". The bridge features some incredibly sappy lyrics, where he says he's only "laden with sadness" because "everyone's heart isn't filled with the gladness of love for one another".
• The American murder ballad "Pearl Bryan" is based on a real and quite horrific incident, but the ballad lyrics are breathtakingly narmful:
  In came Pearl Bryan's sister and falling to her knees
  Begging to Scott Jackson, "My sister's head, O please!"
  Scott Jackson he set stubborn, not a word would he proclaim
  "I'll meet my sister in heaven, where I'll find her missing head."

Heavy Metal

Metal is inherently over-the-top, being filled with Testosterone Poisoning and odd song topics, but just about no room for subtlety. Combine that with the plethora of international acts trying to sing in English to mixed results and lack of research into lyrics at times.

• Staind, a nu-metal staple, has some already narmy lyrics made even worse by lead singer Aaron Lewis's overly-pained vocal delivery. In their first album, "Tormented", Aaron Lewis sung in a much more coarse style compared to his cleaner vocals in later albums. So, with that in mind, anytime he would start getting angry and scream, he would sound constipated. It features themes about suicide, drug abuse, and anger, and begins with this gem, delivered by guitarist Mike Mushok:
  It's been like this forever. No more. I hate my fucking life.
• Christopher Lee, and "The Bloody Verdict of Verden" has silly graphics, the lead singer awkwardly swinging a sword, and a feeling of taking itself way too seriously. But then again, Christopher Lee wants the blood of a Saxon man! And it still manages to be utterly badass in a way that only Christopher Lee could pull off.
• Lonely Day, by System of a Down, is intended to be a song about loss and being lonely. But with random burning objects in the music video and lines such as these, it's narmtastic:
  "The most loneliest day of my life
  Such a lonely day
  Shouldn't exist
  It's a day that I'll never miss"
• Rhapsody of Fire (an Italian power metal band) have lyrics telling an original High Fantasy story. The extreme cheesiness of the story coupled with the writer's less-than-optimal grasp of English produce highly Narmful results on a regular basis. Also, the singers have thick accents. Let's think about it: a group of people with thick accents singing about somebody named "Nekron" conquering the "Darklands". The music is completely serious. Here's a hint, guys: if you don't have a good grasp on English, SING IN YOUR NATIVE TONGUE. It makes everything better.
  
  Some might argue that the combination of magnificently campy high fantasy, the inscrutable accent of the singer and idiosyncratic grasp of English of the writer/guitarist, and the sheer bombast of the music's presentation is exactly what makes Rhapsody so awesome. Christopher Lee wearing a Burger King crown while narrating how "Nekron would rule in the unholy name of cosmic chaos": How can you NOT find that awesome?
  • "Tears of a Dying Angel" has an especially awesome crappy narration in the middle.
  • Luca Turrili's Rhapsody, a spinoff band, has a The Lord of the Rings-themed song called "One Ring to Rule Them All". Pretty good overall, but it's hard to take "repeated, speedy chanting of the One Ring's Black Speech text by tenor choir" seriously.
• Blind Guardian are a great band, but you should hear how they pronounce the titles of their songs: "Black Chamber" (Rhymes with 'jam burr') and "Time Stands Still (at the Iron Hill)" (they pronounce iron how it's spelled. Silly Blind Guardian! The O is silent!).
  • Add "Into The Storm" to that list.
    "Gems of tree-light!"
    • They're referring to the Silmarils, but it's a strange line anyhow. Generally, the "Nightfall in Middle-earth" album relies on the fact It Makes Sense in Context; while some songs (such as Time Stands Still) are fairly cool even without that context, others end up sounding a bit... odd if you don't know what's being sung about, as said above.
    • The chorus of the song also bears mentioning:
    Oh it's sweet how the darkness is floating around
    We are following the will of the one
    Through the dark age and into the storm
    And we're following the will of the one
    Through the dark age and into the storm
    Lord I'm mean
  • Also from "Nightfall in Middle-Earth":
    "The air's filled with tears full of sadness and grief!"
• Dream Theater.
  • "Finally Free". Great music, but bad Anvilicious lyrics. And then there's a deep-voiced guy throwing out a buzzword-filled rap.
    This FEEEEEEEELING... inSIDE me, finally found my love, I'm FINALLY FREEEEEEEEEEEEE....
  • Any time Mike Portnoy tries to sing lead vocals. Apparently, he hangs out with the guy from Opeth and thinks he can do that.
  • "A Nightmare to Remember" is a decent song until Portnoy "sings" a verse in this strange half-shouted, half-growled voice. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't sound good, as if he wasn't sure how he wanted to deliver the lines. That's not the most ridiculous part. That honor goes to when he ends it by going "ROAAAAARRRR!!". In theory, it was a good idea; during one of their live shows, Opeth's vocalist did the growling, and that worked well. Mike Portnoy just doesn't have a deep enough voice to pull it off. ^note Which is also odd, because Akerfeldt didn't even seem to go that low in pitch. For a growl, it's far higher pitched than in some Opeth songs (Blackwater Park, The Grand Conjuration). Mike originally had the vocals sounding much more like Akerfeldt. It didn't work very well.
  • "Open your eyes, Nicholas!", followed by the girliest sounding man scream ever.
  • Most, if not all of the Train of Thought album is narmtastic, but "Honor Thy Father" is without a doubt the kicker. Wangsty lyrics about Mike's step father, James rapping (it's more hilarious than you'd imagine), System of a Down style guitar riffs, James adding "Yyeeeaaaahhh" at the end of every chorus, the deep throated dude saying "Don't cross the crooked step", and the pre choruses:
  On and on and on and on it goes
  Chauvinistic, selfish... COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLDDDD!!!!!
  • "Panic Attack" is an awesome song musically but the lyrics and the hammy deliveries sort of ruin it.
  IIIIII AM PAAAAAAARALYYYYYYZED, SOOOOOOOO AFRAAAAAAIID TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEE
  • Jordan Rudess is a great keyboardist, but some of his keyboard sounds are frankly ridiculous. The throat singing sound in the intro and outro of "Bridges in the Sky" is probably the worst in this regard. It was actually a sample of a real throat-singer. The song was originally called "The Shaman's Trance", so...
  • "Along For The Ride", a great power ballad, until Rudess does a keyboard solo with a instrument patch that sounds like it's coming from a Nintendo Entertainment System.
  • "Count of Tuscany". The line 'A bearded gentleman! HIS-TO-REE-AAAAAN!', sung in the way usually reserved for The Reveal possibly takes the cake in that particular song.
• Immortal are the grim and frostbitten butt-monkeys of black metal, with lines such as this:
  "At the mountains of madness
  Unending grimness
  These mountains which I heart".
  • Abbath posing menacingly with his fly unzipped.
  • "The Call of the Wintermoon". The archetypical black metal video featuring the band members running around in a forest in corpse paint and brandishing weapons for no reason at all. It's even funnier when the audio is replaced with "Good Vibrations".
• Silent Call, a prog metal band, have the line "As darkness falls... It's dark. And cold."
• Rammstein:
  • Their version of "Stripped", while not horrible, is narmy because of heavily accented English ^note Of note: Rammstein's version changes the Title Drop from "let me see you stripped down to the bone" to just "let me see you stripped" because Till Lindemann had difficulty pronouncing the rest of the line and "television" being pronounced "telly-vision". Well, okay, the latter is in the original; but "telly-vision" sounds more natural coming from Dave Gahan than it does from a deep-voiced scary German guy.
  • The music video for "Stripped" is made out of the footage from Leni Riefenstahl's ''Olympia'', which is mostly slow-motion shots of Olympic athletes doing gymnastics and springboard-diving. Combined with the already-narmy music, the movie turns into a complete farce, looking more like a result of a 14-year-old torrenting Sony Vegas for the first time than a film that pioneered many editing techniques. And it is hilariously awesome.
  • Can something be awesome and Narmy at the same time? If so, "Du Hast" is — it's so badass and Teutonically ominous that it loops into the territory of the ridiculous.
  • The song "Benzin" has a VERY strict rhyme scheme, to the point that it sounds hilariously repetitive.
  • Till Lindemann's deep, thickly-accented voice is pure Narm for some.
  • The first minute or so of Spiel Mit Mir is just unintentionally hilarious, especially the part where Till goes "Schaaaaaf" (meaning sheep, It Makes Sense in Context ). After that however, the song is just awesome.
  • Till's scream in "Stein um Stein" has the potential to sound genuinely creepy to most people, especially in the context of the song. On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine that he's just stubbed his toe.
• Hackneyed, a mostly teenaged German death metal band, sound badass enough if you don't listen to their lyrics:
  It's amazing what people eat
  Everything from fat to meat
  You are shocked about your guts
  There aren't only pork and nuts
• Nightwish:
  • Their lyrics are a frequent source of narm, especially when they (or their pronunciation) reveal a limited familiarity with English. ("Deed" for dead from "Planet Hell", and pronouncing the 'w' in sword?) Then there's every single word of "Creek Mary's Blood".
  • "Elvenpath" has some of the narmiest lyrical content. Although meant to be a tribute to JRR Tolkien and his works, it is just a mishmash of fantasy tropes all crammed into one song, not to mention Tarja's Finnish accent, which is especially clear in this song. This is just one example of the narmy lyrics:
    The moonwitch took me to a ride on a broomstick
    Introduced me to her old friend home gnome
    Told me to keep the sauna warm for him
  • "Nymphomaniac Fantasia" from their first album has the lines "The scent of a woman was not mine" and "Old love lies deep you said / Deeper shall be the wound between your legs.
  • Worth noting that Tuomas Holopainen seems aware of the narm on their first album, which the previous two songs come from. He jokingly said that if the album were to be made into a movie like Imaginaerum it would be "a black and white comedy".
  • Even Marco Hietala's singing can incite chuckles.
    SING VAAAAAANCE AGAAAAAIN WITH MEEEE, AAARE STRAAAANGE DYO-EEEEAAAATTTT!
• Disturbed:
  • The infamous rant towards the end of "Down with the Sickness."
    No, mommy, don't do it again! Don't do it again!
    I'll be a good boy! I'll be a good boy! I promise!
    No, mommy, don't hit me! Owww!
    Why did you have to hit me like that, mommy?
    Don't do it! You're hurting me! Owwww!
    Why did you have to be such a bitch?!
    Why don't you, why don't you just fuck off and die?!
    Why can't you just fuck off and die?!
    Why can't you just leave here and die?!
    Never stick your hand in my face again, bitch! FUCK YOU!!
    I don't need this shit! You stupid, sadistic, abusive, fucking whore!
    How would you like to see how it feels, mommy?!
    Here it comes! Get ready to DIE!!
  • And this sounds like a rejected DragonForce lyric:
    TAKE A LAST LOOK AROUND WHILE YOU'RE ALIVE
    I'M AN INDESTRUCTIBLE MASTER OF WAR!!!
  • "The Animal" is tongue-in-cheek in an Alice Cooper-like way. That notion doesn't prevent much laughter after this lyric:
    "And now
    We both shall dine
    In hell tonight!"
  • "Warrior" manages to be even cheesier than "Indestructible." It includes lyrics such as these:
    I am an instrument of violence
    I am a vessel of immense ability
    I cannot leave this undecided
    Stepping down to battle another day
    Determination is a vital part of me
    Surrender now or be counted
    With the endless masses that I will defeat
  • Then later:
    I can't be told to compromise this
    They'll never doubt the body lying at my feet
    A most formidable reminder
    They will speak my name for eternity
    I have no need of any guidance
    I am a weapon, powerful beyond belief
    Seen through the warrior's eyes, I never need to question, how to defeat you
  • "Inside the Fire" is a good song written for a good cause, namely suicide prevention, but the video undermines the message somewhat with over-the-top visuals and an extremely hammy Big "NO!" uttered by the suicide victim's boyfriend upon discovering her body.
• Quite a few of Dio's songs, but especially "Holy Diver". The music video doesn't help. Killswitch Engage's version may be even more Narm, depending on your perspective.
  RIIIIIDE THE TIGER! YOU CAN SEE HIS STRIPES BUT YOU KNOW HE'S CLEAN! OH DON'T YOU SEEEE WHAT I MEEEEAN!
• DragonForce, and their cheesy, charging-courageously-into-battle High Fantasy lyrics, everything taken up to eleven - it's pure Narm. Their music is mostly Rule of Cool and not particularly serious; even so, they were probably going for "uplifting and triumphant", not "helpless with laughter". Even their titles can be Narm, e.g. "Through the Fire and the Flames" (not to mention "through the redundancy and the repetition").
• Grim Reaper's "See You In Hell". A key moment is when Steve Grimmett's over-the-top melisma renders the line "can I make you an offer you can't refuse" as "Can I make you an offer you CAAAARAYOOOOOO!". Then there's the video. If there's a Real Life equivalent to Limozeen, then Grim Reaper is it. Narm Charm can be cited for a lot of their songs.
• Dir en grey:
  • "AGITATED SCREAMS OF MAGGOTS" because of phrases like "I'll rape your daughter on your grave." And the guitar riff under the verse wouldn't sound out of place under a routine from The Benny Hill Show. Sad thing is, all that improves the song.
  • On Withering to death., the lyrics for "saku" ("DICK HEAD!!! FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF AND WIPE!!! BRING BACK MY MERRY MEMORY!!!") and "Machiavellism" ("CRY ON!! CRY ON!! WRIST CUT SHOW!!!").
  • "GLASS SKIN" would be a lovely song if it weren't sung entirely in nigh-unintelligible English. They also recorded the song entirely in Japanese, and it's much less narmy.
  • The song "CLEVER SLEAZOID" contains the line "ONE DAY I WILL RAPE YOUR PARENTS." Doesn't help that Kyo's English is a bit lacking.
    WITHAIHATIHTAITHWIAWITHAWIHTIAWTHWAITHAWIHTIWAHTIAWHTI.
  • RED SOIL. "It's pros-ti-TOO-shun to the kids who LISIWOOFROLAWALLELEF!"
• Nile:
  • In the middle of "Unas, Slayer of the Gods," a voice suddenly proclaims:
    "Uuuunas hath taken possession of the hearts of the gods! Unas FEEDETH on their ENTRAILS!!"
    "He hath GOOOOOORGED on their unuttered sacred words! He hath assimilated the wisdom of the gods!"
    "HIIIIIIIS EXISTANCE... IS EVERLAAASSTIIIIIIIING!!!!!"
  • "Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Bearer Against Attacks from He Who Is in the Water." Not that it's bad! But they ought to have called it "I Don't Want to Be Eaten by Crocodiles," since that's what it's about.
• The Burzum song "War" appears to begin with Varg Vikernes saying, "This is war. Huh! Wow.". The line can also be misheard as "This is, huh... wow." (according to his official page, the line is just "This is war"). The completely unintelligible screeching that immediately follows it is even more Narmy. In another part, he seems to be coughing in the middle of a line. Then again, Varg used the stage name "Count Grishnackh".
• Everything Messiah of Candlemass does in their music video for the song "Bewitched." Most prominent is the doom stomping near the end.
• Black Sabbath:
  • Some lyrics in "Hand of Doom".
    Holes are in your skin
    Caused by deadly pin
  • Almost all of the lyrics to "The Wizard", but especially:
    Casting his shadow, weaving his spell
    Funny clothes, tinkling bell
  • Some people feel that even "Iron Man" has narm.
    IIIIIIIIII AAAAAAAMMMMM IIIIIIIIRRRRRROOOOOONNNNNN MMMMMMAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!
  • In "Electric Funeral" there's this voice that sounds strangely like Arnold Schwarzenegger chanting the song's title.
• In an especially jarring example from an otherwise dark and serious album, the song "Junkhead" by Alice in Chains contains some truly narmy lyrics and rhymes. A few lines from "Sea of Sorrow" are narmy, also.
• Slayer:
  • The song "213" (about Jeffrey Dahmer) from their seventh album, Divine Intervention, has narmy lyrics, such as "My skin crawls with orgasmic seed" and "I need a friend... please be my companion." But the Moment of Narm isn't reached until the closing lyrics:
  Here I stand
  Above all that's been true
  How I love
  HOW I LOVE TO KILL YOOOOUUUUU!!!!
  • The album God Hates Us All, if you couldn't tell by the tile, is infested with Kerry King's Author Tracts against religion which sound less like the words of a seasoned atheist and more like they came from the journal of an angry teenager who had just turned on his religious upbringing. The clincher comes in the song "New Faith", where the music cuts out for a moment and Araya shouts a line that is clearly intended to be the most shocking, brutal moment in the song, but instead sounds incredibly silly:
    I KEEP THE BIBLE IN A POOL OF BLOOD
    SO THAT NONE OF ITS LIES CAN AFFECT MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
  • Their Cover Version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for the Less Than Zero soundtrack. It makes sense in theory because most of the rest of the soundtrack is contemporary acts covering songs from the 60s and 70s, and because the original has been cited as one of the earliest heavy metal songs. But while the Epic Riff is sinister enough for thrash metal, it's still pretty much a love song, so it can be a little ridiculous to hear Tom Araya screaming his way though the Looped Lyrics ^note they might have been aware of this to an extent - their version changes the line "don't you know that I love you" to "don't you know that I want you", and if that's not just a mondegreen on the part of the band, they may have just decided that the words "I love you" don't belong in a Slayer recording.
• Most of the songs in Cannibal Corpse's catalog are so horrifically violent that they turn around and become Narm in and of themselves. But what takes the cake are the names of the songs. "Rancid Amputation?" "Meat Hook Sodomy?" "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt?" "NECROPEDOPHILE?!" They sound like Dethklok songs! A sample of their narmy lyrics from "Post Mortal Ejaculation":
  I baptize her face with my rot
  Then venom forms in her throat
  On my discharge she will choke.
• Most of the catalog for German Power Metal band Wizard probably qualifies as Narm. The pinnacle of narminess would be in the chorus to "Our Hate Will Burn You," a song about how the band plans to attack all of their critics with swords. The singer warbles in a dramatic falsetto, "The day will come when we piss in your FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!"
• There are two Nazi Black Metal bands called Jewicide.
• Accept:
  • They sometimes had problems with English pronunciation and English idioms. Some examples:
    "He was a leader, malicious and wiolent" ("The King")
    "I know you would like some light, but sorry, here is no lamp" ("Turn Me On")
    "The force is too strong, it's breaching the chains" ("The Beast Inside")
  • Then, there are some of their lyrics that are just strange:
  "Icicle brains, bicycle chains" ("Breaker")
  "Write a letter, what's the matter? You'll feel better, write a letter." ("Losers and Winners")
• Lordi, "Hard Rock Hallelujah". Great song, but they don't have a great grasp of English in this line:
  All we need is lightning, with power and might
  Striking down the prophets of false

Also, yes, he said "Arockalypse" and "Day of Rockening". The latter is followed by what the thick accents turn into an endorsement for Hooters.

• KMFDM's "A Hole In The Wall" not only brings to mind people in silver jumpsuits, but also has lyrics almost fit for Silly Love Songs. They are a mix of horrific and hilarious:
  And when I have to die
  I want to suffocate between your sweet breasts
• Grave Digger is narmy. How so, you ask?
  • Singer Chris Boltendahl has two singing styles, an over-the-top screechy style and a melodramatic clean style. His singing has gotten better every album, (un)fortunately.
  • Then, we have the songs:
    • "Night drifter, CRIES IN HIS PILLOW!" from "Night Drifter."
    • "LOVE IS BREAKING MY HEEE-AAAART!" from "Love is Breaking My Heart."
    • From "Shadows of a Moonless Night":
      "I hear you're near
      Near by my ear
      Kissing my ass
      Stealing my breath"
    • "Wedding Day" is about newlyweds; the wife won't have sex with her husband. And the chorus is (so not) ominous:
    " Wedding Day
    All night we gonna burn
    Wedding Day
    The day of no return
    It's my wedding day..."
    • Their song "Dolphin's Cry." Yes, a band called Grave Digger has a song called "Dolphin's Cry".
    • "The Spell," which is sung from Merlin's POV:
    "There in the woods she taught me how to touch a girl
    I taught her to enchant any person in the world
    I feel my end is near
    I think I have to die
    I pay a high price feeling lust between her thighs!"
    • Just this from "Sword":
    Steel by steel
    The hammer falls
    Shaping me - a deadly sword
    With fire and power - I do well
    I curse it with a magic spell!
• Behold Damien Storm, the Holy Grail of Heavy Metal Narm: "Raven in the Courtyard".
• Metallica:
  • St. Anger is full of Narm.
    "MY LIFESTYLE! DETERMINES MY DEATHSTYLE!"
    "ALL WITHIN MAH HAAAAAAAANDS!"
    "KILL KILL KILL KILL! KIIIILLL!" times 40
  • From the Reload album:
  "Gimme Fuel! Gimme Fiya! Gimme Dabichaydesiyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah Oh!!!!!"
  "BUT THE MEMOREEEEE REMMMMOOOOIIIYYYYYYYYNNNNNSSSSSS!!!!!!"
  • From the album Death Magnetic we have this gem of a lyric on the song "The Day That Never Comes"
  "LOVE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD!"
  Then there's the immortal classic, "WHAT DON'T KILL YA, MAKE YA MORE STRONG!"
  • From Load, pretty much the entirety of "Ain't My Bitch." But this line especially:
  "You arrived. But now, it's tiiiime to kiiiss your aaass goodbayyyyyyyyyyyyy."
  • From The Black Album:
  "Yeah heh heh heh heh heh. BOO!!!!"
  "Don't Tread On Me." Yes, the entire song.
  • Yes, Metallica's 80s albums had plenty of this as well:
    • Kill 'Em All: Most of the lyrics on the album are pretty narmtastic. From "You will be dying. A thousand deaths!" to James screaming "And I'm the one!!!" to "On leather steeds, they ride!" Of course, that's all part of the album's charm.
    • From Ride The Lightning: "This can't be happening to meeeeeeeeeeeeeee."
    • From Master Of Puppets: "Leper Messiah" is a pretty narmy song when you consider how melodramatically it depicts the issue of televangelism.
    • A less enduring example can be heard on ...And Justice For All: "Harvester Of Sorrow is quite possibly the most disturbing song Metallica has ever written. But the impact of the line "Anger. Misery. You'll suffer unto me!" is seriously marred by James's bored-sounding delivery of it.
  • And of course, there's the infamous Lou Reed collaboration Lulu, whose first single forces James to yell "I AM THE TABLE!". (taken one step further with Beatallica: "I AM A PRETTY NICE GIRL! I AM THE CHAIR!")
• The Italian symphonic black metal band Theatres des Vampires has to hold some kind of trophy for narminess. While their music is generally well done, they shoot themselves in the foot by having ridiculous lyrics — their writing suffers from "English as a second language."
  • "Angel of Lust" contains these immortal lyrics:
  'He's so sad this moment
  He'sa lookin' for you,
  On God's soul you pray your prayer but for you.'
  • They also have a song called "Curse of the Headless Christ" that is literally about zombie Jesus, with an axe, stalking the woods and looking for the clowns who stole his head.
  • They have a song with the lyrics "Unholy Bloody Virgin Fuckers".
• The music video for "Stick Stickly" by Attack Attack!, which spawned the crabcore meme, which was in turn embraced/lampshaded by the band themselves as a marketing tactic. This video shows the group playing with a weird crab-like stance, and also has incredibly over the top and messy choreography of their constant bouncing and headbanging. It doesn't exactly help that the song itself is a Post-Hardcore Cliché Storm, with endless breakdowns and an inexplicable trance segment.
• Iron Maiden:
  • "Quest for Fire" treats cavemen with the band's usual bombast performance ("“In a tiiiiiiiiiiime when dinosaurs walked the eaaaaaarth"). One review said this:
    "Everything in “Quest for Fire” is writ large, but doesn’t quite deserve to be. That disconnect places the song pretty high on the unintentional comedy scale."

  The funniest part is definitely "And the woooolves, they howled INTOOOOOOOOOO THE NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!!!!!" The over-the-top vocals make it priceless.

  • "The Alchemist" is so badass it hurts... If you overlook this one line:
  Know me, the magus, I am Dr. Dee, and this is my house
  • "Judgment of Heaven" is a bit of a Tear Jerker, until the end of the chorus, where Blaze breaks the mood by shouting "YEAH YEEAAAHHHHH!!!!"
    • From "Blood on the World's Hands"
  IT'S OUT OF CON-TROL!!!!
  BLOOD ON THE WOOOOOOORRRLLLDSSSS HAAAAAAAANDS!!!
  SOME-ONE SHOULD KNOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!
• Iced Earth do this quite often, often combining it with Department of Redundancy Department.
  • Nightmares:
  Nightmares! In The Night!
  • Mystical End
  For the one who shall deceive us is the one - AAAAAH!!!!
  • Reaching The End:
  Now I feel that I've reached the end
  And the end of my quest is close at hand
  What have I done
  I've reached the end
• Lacuna Coil crosses into Narm territory more often than not, especially when Andrea Ferro sings.
  • On "Within Me," he tries desperately hard to sing a ballad, and the resulting product is...hilarious:
  THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU THAT MAAAAAAKES MEEEEE FEEEEEEL BAAAAAAD!
  • Try "Fragments of Faith." The Cliché Storm lyrics are tolerable until he randomly death-growls this:
    WHERE IS THE PAIN?
    SOMEWHERE... DOWN!

  His attempts at rapping in the verse are the clincher.

• The Norwegian Black Metal band called Ancient has a song called "Lilith's Embrace." The song itself isn't Narmy, but the music video is. It has a blue close-up on the lead singer making funny faces and a couple of scenes involving a guy moving his tongue in random, uncontrollable sequences, amongst other Narmy things.
• As awesome as Delain's 'The Gathering' may be, the fact that the male lead singer from Nightwish (see above) provided backing vocals can't help but make this song an easy target.
• Doro's "Night of the Warlock" is a great song. Its intro is less great.
  "I hear your heartbeat from miles away. And I know you're scared. 'coz I smell your pain! Hahahaha!"
• The attempts to describe absolute Gorn in Whitechapel's first album. This is an album about Jack the Ripper, mind you. From the non-indicatively-titled "Fairy Fay":
  "As I hack your lifeless corpse with my chainsaw
  My heart leaps faster every swing I flay while smiling at your face
  Don't fuck up the process; it won't be much longer until you die.
  Just let me have my fun, and then I'll let you die in peace.
  Oh wait, I Lied, false hope is my new trend.
  Disgusting, I know, but that's the general idea of me."
• Tristania is an awesome Gothic metal band with death/doom influences. Unfortunately, they're from Norway, so English is not their first language. This led them to some questionable word choices:
  • The chorus for "My Lost Lenore" keeps using the word "secrete". Don't they know that it's a biology term for when an organism's gland produces a substance?^note "Secrete" does have the secondary, archaic meaning of "to conceal". It's technically correct, but nowadays, the word is used almost exclusively in a medical/biology context, which gives it some icky connotations.
  "Winternight
  Conceal thy precious angellore
  I secrete my soul
  Under thy wings of sorrow. . ."
  • "Aphelion" uses "secrete" too, with the wrong conjugation to boot.
  • Sequel of Decay has the wonderfully Narmy line "Hopefully you'll stop him and delay the conquering angina." They don't seem to get that "angina" usually refers to a specific medical issue, and isn't just some generic word for a malevolent force. That the word is reminiscent of "vagina" doesn't exactly help the lolz.
  • They even made "Angina" the title of an otherwise awesome song, which contains the narmy line "Angina striking Elysium"... whatever that's supposed to mean.
• The folk metal band Elvenking, listen to "Seasonspeech" for instance. Here a male metal singer, a female singer, growls and a female operatic voice are mixed. Couple that with electric guitars, bass, drums and a violin.
• Avenged Sevenfold: NIIIIIIIIIGHTMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA~RE
• Trail Of Tears' "Faith Comes Knocking": You'll either find this part to be Nightmare Fuel or high-octane narm when you hear it:
  "I'm sorry to say
  Now it's goodbye to you..."
  [gunshot]
  [manic laughter]

The bit at the very end, where the singer whispers "Are you dead now?".

• Some of Sonata Arctica's early material is extremely narmy. The combination of Lyrical Dissonance (depressing lyrics don't go well with sugar-coated, high-speed Power Metal), occasional Engrish, and Tony Kakko's thick Finnish accent (all of which vary song by song) leads to songs like "False News Travel Fast". Yes, travel. Unsurprisingly, they regularly tour with Nightwish.
• Blood Stain Child occasionally fall into Narm due to a limited fluency with English. To take the song "Silence of Northern Hell" as an example:
  It's necessary to stay this land no more.
  Now all of matter not and corrupt.
  Our hymn is gotten wet in the rain everyday.
  That never reaches the sky.
• "On Earth As It Is In Hell" by the UK band Hell is fairly standard trad metal, but the video has to be seen to be be believed. The styling is obviously meant to be scary, but the costumes look like they were bought from a cheap costume shop. The singer's movements don't help matters one bit.
• Deicide has some pretty weird videos. Their main gimmick is basically "God is dead." Their videos on the other hand are generally "comically sacrilegious." In one video, there's a priest being chased by zombies. No explanation as to why, they're just there. Another video was to a song about how "God is dead, nobody loves you" but the video is about a fat guy in a cartoony devil costume sneaking around a city doing such heinous acts as tripping old ladies and stealing from children.
• Slipknot can get narmy, especially in the way lead singer Corey Taylor does HARDCORE METAL GROWLS for the verses and then starts singing cleanly in the choruses...that is jarring.
  • "Psychosocial" is one of the worst examples of this. When he's stopped singing with the musical equivalent of Bold Inflation...
    GO DRILL YOUR DESERTS, GO DIG YOUR GRAVES THEN FILL YOUR MOUTH WITH ALL THE MONEY YOU WILL SAVE
  • He sings this in a melodic voice...
    And the rain will kill us all
    If we throw ourselves against the wall
  • And it gets hurled into Narmland with the high, strangulated chanting of "psychosocial, psychosocial, psychosocial" apropos of nothing and the extreme drum cacaphony. The general Word Salad Lyrics don't help.
  • "THE LIMITS OF THE DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAD!!!" That lyric is no surprise as to why it's cut out for the radio/video version of the song.
  • And then there's "People = Shit". The title itself is an indication of how unintentionally hilarious the song can be.
    "I'm!
    Not!
    Like!
    You!
    I!
    Just!
    Fuck!
    Up!"
• Static-X are capable of bringing the narm with a vengeance. Wayne Static has a vocal style that goes back and forth between a screechy wail and a seriously over-the-top, guttural growl. That in itself isn't necessarily narm. But then you have a song like "Love Dump," featuring lines like "I've always loved you, love dumpling / Your shit's like chocolate cake and your ass smells like a rose." All screamed at the top of his lungs.
• Chris Barnes was known for being the frontman of the famous death metal band, Cannibal Corpse. Unfortunately, once he left the band and went to focus on his side project, Six Feet Under, his vocals deteriorated for the worst. His once bloodcurdling screams turned into screams that sounded like a cross between a cat screech and a pig squeal. Example: "The Day The Dead Walked".
  • The Narm is amplified the most on Nightmares of the Decomposed, which features him doing this squeal far more often for some reason, the best showcases being "The Noose" and "The Rotting".
• This mimed TV appearance by obscure Quebecois metal group Trop Ferross, mainly for some truly shoddy props and costuming (such as a jack-o-lantern on a stake that looks to be a plastic Halloween lawn decoration). The band are so enthusiastic about it all that their performance may raise it up to Narm Charm though.
• Ministry's "Ghouldiggers", a rant against record labels milking musicians' deaths for profit, does use some intentional lyrical humor to get it's point across - however, all of the silly-looking primitive flash animation in the music video was probably meant to be taken seriously.
• Nu-metal quartet Coal Chamber were just exploding with narm. As a band, they had their own sort of visceral power and sounded solid for the time, but lyrically, vocalist Dez Fafara tended to have underwritten lyrics that, coupled with his over-the-top, gutteral growl, sounded like he was just throwing a big hissyfit. And god, the melodrama ("YOU'RE BLEEDING MEEEEE, YOU'RE BLEEDING MEEEEE, YOU'RE BLEEDING MEEEEE, YOU'RE BLEEDING").
  • 'KILL DA MAN BE-CAHM DA MON-STARRR!'
  • "Tyler's Song" is merely Dez giving his son life lessons, set to a grinding nu-metal groove. Stuff like "Don't com-pro-mise your ideals for anyone else, respect your Mom and always think of her first," set to distorted guitars, is just too silly to take seriously.
  • "Big Truck" has an ominous Epic Riff and minimal lyrics that are mostly just about driving a big, fast truck. There might be a little more to it than that - some sources say Dez wrote the song after bassist Rayna Foss mentioned to him that she was afraid of some of the large, fast moving trucks they encountered while driving on tour.
• Van Canto is an interesting band. They have a male singer, a female singer, a drummer, and a couple of backing singers that imitate instruments. So they'll do a cover of a Nightwish song or a Metallica song, but instead of guitar and bass, there's a couple of dudes going "RIDDLY DIDDLY DIDDLY DIDDLY" ad nauseam. This makes for a very unique listening experience, to say the least.
• Korn's "Shoots And Ladders." Okay, granted, the whole point of the song is that all sorts of nursery rhymes we had as children had dark undercurrents, which is true... but it's still Jonathan Davis chanting "knick-knack, paddy-whack, give a dog a bone."
• Pretty much the entirety of KISS's catalog, but particularly their hit "Love Gun":
  I really love you baby, I love what you got
  Let's get together, we can...get hot

  And later

  I'll be a gambler baby, lay down the bet
  We'll get together, momma...you'll sweat

That is not even counting what the titular 'Love Gun' actually IS...

• "Asshole", by Gene Simmons, from the solo album of the same name. Sample lyrics:
  You've got a personality
  Like a bucket full of pee

  You have such a stupid name
  You're the king of all stupidness!

  Nice playground insults there, Gene.

• Samantha 7 were a terrible one-album band fronted by Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille pretending to be a nasally-voiced punk-pop brat. Their one decent song on the album is marred by incredibly asinine playground-level rhyming:
  Bonnie Bradley lives across the street
  She has a dog named Ray
  Went to the pound and got a dog so we could meet
  And I named my new dog Fay

• Intentional in the entire output of Austrian Death Machine, a comical side-project from Tim Lambesis of As I Lay Dying. The entire concept is that Ah-nold is fronting a band, and all the song titles are famous quotes from his movies. You haven't lived until you've heard a metalcore growler yell 'RUBBAH BABY BUGGY BUMPAAAAHS, YEAH!', 'you think this might, might be a too-mah/IT'S NOT A TOO-MAH! IT'S NOT A TOO-MAH!', and especially 'WAN-TWO-THREE-GET TO DA CHOPPAAAAAAAH!'
• Power metal band Gloryhammer is made of this, playing every possible fantasy trope out to the point of self-parody in their lyrics. Their album is a concept album about a mythical Scottish past, in which Dundee is destroyed by an army of undead unicorns. Completely intentional, though (keep in mind that this is a side project of Christopher Bowes, whose main band isn't entirely serious either).
• Italian Heavy Metal bands seem to fall into this all too easily. Another example is Burning Black. Their music is fairly normal for Metal but it's the lyrics and vocals that drag the band deep into Narm territory. They are supposedly in English, but the lyrics are so incomprehensible that you'll have to find them online... And even then they make Rhapsody's grasp of the English language seem impressive by comparison!
• Metalcore band The Word Alive covers Kanye West's Mercy. Despair.
• Deathcore band Waking the Cadaver is this top-to-bottom. Just the album titles (Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler, Beyond Cops, Beyond God and Real-Life Death) are enough to get a snort from the labored attempts at profundity. Not to mention the lyrics, especially on Perverse Recollections, where what should be horrifying depictions of rape from the rapist's perspectives are instead rendered hilarious by how far over the top said acts go, especially once some of them start crossing into Anatomically Impossible Sex territory. That album's also infamous for parodic levels of pig squealing, which is likely to draw a different kind of squealing from anyone who doesn't think it's the most "br00tal" vocal technique of all time. While their other albums ditch the pig squeals for generic growling and the misogyny in favor of generic murder and thuggishness, they're no less unintentionally hilarious.
  
  The band's aesthetic doesn't help in the least - they're Pretty Fly for a White Guy to such an extent that they could serve as that trope's poster child if it wasn't already taken by Cartman. This also comes through in their lyrics and music, particularly when frontman Don Campan starts rap-growling.
• Novembers Doom is full of narm, mostly due to the singer's completely unaware approach to the style making him sound like a 15 year old who just discovered poetry.
  • The song "Twilight Innocence" (a song written for his newborn daughter) is full of it:
    I wonder what she dreams about?
    Perhaps my arms that hold her tight?
    Or the love that warms her heart?
    Peaceful sleep till dawn's new day.
  • It's enhanced by the singer's very monotonous singing style, and brought up a notch later on with gems like
    Your dreams inspire me to be the best man that I can be
    To never let you down
    And make you proud of me
• Turisas is a good band. "Ten More Miles" is a good song. The video, however, is almost pure, unadulterated narm. It cuts back and forth between clips of the band as viking warriors ransacking and destroying a village and clips of the lead singer, Mathias Nygård, as a businessman in a suit sitting in what appears to be a boardroom meeting. At the end of the video, businessman!Nygård takes out a sword and (presumably) murders everyone else in the meeting. About 80% of it is in slow motion. Turisas are capable of making entertaining videos, but Ten More Miles was just...weird.
• "Last Breath" by Ensiferum. Petri Lindroos is an absolutely brilliant harsh vocalist, but the man cannot do clean vocals to save his life. His voice is off-key and strained for almost the entire song, and there's virtually no emotion in it. The song is meant to tell the final moments of a warrior dying on a battlefield from their wounds, but it sounds more like someone reading their grocery list.
• Sepultura naturally tends to be pretty narmy, given that English isn't their native language. "Refuse/Resist," despite being a pretty awesome song, has this gem: I'm sick of theess! While the entire Beneath The Remains album has some pretty narm-tastic song titles^note The band consulted an English dictionary for all the lyrics on the album, such as "Sarcastic Existence" and "Hungry."
• Megadeth is filled to the brim with Narm. In fact, you'd probably do better to count the number of songs that don't contain at least a little bit of Narm.
  • The spoken word portions of "Sweating Bullets".
    I hear it in hear...
    Blood stains on my...hands
    The big axe...
    Sweating...
  • The awkward metaphors in "Peace Sells".
    What do you mean I, "hurt your feelings"?
    I didn't know you had any feelings
  • "Forget to Remember", a song about senility, contains a spoken word section where a woman tells Dave Mustaine to leave her alone and that she has no idea who he is. It's Mustaine's fifteen-year-old daughter.
• Pantera seems to intentionally invoke this with their music. The band's "tough guy" image sometimes becomes so over-the-top and ridiculous that you can't help chuckling when listening to their music. Whether this is intentional, however, is anyone's guess.
• "Silent Spring" by Probot (with guest vocals from D.R.I.'s Kurt Brecht) is a Protest Song about how mankind is destroying nature with pollution while also killing themselves off with war. It gets a little hard to take the message seriously when a lyric ends in "...and stuff" just for the sake of a rhyme, making it sound like Brecht has suddenly lapsed into Buffyspeak:
  Then they started to die
  But not fast enough
  So they shot at each other
  With bullets and stuff
• Sharon moves around a bit too much in the music video for Within Temptation's "Mother Nature".
• Shining (Sweden) inhabit (and, indeed, popularized) a genre that some consider full of narm (depressive/suicidal black metal, or DSBM), but even for those who enjoy it, they definitely still have their moments.
  • Main man Niklas Kvarforth's Swedish lyrics are held in high regard by most, but significantly less people hold the same view of his English lyrics. Take, for instance, the refrain late into "Hail Darkness Hail" from Redefining Darkness, sung in his already base breaking clean vocals...
  Without you, there is no light
  At the end of the tunnel
  • ...or "For the God Below" from the same album, at the end of which, he inexplicably and without context sings:
  Christianity worldwide
  • VI: Klagospalmer was a particularly experimental album for Shining, with some ridicule being pointed towards the solos in the album - while solos have long been a part of Shining's sound, the wildness of the ones on the album (not to mention the abundance of them) invited unfavourable comparisions to bands like Van Halen.
  • "Han som lurar inom" from X: Varg utan flock plays like a typical track from the band, up until a break in the song, where Kvarforth partakes in what one can only assume was supposed to be a spoken word section, but ended up sounding almost like he's rapping.
  • By far, V: Halmstad is the band's most acclaimed album from both fans and critics, but one common point of criticism is the many movie samples present in it from movies such as Prozac Nation. Going from killer riffage to a crying woman espousing "I hate myself" can certainly leave a sour taste in the mouth.
  • Possibly the narmiest moment in the band's entire discography, though, is on the prior album, IV: The Eerie Cold, right at the start of the album leading into "I och med insikt skall du förgå", where a man only referred to as "Mr. Björnhagen" runs down the listeners for buying the album, being "ignorant little fucks" and posers, before ramping it up further and outright referring to not just the listeners, but the band and everyone else in the world as "potential child rapists, flaming homosexuals, murderers (and) thieves". Yep. This intro is cut from most reissues of the album, but for the curious, it's still on Youtube.

Musical Theater

• "Looks like he fell on a rock and crushed in his head!" from Brigadoon. Worst Recatitive Evah!
• One of the recurring songs in Blood Brothers tries for a sort of increasingly Dark Reprise in its use of the line "Just like Marilyn Monroe". Instead, the increasing contrivances required to set up the line make it unintentionally funny.
• Several cast recordings have been marred by including spoken lines that sounded flat, over-emoted, or weird. The young actor who does Colin Craven on The Secret Garden Original Broadway Cast album is a major offender.
• Jesus Christ Superstar:
  • The Original London Cast album has a brilliant, beautifully enunciating Pilate threateningly sneering, "Who is this broken man/cluttering up my hallway?/Who is this unfortunate?" It's fearsome and tense. Then the guard replies in Cockney so thick that it's painful, "Someone Chrois', Kin' of the Gee-ewwwwwws!"
  • The ridiculously high-pitched, scratchy voice of Caiaphas can get this way sometimes. On the other hand, you can close your eyes and pretend that Starscream is singing it.
• Most of the soundtrack for Zumanity by Cirque du Soleil. There's one song where half the lyrics are the words "Sex is beautiful". Then to make matters worse, the TV Dance song has this chorus sung completely in histrionics.
  I wanna be your hero
  I wanna be your EEEEEVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRYYYYYTHIIIIIIIIIIIING
  WHAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOAAAOAOAAOAOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOWWWW!!!

"Mio Bello Bello Amore" doesn't fare better either. Its attempts at sounding touching just fail horribly.

• Many Sera Myu songs - they tend to be full of Gratuitous English. The choreography helps, too.
  • From "All Of You Shall Die":
    "All of you shall DIE! ... Dammit."
  • Sailor Mars' image song "Flame Sniper" (or better said, FRAME SNIPAH) has an Engrishy beginning between a bystander and her. It stands out painfully, and the bystander's speech is so slurred that he sounds drunk.
    Bystander: Say... ah you da one... everrybody's talkin' bowwt?
    Mars: Yesss... I am Sera Mars... They aw caw me frame snipah. Ah you weady?
• Stephen Sondheim, despite his reputation for intelligent, biting lyrics, has written a howling Narm on occasion.
  • Into the Woods features a deep moment ruined by this:
  "Witches can be right, giants can be good
  You decide what's right, you decide what's good."
  • Somewhat justified in that the singers were addressing two exceptionally clueless and/or thickheaded teenagers. Sometimes you have to introduce subtle concepts with a clue-by-four.
  • Sondheim wrote "Send in the Clowns" too. It's gorgeous — arguably the highlight of A Little Night Music — and It Makes Sense in Context (the character singing it is an actress realizing her love affair has become a farce), but a serious song focused on something as fundamentally lighthearted as clowns is just asking for unintentional titters.
    "So where are the clowns?
    There ought to be clowns
    Don't bother, they're here."
• Ruthie Henshall as The Younger Woman in Putting It Together—during the performance on the DVD, she frequently makes strange faces while singing, but the most ridiculous is near the end of "More".
  "Nothing's better than more, more more... except all, all all!" Gonk!
• Jekyll and Hyde:
  • Emma explains her reasons for marrying Jekyll to a thwarted suitor thus:
  "What I choose to do is decided by me."
  • At the end of "The World Has Gone Insane," Hyde just growls "Insane! Insane!" over and over. Then again, most of that song could qualify.
  • "Confrontation" consists of Jekyll and Hyde in a heated argument. Since both are portrayed by the same actor, one half of the actor has hair and makeup to look like Hyde, and the other made up normally to look like Jekyll. When they switch parts of the song, the actor turns so that either his left or right side is exposed to the audience - complete with lighting cues. The concept is already flawed - but in the hands of a bad actor, it is absolutely hilarious.
  • "Facade" is an interesting song when the audience first hears it, but it gets reprised so many times that it just starts to get silly.
  • David Hasselhoff played the title characters in one production of the show. Enough said.
• West Side Story: "MARIAAAAA! I just met a girl named MARIAAAAA!"
• The song Adam Lambert sings in The Ten Commandments, "Is Anybody Listening?", is so narmy it's almost impossible to listen to. Some choice examples:
  "They say I've got no right to question life without hope
  Or ask for anything more than to suffer and bleed at the end of a rope."
  "Is anybody listening? Does anybody hear?
  Does anybody out there see us drowning in our tears?"
  "They try and make us think that we'll never have a chance
  Can I fight for my own freedom with only these two hands?"

  And the climax

  "You can tie a rock to my soul,
  But you can't build a prison for my mind, no.
  You can chain my body to the earth,
  But still my spirit flies,
  My spirit FLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIESSS!!!"

Watching the film of the production doesn't help. Lambert's mouth does some... bizarre contortions at the end.

• "The Big Black Giant" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Me and Juliet. Hammerstein chose to express his philosophy of the theater through, as Dave Barry said of "MacArthur Park," a really stupid metaphor:
  One night it's a laughing giant;
  Another night a weeping giant.
  One night it's a coughing giant;
  Another night a sleeping giant.
  Ev'ry night you fight the giant and maybe if you win,
  You send him out a nicer giant than he was when he came in...
• "Defying Gravity" from Wicked is either this or Moment of Awesome.
• Whistle Down the Wind is so full of this it's ridiculous. With a main character named Swallow belting lines like "I don't even know what I know!" and an entire song about a compulsive gambler named Charlie Christmas, it's impossible to take anything seriously. Not the mention the Londoners CANNOT seem to do Southern U.S. accents.
• "Dancing is Not a Crime" from Footloose. It's Narm masquerading as Piss-Take Rap at best. At worst, it's Uncle Tomfoolery.
• It's downright tragic that the English translation of the beautiful musical Kristina från Duvemåla (or simply Kristina) throws out all the glory of the original Swedish lyrics, replacing it with purple prose and repeating the same stuff over and over and over and over and over again. The one song that manages to go safe from this is the hauntingly beautiful Gold Can Turn To Sand, which in its English form may not have half the impact of the original Swedish lyric but at least it isn't narmtastic purple prose.
  • One particularly bad offender is the ballad In the Dead of Darkness, where the titular line is repeated countless times in a two minute song. The original lyric, simply called Stanna (Stay) never says a word about darkness and actually goes into detail of what Karl Oskar would be losing if Kristina died, rather than harp on about the stupid dead of darkness.
  • The show's most popular piece, You Have To Be There. The Swedish lyric tells you so much about the role God plays in Kristina's life, in every aspect of it. When they wrote the English version they chose a few selected lines and proceed to harp on about them to no end. And they do it narm-style. Just compare the chorus where in the English she just won't shut up about the water metaphor:
    Kristina: (original) You must exist, You must. I live my life through You. Without You I am a wreckage on a dark and stormy sea. You must exist, You must. How can You then abandon me? I would be nowhere, I would be nothing, if You didn't exist.
    Kristina: You have to be there, You have to. My life I have placed in Thy keep. And without You I am drifting on a dark and stormy sea. You have to be there, You have to. Without You I'd drown in the deep. Too far, too far from land. The waters drag me down, I reach for Your hand.
  • And mind you, that's one of the more creative bits. How about this piece of variated lyrics:
    Kristina: (original) Who would feel my regret, and then grant me forgiveness? The peace in my soul, yes who would give that to me? Who would be there to greet me after death? If You didn't exist, who'd take care of me then?
    Kristina: And when I die who'll throw open His arms to recieve me? Who will forgive me and take me and show me His face? When I have gone to my rest will you watch me and wake me? When my time comes at last will you grant me Your grace?
• All ye who love music theater Narm, look no further than the Love Never Dies soundtrack:
  • "Beneath a Moonless Sky," in which a significant romantic evening is described with lines like this:
  "And I held you!"
  "And I touched you!"
  "And embraced you!"
  "And I felt you!"

The histrionic manner in which the singers deliver these gems adds to the hilarity.

• "The Beauty Underneath", a duet between the Phantom and Gustave, his illegitimate son with Christine. Set in a Coney Island carnival, the whole number seems like a Lady Gaga video with human oddities, mirrors, swirling sets and dancing lights. It actually sounds like one of her songs too, with a ridiculous throbbing guitar - and the ten year-old boy yelling "YES!" all the time, which sounds like something else entirely, and rather inappropriate at that. Not to mention the lyrics, dear God.
• "All would be ours if that bastard had never been BOOOOOOOOOOORN!!" Leave the melodramatic raging to the professionals, Madame Giry.

• Opera has its fair share of narmy moments:
  • Even the most hardcore opera buffs will admit that the famous "madness scene" from Lucia di Lammermoor, where Lucia has stabbed the man she was forced to marry and stands around in her bloody wedding dress and fantazises about her true love, is comical if it's not done really well. The music is still awesome, though.
  • In Siegfried by Richard Wagner, the Idiot Hero Sigfried does not know fear until he accidently cuts open the armor of the sleeping valkyrie Brunnhilde with his sword.
    Siegfried: THAT'S NOT A MAN!!!!!
  • The "Wolf's Glen" scene from Weber's opera Der Freischütz, opens with an eerie "Chorus of invisible spirits". Just don't listen too much to the lyrics:
    Moon-milk falling on the grass
    Oohooey! Oohooey!
    Spider’s web with blood o’ercast!
    Oohooey! Oohooey!
    Before the evening shadow’s cast
    Oohooey! Oohooey!
    the tender bride will die, alas!
    Oohooey! Oohooey!
    Before the owl has hooted thrice
    accomplished is the sacrifice!
    Oohooey! Oohooey! Oohooey!
  • Act 2 of Puccini's Manon Lescaut ends with a big scene where the title character is about to be arrested for adultery. Her lover urges her to flee with him, but she cannot bring herself to leave the luxuries at her wealthy husband's place. This is supposed to show her tragic materialism, but since it is clear that she is about to lose it all anyway AND get arrested to boot, it just makes her seem Too Dumb to Live. This is also the opera that ends with Manon dying a very prolonged death from thirst - in the desert outside New Orleans.
• The Phantom of the Opera is the mother of big, over-the-top, cheesy, gratuitous 1980s spectacle musical theatre. And yet, it is so enjoyable just because of this.
  • The official music video for the title song — directed by Ken Russell and made early in the show's development, long before its tone and look took their final forms — takes the narm and turns it up to eleven. Way up to eleven. You won't know where to start: Sarah Brightman's scary stare? Steve Harley gnashing his teeth? The Cape Swish? The very random close-ups? The skull on the boat with the dreadlocks on it? The ending screen? Holy crap!
  • The orchestrations. The wailing guitars! The synthesizer hand-claps! The arrangement of the song in the stage version was a lot less narmy — up until a few years ago, when they brought back the single orchestrations in all their cheesy late 1980s-rock glory. General fan reaction might best be described as They Changed It Back Now It Sucks.
• Andrew Lloyd-Webber's other big success, Cats, has potentially narmy moments, the fight with Macavity not least among them. The rest of the musical is either great at coming across as better for any narmy scenes, but the choreography of that scene is comparable to the infamous dance-fighting from West Side Story.
• Titanic: The Musical: During the sinking of the ship, the ship's designer Mr. Andrews bemoans the problems with the ship that could have been fixed before the ship even set sail, with the song "Mr Andrews' Vision". As the ship sinks in the background, he pores over the blueprints and goes "And this! And this! And this! AND THIS!".

New Wave

• Spandau Ballet:
  • Gold could've been a decent Synth-Pop anthem if the lead singer could actually sing.
• Culture Club were no strangers to narm:
  • While "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" isn't this as a song, its notorious music video, featuring blackface minstrels next to actual black people, certainly is.
  • "Time (Clock Of The Heart)" has two: the lyric "Because time won't give me time", which manages to combine Department of Redundancy Department & Captain Obvious in a single line, and the lyric "This could be the best place yet", which sounds a lot more like "This could be the bestest yet", which can cause chuckles amongst those bewildered the childish non-word "bestest" would be used in a serious song about a troubled relationship.
  • "The War Song; perhaps the daftest Protest Song ever, containing the beautifully written chorus hook "War, war is stupid, and people are stupid"
  • "Mannequin", due to just how bizarre the lyrics are, even by the standards of their other songs.
  • "Love Is Love", due to being a typical Silly Love Song with incredibly corny lyrics that would put most Céline Dion cuts to shame, especially the repetition of the nonsense eponymous phrase.^note Though, to be fair, Electric Dreams was a highly cheesy film itself...
  • "God, Thank You Woman" provides a rare meta example; knowing Boy George is gay (and flamboyantly so, at that) makes it difficult to take the song seriously, and causes one to wonder if he recorded it just to shut down speculation about his sexuality. Not only that, but the lyrics are both cliche ("I would give the world to you") & highly creepy ("You're the air I breathe", really?), making it come off as an Obsession Song rather than the Silly Love Song it's supposed to be.
• M had an embarrassing number with "Pop Musik". The lyrics including "Eenie, meenie, mynie, moe" is bad enough, but it's meant to be a celebration of pop music, which makes it even worse.
• The Ure-led period of Ultravox is littered with examples:
  • "Vienna" is very melodramatic, what with Midge's hammy vocals & the pretentious instrumentation. It's unsurprising some consider it either one of the 80s' worst singles or their best.
  • "The Voice" has some rather silly lyrics ("the look and the sound of the...voice?") and the "oohh-oohhh" backing vocals in the chorus are a bit much, even those used to the band's overblown style.
  • "Dancing With Tears In Eyes", despite being about a nuclear meltdown, is often mocked due to it's title alone, as well as Midge becoming a huge slab of pork during the chorus.
  • Midge's singing voice in general is either wonderfully textured although high-pitched, or whiny, hammy, and over-the-top, making each track hilarious.
• Tears for Fears in "Mad World":
  And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad, the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.
• "Shiny Shiny" by Haysi Fantayzee. The song is the 80s equivalent of "Disco Duck" - produced quickly to cash in on a trend (the blossoming New Wave era); annoyingly, almost perversely catchy, so bad that listening to nails on a chalkboard would be preferable. The lyrics are screamed, not sung, and the backing track is a bizarre combination of country music & synth-pop. In spite of all this, if you decipher some of the lyrics and watch the video, it's also supposed to be some sort of Protest Song about nuclear war (e.g. "We ain't got a hope / press a button, it's all remote")Hear it here, if you dare!
• "Ordinary World" is abeautiful, introspective ballad by Duran Duran, and arguably one of the best songs of their career. The issue is not the song itself, but the music video — it depicts the band singing the song to a woman wearing the most ridiculous bridal ensemble in the free world. One of the guitarists even plays with it at one point.
  • A lot of Simon's, err...over-exaggerated motions in their music videos can come across as this. Particularly bad is one of their very first, "Planet Earth", where he spends the entire video doing an absolutely cringe-worthy dance, which greatly distracts from the spectacular song.
• For those who don't have either their judgement clouded by Nostalgia Filter or are devotees of the New Romantic era, pretty much every song by Visage is this in spades. As it turns out, having a nightclub owner be the lead vocalist was a terrible idea, as Steve Strange can't sing; his vocal range is as flat as a pancake, and his slurred Welsh accent makes the lyrics neigh-incomprehensible to decipher. It helps that Midge Ure wrote the admittedly-catchy melodies, but many listeners wish he sung the tracks as well due to his immense singing ability, making this Ultravox & Magazine side project a great case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character (well, singer).
  • According to rumours, Midge wanted to do the vocals, but Steve overrode him personally, thinking he was talented enough. We can only wonder....

Pop

• Diane Warren, the human incarnation of Narm if there can be such a thing. A list of her more notable works is here.
• James Blunt's "You're Beautiful."
  • The line about the "Angel with a smile on her face (who)... thought up that I should be with you!". It may be interpreted as a Stalker with a Crush story — he is so madly in love with a woman that he has only caught a glimpse of at the subway!
  • In the music video, James Blunt spends almost the entire song slowly stripping down to his underwear (all in a single shot) and then throws himself off a cliff to these lines:
    "But it's time to face the truth:
    I will never be with you."
  • In the beginning, he sings "I've got a plan!" At no point does he say what that plan might be. Made even more absurd when, seconds later in the chorus, he laments, "I don't know what to do..." You just said you had a plan. The video makes this clear, though: the plan is suicide.
  • The narmiest thing in the song has got to be the way he sings pretty okay in the verses, and then in the chorus he goes all helium and thinks he's having a Moment of Awesome.
  • "You're Beautiful" is vastly improved in its Sesame Street form. The video can be found on YouTube. It's also improved in Flapjack form, and hilariously funny when performed by the good people of "Dead Ringers."
  • If you've ever watched the video about the meth-addicted Australian "Trent from Punchy", then the similarities between Trent's speaking voice and Blunt's singing voice make all of his songs hilarious.
  • Blunt sings this line quickly and somewhat incoherently:
    "I saw an angel
    Of that I'm sure."

  The problem? It comes out sounding like "I saw the angel of Adam Shore."

• Yet another Stalker with a Crush: Clay Aiken's "Invisible" often refers to how, were the singer invisible, he would be watching the object of his affections in her room (or rather his).
  "Wait! I already aaaaaaammmmmmmm!"
• Kidz Bop:
  • Their versions of songs with adult themes, like "My Immortal", "Summertime Sadness", "In the End", and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." Just... what?
  • Their cover of "Welcome to My Life"; a narmful song on its own (see Simple Plan's section in the "Rock" folder), made even more ridiculous with the addition of way too enthusiastic-sounding kids.
  • "Born This Way", where all mentions of homosexuality/bisexuality/transgenderism are removed. It's been often referred to as "Born This Way: Homophobic Edition". It doesn't help that the line "A different lover is not a sin, believe Capital H-I-M" is changed to the accidentally conservative "A different viewpoint is not a sin, believe Capital H-I-M".
  • "Party Rock Anthem".
    We just wanna see ya... DANCE THAT!
  • Their cover of "Moves Like Jagger", for several reasons. First, the song's subject matter definitely isn't something kids should be singing about, never mind that they probably wouldn't get it anyway. Second, the kids singing may very well not even know who Mick Jagger is. Finally, if the previous reasons don't get to you, the fact that they added what sounds like frogs croaking to the chorus should.
  • Kidz Bop's cover of "Locked Out of Heaven", which, as mentioned below, is narmful in itself. Kids singing about not loving someone and feeling like they're in hell!
  • Their cover of Beyoncé's "If I Were a Boy". Not only because most of the kids singing probably don’t even understand the song’s lyrics about the double standards between how men are expected/allowed to behave versus women, but because Kidz Bop thought it would be brilliant to have boys singing the song! BOYS singing about what would happen if they were boys?!
  • Their cover of "All the Small Things" doesn't even sound like children. And the guy singing the verses has a voice suspiciously similar to that of Greg Universe.
  • Not that it was ever a serious song to begin with, but their version of "All About That Bass" is notorious for its mishearing that results in an Unusual Dysphemism: "I'M BRINGING ANAL BACK!" (They're actually singing "bringing it all back." Blame Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable here.)
  • The cover for Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life" takes out any seriousness the song has with its terrible sounding instrumental, nevermind the too-enthusiastic children singing such a dark song while an offbeat adult repeats "Wake me up!" and "Save me!".
  • And that's not Kidz Bop's only Evanescence cover. How about kids happily singing "My Immortal", of all things?
  • The cover for Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" has incredibly unfitting call-and-response ad libs from the kids.
  • The lead vocalist in "We Belong Together" audibly struggles carrying the last note at the end. We don't expect all female vocalists to have the same range and ability Mariah Carey has, but we do expect their engineers to not leave in a clear flub in the final recording.
• "MacArthur Park" once provided a quote for this very page. And for very good reason. It can be summed up with the line "Someone left the cake out in the rain!"
  And I don't think that I can take it,
  'Cause it took so long to bake it,
  And I'll never have that recipe again!
  "Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!"
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Jurassic Park" was based on this song, and it's one of the few times his parody had no hope of outdoing the hilarity of the source material. Here's a karaoke video for Donna Summer's version of the song so you may listen for yourself and read along with the lyrics. Dave Barry said it best:
    Dave Barry: "My 12-year-old son, Rob, was going through a pile of ballots [from readers voting for the worst song ever written], and he asked me how MacArthur Park goes, so I sang it, giving it my best shot, and Rob laughed so hard that when I got to the part about leaving the cake out in the rain, and it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again, Rob was on the floor. He didn't believe those lyrics were real. He was sure his wacky old humor-columnist dad was making them up."
  • There's also the line "I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave". A yellow dress is compared to water. Yellow water. Think about that for a moment. ^note Why shouldn't you eat yellow snow?
  • The I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue version replaces that with "oh bugger". Also, once, they were playing 'Singalong'. When Humph said MacArthur Park was going to be Tim's song, Graeme buzzed in, objecting with 'I thought you said we'd be singing!'.
  • It's not just about a cake out in the rain. The lyrics compare the protagonists to — a "striped pair of pants"!?
    Spring was never waiting for us, girl
    It ran one step ahead
    As we followed in the dance
    Between the parted pages and were pressed
    In love's hot, fevered iron
    Like a striped pair of pants.

  It is — let's be clear on this — "stri-ped". Two syllables, like "bless-ed". Narmtastic.

  • On a meta-level, there's the fact that songwriter Jimmy Webb still passionately defends the song to this day and insists that the lyrics aren't ridiculous because they're based on real things he saw in the titular park. As the So Bad, It's Good page notes, this means his song is the musical equivalent of a "you had to be there" joke.
• Kelly Clarkson:
  • "Because of You." Never has the Freudian Excuse, directed at its source, been presented so eloquently, so clearly, so directly. (Good thing the narrator isn't an outright villain — though she is a coward...) You laugh so you do not cry or squirm in your seat.
  • "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)". Ignoring the unnecessary and out-of-order secondary title, the song itself is an OK breakup jam... except for a couple of silly lines that make it sound like her ex was, as described by Todd in the Shadows, "cartoonishly evil".
  Think you've got the best of me? Think you've got the last laugh?!

  It makes one imagine a flashback to her ex tying the narrator to some railroad tracks while laughing evilly and then twirling his mustache, before the narrator makes her escape...and gets back at him by singing to him.

• Acadian singer Lisa Leblanc's "Kraft Dinner". It's hard not to giggle when she sings (completely seriously) in French "At worst all we'd need to do is laugh together and eat KRAAAAAFT DINNAH!" Take a look at the lyrics - she's tried to be serious, but it just sounds... off (the Acadian accent doesn't help).
• From Chicago's "Look Away," the opening lines of the first verse:
  "When you called me up this morning
  Told me about the new love you found
  I said I'm really happy for you
  I'm really happy for you".

Then a few lines later, the opening lines of the chorus...

"But if you see me walking bye And the tears are in my eyes
Look away, baby, look away!"

From trying to be a good sport to shamelessly trying to guilt-trip the ex-girlfriend the singer is addressing...

• U2 is often considered to have musical Narm throughout their career:
  • The nadir is their Pop Mart Live From Mexico City concert video: their whole Satire Of Consumer Culture With Shiny Colours tends to wear thin after the first few numbers. Bono constantly speaks in Spanish and repeats the word "Mexico" - turning it into Mexico-mofo, Mexi-cola, etc.
  • The count-in at the beginning of "Vertigo":
    Unos, dos, tres, catorce!

  "Some, two, three, fourteen" indeed. Bono admitted there "may have been some alcohol" involved in the writing of that line...

  • Bono's beyond-Large Ham stage patter in the live tracks on Rattle and Hum:
    This ["Helter Skelter"] is a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. We're stealing it back.
    This song ["Silver and Gold"] was written in a hotel room in New York City, right about the time Little Steven was putting together a record of artists against... A. Part. HEID! [...] Am I buggin' ya? Don't mean to bug ya. Okay, Edge, play the blues.
• Wings:
  • "Live and Let Die" has a line that could be understood as grammatical redundancy trainwreck, "in this ever-changing world in which we live in" (Paul McCartney disagreed, saying it's possibly "we're livin' "; helps that Chrissie Hynde's cover reducing to "in which we live" doesn't scan). Also to be considered is Shrek the Third, as the scene with the king's funeral would have been sad if it wasn't for this song being sung by a frog.
  • This line in the album track "When the Night" from Red Rose Speedway:
    "And the night (and the night)
    is marvelous and yellow..."

  Yes, the nights used to get yellow in London, but if you didn't already know that...

  • Their hit "C Moon." It was silly enough when Paul released it in the early 1970s. But Paul now has live Cover Versions out from The '90s and even from 2005 - at which point the line "How come no one older than me ever seems to understand the things I want to do?" is either Narm or a Harsher in Hindsight.
  • The third verse of "Calico Skies." "Calico Skies" is a beautiful, delicate love song to the lovely Linda, his first wife. But he tries to make it a "protest song" in the third verse, and isn't much more successful at it than Nickelback (see below for that one). Keep in mind that there's no change in melody or tone from the undying declarations of love:
    Long live all of us crazy soldiers
    Who were born under calico skies
    May we never be called to handle
    All the weapons of war we despise...
  • If you're not into Silly Love Songs, lines like this will be Narm:
    It was written that I would love you
    From the moment I opened my eyes...
• New Found Glory:
  • Their cover of "Tennessee" by Arrested Development. Jordan Pundik is black and proud.
  • The album Punk Goes Crunk has not one straight-up punk band, nor one single Cover Version with more than a tangential relationship to crunk. Possibly excluding the "Hey Ya" cover. That entire "Punk Goes..." series is evenly split between Narm and Narm Charm because it's obvious that the bands do it because of the silly factor.
  • "Got Your Money" has a certain Narm/Narm Charm to it because Max Bemis' delivery makes it so bloody hilarious.
• Feist's song "A Commotion", off Metals, is a decent song, with the exception of the weird male chant that makes up the chorus. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't sound good, ruining the song almost completely. When she performs it live, she has her female backup singers do the chant, and it sounds MUCH better given the sassiness of their voices.
• Carly Simon's "You":
  • "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The "you" in this line has been mentioned in almost every stanza, almost every line; how could the song not be about "you"? ^Explanation There are two ways of parsing the word "you" — the general "you" which Carly Simon is using throughout most of the song and the specific "you" that she sings in the chorus bit (the "you probably think the song is about you"). That's how there can be so many "you"s in the song while not being about the specific "you" Simon is directing the "you're so vain" at. Though the listener may not buy that it was about David Geffen at all. However, it makes more sense after Simon publicly revealed in 2015 that each verse is about a different man, and therefore the target's vanity is in assuming the entire song is about him, which longtime suspect Warren Beatty (who is targeted in the second verse) actually did assume.
  • The brilliant vocabulary: rhyming "yacht", "apricot" (as a color) and "gavotte" (in the first verse!)
• Rihanna:
  • "Disturbia" is a cool song. But watch the video... at the end, Rihanna revels in the "bum bum be-dum bum bum be dum bum" as if it were a cursed incantation.
  • "Under my umbrella! Ella! Ella! Eh! Eh! Eh! Under my umbrella! Ella! Ella! Eh! Eh! Eh! Eh!" Either she sounds like a hungry crow, or a malfunctioning synthesizer ("Under my umbErella!") or she really wants her friend Ella to get out of the rain before she catches her death.
  • T.I. and Rihanna's "Live Your Life" samples from O-Zone's "Dragostea din tei", arguably best-known for the "Numa Numa" meme. Yeah.
  • "Loveeeeeee Song" (Yes, that's the actual title). Rihanna sounds fine, but Future, the guest artist, sounds like he's vomiting all through out the song.
    Loooov-UH UH UH, loooov-UH UH UH!
• The music video for the David Bowie and Mick Jagger version of "Dancing In The Street", especially if you've seen it in the cutaway gag for "Foreign Affairs".
• "Iris," by Goo Goo Dolls, almost seems like a respectable lament until you realize that it's supposed to be about how happy he is. The song was written for City of Angels (which is Narm-tastic in its own right) and is about the protagonist being happy about being able to be unhappy. As such, it makes very little sense divorced from its in-film context:
  "When everything feels like the movies
  yeah, you bleed just to know you're alive!"
• Neil Diamond:
  • "I Am, I Said" includes Diamond reaching for a rhyme to "there" and ending up with "And no one heard at all, not even the chair". Because the chair might, in other circumstances... never mind.
  • Similarly, in "You Were Meant For Me", Jewel seems ticked off that her coffee cup doesn't answer her.
• Billy Joel:
  • "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a great song, but...
    • It consists of references to historical events strung together in roughly chronological order with no real connection between them. This lends itself to certain issues because he fails to sing the commas; when he does pause, it's more for emphasis than for sense. This creates a reference to the "space monkey mafia" which has left more than one listener giggling uncontrollably.
    • Listening to the song now is even weirder because so many people miss 2/3 of the historical references, and assume things like U2 and Sugar Ray refer to bands.
    • At the end of the song, after listing many terrible things that have happened in history, we witness Billy's Rage Breaking Point: "Rock and Roller Cola Wars... I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!"
  • "Piano Man" contains the line "I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes". The thing is, "Piano Man" was written in approximately 1973, and Joel is still singing it in concert in this millennium. Not quite "C Moon"-level absurdity, but it's a narmy line in an otherwise brilliant song. Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl made a similar point about Joel still singing lines like "And they sit at the bar/And put bread in my jar" when Joel was making millions of dollar a year, flying around the world in Lear jets, and having sex with (then-wife) Christie Brinkley. It Makes Sense in Context, though, if you read the entire verse. The line is spoken by a very unhappy and drunken elderly man who is a customer in the bar where the eponymous Piano Man works. Either that, or it sounds like he just stole some poor sap's trendy threads.
    He says, "Son, can you play me a memory
    I'm not really sure how it goes
    but it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete
    when I wore a younger man's clothes.
  • Another clunky Joel lyric: On his second album, he has a song called "You're My Home," which is a sweet, if somewhat undistinguished, ballad about how the love of his woman makes him feel at home wherever he is. It's all nice and pleasant up until "You're my castle, you're my cabin, and my instant pleasure dome/I need you in my house, cuz you're my home". Even a stock rhyme like "and wherever I may roam" would be preferable.
  • "My Life" is great up until the final stanza (just before the piano solo), where Joel (hilariously) snarls out the line "Don't get me wrong" where he'd sung it cleanly beforehand.
  • The singer's infamous freak-out out on stage during one of his historic 1987 shows in the USSR might qualify, as seen in this video.
  • Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) is quite serious on it’s own. But then the serious lyrics get ruined by the ending, which is Billy Joel saying "Ooooh, I'm movin' out!" over the sounds of a car driving away.
  • "Just The Way You Are" is a very nice slow song, but it (unfortunately) has a narmy hiccup - namely, how he very, very painfully mispronounces the word unspoken as un-SPOOK-en. It wasn't even an end-of-lyric rhyme, so why he pronounced it that way is a mystery.
• Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" is a bittersweet tale set to a gorgeous melody. It's about old (ex)lovers meeting accidentally at a grocery store. OK, fine, but he probably didn't need to elaborate on that setting by including lines like "I stole behind her in the frozen foods" and these lines:
  We took her groceries to the checkout stand
  The food was totalled up and bagged...

They drink a six pack in the car... and then they both drive away from each other.

• The Killers:
  • "Human" - The song's infamous line, "Are we human... or are we dancer?", was meant to reference Hunter S Thompson's comment about America in his time "raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line." Said line is unfortunately ruined by its bad grammar and the unintentional implication that being human and being a dancer are somehow mutually exclusive.
  • The chorus of "When You Were Young." Yes, we know, he doesn't look a thing like Jesus. WE GET IT. No Jesus lookalikes need apply.
  He doesn't look a thing like JEEEEEEEEEEEEYZUUUUUUUUUUUUS...
  • The mantra "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier". As Bill Bailey pointed out, it might as well have said, "I've got ham but I'm not a hamster".
  • The music video for "Mr. Brightside" was kind of sad (unless you have no idea what's going on). But the random, unenthusiastic man that shows up around 2:48 is just hilarious.
• In Brazil, a tacky band called Calypso turns every mention of a certain Greek goddess into Narm.
• "You Raise Me Up", as covered by Josh Groban. You don't need to tell everyone that. "Oh no, here comes the uplifting chorus!"
• Miley Cyrus:
  • Hannah Montana, you got the party, you might even be a rockstar, and you also know that nobody's perfect. But seriously, you're fifteen and on the Disney Channel. Come back when you really learn how to rock out. That can apply to almost any popstar who acts like their music is the hardest, most bad-ass rock ever (see also Nickleback in the Rock section). It's just extra points when the popstar is currently in a Disney Channel Kid Com.
  • "The Climb," which is an extreme failure to create an uplifting ballad. It makes it sound like she's on some incredibly epic journey, chock-full of suffering and misery, coming off as a serious case of wangst.
    There's always going to be another mountain
    I'm always gonna wanna make it move
    Always gonna be an uphill battle
    Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose...
  • Another narmy song is "Party in the U.S.A.", which tries to come off all "Kids in America" but ends up more like it's just seriously trying to tell you in what location the party will be held.
  • "Wrecking Ball". It's hard to feel bad about the failed relationship the song is about when you watch the video in which Miley is, for absolutely no reason, half the time in her underwear and half the time naked on a wrecking ball. Also, her licking a sledgehammer... where has that thing been?!
  • "Adore You": The song isn't terribly narmy, except for the oddly specific line of, "But when you're near me I feel like I'm standing with an army omen armed with weapons."
• Hilary Duff:
  • She had an embarrassing number with the lyric "I'm living proof that a girl can rock." Janis Joplin isn't even bothering to turn over in her grave.
  • From "So Yesterday": "If the light is off, then it isn't on"
• The end of the Cyndi Lauper video "I Drove All Night". What the?
• Celine Dion and Luciano Pavarotti. "I Hate You Then I Love You". That's all.
• The line "I'm as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer!" from Snap!'s " Rhythm is a Dancer". Made all the more amusing by Turbo B's temporary inability to pronounce the word "rhythm" in the line immediately prior, despite him saying it correctly in every other instance.
• Utada Hikaru probably shouldn't make albums in English — case in point, Exodus.
  • How could two generally-skilled producers (Utada and Timbaland) let a Narm-fest like "Let Me Give You My Love" out of the studio?
    I was kinda like soul-searching, but your body's so jaw-dropping...

  The first lines of that song aren't much better? The sudden change from "some boy died" to "lolsextime" is just narmtastic.

  What a day, young boy next door passed away
  Ooh, it makes me wanna say I don't wanna waste another day
  Could you and I start mixing gene pools...

  • This One (Crying Like a Child) is a beautiful song with lines like... let's just say Utada can be very good at this trope.
    We should get back on the road
    Like Simon and Garfunkel
    Let's get married.
  • "You're easy breezy, and I'm Japanesey..."
• Peggy Lee had a hit in the early '70s with "Is That All There Is?" Points to her for longevity, but her world-weary observations of pivotal life moments sound like they're coming from a chain-smoking, fur-coat-wearing barfly... which gets truly weird when she's relating childhood memories of watching her house burn down or going to the circus. However, a cover featuring PJ Harvey and John Parish is less narmy.
• Elton John:
  • "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" is full of lines like these:
  "A couple of the sounds that I really like
  Are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike..."

  being sung by Elton John. Priceless. Aren't you glad he went with a cheerful melody? And the line "I'm looking for a woman to treat me right" is Hilarious in Hindsight after he eventually came out as gay. Hell, it was snicker-inducing at the time, too (oh yeah, you're a real butch there, Elton).

  • For bleaker unintentional Elton John humor, we have "Empty Garden." It's beautiful, it's painful, it's meaningful, but it's over the top.
    "And what's it for
    The little empty garden by the brownstone door?
    And in the cracks along the sidewalk
    Nothing grows no more..."
  • "Your Song", which includes awesome lyrics such as "If I were a sculptor... but then again, NO!" and this amazing stanza:
    "I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss
    Well a few of the verses well they've got me quite cross
    But the sun's been quite kind while I wrote this song
    It's for people like you that keep it turned on"
  • The video montage played at Elton's "Red Piano" show for "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" involves Elton trying to commit suicide by sticking his head in the oven. A bizarre and maybe humorous sight... until you remember that this really happened and inspired the song.
  • "Rocket Man" was poignant until the moment William Shatner attempted singing it as beat poetry... or something. One has to wonder what the audience could have been thinking. It has been mocked by Family Guy in addition. Actually, just about any time William Shatner sings could count as either this or So Bad, It's Good.
  • "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" is about a Country Mouse turning his back on phony, back-biting high-class urban life and returning to simple, wholesomely satisfying rural life... which apparently includes "huntin' the horny-back toad." Okay then, Snuffy.
• Bob Dylan:
  • "Hurricane" has a gorgeous tune and Dylan's disgust at racism blazes in every note, but oh, some of the lyrics... "Don't forget that you are WHIIIIIIIIIIITE!!" and some of the William McGonagall-esque rhymes...
  "But then they took him to the jailhouse
  Where they try to turn a man into a mouse"
  "The DA said he was the one who did the deed
  And the all-white jury agreed"...
  • In the closing song on Desire, "Sara", he tells his then-wife "you always responded when I needed your help", but only after singing "Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp" for the sake of forcing a rhyme.
• Shakira:
  • While many critics gave high-scored reviews to "She Wolf", they still consider the howl goofy. And the lyrics are too weird for their own good, either in English or in Spanish.
  • The dubious nature of some of the lyrics in "Whenever, Wherever":
    "Lucky that my lips not only mumble
    They spill kisses like a fountain
    Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
    So you don't confuse them with mountains"
  • A lot of people assume that part of the Narm in "Whenever, Wherever" could be chalked up to her only just getting her footing with writing in English. However, "Ojos Asi" ("Eyes Like Yours") started the tradition back in Spanish. The verses dive into incomprehensibility, with the most lucid line being "Crossed a river of salt/Just after I rode a ship that sunk in the desert" (If you take a river of salt as the ocean, but sand doesn't work that way.) The chorus turns the song into a gender-flipped version of Cinderella, with Shakira saying she traveled over the seven oceans... but later saying the came from Bahrain and got to Beirut (meaning the girl needs a globe and an abacus.) She says she's tearing down windows and doors (one or the other would suffice) and spends the entire time looking for someone with eyes like her lover's. It's an awesome song with great music, but when you sit down and really analyze the lyrics (in English or Spanish, since the lyrics were pretty faithfully translated), it gets downright narmy.
  • "Try Everything" pushes the "never give up" Aesop hard... and features lyrics like "I wanna try even though I could fail" (as opposed to "I wanna try because I'm sure to succeed"?)
• Taylor Swift:
  • "Love Story" is a melodramatic, sugary-sweet retelling of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending.
  • "You Belong With Me" hits every high school drama cliche in one blast of country pop music.
  • "I Knew You Were Trouble". There is just something about these lines and the way she sings them that it's just narmy to me.
    And the saddest fear comes creeping in
    That you never loved me
    OR HER, OR ANYONE, OR ANYTHING!
    YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH
  • "Look What You Made Me Do" tries to be frightening, but...
    • The lines "I've got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined/I check it once, then I check it twice, oh!". It sounds like she's proudly singing about her burn book and expects you to be intimidated. Or, worse, that she's a bizarro Santa Claus. She's making a list and checking it twice. She's gonna find out who's naughty and nice. Taylor Swift is coming to town!
    • The chorus is sampled from the not-so-scary "I'm Too Sexy (For My Shirt)", of all things.
    • The "I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, 'cause she's dead!" bit is up there with Jughead's "I'm A Weirdo" speech for on-the-nose edginess.
  • "ME!" has the cheesy "Hey, kids, Spelling is FUN!" line. The song doesn't take itself too seriously, but she was probably going for "cheerful", not "makes you laugh at her". Apparently someone working on the song agreed, as the line was removed from the album version. It doesn't help that the "fun" spelling consists of stuff like "you can't spell 'awesome' without 'me'".
• "How Do You Love Someone" by Ashley Tisdale:
  Mama never told me how to love
  Daddy never told me how to feel
  Mama never told me how to touch
  DADDY NEVER TOLD ME HOW TO HEAL!!
• Katy Perry:
  • "Thinking Of You." This line pushes it into Narm:
    You're like an Indian summer in the middle of winter
    Like a hard candy with a surprise center.

  Raising the question of whether Russell Brand's hard candy has a surprise center.

  • "Firework" is all right, but the video has the titular fireworks coming out of Katy's chest in a manner spectacularly reminiscent of a chest-burster.
  • The beginning when she ask if you ever feel like a plastic bag.
  • "Unconditionally" is fairly sincere, especially for a Katy Perry song, but the way Katy tries to pronounce "unconditionally" in the chorus like she's reading it in a book for the very first time really ruins it.
  Katy: I will love you... un-con-dish-un-all-lee!
  • "Dark Horse":
    • It sets up a fairly creepy mood within its verses. The chorus is ruined with the very last line, however, in which Katy, with her voice pitched down to ridiculous levels, says, "There's no going back!" It's like she attempted to sound demonic but failed.
    • In the chorus, Katy says "Do you dare to do this? I'm coming at you like a dark horse", which basically makes no sense- a dark horse is a little-known candidate who comes out of nowhere to win. It's not a metaphor for an unstoppable force or anything.
  • "Birthday" is an Intercourse with You song with hilarious birthday-related Double Entendres. If you didn't get that in the first part of the song, the bridge makes it very clear.
  SO LET ME GET YOU IN YOUR BIRTHDAY SUIT!
  IT'S TIME TO ROLL OUT THE BIG BALLOONS!!!
  • Try listening to the lyrics of "Bon Appetite" without laughing at how miserably it fails in making food puns sexy:
  If you take your time
  Eat with your hands fine
  I'm on the menu...

  Or

  So you want some more
  Well, I'm open 24
  Hope you've got some room
  for the world's best cherry pie
• Michael Jackson was no stranger to Narm.
  • He breaks down and cries at the end of "She's Out of My Life".
  • "Earth Song" pushes the Narm up to eleven. Michael was passionate about protecting the environment, and sometimes his fervour got in the way of his better judgment. Most of the song is well done, mind you. But...
    • After the bridge and the rather awkward Truck Driver's Gear Change, something snaps; Michael begins screaming about things that we the human race don't care about enough. "What about the bleeding earth? Can't you feel its wounds?" is fine, but then Michael shrieks that we've lost the trust of elephants, follows it by lamenting "crying whales," and demands "What about Abraham?" (What?) And then he yells "DO WE GIVE A DAMN?" and begins crying and wailing in tune to the chorus. This goes just fast enough that we barely have time to register one outrage before he moves to the next.
    • The video makes the histrionics even better. It defies description. Suffice it to say, we need to retire the "Jesus pose" from all music videos forever.
    • When this song was performed on the HIStory tour, it had the setting of a bombed-out village and climaxed with a tank rolling onto the stage that Michael successfully stood up to. A soldier emerged with a rifle that he threatens the cowering rag-clad villagers with before aiming it at Michael. Michael simply takes the tip of the rifle and stands it down — whereupon the solider starts crying and takes off his helmet while a little girl gives him a perfect sunflower. The hammy acting didn't help at all.
    • When Michael Jackson performed this song at the 1996 BRIT Awards, a wild Jarvis Cocker ran on the stage and pretended to moon Michael.
  • This exchange from "The Girl Is Mine" is particularly hilarious if you try to imagine it occurring during an actual argument (thankfully, the song is silly anyway):
  Paul: Michael, we're not gonna fight about this.
  Michael: I think I told you; I'm a lover, not a fighter.
  Paul: I've heard it all before, Michael. She told me that I'm her forever lover; don't you remember?
  Michael: Well, after loving me, she said she couldn't love another.
  Paul: Is that what she said?
  Michael: Yes, she said it. You keep dreamin'.
  Paul: I DON'T BELIEEEEEEEEVE IT!
  • In the This Is It film, it's revealed that the intro to "Smooth Criminal" was a sequence that placed him in classic gangster/film noir films. The first shot of him watching Rita Hayworth performing at a nightclub (taken from Gilda) with an almost-vacant expression on his Uncanny Valley face is worthy of a titter.
  • Harsher in Hindsight though it is, "Morphine" has the "Demerol/Oh God, he's taking Demerol" section. The music and his quavering voice were certainly meant to be dramatic, but the whole stretch comes off as something written for The Simpsons' fake celebrity rehab musical Checkin' In.
  • "Give In To Me" takes itself so seriously it's just depressing.
  • "Heal The World" is a sweet, if Glurgey, song about making the world a better place. Then the giant frickin' choir kicks in...
  • "Ben" is a love song...to a pet rat.
• Train:
  • "Hey, Soul Sister":
    • It features lyrics like as the ever-so-memorable "So gangsta, I'm so thug" and "My heart is bound to beat right out of my untrimmed chest" sung by the whiter-than-white frontman Patrick Monahan.
    • Pro-tip: don't claim to be "gangsta" when the instrumentation of your song includes a ukulele.
    • The unforgettable hook "Hey, soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio?" OK, so "Broken Wings" was a great '80s power ballad and "Kyrie" was catchy, but if the radio station you're listening to is playing either, you're probably a huge '80s fan (complete with Buffy Speak), not a "soul sister".
    • Apparently, "Hey Soul Sister" was an attempt to sound like INXS. Er, not quite.
      Todd in the Shadows: INXS. You were trying to sound like INXS. You were trying to emulate one of the sexiest bands of all time, and instead... you wrote "Hey, Soul Sister." My God! That's like if you tried to make scrambled eggs and instead caught syphilis! How does that level of failure even exist?!
    • The opening line alone—"Your lipstick stains on the front lobe of my left-side brains"—lets you know you're in for a wild lyrical ride.
  • "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" starts out as your average breakup song, but quickly descends into this trope with its chorus. Even the music to this song is narm-y since the main instrumental melody sounds a hell of a lot like the titular song to The Phantom of the Opera... and it's played by a mariachi band.
    That's cool, but if my friends ask where you are I'm gonna say
    She went down in an airplane
    Fried getting suntanned
    Fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand
    Help me, help me, I'm no good at goodbyes!
    She met a shark under water
    Fell and no one caught her
    I returned everything I ever bought her
    Help me, help me, I'm all out of lies
    And ways to say you died

  Other ways to say she died include getting eaten by a lion, run over by a crappy purple Scion, drowned in a hot tub, and danced to death at an east side night club. The song also includes this gem of a line (in regards to the latter lyric, Monahan isn't even Jewish as far as we know!).

  She'll think I'm Superman, not Super-Minivan
  How could you leave on Yom Kippur?

  • "Drops of Jupiter" is a fairly sincere, if slightly sappy ballad, with lines like "Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken?" and "She checks out Mozart while she does Tae-Bo". After that, it's hard to take the rest of the song seriously.
  • The lyrics of "Drive By" are a bit ridiculous. In the chorus, the narrator sings that he needs a trash bag to hold his love. And for the song to scan properly, the "my" in "my love" has to be sung as though it has seven syllables.
    Oh I swear to ya, I'll be there for ya
    This is not a drive by-y-y-y-y
    Just a shy guy looking for a two-ply Hefty bag
    To hold my-y-y-y-y-y-y love
  • From "All-American Girl":
    My dad used to tell me I was lazy
    I got dance moves like Patrick Swayze
    I'm the left over turkey for the world's mayonnaisey
    The star next to the moon
• Dan Hill's 1977 power ballad "Sometimes When We Touch" features some of the most Narmish lyrics ever to come out of the decade, which is saying something. Just listen to the opening lines:
  You ask me if I love you, and I choke on my reply
  I'd rather hurt you honestly than mislead you with a lie

The entire song is like that. By the time he hits the Glory Note at the end, you half-expect him to burst into tears. Then again, this fella should be sad. This song is a beautiful, lyrical Obsession Song. To put things far less lyrically than the lyrics, the honest answer is "no" — but he doesn't want to give that answer. He does want her and need her, and he speaks of that in some detail. He also waxes eloquent about his inability to express himself... This is the chorus.

And sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I want to hold you till I die
Till we both break down and cry
I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides

In short, this is either severe Narm or a serious Tear Jerker. (We laugh so that we do not cry.)

• Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry." The delivery of the line "And I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket" with a faint air of baby-talk doesn't help. Even "better", it can easily be heard as "... like a child misses their pinky" or even "... like a child misses their pink eye." The hell?
• "Glory of Love" by Peter Cetera is a cheesy but heartfelt song that is a mix of So Bad, It's Good and Narm. The weird faces that Peter makes in the video as he sings (aptly described as "jaw singing") makes the video Narmier. Here, for more proof.
  I am a man who will fight for your honor
  I'll be the hero that you've been dreaming of
  We'll live forever, knowing together
  That we did it all for the glory of love
• Inevitable in Sorry, Sorry by j/k/c-pop group Super Junior, especially in the music videos. All Super Junior songs feature a dance break and elaborate music videos, where all THIRTEEN members wear like six different outfits each and jump through a couple of languages. Their English isn't necessarily incorrect, just a little off, dropping 'baby' and 'shawty' and eventually SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY.
• Titanic's theme, anyone? Neeeaaarrr... faaaarrr... where-EEEVVVERR YOOOU ARRRE... Though, to be fair, take Céline Dion's voice out of it and you get a lovely instrumental song.
• "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias:
  • It features such scorching lyrics as:
  Would you tremble if I touched your lips?
  Would you laugh? Oh please tell me this
  Now would you die for the one you love?
  Hold me in your arms tonight
  • The video, which has our "hero" Enrique slobbering all over Jennifer Love Hewitt and being beaten to death by Mickey Rourke. Because no love song is complete without some manslaughter. He's also singing all tearfully as he lays dying after Marv "roughed him up" several hours ago? COOOOOME OOOOOOON! It's even Narm-ier since Enrique looks like a Nicholas D. Wolfwood cosplayer for that last minute and a half, and the scene could be right out of Trigun. On the other hand, large portions of the video are Mickey Rourke pacing around in a black silk shirt and suit looking vaguely menacing. So, there's some Narm Charm in there.
• Martika's "Toy Soldiers". Quite possibly the funniest song of the 80s, thanks in no small part to Martika's gloriously over-the-top performance in the chorus.
• "Where Life Begins" by Madonna. What starts out as an incredibly blatant tribute to cunnilingus ends up sounding like an ad for KFC.
• "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" is an incredibly over-the-top cheesy ballad as it is, but then... you see the video. Bonnie Tyler floating about a boy's boarding school singing, all while random scenes of the boys doing the sports the school offers (swimming, fencing, martial arts, etc.) makes a bizarre montage to start with. And then, glowing eyes from the boy choir, and a young teen boy in nothing but tighty-whities. The pedophiliac undertones are bad enough as it is, but the execution of the video is just bizarre. The Literal Video version is hilarious.
  But Arthur Fonzarelli's got an army of clones (Fonzie's been cloned!)
• The Moody Blues' intended-to-be-ominous spoken monologues were a rich source of Narm, but it's difficult to surpass the sprawling drivel of "My Song":
  Love can change the world
  Love can change your life
  Do what makes you happy
  Do what you know is right
  And love with all your might
  Before it's too late
  Where did I find all these words?
  Something inside of me is burning
  There's life in other worlds
  Maybe they'll come to Earth
  Helping man to find a way
• The Rhythm Game O2Jam has "I Need Your Love" by Red Pulse, a lovely house song that throws in pointless rapping near the end of the song (1:45 in the video).
• Jesse McCartney's "Invincible" passionately laments the death of a young drunk driver, and could work as a tearjerker. It's just that chorus...
  Four or five drinks and you were on your way
  Everything's cool on the straight away
  But you took that turn doing eighty-five in a thirty-five
  WHYYYY, BABE??
• The Bee Gees:
  • "I Started A Joke". Meant to be a Tear Jerker, but goes straight to narm with its overly dramatic lyrics. Low covered the song with somewhat less Narm involved.
  I started a joke
  Which started the whole world crying
  But I didn't see
  That the joke was on me
  
  I started to cry
  Which started the whole world laughing
  Oh, If I'd only seen
  That the joke was on me
  
  I looked at the skies
  Running my hands over my eyes
  And I fell out of bed
  Hurting my head from things that I said
  
  'Till I finally died
  Which started the whole world living
  Oh, If I'd only seen
  That the joke was on me
  • Most of their songs are narmy due to their high-pitched voices...it's hard to get pumped up with the great disco beats of "Night Fever" or "Stayin' Alive" when you're distracted by Barry & Robin sounding like they're being set on fire. "Ah, Ah, ahhhhh..."
• Kesha:
  • "We R Who We R". Try not groaning when you hear "DJ turn it UP-GUP-GUP-GUP-GUP" in all different pitches, which makes it come close to an auditory YouTube Poop.
  • "TiK ToK", at the part where she says a guy looks like Mick Jagger like that's a good thing.
• Kiiara's "Gold" is even worse in the aforementioned "We R Who We R"'s regard. The chorus is split up and chopped up like a YouTube Poop and it sounds... weird and hilarious rather than being cool. It is basically a heavy burtation set to music.
• Bruno Mars:
  • "Grenade":
    • It mixes forced rhymes, wangst and Romantic Hyperbole to come up with lyrics like this. It doesn't help that his pronunciation is so garbled the second line sounds like "throw my head on a plate for ya".
      I would catch a grenade for ya
      Throw my hand on a blade for ya
      I'd jump in front of a train for ya
    • The line "I shoulda known, you was trouble from the first kiss. You had your eyes wide open, why were they open?!?" It's whiny hyperbole and an odd reference to Traitor Shot, and the Fridge Logic inherent in it is the cherry on top. How would he know that unless his eyes were also open? Or someone watched them and tattled on her?
    • This line:
      Yes, I would die for ya baby
      But you won't do the same
  • "Locked Out of Heaven". The song itself is a happy, bouncy, Police-esque song. That is, until you listen to the lyrics. "Your sex takes me to paradise" and "You make me feel like I've been locked out of heaven for too looooong!" make it seem like Bruno Mars is the most overdramatic person ever; just because his girlfriend isn't having sex with him right now, he feels like he's been damned to hell. Romantic Hyperbole at its finest!
  • "When I Was Your Man" is a fairly sincere song, but really doesn't need Bruno saying he "should have gave [her] all [his] hours." He's trying to say, "I should have been there for you," but instead, makes it sound like, "WHY DIDN'T I SPEND EVERY WAKING MOMENT WITH YOOOOOOOU??!!" Even worse are the "It all just sounds like, "OOOOOOOOOOOOO..." lines. What, it sounds like wolves howling?
  • "It Will Rain" is another whiny song, not helped at all in that it was featured in the Twilight Saga film Breaking Dawn. If you're such a troublesome person, narrator, maybe you should improve your lifestyle. "There's no religion that could save me" makes him sound like the most satanic person on earth instead of lamentful about his failing relationship.
  • Then there's "Gorilla". It probably could have been a funny song, but is instead played straight. Try not to laugh at the muffled echo effects on this line:
  Bruno: You'll be banging on my chest, bang bang, GORILLA...
• Selena Gomez And The Scene:
  • "A Year Without Rain" is a pretty good song until Selena decided to add the lines I'm so glad you found me, stick around me, baby baby baby, ooooooo... This is actually cut out from the song's music video.
  • "Same Old Love". It's a good song, but towards the end, Selena begins singing the chorus with a seriously low-pitched filter that makes her sound like a man.
• Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" is a damn good pop song. But the part that goes, "From my body I could show you a place God knows" goes from romantic to... something else... It doesn't help matters that the next and final line is "You should know the space is holy; do you really wanna go?" It still carries the bittersweet tone the rest of the song has, but it still feels jarring either way.
• Given Lady Gaga's propensity towards using made-up baby talk in her songs, she could have her own page on Narm.
  • As far as comprehensible lyrics go, in "Born This Way" she repeats the line "Don't be a drag, just be a queen" during the bridges. In case it hasn't been obvious that she's pandering to LGBT listeners before, Not That There's Anything Wrong with That, it should be blatantly so now.
  • Since some people find her incredibly outrageous, for the people who don't find her outrageous, her attempts at provoking shock and horror can border on the hilarious. One example is the line from her song "Government Hooker" (hell, even the song title is funny) that goes "Put your hands on me John F. Kennedy," and her Despair Event Horizon scene in her Marry The Night video where she unrolls a sanitary towel and sticks it across her breasts - it's so obvious that she's trying to be shocking, so when it fails, it fails hard. It's especially funny because, well, who on Earth needs a pad that big?
• Usher's song "OMG" has this gem, "Honey's got a booty like pow pow pow, honey's got some boobies like wow oh wow". Todd in the Shadows found this amusing in his review of the song.
• Big Time Rush:
  • Boyfriend has these lyrics at the bridge:
    If you tell me yeah I'm waiting here
    Every day like Slumdog Millionaire
    Bigger than the Twilight love affair
    I'll be here girl I swear
  • Because the official music video for Worldwide shortened the original song, the bridge now goes like this:
    (Oh)
    Wherever the wind blows me
    You're still the one and only
    Girl on my MIIIIIIIIIINE
  • "All Over Again" has a very weird lyrical dissonance in the chorus:
    It's like I'm falling in love, all over again
    For the first time
    And I know that it feels right
    I think I'm falling in love, all over again
    Love at first sight
    Do you know how I feel
    To the left, left, left
    On the right, right, right
    To the back, back, back
    On the side, side, side
    To the left, left, left
    On the right, right, right
    To the back, back, back
    On the side, side, side
  • "No Idea" has the line "Every time you come around, you put a lightning bolt on my face." It's difficult not to think of Harry Potter.
• "Afternoon Delight" by Starland Vocal Band, a famous piece of '70s cheese that tries and fails to be a sexy Intercourse with You song. What's narmy is that it's specifically about daytime lovemaking and that fact that it refers to that as Afternoon Delight. Also, the song has a very light folksy tune that does not sound like a sex song at all, something that was pointed out on Arrested Development. Due to the song's cheesiness, it has since been used for comedic purposes in several works such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
  Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
  Gonna grab some afternoon delight
  My motto's always been, when it's right it's right
  Why wait until the middle of a cold dark night?
  Sky rocket's in flight!^* byooooooo! Afternoon delight!
  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaafternoon Delight!
• Alanis Morissette is frequently prone to narm due to her odd singing voice and word pronunciation. One example is the way she sings "piano" in "Hand in My Pocket".
  I got ONE HAND in MY POCKet, and the OTHER ONE is playin' a PEE-EAH-NOE!
• Delta Goodrem's "Believe Again". Overly long outro, the long intro, the over-use of drums, the lack of contrast, and the constant positivity.
  I'd lost my faith in love, now I believe again
  My heart was a broken place, now I feel whole again
  You bring me honesty, and that's worth believing in
  And I believe, I believe again
• "Jar of Hearts" by Christina Perri:
  • The hilariously awful "You're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul". That at least has to be in the top 10 of the worst lyrics ever created.
  • "Who do you think you are, going around leaving scars"
  • The title itself is hilarious.
• "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes. It's trying to be an inspirational power ballad, but the overwrought vocals place it squarely into Narm territory. The chorus is the worst part (you might recognize it from a certain YouTube Poop of He-Man), but throughout the song the intonations are just plain odd.
  "I said HEY! HUH-WHAT'S GOWIN' AHN!!"
• Ronan Keating's cover of "If Tomorrow Never Comes" features the singer leaping in front of a car in slow motion, and singing to the camera as we intercut with his love interest in bed. The title of the song implies unexpected death separating the singer from his lover, and his reassuring her of his love for her in case something might happen. It probably doesn't refer to throwing oneself in front of a car... while singing.
• Every song by fun., ever.
  • "We Are Young":
    • This line from the chorus:
      TONAAAAAAAAYYYYYTTTT, WEEEEEEE AAAAAARRREEEE YAAAAAAAAANG, SO I'LL SET THE WOELD ON FIYAAAAAAAH!!! WE CAN BURN BRIGHTAAAAHHH! THAN THE SAAAAAAAAAAAAHOAHOAHANNNN!!!
    • Or the song's opening line.
      Give me a second, I need to get my story straight. My friends are in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State.
    • "My seat's been taken by some sunglasses." Especially since the very next phrase has the "sunglasses" doing something, so it doesn't just mean a guy put his sunglasses on the seat to save it. It clearly means the guy wearing sunglasses, but try not to picture a pair of sunglasses sitting there by itself talking to a woman.
  • "Some Nights" is a surprisingly decent tune, but the climactic line "I guess it's alriiiiiiiiiiiight!" is for whatever reason drenched in Auto-Tune, so much that it ruins what could have been an emotional part. Not helping matters is the "Who the fuck wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?!" line. Some have also found the opening lyric to be hilarious: "Some nights I stay up cashing in my bad luck/Some nights I call it a draw". It can be even funnier when you think Nate is actually singing "Some nights I stay up splashing in the bathtub".
• BERA sounds incredibly narmy in Don't Worry. "Yeah, your ex dude is a bozo, Pinocchio, clown, red nose."
• Jeremih's "Birthday Sex". The song itself has a rather unsettling tone, as it uses an Ominous Music Box Tune and the singer sounds like he and the girl are about to fight as opposed to have sex, thanks to the awkward double meanings he uses. However, it's hard to take the song seriously with Jeremih's awkward "IIIII" enlonging in several lines of the song. That, and the song sounds more like something you'd hear from The Lonely Island as opposed to popular radio.
• Heavy Weather, the English version of Rebeka Dremelj's Eurovision entry, unfortunately decided on the worst possible translation of "tujec" (stranger, foreigner, non-resident alien) and ended up with the line You're an alien to me in this breakup song. The word alien is typically used to describe extraterrestrials (which is a different word in Slovene) or illegal immigrants in Americans media, so it kind of brings to mind the wrong type of imagery.
• Another Eurovision gem is Sanna Nielsen's 2014 entry for Sweden, "Undo". If the chorus didn't contain the odd line "Undo my sad", it would have otherwise been a strong Break Up Song power ballad.
• The entirety of Village People's 'Sex Over The Phone'. An attempt to sound like hetero-love machines, from a band marketed towards homosexual males. Right. And that's not even counting the hammy delivery and softcore backing track.
• The spoken word at the beginning of Milli Vanilli's 'Girl You Know It's True'. This also counts as an example of Bad "Bad Acting". Lampooned in Mr. Nice Guy by Mr. Bungle
• Icona Pop 'I Love It' contains several instances of the line 'I crashed my car into the bridge. I watched, I let it burn./I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs./I crashed my car into the bridge./I don't care, I love it!'. So... you love repeatedly inflicting serious injuries on yourself? Okay...even with the fact that it's about angrily breaking up with an older boyfriend (hence the "you're from the 70s and I'm a 90s bitch" line) who "made things complicated", wouldn't you want to crash his car in a bridge instead of yours?
• "La La La", by Naughty Boy and Sam Smith. Just listen to that chorus. JUST LISTEN TO IT.
• Hanson's 'Yearbook' might seem super-poignant when you're a kid, but in hindsight, it's chock-full of Narm. It is a poignant ballad about a kid from the singer's class who died/disappeared, and the singer demanding answers about what happened to him as the adults try to protect his innocence. That's why they shouldn't have let squeaky-voiced Zac Hanson sing lead...
• Jillette Johnson's 'Cameron', a song about a boy ostracized from society because he likes to dress in drag and wear makeup. It does get pretty heavy-handed.
  These days the world is full of aliens
  The world is full of aliens, but you are a human
  A real, live human
  Aren't you Cameron?
  
  You're not an alien, you're not an alien
  You're not an alien, Cameron
  You're not an alien, you're not an alien
  You're not an alien, Cameron
• The last song of Cœur de pirate's album Blonde is a sad song about death. The song itself is all right. The true Narm comes from the title "La petite mort" if you're familiar with a certain euphemism.
• Passenger's "Let Her Go": The song is missing a girl after breaking up. To deliver the message "You don't what you're missing until it's gone", the song lists several scenarios... that all rhyme with "o". Over and over and over. Also, the lead singer has a British accent so thick, it can barely be taken seriously.
• Samantha Fox's "Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)" is a mess of narm. For starters the title is absolutely cliched. After that we have certain lyrics which Samantha speaks and you can hear her English accent really well (like the line about how sex was something she had "just had" or when she proclaims that "the groove is just too naughty"). If you can get past the lyrics there is the video which features Samantha as part of a street gang that mostly dance around and occasionally sing at her. But what really completes the package is that one might associate the song with a certain scene involving a donkey in Clerks 2.
• Kanako Hoshino's "never..." with lyrics entirely in Gratuitous English. It's either an honest and powerful song about dealing with a loss, or a 5-minute Engrishy narmfest. The Engrish may make it charming, though.
  The voice of us faded away
  and only left that faded things
  I know, always we have so many many things were
  lost and got and lost and got
  but inside me how they are all so all shining
• Alcazar's "Not a Sinner Nor A Saint" has bizarre lyrics with non sequiturs like "I am not a sinner not a saint, not that I will lose my head and faint". There's also the awkward and grammatically incorrect "Confessions are made in the name of myself" and a line written by the Department of Redundancy Department: "In days of joy and lack of sorrow".
• Janet Jackson's otherwise catchy "Feedback" has this gem: "'Cause my swag is serious/Something heavy like a first day period.”
• While Little Mix's "Black Magic" isn't narmy, the video accompanying it is. Even though the song is upbeat from the beginning, the first half of the video has the girls singing the lines despite the fact the scene clearly shows them being unhappy because they’re unpopular. The lyrics clearly do not mesh with the starting scenes at all.
• The Preatures' "Somebody's Talking" has first lines of the chorus: "Now I'm walking away/but somebody's talking/if I ever see you again/I'm gonna have to give you something". Not only does it not really rhyme, it's also not a very good threat.
• Peter Sarstedt "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" grabs this trope by the horns and never lets go. It's hard to tell what is Narmier about this song - the cheesy French accordion, the annoyingly gratuitous name-dropping, or Sarstedt's frequent vocal asides at the end of each verse ("yes, you/I do" seems to be his favorite).
• David Hasselhoff's rendition of "Hooked on a Feeling" isn't too bad. The video, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of The Hoff being superimposed over various pieces of stock footage by means of the laziest green screen technology that the mid-90s can buy. Highlights include Hasselhoff wearing a safari outfit and floating in front of a river where two random weiner dogs are standing while two little girls in angel costumes float out of the sky, Hasselhoff "flying" on a motorcycle, Hasselhoff wearing an eskimo suit and holding a fake fish in his mouth, and the grand finale where all of the random elements from throughout the video are combined in increasingly nonsensical ways.
• "Baby, kom ut" (Baby, Come Out) by Norwegian artist Bjørn Anders Hermundstad is supposed to be a heartfelt song about welcoming one's child to the world, but it's hard to take seriously because of how saccharine it is. Sample lyrics:
  Verden er fin, verden er god, verden er bra for oss to
  The world is beautiful, the world is good, the world is fine for the two of us
  Verden er far, verden er mor, verden er søster og bror
  The world is your father, the world is your mother, the world is your sister and brother
• "Despacito", or at least the Spanish version. It has Fonsi's creamy vocals and Daddy Yankee's word-blender rapping, and it's so catchy that it's barely even a guilty pleasure - unless you speak Spanish, because the lyrics are frankly ridiculous. "Let me pass over your danger zones" is one of the funnier lines, and that's the part where Fonsi isn't being extremely upfront about all the (detailed) kinds of sex he wants to have with this girl.
• Most of Wham!!'s songs:
  • "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" is very narmy, especially when he makes a Doris Day reference (that most 80s kids didn't even get!)
  • "Careless Whisper" is a decent slow song, but is ruined by the dumb saxophone that makes it sound like a cheap jazz song.
  • Last Christmas is pretty narmy too. Particularly the chorus,
    "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away."
• ABBA's "Fernando" includes the line "If I had to do the same again/I would, my friend, Fernando...". If you "have to" do something, you don't have a choice in the matter anyway.
• In Jim Reeves's "Snowflake", the narrator compares his beloved to a snowflake. It was cute back when it was released in 1966, but now that "snowflake" has become a common political insult...
• Superchic[k]'s "Hero" is clearly meant to be inspiring, but it's so cheesy that it sounds like something that would be played at an elementary school anti-bullying assembly. The out-of-place rap verse before the bridge is even more narm-y, as if the songwriter decided "How can we make this appeal more to kids? A Wild Rapper Appears!"
  You could be a hero - heroes do what's right
  You could be a hero - you might save a life
  You could be a hero - you could join the fight
  For what's right, for what's right, for what's right!
• "What About Me" by Moving Pictures may be one of the Narmiest, Wangst-filled songs of all time.
• Maroon Five brings us some unintentional hilarity in the song "Ladykiller". The song refers to a dangerous woman as a "ladykiller" in the chorus: "It's like a cheap thriller/She's such a ladykiller." Small problem though: the word "ladykiller" refers to a man. Specifically, a ladykiller is a man who is extremely attractive to women. Looks like Adam Levine needs a dictionary.
• Icehouse's "Electric Blue" would be a decent troubled relationship song, if not for two problems: the rather random phrase "Electric Blue", which seems to have been chosen only for it to fit the rhyming scheme of the chorus, and the hideous '80s Hair Iva Davis, the lead vocalist, has in the music video, that not even the most nostalgic for the Eighties can excuse. Behold!
• Pretty much every song by Scritti Politti at their height of popularity (well, definitely after their politically-charged debut) is this, though the more charitable could call it Narm Charm. As staunchly socialist the band is, they knew the only way they could be commercially successful was to go against their own principles and sound mainstream and boy, they took that up to eleven. Their songs became as '80s as you can get, becoming synth-heavy with their fair share of cheesy love songs, it's hard to miss that Green Gartside^note lead singer-songwriter was playing an elaborate joke on the listeners.
• "Boom Boom (Let's Back To My Room)" by Paul Lekakis. There's a reason it often ends up on "Worst Songs of All Time" lists. The backing track is a Cliché Storm of 80s synths, and "boom boom" is used as an euphemism for an Afternoon Delight (if ya know what I mean).
• *NSYNC's final album Celebrity gets Narmy thanks to its boastful lyrics. Case in point: "Pop", a song of them trying too hard to pass themselves off as cool.

• Before Midge Ure was in the highly successful band Ultravox (which nonetheless is mentioned above), he was in the much less succesful group Slik. Even by 70s pop standards, their songs were cornball as hell. Forever and Ever is quite possibly one of the cheesiest tracks from the 70s, with a dull, labourious chorus that sounds like Midge is singing through clenched teeth, thinking "Will the 80s come along already?! I wanna work with Steve!"
• O-Town's "Liquid Dreams", in its entirety. The song is about them trying to be sexy and romantic - by saying that they have wet dreams about their love interest (and namedropping a bunch of celebrities in the process). Said love interest is heavily implied to be imaginary; just a fantasy "dream girl" who is an amalgamation of all the most attractive physical traits of the aforementioned celebrities ^note Only a single line in the bridge mentions something about the love interest other than what celebrities she supposedly looks like, and even that falls back on namedropping - "She's got the sweetest personality / like Halle B.". It feels both uncomfortable and like something out of a parody, not a serious effort.
• Lukas Graham's "7 Years" is intended to be a humble, melancholy reflection on Graham's difficult upbringing and journey to fame, but the soundbyte in one chorus of an announcer calling his name before a cheering crowd clashes with the tone in a way that sounds comically ironic. Also, the way Graham gets louder and croons lyrics like "Soon I'll be sixty years old" sound less like he's truly worried about his fleeting years and more like he thinks aging is truly Serious Business.
• As a tribute to Initial D, Eurobeat musician Dave Rodgers produced a variety of self-remakes of his songs that were featured in the Initial D anime, as well as covers of other Eurobeat vocalists' songs that were also featured in that series. They're generally agreed to be great covers, and it even mostly works fine with the songs originally sung by a female vocalist, like "Remember Me", "Gamble Rumble", and "Killing My Love" since the key for each of these songs is modified to accomodate his vocal range...but he didn't change the lyrics for the songs already in English, even gender-specific lines, so in "Killing My Love", he still sings about "thinking to become your wife". Cue jokes about "Malewife Dave".
• "Romeo & Cinderella" by doriko has an eyecatch of Hatsune Miku in nightwear in bed, laying stomach down with her head on a pillow and an apple in her hand, with the arm of an offscreen person pressing down next to her, implying that they're about to have sex with or at least cuddle with her. However, there isn't a body associated with that arm visible, the arm extends all the way from the top of the illustration, and there's a fair amount of empty space between Miku's body and the top. Whoever that is, the way the arm is positioned implies that whichever offscreen person that arm belongs to is doing a handstand rather than mounting her.

Rap/Hip-Hop

• Ubiquitous in hardcore rap is the "token personal song", usually the last or second-to-last track. Even though the entire rest of the album contains odes to violence, drugs, and casual sex, in this song the rapper thanks God and/or their mama for their success. It's a little hard to take seriously since in most of their songs they're acting in a manner unbefitting of a good Christian or Mama's Boy. Sometimes the song is a dedication to a deceased loved one, which tends to be a little more sincere. Still, the purpose of this song is that this is where the rapper lets the audience see their real self, which raises the question of who we're getting the rest of the time.
• Sean Paul frequently veers into this. Many of his lyrics are difficult to understand for most people, and those that are understandable tend to be rather cheesy. His music is still very enjoyable and fun, but one can't help but find his lyrics to be rather narmy, even as you dance to it. Towards the end of his duet with Beyonce, "Baby Boy," Beyonce starts singing the last few lines, while Sean Paul cheerfully exclaims "Atta-atta-atta ya! Atta-atta-atta-ya!" over her lines, prompting many listeners to have a Flat "What" reaction. If you listen carefully, he's actually echoing her "We're stepping in hotter this year" line with "Hotta hotta ana ya!" It's his accent - it's quite strong and makes it harder to understand.
• So many from N Dubz, with the most notable being this from "Ouch":
  Who's this woman in my bed?
  My name's Shaniqua, and what?!
  Naaaaa!
• R. Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet." In particular, episode 9, with its truly amazing reveal that seems to indicate that Kelly is at least a little bit in on the joke:
  "Then he looks at the cabinet
  getting close to the cabinet!
  He's close to the cabinet!
  And he opens the cabinet!
  "Now pause the movie cause what I'm about to say to y'all is so damn twisted:
  not only is there a man in the cabinet
  but the man is a midget!
  Midget, midget, midget, midget..."
  • It peaked with his '05 VMA performance. No matter what he does, he can't un-perform it.
  • By the end of episode 21, there's no question whatsoever.
  • The Music Video Show:" This is one of the most over the top things I have EVER seen...you should totally watch this."
• Ja Rule:
  • "Mesmerize" is a shamelessly narmy love song. The music video just makes takes the Narm level up to eleven, which The Music Video Show looks at here.
  • There's also Loose Change, his diss to Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent, among others, which contains an unintentionally hilarious threat.
  "50, you gon get shot again,
  by the M-U-R-E-D-R Inc"
• Eminem:
  • "Cleaning Out My Closet" by would be creepier if they hadn't left in the studio talk at the beginning.
    "Where's my snare? I have no snare on my headphones."
  • The Marshall Mathers LP in general takes Cluster F-Bomb and Take That! so far that it just lapses into Narm on some tracks, especially on "Marshall Mathers" and "Kim".
  • The end of "Mockingbird" does a lot to kill some the touching vibe the song had going on.
    "If that bird won't sing and the ring don't shine, I'MMA BREAK THAT BIRDIE'S NECK,
    I'mma find the jeweler who sold it to you, make him eat every carat, don't fuck with Dad!"
  • Overall, "When I'm Gone" is a good song, but it's impossible not to smile a little when Eminem sings the lyrics: But we're in Sweden / Baby, how'd you get to Sweden? To be fair, the subject matter of the song outright states that he was having a truly bizarre nightmare.
  • "Just Lose It". The video is an acid trip featuring weird and outdated references to Michael Jackson's hair catching fire and child molestation accusations, Pee-Wee Herman, MC Hammer, and Madonna's Blonde Ambition Tour. The song's lyrics features such gems as:
    Up the center of the dance floor
    Like TP for my bunghole
    And it's cool if you let one go
    Nobody's gonna know, who'd hear it?
    Give a little "poot poot", it's OK! (pffrt)
    Oops, my CD just skipped
    And everyone just heard you let one rip
  • The entirety of Eminem's Horrorcore album Relapse is filled with genuinely unsettling violence and horror scenarios, all narrated in a ridiculous Vampire Vords accent.
  • "Not Afraid" is a Sincerity Mode song in which Eminem tries to reach out to his fellow drug addicts and encourage them through it. If the incredibly over-the-top and Glurgey tone doesn't raise a giggle, or the fact that the song is being done by one of rap's angstiest shitheads acting happy and enlightened, the fact that the song is built out of pointless puns (such as an extended wordplay section based on shitting) will.
  • From "Love The Way You Lie": "Now you get to watch her leave out the window, GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT WINDOW PANE!!!"
  • "Bad Guy" starts its otherwise terrifying and condemnatory final verse with "toilet's clogged, yeah, 'cause I'm talking a lot of shit but I'm backing it all up".
  • "Stronger Than I Was" is a belted piano ballad Break-Up Song that Eminem sings. His voice can be described as "distinctive" and mostly in tune. He also provides ridiculous uuungh!! adlibs in the background, just so we know he means it.
  • "Headlights" has a section where the string section suddenly performs an over-the-top build as Eminem delightedly screams about how much he loves his mother. Just try to explain this to someone in 2002.
  • "Walk On Water" has the howler lyric "pressure increases like khakis".
• Any time Shaquille O'Neal tries to rap. His single "I Know I Got Skillz", between Shaq's terrible singing, various product plugs, and completely ridiculous lyrics, it is just Narmtacular:
  I got a hand that'll rock ya cradle,
  cream you like cheese, spread you on my bagel,
  my Ford Explorer boomin' with the clumped-up funk,
  all you jealous punks can't stop my dunks,
  they're brand new like Heavy,
  built like Chevy, Impala,
  but Shaq's a smooth balla,
  (yeah, but what about rhymin?)
  I can hold my own,
  knick-knack Shaq-attack, give a dog a bone

The music video is narmy too.

• "Me and My Bitch" by The Notorious B.I.G. contains an infamous second line (taken from a Richard Pryor routine) that causes most listeners to rewind to see if they really heard it.
  You look so good, I suck on your daddy's dick
  • "What's Beef" includes a personal attack on the musician Suif "C-Gutta" Jackson, comparing him to child murderer Wayne Williams. The problem is how Biggy chooses to word this comparison:
    Don't they know my nigga Gutter fuckin' kidnap kids
    Fuck 'em in their ass, throw 'em over the bridge?
• In the early 90s in Dublin, some people performed onstage to raise money for the Rap Crisis—uh, I mean Rape Crisis Center. Behold the Rap About Rape! Their intentions were obviously great; it's a truly noble cause and they really were trying to help—but this is what happens when you try too hard to be hip and modern. *pinches nose* "What did aaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhhhAAHHAAHHaaaaaaaaahhhhh dooooo-oooo wroooo-ooo-ooong?"
• As The Rap Critic pointed out, using a Verbal Tic in a Grief Song, as Master P does in "I Miss My Homies", is a bad move.
  Sittin' at the ghetto thinkin' 'bout All my homies passed away (Uunngh)
• "Rocketeer" by the Far East Movement was an otherwise good song, but one particular verse just sounds ridiculous:
  Let's go the next level, Super Mario
  I hope this works out, cardio
• "Move Bitch" by Ludacris.
  "MOOOOOOOOOVE BITCH, GET OUT THE WAY!"
• Vanilla Ice's "Word to your mother."
• Insane Clown Posse:
  • "F**king Magnets, how do they work?"
  • Their cover of AMG's "Bitch Better Have My Money" had Fred Durst involved and... let this sum up Fred's lyrics for you...
    Come on, bitch! Don't talk shit,
    How 'bout a bowl of them fucked up grits?! (you can easily confuse that as clits there...),
    Open up wide, slip & slide,
    BUTTSTAINS in the back of your Mustang!
• Rick Ross's "Hustlin'". The song is a Boastful Rap about how awesome of a rapper and drug dealer Ross is. Try not to laugh at the opening lines.
  Who the fuck you think you fuckin' with?! I'm the fuckin' boss!
  Seven forty-five, white on white that's fuckin' Ross!

  All the song really proves is that Ross likes to rhyme words with themselves.

  Don't tote no twenty-twos, Magnum cost me twenty-two.
  Sat it on them twenty-twos, birds go for twenty-two.
  Lil' mama super thick, she say she twenty-two.
  She seen them twenty-twos, we in room two twenty-two!
• These lines in Kanye West's Bound 2:
  I mean damn, what would Jeromy-Romy-Romy-Rome think?
  Jerome's in the house! Watch ya mouth!

  As pointed out by The Rap Critic, it gets worse- the song itself basically just stops when Kanye raps the lines, like it's taking care to emphasise them- but in the process, it's just highlighting how utterly terrible they are.

• 9th Wonder & Buckshot's "The Change Up" features a shirtless rapper doing pushups, allusions to Chinese food... Basically 2 minutes 41 seconds of Buckshot and his producer trying way too hard.
• Auto-Tune rapper Future:
  • "Turn on the Lights". After hearing him in the first few seconds, you can tell things are about to go very wrong. And it's hard not to laugh at how bad he "sings" the title.
  • Also "Honest". If Lil B is no longer enough for your comedy rap needs, your boy Future's here for you.
  Live a rich nigga life, I'm just being honest. FUTURE!
• "Hood Gone Love" it is a great track, but at some point when Kendrick Lamar raps, he stops to squawk like a parrot. But other than that, it's a pretty great song.
• Jason Derulo has numerous examples, but "Trumpets" is probably the pinnacle. It contains lines like "Is it weird that your ass reminds me of a Kanye West song?", "Is it weird that your eyes remind me of a Coldplay song?" (so... they were all yellow? Granted, he was referring to the Coldplay song "Green Eyes", but it's not one of their more popular songs, hence the confusion at the line) and "Is it weird that your bra remind me of a Katy Perry song?" (unless his girlfriend is wearing a bra that shoots whipped cream, then yes, that is kind of strange).
• T Baby's infamous It's So Cold In The D tries to be a Tear Jerker song in memory of her friend, Mason Graham, who was killed by gang violence, and is meant to talk about it, but it's hard not to take it seriously when the singer ends up starting verses in the middle of the background beat.
• Drake's "Hotline Bling" is supposed to be about a broken man angsting over his ex. However, some of the lyrics tend to sound silly and unintentionally funny. The music video's setting and choreography don't exactly help.
  Why you never alone
  Why you always touching road
  Used to always stay at home, be a good girl
  You was in the zone, yeah.
• Near the end of Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar's track "Nosetalgia", Kendrick angrily exclaims "Your son dope, nigga! Now reap what you sow, nigga!" It's a powerful line, but it's immediately undermined by the voice that politely and almost apologetically murmurs "Please reap what you sow, nigga" after Lamar's done.
• Logic's "1-800-273-8255": "Who can relate? Woo!". The song otherwise gets its message across, and effectively promoted awareness of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the organization whose phone number is in the song's title. However, it's still a little odd for a somber song with an anti-suicide message to include several exuberant shouts of "Woo!".
• XXXTentacion's "Sad!". The song itself is not narmy, but the title is too on-the-nose and looks like something from one of Donald Trump's tweets.
• The Black Eyed Peas had several songs in which they tried to be cool. They didn't always succeed. Case in point: "Imma Be". The frequent repetitions of the title are way too easy to mishear as "I'm a bee, I'm a bee, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a bee". There's also the line where will.i.am compares himself to a sperm bank. Apparently he forgot that people also deposit sperm at sperm banks.
• Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Wildside", regarding the murder of Carol Stuart in 1989:
  Charles was the culprit
  The whole plot was an insurance scam
  Charles and his brother came up with a plan
  Kill Carol, collect a big check
  Blame it on a black man, what the heck?

R&B/Soul

• Ruben Studdard's cover of Luther Vandross' cover of The Carpenters' "Superstar". Besides coming across as a bad karaoke version of Vandross' classic, Studdard's tendency to round out his "R's" and "L's" makes him sound like a tenor Elmer Fudd. And the auto-tune. Dear lord, the auto-tune...
• Stevie Wonder 's Livin' for the City is an amazing song with a poignant message about hardship and adversity faced by impoverished African-Americans, and it's obvious that Stevie took the whole endeavor very seriously. With that in mind, why on earth did he bring in Animal to sing the final stanza?
• Willow Smith's song "Whip My Hair". With the chorus line of "I whip my hair back and forth", Tumblr is having a field day with this song.
• Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" is already bombastic enough. But the last chorus, with a dramatic drumbeat followed by the mother of all Incredibly Long Notes is so overdone it's become narm (this doesn't help).
• James Carr's "A Man Needs a Woman" is made of this trope, but it turns into a Crowning Moment of Narm toward the end with the lyrics "I need a little love/like a soldier needs a gun/just like a hamburger needs a bun". Carr sings these lines so straight that it can't help but sound like a parody.
• Har Mar Superstar's "Power Lunch". "Deeper, deeper, I can feel your beeper"? Really?
• Diana Ross & the Supremes' "I'm Livin' In Shame": an admirable lyric about a girl who grows up poor, disowns her mother in adulthood and tries to pass herself off as coming from a wealthy family, but feels shame and guilt after learning that her mother has died. Torpedoed by the line "Came the telegram - Momma passed away while making homemade jam". Narm on so many levels. That anyone would actually write that in a telegram. That Momma crashing to the kitchen floor during jam-making could in any sense be described as passing away. That "homemade" needed to be specified.
• Des'ree's Life "won" a BBC poll to find the "worst ever pop lyric". It's hard to see why:
  I don't want to see a ghost
  It's the sight that I fear most
  I'd rather have a piece of toast
  Watch the evening news
• ThreeLW's song "No More (Baby I'ma Do Right)" is a perfectly normal R&B song but one of the lyrics is "And you promised me Kate Spade, but that was last year in the 8th grade". That creates a lot of Fridge Logic. What 13-15 year olds have serious relationships, drive cars, and can afford Kate Spade? That's even ignoring that Kiely's lisp makes her sound even younger than she is, which contrasts even more with the lyrics.

Rock

• Probably the most horrific example has to be Tim Capello's "I Still Believe", as seen in the movie The Lost Boys. It's not even the raspy-fart saxophone playing, nor that the man himself is a mulleted, unitard-wearing wrestler-lookalike; it's lyrics like "I'll take my place, Upon this stage, I'll wait till the end of time for you like everybody else!!" The last lines of this verse are sung in such quick succession, with such unbelievable gusto, that it sounds like Capello's about to explode, take off, foul himself, and orgasm all at once. In addition, it sounds like he's actually fucking his saxophone, judging by the rhythmic, shrieking blasts and final orgasmic shudder it makes as the song finishes... The original version of the song by Santa Cruz new wave band the Call is good and has a much better delivery; the potential humor of the lyrics is almost unnoticeable.

• Linkin Park
  • "Crawling". For some reason, the Vancouver Winter Olympics once used a remix of that song for couples figure skating. Yes, really.
    CRAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWLING INNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN MY SKINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN...
• Many songs by Nickelback:
  • In "Photograph," the nostalgia of the lyrics is nullified by the over-enthusiastic tone of the music. In the beginning of the video, when Chad Kroeger lifts a photo at arm's length to the camera and sings "Look at this photograph!" with a largely blank face, he looks like an enormous manchild. This has been marvelously parodied in this reinterpretation.
  • "If Everyone Cared" is the band's spectacularly non-specific, crowd-pleasing, inoffensive protest song, in which Chad whines about how much better the world would be if nobody ever had to be sad. If this counts as a protest song, then maybe The '60s were all in vain.
  • Most of All the Right Reasons (the album from which those three songs came) is full of Narm.
  • Not to mention the fact that at least three of their songs sound identical, just with different lyrics. Case in point.
  • The song "Far Away" is just as narmy and sounds just as much like every other Nickelback song.
  "I LOVEEE YOOOOUUUUUU/I LOVED YOU ALL ALONG..."
• Ringo Starr's "Photograph" has some of the same problems as Nickelback's song of the same name. It sure seems like he's cheerfully singing "But all I've got is a photograph, and I realize you're not coming back any more..." ^note  Word of God says that although the line is sad, they are also remembering the good times at the same time, so - ruefully cheerful, anyone?

• Death Cab for Cutie. Their lyrics are typically out there...
  • The sweet yet stalkerish song "I Will Possess Your Heart". Lyrics include lines such as these:
    "There are days when outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass
    And I long for this mirrored perspective, when we'll be lovers, lovers at last"
    "You reject my advances and desperate pleas
    I won't let you, let me down so easily, so easily"
  • The title of the song: "I will possess your heart". But it is meant to be about a stalker.
  • "I Will Follow You Into The Dark." The sentiment is sweet, but the opening lines are hard to get past.
    "Love of mine, someday you will die"...
  • And what sort of non-comedic band deliberately names themselves after an Elvis Presley send-up by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band?
• Any song from Silverchair's first album. Especially "Suicidal Dream". All of them were written when frontman Daniel Johns was fourteen...
• Meat Loaf:
  • "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" features the Narmy chorus, "I want you, I need you, but there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you, but don't feel sad, 'cause two out of three ain't bad".
  • Then there's the song "For Crying Out Loud" with these lines:
    "And don't you see my faded Levis
    Bursting apart
    And don't you hear me crying
    Oh babe, don't go
    And don't you hear me screaming
    How was I to know?"

  For the record, that first couplet is quite delicate; the four lines after are more intense each time they are sung. (Yes, that's right, that set of lines is part of the bridge!) However, Jim Steinman has gone on the record as saying that he intentionally put that part in as a stealth boner joke. (If you're watching Meat Loaf sing it or even just aware of what he looks like, "faded Levis bursting apart" conjures up a different mental picture.) He tends to point his lyrics straight at Narm and then drive into it as hard as he possibly can in the hopes of coming out the other side into Awesomeness. His success varies by song and depends on you.

  • The Bat Out of Hell album is full of narm.
  • The seriousness of Jim Steinman's writing should be taken with a grain of salt. Any man who writes "... There ain't no Coupe de Ville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack Box" is either writing tongue-in-cheek or is bloody loco. Or both.
  • The "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" music video.
    ON A HOT SUMMER'S NIGHT, WOULD YOU OFFER YOUR THROAT TO THE WOLF WITH THE RED ROSES?!?!!

  I bet you say that to all the boys.

  • LIFE IS A LEMON AND I WAAAAANT MY MOOOONNNNNNEEEYYYY BACK!
    There's desperation (desperation!) in the air
    It leaves a stain on all your clothes
    And no detergent gets it out...
  • The end of the final chorus, where he randomly yells, "Back? BACK? BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!"
  • "I WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE... BUT I WON'T DO THAT!!!
  • Either of the following:
    "After a while you'll forget everything
    It was a brief interlude
    And a midsummer night's fling
    And you'll see it's time to move on
    ...
    I know the territory I've been around
    It'll all turn to dust and we'll all fall down
    Sooner or later you'll be screwing around..."
  • STOP RIGHT THEEEERRE *powerchords*
    • Ah.
  • The song "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" features the fantastic line:
    "If you want my views of history then there's something you should know
    The three men I admire the most are Curly, Larry, and Moe".
  • One of Meat's less well-known songs is "More Than You Deserve". The singer who finds his wife cheating on him with his best friend (prompting him to declare, "LISTEN, BOY!" as he admonishes the friend), then two of his best friends (provoking the reaction, "LISTEN, BOYS!"), and finally a group of his best friends, who he addresses with the cry of, "LISTEN HERE, GROUP!"
  • "It Just Won't Quit" from the second Bat Out of Hell album:
    Maybe it's nothing, and I'm under the weather
    Maybe it's just one of those bugs going 'round
    Maybe I'm under a spell and it's magic
    Maybe there's a witch doctor with an office in town
• The musical output of A Silver Mt. Zion (and all variations thereof) skirts dangerously close to Narm sometimes because the lead singer is honestly trying to sum up the bleakness of modern society, etc., with a voice that can only be described as a combination of Bob Dylan at his worst and Brak.
• Nine Inch Nails:
  • The majority of Pretty Hate Machine can be considered amusing. Here's an instance from "Something I Could Never Have" (Trent, stop bitching):
    Grey would be the color if I had a heart.
  • The whole of "Happiness In Slavery" is quite over-the-top, and DANG, its video is disturbing, but the outro is plain overdone:
    Happiness in SLAVERYYYYAAAAAAGGHGHGHGHHHHH, happiness... SLAVERYYYYAAGGHGHHGBLBLBLRLRLRLLLHHH... happiness... SLAVERYYEEEAHEAWHEAYWEAWEAHHH
  • The Downward Spiral:
    • "Closer" can drift into this territory if you happen to mistakenly hear the chorus' first line as "I wanna fuck you like an Elmo!" You might try to listen to the song without picturing Elmo laughing in the background and cracking up.
    • The line "I wear this crown of shit..." from "Hurt". Johnny Cash decided to change it to the more effective "crown of thorns" for his cover of the song.
  • The Fragile:
    • "The Wretched" might as well be the embodiment of Narm.
      The clouds will part and the sky cracks open, and god himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just t-t-to hold you down. Stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss...
    • The repetetive Title Drop chorus of "Starfuckers, Inc." can be hilarious after listening to it for a while, but you can also pretend that Trent Reznor's house really looks like in the song's music video.
  • The way Trent pronounces the Title Drop in the chorus of "With Teeth" is so bizarre-sounding that fans came up with the Fan Nickname of "AWITH ATEETHA."
  • Year Zero:
    • "God Given" has a rather unfitting Audience Participation line in the middle of its lyrics.
    Come on, sing along, everybody now!
    • "Capital G": "Ah-Push-ThaBut-tonAnd-Elec-tedHim-ToOf-ficeAnd-AH-HePush-ThaBut-tonAn-ADrop-Thuh-Bomb-HUH-HUH" straddles the thin line between Awesome Music and Narm.
• Regina Spektor's Fidelity has this unforgettable lyric:
  "It breaks my hea-ah-ah-ah/ah-ah-ah-ah-art".
  • And goodness, the music video!
  • Or "Lady". She's done quite a few good blues songs. "Lady"... what happened there?
  • And who could forget "Laughing With"? God can be so hilarious, HA HA!
  • "Us" features a doubleshot of narm in quick succession, when Spektor unleashes a stream of toy soldiers from her mouth during a falsetto note (a la Peter Gabriel's stop-motion "Sledgehammer" video) and hilariously overemphasizes the word "contagious" (or, in this case, "Oh, it's con-TAY-gio-u-u-u-ussss!"). Coupled with her involuntarily lifting her upper lip as she says the word, it makes her look like she has some sort of speech impediment.
• Nirvana has some Narmtastic gems:
  • The pre-chorus and chorus of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for example: "Hello, hello, hello, how low?", "I feel stupid and contagious", and of course, "My libido! YAY!!!"
  • "Rape Me," which is about... exactly what it sounds like. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't extremely repetitive.
  • In some In Utero songs, Kurt's screaming sounds so over-the-top that it comes across as almost unintentionally (or, knowing Kurt, possibly intentionally) comical. His screaming of "Go Away!!!!" at the end of "Scentless Apprentice," for example, comes across as this (especially with the rather subdued guitar riff playing behind it).
• Most of Limp Bizkit's catalog is pure unabashed narm.
  • The Speak-N-Spell solo in their cover of "Behind Blue Eyes". Then there's that awkward make-out session Durst has with Halle Berry in the video.
  • Likewise, the attempted Careful with That Axe in their cover of "Faith".
  • From "Eat You Alive:" "DAMN, YOU'RE SO HOT!!!" Well, pretty much the entire song too.
  • The title to their third album: Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.
    Luke Spencer: Of all the names you could give your album, you chose an anus analogy. Classy."
  • The pre-chorus and chorus to "My Generation" can be summed up as "Go ahead and shit-talk my generation, because in turn, I won't care about yours until you care about mine!" All this written by someone who was pushing 30.
  • From "Hot Dog", amidst all the Cluster F Bombs: "If I say 'fuck' two more times, that's forty-six fucks in this fucked up rhyme!"
  • And, of course, the fact that Fred "did it all for the nookie (come on), the nookie (come on)/so you can take that cookie and stick it up your—yeah!!" Considering this is prelavent in the explicit version, one has to wonder why the random self-censoring.
  • "Ready to Go". Between Fred still posturing and trying to convince us he's a badass (despite being in his forties) and getting Lil Wayne on board for no reason, it also features this wonderful pun:
    I'm so poker faced, ladies going Gaga.
• Interpol sometimes suffer from this.
  • "Obstacle 1":
    "IT'S IN THE WAY THAT SHE POSEEEEES / IT'S IN THE THINGS THAT SHE PUTS IN MYYYYY HEEEEEEAAAAAD / HER STORIES ARE BORING AAAND STUUUFFF / SHE'S ALWAYS CALLING MY BLUFF / SHE PUTS THE SHE PUTS THE WEIGHTS INTO MY LITTLE HEART ANDSHEGETSINMYROOMANDSHETAKESITAPAAAARRRRT".
    • Okay, okay, we get it, dude! Calm down!
  • "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down", from the same album. It's a song which uses scuba diving as a metaphor for depression, and manages to maintain a completely straight face throughout.
    Stella, I love you / Stella, I love you / Stella, I looooooooooove yooooooooooooooooooou!

However, the lyrics heavily imply the song is about oral sex, in which case the above is kind of justified.

• "Roland" features this beauty:
  My best friend is from Poland, and, oh, he has a beard.

• Yoshiki of X Japan usually avoids this by writing lyrics in excellent English, but occasionally the English as Second Language problem catches up with him:
  • "Tears" (written about his father's suicide) contains the line 'Never thought you'd leave me alone'; this, while grammatically accurate, doesn't mean what he thinks it does. However, that line is forgivable compared to this lyric in the same song:
    Love everlasting fades away
    Alive within your beatless heart
  • "Forever Love", while insanely over-dramatic, isn't necessarily Narmy by itself, but it had the unfortunate timing of being paired with the ridiculously Narmy X1999 movie, leading to it becoming the laughingstock and staple of drunken anime-fan karaoke. This only counts for the original version, though. The acoustic version is hilarious in any context.
• The Smashing Pumpkins are blatantly narmy:
  • A small sample of Billy Corgan's effervescent lyrics. Most of these lyric samples come from just one album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, whose very title oozes narm. But it's good anyway, with most of its songs leaning toward Narm Charm.
    "Love is suicide"
    "Living makes me sick
    So sick I wish I'd die"
    "Forever waiting on cruel death
    You know I'm not dead"
    "I'll tear my heart out
    Before I get out"
    "I don't live
    I invade"
  "Emptiness is loneliness
  And loneliness is cleanliness
  And cleanliness is godliness
  And God is empty... just like me".
  • "Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage".
    And into the eyes of the jackal I say ka-BOOM!
  • "Disarm". Just listen to it.
• Stone Sour's song "Bother": the lyric "A zombie hides my face". Then again, this is the lead singer of Slipknot we're talking about.
• The Automatic would be just another standard indie rock group were it not for one thing - their keyboardist, Pennie, screams constantly into the microphone. "Screaming? Lots of bands do that!" - but you haven't heard Pennie's screaming. Pennie recently left the band; despite releasing a good record in 2008, some fans believe that with Pennie's departure, the band lost the one thing that made them unique and are now just another Stereophonics clone.
• Secret Agent Man by P.F. Sloan, as sung by Johnny Rivers, has been noted by many people to sound like "secret asian man" to the point that Da Vinci's Notebook released a parody version with this name.
• IOSYS's "Border of Death", a remix of the song "Necrofantasia" from

Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom, opens with spoken lines (repeated later during the song) that would probably sound absolutely badass and unearthly if they did not consist of Gratuitous English. The flash music video also contains Gratuitous English ("POWOR[sic] OF SPIRITUAL BORDER").

• Have you heard that Art Alexakis, lead singer of Everclear, has daddy issues? Oh, you haven't? Listen to one of his songs. Which one? Take your pick. He's not particularly subtle about it. Also, almost every song he ever wrote refers to his dead brother or girlfriend in one way or another.
• P!nk:
  • Lampshaded at the end of "Misunderstood", which involves a long section of her yelling 'Unngh!' in time with the beat. At the end, she breaks off to talk with the studio engineer:
    "What? No, this ain't no damn Ex-Lax commercial. This is my first single, man!"
  • Also from P!nk:
    "This used to be a funhouse
    But now it's full of evil clowns"
  • "Family Portrait" is a potential Tear Jerker for children of divorced parents with its implications of Abusive Parents and Divorce Assets Conflict, but what sends Pink really over the top in the bridge comes off like a case of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking. The Creepy Children Singing that immediately follows the last line doesn't help matters.
    I don't wanna have to split the holidays
    I don't want two addresses
    I don't want a stepbrother anyways
    AND I DON'T WANT MY MOMMY TO CHANGE HER LAST NAME!
• David Bowie:
  • His progressively hysterical yelling of "FIVE YEARS!" gets Narmful by the end of the track.
  • While Station to Station isn't an entirely bad LP—and yes, Bowie was nearly psychotic from cocaine abuse at the time it was recorded—still, parts are difficult to take seriously:
    Here am I
    Flashing no colour; tall in this room, overlooking the ocean
    Here are we
    One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth
    [...]
    The Return of the Thin White Duke
    Throwing darts in lovers' eyes
    The Return of the Thin White Duke
    Making sure white stains
• The Deathstars':
  • "Cyanide" is quite good, except for the line:
    "When the dark does what the dark does best... IT'S DARKNESS!!"
  • "Opium" and its chorus:
    "Zeit... geist! WOW WOW DARKNESS KINGSIZED! Zeit... geist! Opium...
    Zeit... geist! WOW WOW THE END OF OUR LIVES! Zeit... geist! Opium..."
  • And on top of that? Both examples, but especially the one from "Opium" count as Moment of Awesome when perceived musically. Deathstars can sing just about anything and make it awesome, Narm be damned.
• Trans-Siberian Orchestra, best known for their intense rendition of "Carol of the Bells" ("Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12-24"). Their other tracks feature powerhouse singers backed by gorgeous rock/classical fusion arrangements; but listen to the awkward and overwrought lyrics for a while, and you'll understand why their biggest hit is instrumental. Now that they've released three Christmas albums, there are enough instrumental tracks for discerning listeners to compile one Narm-less and pretty amazing album. It's undoubtedly the best way to enjoy the band.
  • "What is Christmas?" from The Lost Christmas Eve deserves a special mention.
  And there's one more thing that I have discovered
  And I would now like you to know
  The reason for Christmas I now realize
  Is an excuse to tolerate snow
  • Doesn't help that the singer puts the Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable for "excuse". EX-kyoos.
• Mannheim Steamroller, on the other hand, manages to generate mass quantities of Narm despite being 100% instrumental, to this day still rocking that synthesizer like 1982 never ended.
• Aerosmith's "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" is hilariously bad and enjoyable for this very reason. (Aptly, it was written for the movie Armageddon (1998).)
  I don't wanna close my eyes
  I don't wanna fall asleep
  Because I miss you, babe
  And I don't wanna miss a thing...

It's a good Power Ballad, but it fails the logic test here. Fittingly, the lyricist is Diane Warren, already mentioned in the Pop section.

• HIM. The lyrics often balance between the prettily gloomy and the hilarious. Their breakthrough album is called Razorblade Romance.
  And the devil inside is reading
  The words of the saddest poem
  To be engraved on the stone of my grave
• Orange Range's song "City Boy" sounds harmless enough... until you listen to the words with the singer's heavy Japanese accent. Then, "city" turns into "shitty"...
• The gazettE's song "Defective Tragedy" could be a sad, beautiful song all the way through... if only someone didn't, about 3/4ths of the way in, sound like they were covering and uncovering their mouth... while screaming like they were dying. It's hard not to laugh.
• Alice Cooper's music is usually tongue-in-cheeck, but it still sometimes contains narm:
  • "Chop Chop Chop," one of his numerous songs about serial killers, has an incredibly cheery chorus that begins thus:
  "Chop chop chop
  I'm an engine of destruction..."
  • "Only Women Bleed." It's a serious song about a woman in an abusive relationship. But then the titular chorus: Only women bleed... Even though it's most likely unintentional, one cannot help but think he is referring to "that time of the month," especially given his dark sense of humor.
  • "Nobody Likes Me" is one huge Narm-fest. No wonder it's hardly included on boxsets of old material.
  "HAHAHAHAHA
  Alright we all hate you, we hate you a lot
  We hate your whole family, we hate your dog Spot!
  "Even Spot?
  YES!"
• Live:
  • "The Dolphin's Cry". Aside from the title, the song features lines such as these:
  "We are lost till we are found
  This phoenix rises up from the ground."
  • The video for "I Alone", which features the group dancing around and miming playing their instruments against weird backgrounds. It doesn't help that their drummer didn't even have an instrument to mime playing (Beavis And Butthead figured he must have forgotten to bring his drum set to the video shoot). Whatever effect they were going for, it comes across as goofy.
  • "Freaks" has the line "You know your sperm is weak", as well as that odd moment before the last chorus where Ed Kowalczyk starts growling "Labor-labor-labor."
    • The second verse of the song begins with this: "If the mother goes to bed with you, will you run and tell the papers how she picked you from a line up in downtown Philadelphia with a cigarette hangin' out of your mouth and Henry Miller in your back pocket?" The second half of that lyric is sung in Motor Mouth fashion, and it's like that in the verses. And immediately after that, Ed goes "You little fucker!"
  • From "Lightning Crashes": "Her placenta falls to the floor."
  • From "Lakini's Juice": "I rushed [to] the ladies room, took the water from the toilet, washed her feet and blessed her name." Symbolic or not, that's just funny. Also, was there no sink in that ladies room or were they not working? Either way, that's just gross.
  • "Waitress" tries to raise a point about putting aside petty differences and looking out for other people... but on the surface it's a dramatic Post-Grunge song pleading for someone to leave a tip for their waitress even though "she was a bitch". Also, for some reason one of Ed's arguments for tipping her is that she "wore a funky barrette in her hair".
• "Last Kiss", while sad in context, gets pushed into Narm territory by both the lyrics and, at least in Pearl Jam's cover, Eddie Vedder's rather upbeat singing. Some consider Eddie Vedder's voice to be heartbreaking on this; others may think he sounds like a cross between Darius Rucker and a Dalek. The original (from the late fifties or early sixties!) was upbeat, too.
  Oh where, oh where can my baby be?
  The Lord took her away from me
  She went to heaven, so I've got to be good...
• The Posies (you get two of their songs free on any Vista laptop) managed a particularly bad example with "Love Comes", which appears to have been intended as serious.
  Oh baby, you're too pure
  You're too pure for this wicked world!
  Your data's uncorrupted...
• Neil Young's "Southern Man", otherwise a serious and moving commentary on racism in the American South, does a quick foray into Narm territory in the beginning of the first verse, which goes: "I saw cotton, and I saw black."
• "The Northern Kings" are a band who do covers of various 1980s pop songs, turning these cheesy pop songs into epic rock songs. Of course, if you know/really like the original song then expect a fast paced rock version to be full of Narm, especially when they decided to do a heavy metal version of Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky" (seriously).
  • Well, of course. One of their singers is Marco Hietala, who's already on this very page. And he's only a quarter of the singers- this band also has Tony Kakko.
• Tesla's song "Wonderful World" is a song about lost innocence, and is trying to be somber and wistful. Unfortunately, the tone is completely wrecked by this unintentionally hilarious couplet about the President being shot:
  Didn't know much but I knew it wasn't funny
  Everybody's crying like they killed the Easter Bunny
• Greg Lake could write narmy lyrics with the best of them.
  • For instance, the Emerson, Lake & Palmer song "Still... You Turn Me On" plays as a completely serious romantic ballad, and then out of nowhere comes this line:
  "Every day a little sadder, a little madder
  someone get me a ladder"
  • Emerson, Lake, & Powell's (Cozy Powell was Carl Palmer's replacement on their self-titled album) "Touch And Go" has some real gems:
  Man in the street, nowhere to sleep
  No time for nothing, no Patek Phillippe
• The Mars Volta:
  • Cedric Bixler-Zavala makes his career on ridiculous, nonsensical Narms, which he pulls off with pure ballsy delivery
    ''EXO SKELETAL JUNCTION AT THE RAILROAD DELAAAAYYYYEEDDDD
    IF YOU COULD SEEE WHERE I'VE BEEN, YOU'D TOUCH THE HAND THAT'S TOUCHING SIN
    MY HEART IS DARKCLOTS
    FREEZE WITHOUT AN ANSWERRRR FREE FROM ALL THE SHAME; MUST I HIDE
    HAAAAAAAAVEEEEE YOU SEEN THE LIVIIIINGGG!
    TWENTY FIVE SNAKES POURING OUT YOUR EYES YEAH THE ICE PICK’S COMING ON THE MARBLE SHRINE
    NOW THIS TRAIL DON’T LIE, AN ABORTION THAT SURVIVED, LINEAGE OF BASTARD MASTURCATION\\

NOOOOOOWW IIIIIII’MMM LOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTT\\IS THAT YOU, MOATILLIAAAAAAAAAATTAAAAAAAAAAAAAA\\ALL THE TRAPS IN THE CELLAR GO CLICKITY CLACK\\THERE'S TOO MANY REEEEEAAAASONS, TOO MANY REEEEEAAAAASONS, TOO MANY RAYAYAYAYAYAYAYSONS, TOO MANY RAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA WAAAAYYYYAAAAHHHYYAAAAA HAAAYYYYAYAAYAYAAYAAAHEEEEEYAAAAHHHYAAAAAA!
** "With Twilight As My Guide", off Octahedron'', finally brought his narminess over the edge after over a decade of toeing the line.

• It's a brave man indeed who can hear Cedric screeching "THE KIOSK IN MY TEMPORAL LOBE IS SHAPED LIKE ROSALYN CARTER!" in the middle of "Tetragrammaton" and not burst into laughter. However, the lyrics may lose a lot of their Narmfulness if you get a lot of the references and meanings, like the Rosalyn Carter line.

• Skillet:
  • "Monster" being a poor man's "Animal I Have Become" is excusable, but nothing excuses digitally altering the singer's voice to emulate growling, especially when vocalists who can naturally switch from singing to growling/screaming are a dime a dozen. The fake growling wasn't on the original album version — if only it had stayed that way... It also doesn't help that the first line of the song sounds like he's singing "this secret sodomy".
  • Ever since Skillet moved from Christian garage rock to their current Christian-themed mainstream sound, their output has been afflicted with Narm to varying degrees. "Monster" just happens to be outrageously so.
  • WORLDWIDE JESUS DOMINATION
  • The lead singer's dancing moves in the music video of "Sick of it"' is... weird.
  • Their video for "Hero." They use all the pyrotechnics. All of them. And that it randomly starts raining in the middle of the song doesn't slow down those Great Balls of Fire! one bit, not until the song ends with a mushroom cloud.
  • They take various rock tropes and subverts them to demonstrate God's unconditional, unlimited love, and that's fine... but between the ridiculous lyrics, the growling vocals, and the over-the-top guitar riffs, "Better Than Drugs" is a near-fatal overdose of Narm, plain and simple. Overlooking the fact that following God can apparently get you high, the idea that a single entity can simultaneously be "my addiction, my prescription, my antidote" is contradictory at best, outlandish at worst.
• Nick Cave's lyrics sometimes tend towards this.
  • "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" — the title words which are repeated in the chorus, and the part where he starts buzzing.
  • "Babe, I'm on Fire." Specifically the part when he gets to the dog and the frog sitting on the log. And Nocturama is a narmy album in general. Just look at that title. All you need to know.
• Placebo's "Special Needs" might be a bit over the top from the start. but it falls straight into narm with one line.

  I guess I thought you had the flavor

• The Darkness's 'Keep Me Hangin' On' is a great tongue-in-cheek hard rock song, but...
  'Love you so much, like a rabbit loves its hutch'
• Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon puts his entire heart and soul into his music. However, because of that he can come across as just plain corny at times. Take the following examples from both bands:
  • "Have You Forgotten" is about growing up, feeling awkward with oneself, and losing touch with your inner child. However when he mentions things like "Casey Kasem's radio show" and "your friends are fucked up anyway" you can't help but crack up. Narm points also go to the line "That's when friends were nice, To think of them makes you feel nice"; the Rhyming with Itself doesn't help.
  • "Cabezon" with its hokey, overly-Americana like feel to it.
  • "Silly Love Songs" is this in spades. For some it can be a gut-wrenching masterpiece; to others the sheer irony of him over-emoting a "Silly Love Song" can really turn it into unintentional comedy.
  • Much of Among The Leaves is just pure narm. The man just isn't fit for an ego. And this album is bleeding with Kozelek... being self-indulgent.
  • The Modest Mouse Cover Album Tiny Cities and Kozelek's What's Next To The Moon AC/DC Cover Album also qualify as Issac Brock and Bon Scott's lyrics just plain old don't suit the soft guitar ballads he turned them into at times.
• Five Finger Death Punch:
  • "Hard to See" is a decent song music-wise, but the lyrics... Oh God, the lyrics...
    I'm growing so disturbed
    Nothing makes sense to me anymore
    I'm learning to resist
    Becoming more than you ever were
    Can't explain, what's come over me (come over me)
    Can't explain, why it's so hard for me,
    So hard to see your side.
    Projecting all my anger
    I can't seem to get this through to you
    The walls are closing in
    I dare you to walk in my shoes
  • "YOUR SIIIIIIIIIIIDE! I WON'T SEE YOUR SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE!"
  • A"War Is The Answer" is a pretty good adrenaline pumping song until you hear the vocalist say "I'LL SMACK YOU SO FUCKING HARD YOU'LL FEEL LIKE YOU KISSED A FREIGHT TRAIN." Of course, this could also add to the song's appeal for some.
  • They also have one section of the song "Never Enough" where the singer breaks the music and delivers the dark, ominous, and hilarious line "In the end we're all just chalklines on the concrete."
• Bush's "Glycerine" offers "We live in a wheel, where everyone steals. But when we rise, it's like strawberry fields." Narmy and nonsensical at the same time! It's Narm with a gratuitous The Beatles reference!
• Kate Bush:
  • She has a tendency to write great songs that are nearly ruined by a line or two of Narm, like "Mmm, yes, I said mmm, yes" from "The Sensual World". ( It's a Shout-Out to Molly Bloom's "yes" monologue, which—in its stream-of-consciousness extremes—was a startling conclusion to Joyce's Ulysses.)
  • "Wuthering Heights" and its video. "Heathcliff! It's me, Cathy, I've come home! I'm so co-o-old, let me in-a your window." Combine that with her extremely bizarre dancing, which eventually turns into random spinning, and her bright red lipstick and dress, and you've got an incredibly Narmy ballad.
  • The way she says 'GODDDDDD' in "Running Up That Hill".
  • What about when Kate stares at you in her music videos? Skip to 0:53 and say that's not narm.
  • In "Houdini" (an otherwise great song), Kate randomly screams, "With your spit still on my lip, you hit the water!"
  • There's also "Song of Solomon"'s eloquent line "I don't want your bullshit/I want your sexuality!". Sung in a high-pitched girly voice. Spit Take in 3... 2... 1...
  • Let's not forget the over-enunciated "never never never never let me go!" from "Jig of Life", the silly dog-howl imitations in "Hounds of Love" or the Improv bits of "The Big Sky", which seemingly answer the question "What would it sound like if Paul's scatting in 'Hey Jude' was just a bit sillier?".
  • The Director's Cut remake of "Deeper Understanding", apart from falling prey to severe Technology Marches On by not changing the lyrics, replaces the song's original vocoded chorus with an effect that can only be described as GLaDOS.
• Many of John Lennon's solo songs border on this, perhaps because he sometimes acted like a Real Life Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
  • "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" sounds cynical coming from anybody else, probably because it is scathingly cynical. A scathingly cynical Christmas Carol. Maybe the producers added a chorus of children to drown out Yoko's screeching. It didn't work.
  • Then we have "Mind Games."
    "Yes is the answer!"

  What was the question?

  • "How Do You Sleep?" John may have valid points, but he gets over-the-top. Executive Meddling to remove one of the slanders didn't help the song as an artistic work.
  • Almost all of Sometime in New York City falls prey to this, but especially "Sunday Bloody Sunday."
  • Imagine can get this at the "Imagine no possessions" line. (Apparently, even John and Yoko couldn't for long.)
  • "Oh Yoko!" Perhaps the silliest of Silly Love Songs (even moreso than former bandmate Paul McCartney's, and one of his songs was the Trope Namer!).
    In the middle of the bath
    In the middle of the bath I call your name
    Oh... Yo... ko! (x2)
    My love will turn you on (x2)
    In the middle of a shave
    In the middle of a shave I call your name...
  • "John & Yoko" from Wedding Album consists of John and Yoko calling out each other's names for 22 minutes.
  John: YOOOOOOOOOKKKKKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
  Yoko: JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNN!
• Guns N' Roses:
  • "Get in the Ring". Axl gets a bit... over the top with his swearing and critic bashing in this one, featuring this wonderful couplet:
    I don't like you, I just hate you
    I gonna kick your ass, oh yeah! Oh yeah!

It doesn't help when you keep expecting the second line of the above to be "I'm gonna go eat worms".

• "One in a Million" was one of the first songs Axl wrote without the rest of the band's influence, and they didn't even like it. It was criticized for its lyrics being seen as racist. With lyrics like this, it's not hard to see why.
  Police and Niggers, that's right
  Get out of my way
  Don't need to buy none of your
  Gold chains today
  • Aside from that, a couple of the verses address two separate groups of people, then mention a stereotype that's typically only applied to one of these groups: Due to Ambiguous Syntax, the above quote can be interpreted as Axl expecting policemen to try to sell him fake jewelry, while another verse similarly can make it sound like he thinks all homosexuals come from outside of the US, and that they have their own language.

• Some of Rick Wakeman's solo output falls into this; the most notorious example is The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, where one of his performances of the album was accompanied by an ice show.
• Pretty much everything the ultra-patriotic American band Madison Rising does is so Narmful it falls smack into Poe's Law territory (but yes, they are for real). Just look at the track list for their debut album: you've got titles like "Right to Bear," "Before the Hypens Came," and "In the Days That Reagan Ruled." (Here are all the lyrics.) And then there's the cover, which shows the lead singer with his greasy hair kind of crying and clutching an American flag.
• Rise Against:
  • "Hero of War" manages to not only be Anvilicious and narmtastic, but also fails as a war protest song. The moral of the narrative is more along the lines of "DON'T JOIN THE MILITARY OR YOU'LL BECOME A BITTER OLD MAN WHO SHOOTS IRAQI WIDOWS WHO RUN AT YOU WITH WHITE FLAGS!"
  • "Make it Stop", which is otherwise well done song against bullying of gay teens, has this line which was a tad hard to take seriously: "And too much blood has flown from the wrists/ Of the children shamed for those they chose to kiss" which ruins the Tear Jerker of the lyrics completely.
• The Beatles weren't immune to this:
  • "She's Leaving Home" is a beautiful arrangement and it mostly succeeds on a dramatic level, but it lapses into melodrama with some pretty silly lyrics towards the end. "Sheeeeeeeeeeeee is haviiiiiiiiiiiiing fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun! (Fun is the one thing that money can't buy...)"
  • Similarly, "Helter Skelter". The hardest-rocking song of its time is sure to have extremely badass lyrics, right?
    When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide,
    Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride,
    Til I get to the bottom AND I SEE YOU AGAIIIIIIIIIN!!!! YEAH YEAH YEAH, *chuckle*!!!!'
  • "Girl," which begins with John whining in an incredibly nasal voice: "Is there anybody going to listen to my story—" No.
• Loverboy's Gangs In The Street from their sophomore album Get Lucky. The song was intended to warn about the perils of gang violence, but ended up so overwrought that it came across as unintentionally funny.
• Faith No More have a reputation for being off-kilter and unusual, but the Chuck Mosely era had the narmhandle cranked firmly to "yes". Anne's Song is very much of its time, but the opening of Death March is... just... FUCK you, I'll SKATE to the... BEACH!
• The Smiths had some moments, but the most laughable is "Meat Is Murder": a combination of a tuneless, two-chord dirge played at a molasses-slow pace, ridiculous synthesized animal death sounds, the sort of Anvilicious Animal Wrongs Group lyrics that probably led Robert Smith to boast that he eats meat because he hates Morrissey and will very likely provoke Don't Shoot the Message, sung deadly straight by the otherwise more humour-friendly Morrissey, and topped off with some irredeemably cheesy pitch-manipulated backing vocals that try to sound female but land in Uncanny Valley instead. AND A DEATH FOR NO REASON IS MURDER!
• "Revelation", the 18 plus minute jam that took up the second half of Love's Da Capo, is widely considered this, mainly due to Arthur Lee's vocal hysterics which range from unintentionally creepy to downright hilarious.
• There isn't a Foreigner song that isn't Narmtastic, but "I Want To Know What Love Is" is truly a crowning achievement.
• Name any Afternoon Tea Time that DOESN'T go on this path. The Nu-Metal-ish (along with Piss-Take Rap) part in "Fuwa Fuwa Time" being the main offender. To be fair, the songs are written in-universe by a bunch of high-school girls, most of whom are cloudcuckoolanders to some extent, which pushes them into Narm Charm territory for some.
  • "Don't Say Lazy" is such a hard rock song... yet look at the title. Try not to laugh. Also, this part before the chorus:
    Oh crap, I broke a nail
    But you fix it with glue
    And just that can make you feel so accomplished
  • Then, before the second chorus:
    Alright, I got a bit thinner
    But in victory, you ate
    And just that can make you feel so defeated
  • The Gratuitous English on "Go! Go! Maniac". ("We have fabulous bodies, soul and love")
  • What's "Early Summer Rain (20 Love)" about? Counting raindrops being quite a big deal... Fall Out Boy should now be jealous in the category of strange lyrics.
  • The very first verse of "No, Thank You":
    Crammed in front of a white board
    We scribble our wishes freely
    Even though the after school bell is echoing into the sunset
    We can't diss on the power of dreaming, unfortunately
• This may be a low blow, but Bon Scott's singing of the lyric "And you could hear the fingers pickin" on "Let There Be Rock" always makes me chuckle.
• With their enormous, bombastic overproduced sound and occasional silly lyrics, Def Leppard can sometimes end up sounding kinda narmy. The crowning example has to be the song "Let's Get Rocked"; there are few words to describe Joe Elliot bellowing, "LET'S GET THE ROCK OUT OF HERE!" or asking (when the singer ends up getting turned off after discovering that his girlfriend only likes classical music), "I suppose a rock's out of the question?"
• Most of the lyrics from the Lou Reed / Metallica collaboration album, Lulu, including the infamous "I am a table" line. Not to mention that Lou Reed's vocal style on this album has often been compared to Grandpa Simpson...
• Steve Vai whenever he sings. His voice and lyrics are dreadfully narmy, making otherwise good music laughably unlistenable. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Vai is an innovative and stellar guitarist who's probably in the running for greatest guitarist of all time. Please just stick to instrumentals. Or have someone else sing. Then again, he was in Whitesnake for awhile.
  • We mention Steve Vai, and yet nobody brings up the video for Bad Horsie?? What's he even going for here, "Mudvayne For Dads"?
• Tonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At the Wheel is a good song that has much Lyrical Dissonance and Tear Jerkers, but hearing the line "Never seen so much BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOD" kinda ruins the moment.
• Not even Led Zeppelin is immune from this trope.
  • "Stairway to Heaven" is arguably the greatest song ever written. The version on their live album The Song Remains the Same, however, while generally a good performance, has Robert Plant adding in little comments like "Does anybody remember laughter?" which make it hard to take seriously.
  • From Led Zeppelin II, Robert Plant tries to pay a vocal tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson II in "Bring It On Home". Unfortunately, his attempt at imitating Sonny Boy makes him sound more like Droopy.
• Frank Zappa:
  • Parodied in "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee"?
  • Much of Zappa's Cruising with Ruben & the Jets would count too.
• Rush: The video for "Time Stand Still." An emotional power ballad ruined by a video that makes "Rock Me Tonite" look like the epitome of cool, with horrific green-screen work that basically involves showing the band members floating - yes, floating - in front of random backdrops. Even though it was done in 1987, there's still no excuse for this monstrosity.
• "100 Ways" by Porno For Pyros is a pretty, romantic song, and this passage doesn't even stand out too much... Until you think about the fact that Perry Farrell is basically telling his lost lover that she sounds like a bird when reaching orgasm:
  Birds build their homes here right above my head
  They make the same kind of sounds you do
  When we're laying in my bed
• Creed's "Signs" has the line "This is not about sex" followed by Scott Stapp screaming "SEX!" Rocked had a field day laughing at how unexpected\unintentionally hilarious it is, saying it ruins a mostly OK song.
• "Another Life" by Rollins Band has a section where Henry Rollins screams "Bad monkey! Bad monkey! Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!". It Makes Sense in Context, as it's a song against drug use that alludes to "having a monkey on your back" as an expression for having an addiction... But it still sort of sounds like he's warning the listener about literal Maniac Monkeys.
• Yes tend to have lyrics that are more nonsensical than anything else, but "Love Will Find a Way" has what might be one of the most ridiculous and blatant lyrical shoehorns ever (which ruins the song by making the listener laugh at the absurdity of that line in what is supposed to be a love song):
  Here is my heart
  Waiting for you
  Here is my soul
  I eat at Chez Nous
• Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" is an emotional, heartfelt song... but the references to sports teams in the chorus kind of sully that.
  They call Alabama the Crimson Tide!
  Call me Deacon Blues!
• Cryoshell's "Trigger" succumbs to narm via Indecipherable Lyrics. There is an early lyric of "These ripples", but the singer pronounces it strange, like she couldn't decide whether to sing "These ripples" or "These troubles"; consequently, it ultimately sounds like "These tribbles", thus colouring the entire song as a conflict against the Explosive Breeder fuzzballs.
• The Norwegian band CC Cowboys has a song called "Tigergutt". The narrator is a boy with an abusive girlfriend, and it's actually played somewhat seriously. Unfortunately, he has the nickname "Tigergutt", which means "tiger boy" and would only have been somewhat cheesy if it weren't also Tigger's Norwegian name.
• In Mew's song "156" there's a line going "From my boat I can see your house", but the singer mispronounces "boat" and it sounds like he's saying "From my butt I can see your house", unintentionally making it funny.
• In the R.E.M. song "Be Mine", Michael Stipe sings "I want to be your Easter bunny, I want to be your Christmas tree". It's pretty hilarious if you take it literally and imagine him decorated like a Christmas tree.
• The Afghan Whigs' song "Faded" has the line "I wish I could remember what you said/when I said 'Enough'." Sure, except that he immediately begins recounting what was said without so much as indicating that he suddenly remembered it, or anything along those lines. Not to mention, given that the song otherwise has no swearing in it, the use of the word "ass" clashes badly.
• Ling Tosite Sigure often uses nonsensical English phrases such as "disco flight" and "Pierre dancing beat", but they get a pass since frontman TK tends to prioritize how the lyrics sound over what they mean. One song that definitely falls into the narm category, however, is "赤い誘惑" (akai yuuwaku, lit. "red temptation"). At the song's big climax he belts "FUUUUCK YOOOOU LAAAADY!" Over. and over. again.
• Joy Division's "I Remember Nothing" starts with an ominous musical build-up, which is arguably spoiled when the first syllable Ian Curtis sings is "Weeeeee!" (the first verse starts with the lyric "we were strangers", and he's just really drawing out the first word for intended dramatic effect). Someone on youtube took a clip of the relevant portion of the song out of context and synched it up with first person rollercoaster stock footage.
  • Since Ian couldn't sing very well, all their songs can be this.
• Mick Jagger's falsetto vocals on The Rolling Stones' "Emotional Rescue" are a musical exercise in unintentional comedy. Also, his deliberate delivery during the spoken bridge ("I will be your knight in shining armor"), which makes him sounds like a slightly drugged child.
• Simple Plan:
  • "Untitled" is a sad song about a fatal drunk driving accident and how it affects the victim's family and the person who caused it. Thanks to the overdramatic vocals and its Memetic Mutation on YTMND (it's used in sites depicting Emo Teens), it's become a laughingstock on the internet. The music video is just as bad. The point of the music video is to show that driving under the influence affects the family of the victims. But this video presents the Space Whale Aesop "don't get in a car crash, or voodoo forces will throw your family around their house". That the song is titled "Untitled" is a source of Narm as well — nothing professionally published should be titled "Untitled." (Well, unless you are Cameron Crowe, and even then he had the good sense to ultimately give his "Untitled" a title. Or even D'Angelo, who had the good sense to add a subtitle ("How Does It Feel") to his "Untitled.")
    How could this happen to MMMMMEEEEEEE????? The Music Video Show looks at the video here and destroys it.
  • "Welcome To My Life," which has more than enough Wangst for one hundred parents to put up with.
    Nooooouuu you dont know what is liiiiiiike to be like meeeeeeee The Music Video Show looks at the narmy music video here.
  • The line "I'm just a kid and life is a NIGHTMARE" was definitely formulated for the Hot Topic crowd to scrawl on their schoolbooks, use on their MySpace pages, and wear on angsty t-shirts.
  • The first track off of their self-titled album, "When I'm Gone", has this awful, totally dated-sounding bleeping noise. After about seven seconds of that, there's a radio announcer-sounding guy saying "WE'RE DOING IT" in a super monotone voice. It comes back in the second version too, saying "YOU'RE LEFT FOR DEAD!". It sounds out of place that it can't not be chuckle-inducing. Same with the "LET'S GOOO!" Pierre lets out before the last chorus. The music video takes up to the next level of narm, showing the band rocking out in a black void with colorful beams of light trailing around them as they play. And then Pierre sprays white paint at the screen...
  • Their totally-not-Green Day song "Your Love is a Lie" counts too, just for the fact that it's a knockoff of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", and "Clumsy" by Our Lady Peace.
• Soundgarden:
  • "Circle of Power" from Ultramega OK. Instrumentally, it's a pretty decent punk rock song, but Hiro Yamamoto's (the band's then-bassist) singing is just dreadful. He sounds like a screechier version of Lemmy.
  • The infamously weird video for "Black Hole Sun" can almost fall into this, just because the band members look so bored.
• Deryck of Sum 41:
  • "Still Waiting" is supposed to be about being angry about the events of 9/11, but the lyrics and the way Deryck Whibley shout-sings it makes it sound so melodramatic it's comical. Turned up to eleven somehow in the demo version, where he is literally shouting in Angrish because the lyrics weren't finished yet. The way he screeches "MOTIVATION!" at the end of some the lines after the Angrish makes it even more hilarious.
  • The demo version of "Over My Head (Better Off Dead), where in the chorus it sounds like he's saying "TUESDAY WHAT!? TUESDAY BLOOD!". Other gems include "*random gibberish* for the way, *random gibberish* for the way", "No, it's not bad, I know it's not bad", "Right before you down... CAUSE WE ARE FALLIN", "Cause we are different to me", and "ROW ME OVER, ROW ME OVER, ROW ME OVER... TOGETHER!", as he's screaming "MEEEEE!" in the background, at the top of his lungs. It needs to be heard to be believed.
  • The crucially underrated bonus song off of Screaming Bloody Murder, "We're the Same", sounds pretty awesome, but don't look too close at the lyrics... It all makes sense when you find out that Cone McCaslin co-wrote the lyrics, the same guy who also writes some pretty narmy lines for his own band...
    'Cause when you think your race is run and you’re left standing there, with all your laces still undone
  • Sum's live performances are pretty good, but the backing vocals of Cone and Tom are just dreadful- Tom has a powerful, sandpapery yell, and Cone sounds like he's gargling marbles most of the time while not even trying to harmonize. Take this live performance of "Screaming Bloody Murder", for example.
• Good Charlotte:
  • "Little Things" is a master at that, specifically the beginning of the song with the speaking. They just think they're so cool!
  Yeah, This song is dedicated (This is Good Charlotte)
  To every kid who ever got picked last in gym class (You know what I'm saying, this is for you)
  To every kid who never had a date to no school dance (Run to your mother)
  To every one who's ever been called a freak (This is for you!)
  Here we, here we go...
  • That shrill as all hell guitar solo in "Misery" can count too, because it just sounds so terrible.
• Jethro Tull's "Hymn 43" from Aqualung (Jethro Tull Album) has Ian Anderson going way over the top on his vocals, especially on "his cross was rather BLOOD-EEEEEEEEEE!!".
• AC/DC can get narmy if you listen to too many of their songs; they're all about drinking, hot chicks, partying, rock music, & such. "Rock The Blues Away" is the quintessential example. It mentions all of the above. Seriously, it could be renamed to "The Cliche AC/DC Song".
• Basement's song "Aquasun" has a chorus that starts "Dive into me, dive into me". It would be perfectly fine, except that the lead singer pronounces it "Dive into me-ah, dive into me-ah". All seriousness, instantly gone.
• Wintersleep's song "Dead Letter And The Infinite Yes" has the chorus "I think it's coming and it comes so fast/I'm hearing whispers of an infinite yes". Unfortunately, the singer pronounces "yes" to rhyme with "fast", resulting in "I'm hearing whispers of an infinite yaaaas", which has the effect of making him sound like a teenaged girl on Tumblr, and ruins the sombre effect the song was trying for.
• Norwegian band Vazelina Bilopphøggers has plenty of intentionally silly songs, but "Feil side ta Mjøsa" seems to be a genuine attempt at a Tear Jerker about a man who tried to start a new life with his sweetheart, only to lose everything. First their farm went bankrupt due to parasites and poor harvests. Then they bought a cow in an attempt to get back on their feet, but it died after eating contaminated fodder. Then... the slaughterer came to take care of the cow, and the poor man's wife randomly decided to dump her husband for the slaughterer, which at this point is more funny than sad. The man mentioning that he's sucking on watery powder tobacco immediately afterwards doesn't help.
• NateWantsToBattle's "The Evil King" is a cool song, but the Department of Redundancy Department in the following lines is a bit hard to take seriously:
  Now I aim to take what is mine
  And now there's only one thing left to do now
• The Cab's "Angel with a Shotgun" has the narmy line "they say before you start a war, you'd better know what you're fighting for". Apparently people starting wars without knowing why is a common problem. Listening to the original version while having heard the nightcored one before can be this too.
• Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" is a great song, but did the vocalist have to pronounce the line "feel the fear in my enemy's eyes" like "feel the fear in my enemy's ass"?
• The song "Awaking Bugs that Cold Dislike" by Pizuya's Cell apparently tries to be a badass rock/metal song, but its Engrishy lyrics are too ridiculous for their own good:
  • The first line is "I have many bugs inside", and the protagonist mentions that she's turning into worm and informs us that she will squirm in the chorus. To make the Narm worse, we're left interpreting it literally because nothing in the song makes it clear that this is merely an odd metaphor.
  • The line "Bugs make me a mad" is repeated several times throughout the song. Yes, it's "me a mad", as if Mario was saying it.
  • "Sun will be far/Break hum of freaking insects right now" is just incomprehensible.
  • The lines "Every muggy night I lose the fight" and "Break hum of freaking insects right now" sound like they were supposed to contain the words "bloody" and "fucking", but the former was hastily replaced with a similar non-swear and the latter got the Gosh Dang It to Heck! treatment.
  • "In the deep red bleedy eyes, I look greedy guys/Who try to pull me in their dark" speaks for itself.
• The Sisters of Mercy's 'Temple of Love' has the chorus, which starts 'In the temple of love/shine like thunder/in the temple of love/cry like rain'. Apparently nobody told Andrew Eldritch that thunder, being a sound, cannot shine. Why he didn't just make it 'in the temple of love/shine like lightning'...
• White Lion were unique among Hair Metal bands from the 1980s for writing songs with socially conscious lyrics and themes... which were unfortunately undercut by lead singer Mike Tramp's distractingly thick Danish accent which makes his delivery sound slurred, especially in the slower songs. Nowhere is this more tragically hilarious than "When the Children Cry", a sombre acoustic ballad which earnestly tries to sum up the senselessness of war and the suffering of children, because Tramp sounds drunk the whole way through.
• "Run Joey Run" by David Geddes is a "teenage tragedy" song that ends up impossible to take seriously, much like the aforementioned "Last Kiss." The story immediately falls apart when the titular Joey rushes to his girlfriend Julie's house immediately after she calls him and tells him not to come, explicitly saying that her dad is armed and wants to make Joey "pay for what we've done" (presumably getting Julie pregnant). As a result, a scuffle ensues, and Julie is killed when her dad tries to shoot Joey. If all that isn't enough to make the song qualify as this, Julie's melodramatic delivery of the chorus (which apparently doubles as her last words) definitely is.
  Daddy, please don't!
  It wasn't his fault;
  He means so much to me!
  Daddy, please don't!
  We're gonna get married;
  Just you wait and see!
• Måneskin's very first single "Chosen" starts with lead singer Damiano David speaking "Hi everybody, this is Måneskin, you're listening to Chosen! Listen clear now, baby!" before seguing into the song. The strong accent and mispronunciation of the song's title add to the unintentional hilarity. You won't find much of this in most of their other material, partially due to David's greatly improved pronunciation since then.
• Coheed and Cambria's concept albums, Word Salad Lyrics and singer Claudio Sanchez's unique singing style and pronunciation means they often veer into narm, mostly on their earlier albums. Much of it makes sense in context but is still funny, to the point of Memetic Mutation within the fandom.
  • Some of the most common misheard lyrics are "Fucking/Barking apple of doom" ("Fucking up all I do" from "Welcome Home") and "Should the iron negro hungry" ("Should the irony go hungry" from "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3")
  • "Domino the Destitute", one of their heaviest songs, is interrupted halfway through by Claudio putting on an old-timey newscaster voice to commentate a boxing match.
  • The character of The Writer is being manipulated by his demonic bicycle. A brief argument between the two can be heard in "Ten Speed (Of God's Blood and Burial)".
  The Writer: It's not your decision. I love the character, she stays.
  Ten Speed: Yeah, well the only thing love's done is put you in this position, I'd say kill her off!
  The Writer: Yeah, but you say a lot of things... And how's that work? You're a bicycle.
  • "Hearshot Kid Disaster" from their first album gives us the iconic line "I NEED MAYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
• Muse is no stranger to Narm given their somewhat self-aware over-the-top nature and Matt Bellamy's love for making everything boldly crazy. Let's see...
  • For starters, any time Matt's Elmuh Fudd Syndwome slips into his singing. Try not to think of the pwoper fish...
  • "I have played in every toilet" makes sense in the context of Muscle Museum ^note (It's referring to the band paying their dues in small clubs - the "toilet circuit" is a set of small venues in the UK, with the term either stemming from the spaces being cramped and dirty or from bands having to use public restrooms as dressing rooms) , but it sounds really funny if you don't know what it actually means .
  • The really bad Gratuitous French in the middle of the "Mon Couv're A Ta Voix" section of "I Belong To You" (which is already a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment to begin with breaking up a cheesy love song!).
    Matt:REEEPONDS AH MAH TONDRESSSEEEE, REEEPONDS AH MAH TONDRESSSEEEE, EHHHHHHHH VERSEEE MWAAAHH....
  • "Brainwashing our children to be mean" from "Supremacy". The word choice here just seems oddly childish in the midst of a song to kick ass to, particularly in contrast to the rather well-written lyrics preceding this. On top of that, it' doesn't even rhyme with the previous lines. At least you forget it exists when you hear everything after that.
  • '''MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA MAD-MAD-MAD.'' Can sound seriously jarring as the first thing you hear in the song.
  • The random piano smashing before the choruses of "Dark Shines".
    abug r;ush pie8a9 a4buip DAAAAAARKSHIIIINES BRINGING ME DOOOOOO~ooowwwwnnn
  • Basically all of Propaganda's lyrics, namely, the opening "Floosy, you're making me woozy."
    • Also, "You ate my soul just likea Death Eater."
  • "And we've tried, oh, we've tried! So hard! To be good! But the world rewards us...when we're bad!" Umm, real subtle, Matt.
  • From "Agitated": "You do it to me sweetly, to my yeah-yeah."
  • "Dead Star": Oh, god, once you get used to all the creepy slurping noises, it can become funny when you imagine Matt trying to record the song while eating noodles. And the random standout attempts at beatboxing and imitating a hi-hat should be best heard before commented on.
    "WHY CAN'T I SLEEP WITH SOMEONE WHO PROTECTS ME?!?"
  • From "Filip": "It's happening soon, it's happening soon, its scent is blowing in my..." direcshoon?!?
  • "Sober"'s verses consists mostly of Matt rattling off the brand names of different types of alcohol, as if he was running out of ideas of what to write.

Other

• Teenage Death Songs are almost all glurge staples, and represent pure, unadulterated Narm.
• Steven Seagal's frankly hilarious album, "Songs from the Crystal Cave", that are narmy, Anvilicious and painful. Read more: http://www.cracked.com/funny-45-steven-seagal/#ixzz19USMx69h
  • In the song "War":
  You will sell us all these lies, like a can of soup.
  • Then there's his jaw-dropping cover of the classic ska song "My Girl Lollipop"^note It's either "My Boy Lollipop" or "My Girl Lollipop" depending on who's singing it. "My Boy Lollipop" was a huge hit single for Jamaican singer Millie Small in 1964 and is one of the biggest-selling ska songs of all time, and then in the early '80s the male-fronted British ska band Bad Manners covered it as "My Girl Lollipop". He sings it in a bad Jamaican accent, and he tries to remake it as a more "modern" dancehall tune and fails miserably at it. Seriously.
• Trade Martin's "We've Gotta Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero". Words cannot describe how surreal some of the lyrics are. It sounds disturbingly like something out of South Park. The song also suffers from severe Lyrical Dissonance—lines like "thousands of Americans died in the attacks" are sung in an upbeat tone. The lyric "it's a slap in the face" is accompanied by a Stock Sound Effect of a slap, and the music video ends with George W. Bush saying "I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you hears you hears you hears you hears you hears you..."
• Some of Jacques Brel's live performance videos are pure Narm, especially when there are close-ups to Brel's face and you see him all sweaty and shivering as he sings. No matter how gorgeous the song is, when the camera does that...
• There's just something about Murray Gold's "Song of Freedom" that's a little too earnest. It's also listed under Awesome Music.
• Many Japanese Enka songs. Most of the songs in this genre sounds overblown and unbearably melodramatic to the modern ears. It's kind of being the point. There are few straightforward enka songs, as the genre relies on ... uncommon... expression of your heart's feelings. It doesn't help that the majority of singers wholeheartedly believe that True Art Is Angsty. "Sake Yo" by Ikuzo Yoshi is an example. The last chorus roughly translates to "I apologize for drinking sake alone and listening to enka. I love you, AND THAT YOU UNDERSTAND. Is that right, my sake..." It sounds better and less Narmtastic in Japanese.
• Afro-Latino Puerto Rican Christian singer Nelson Hernandez's "El Loco Feliz" ("The Happy Nut") definitely is a victim of this, and quite hilariously at times. The melody of "Cristo te Ama" ("Christ Loves You") ends ups making the song feel like a song about a old man lamenting that he missed the bus more than Christian song. Not to mention his voice is funny especially because he sounds drunk.
• Paul Gross' "Ride Forever." Paul has a good voice, but the lyrics...
  "They tell me I'm an old man
  They tell me I am blind
  They took my driver's license
  This house ain't far behind..."

Despite the cheesiness, the song still manages to be stirring.

• "Diary of an Unborn Child". The supposed Downer Ending of the eponymous fetus's demise by abortion is more of a relief from the sickly-sweet Glurge it has seen fit to offload on us, but it takes a hard left into full-blown Narm when it starts singing. The ending's on a bizarre borderline between narm and Nightmare Fuel: it's a fetus from beyond the grave asking "Why did you kill me, mommy?" In song, with a voice sounding like Gollum high on helium. Then again, it's probably supposed to cause nightmares. It isn't supposed to cause groaning... Here's a link.
• Vocaloid:
  • "Women's Blues" is (intentionally?) so bad that all the singing sounds like it's done on helium. It's also So Bad, It's Good - back when YouTube used the star rating system, the thing had four stars! (Or at least, so bad it's funny.)
  • In "Kagome, Kagome," (widely mistranslated as "Circle You, Circle You", which is not what "Kagome", a name, means) a very creepy song otherwise, one of the lyrics translates to "You lost the game."
  • If you listen to them enough times, most creepy Vocaloid songs may become Narm.
  • Megurine Luka's song "Wash My Blood" was probably intended to be edgy and passionate — but it's much worse than the lyricist probably realized. One becomes caught between offense and laughter, hearing such vulgar lyrics being sung so earnestly. Also the song itself was recorded with MIDI guitars, which don't have a good sound quality.
  • "MUTEKI.SHOUJO 99" by Kaai Yuki is insanely bad with the Narm:
    • The whole song is in Gratuitous English. "I'm not girl, candy girl"? Uh, yeah.
    • The random line "what a crappy crud, clap your hands".
    • The chorus is just ear rape, and the hard rock guitars come out of nowhere after the electronic sound the verse preceding it had.
    • The artist wants us to think that this six-or-something-year-old girl is the awesomest person ever to walk the earth. Needless to say, she doesn't qualify, especially after the Gratuitous English and grating chorus.
    • The artist decides to throw in some ad-libs like "huh" and "yeah". However, since the ad-libs are 1) in English, and 2) being sung by a Vocaloid, it sounds more funny than awesome or edgy.
    • It doesn't help that the Japanese translation is written in really polite language and translated very literally. The line "Say, it's show time" translates as "Please say that show time is in existence."
  • There's metal Vocaloid songs with growling and Metal Scream. As the software was never intended for these kind of vocals, the result isn't always satisfying. Sometimes it ends up in a low pitched mess, due the different kind of techniques of achieving unclean vocals (the most common (and the least narmy) is tweaking the voicebank, then adding some distortion at the end as a separate effect).
  • Bad End Night, while generally very creepy...
  Len: JESUS, JESUS!
• "CHOCOLATE RAIN! SOME STAY DRY AND OTHERS FEEL THE PAIN!" Yeah, "Chocolate Rain" is pure narm. So is most of Tay Zonday's music.
• Too Much Too Young by the Specials; a song about teenage pregnancy featuring the silly lines:
  Now you're chained to the cooker
  Making currant buns for tea.
• "I Am The Wind", from the closing credits to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Of course, pretty much every part of this game apart from the actual gameplay is just narmtastic.
• Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State by Los Campesinos! is a poignant track, presumably about the death of a loved (maybe unrequitedly) one but this descends into narm with the lines "I fall to my knees / My piss-soaked jeans". One would assume it was from shock and fear but... yeah. It manages to recover from it though.
• EXEC_CUTYPUMP/. is horribly, horribly narmy. Just listen. Or better yet, take a look at the lyrics. But somehow, it manages to be awesome at the same time.
• The sudden transition from droning piano chords to circus-synths in Enya's "Cursum Perficio" destroys the song's intended dark tone. But for others, of course, it might be more than a bit unsettling.
• Hulk Hogan And The Wrestling Boot Band's album Hulk Rules alternates between So Bad, It's Good and just bad, but "Hulkster In Heaven" stands out as narm since it's the only song that's really meant to be taken seriously to begin with. It's supposed to be a sincere tribute to a fan who died at a young age, but the lyrics keep throwing in gratuitous references to Hulk Hogan himself ("I used to tear my shirt, but now you tore my heart/ I knew you were a hulkamaniac right from the very start"), to the point where it's almost more about him than it is his late fan. Then there's the cheesy synthesized backing music, and of course the fact that, well, it's Hulk Hogan singing what's meant to be a moving ballad (with some much more capable gospel-style backing vocalists helping out). Granted, it doesn't make the story behind the song any less sad, but just see if you can force a tear while listening to it.
• Abney Park, a rather dominant band in the Steampunk genre, manages to have a wonderfully Narmtastic song titled "Virus". Who can honestly hear the lines "If you're dead it will keep you alive, and if you're alive it keeps you really dead..." without wondering what the hell they were thinking?
• Scott Walker:
  • "The Escape" features a Donald Duck voice towards the end, which, if you're not totally in the moment, just scans as entirely incongrouous.
  • From Walker's 60s career, we have his cover of Jacques Brel's "Jackie," with an odd example of Narm in a failed Woolseyism. A faithful translation and fine vocal for the most part, but in place of the original's "beau, beau, beau et con à la fois" (handsome, handsome, handsome and stupid at the same time) we have him sing this chorus with complete conviction:
  If I could be for only an hour
  If I could be for an hour, every day
  If I could be — for just one little hour —
  A CUTE CUTE in a STUPID-ASS way!

  Yes, you heard that right. "Stupid-ass." In 1968.

• Artemis Fowl has Disney doing songs for him now. To those that know him from the book, this seems rather contrasting with his personality, song style wise. Some find the lyrics kind of corny also. May fall into Narm Charm.
• Sid Vicious' cover of "My Way" could well be one of the best examples available. It is well played, but Sid Vicious vocals are impossible to listen to without either turning it off and vowing never to listen to it again, or listen to without fighting the urge not to laugh. At the same time, you can't help marvelling at his choice of lyrics (he didn't know all the lyrics, so he wrote what he didn't know, according to The Other Wiki). You can't help wondering how many drugs (and/or units of alcohol) were in his system when the idea came to him... yet it is still My Way done his way.
  
  To be fair, though, the song is a pisstake, as evidenced by his mocking, smug warbling in the first stanza. Also, 'I've 'ad mah fill/this SHIT of living' and 'to think/I KILLED A CAT!' are Crowning Moments Of Awesome, as is the live version. 'Is this the personal touch y'all wanted?'
  
  The video turns it up to eleven to the point where it becomes a Moment of Awesome. Sid is in France, singing to an audience of what appear to be rich Victorians (and his mother), then at the end he shoots the audience.
  • The album where the cover came from, Sid Sings, is a cornucopia of narm. I Killed A Cat, in particular, is just painful to listen to.
• The 2010 version of "We Are The World" was a great idea for a noble cause, but was blown by Wyclef Jean yodeling over the rest of the singers for the last half of the song.
• It can be said that many school songs and national anthems, while patriotic/heartfelt/sincere, are very narmy. This is particularly true of English translations of national anthems that were originally written in another language. What would sound poetic and poignant in one language can sound really silly in another, if the translation is done badly. Other times, over-the-top rhetoric is used, and it seems like every time the song is sung, it is a call to arms. No specific examples though, don't want to ruffle any feathers.
  • The translated opening lines of Senegal's national anthem have a certain Narm Charm:
    Everyone, strum your koras!
    Strike the balafons!
  • The anthems for Brazilian soccer teams. If you know some Portuguese, take a look here.
• Music-related: Something Awful recommended Pit, a Death Metal magazine, for unintended hilarity, particularly the band names ("Lair of the Minotaur is a side-project of the guys from 7000 Dying Rats and Pelican. If you are into the tunes of guys like The Christpunchers, Rwake, Cult of Luna, and Earthride then this is your shit.").
• Jon and Vangelis's music is awesome, few would discuss it. But...
  • The video for I hear you now... um, it has not aged well. The Ambiguously Gay classic dancer, the clownish mimes and Jon's horrible '80s Hair really distract you from the great song.
  • Some of the sound effect in The Tao of Love are bound to make people chuckle. 1:33 in the video linked here is specially bad about it.
• VAJAS's Sparrow of the Wind. Listen to it without cracking a smile.
• a-ha:
  • "Stay on these roads". The music is rather pretty but the cheesy, wangsty and Purple Prose-lyrics push it to this extreme.
  • "Manhattan Skyline" is a VERY sad break-up song about two Star-Crossed Lovers. Well, if you ignore how Morten Harket lets out a rather overblown Big "NO!" in the first chorus.

• Lana Del Rey's "Off to the Races" has the lyrics "Light of my life, fire of my loins..." It's a reference to Lolita, but people who don't recognize it might be caught off-guard with laughter.
• This would be an emotionally touching piece... if it weren't for the title "Forever Alone", which is the name of a Rage Comics character that's used to express loneliness and disappointment with life.
• "I no she wants me back" by R.A.E.D. (AKA Ur Boy Ra RaH, a name which manages to be narmy in its own right) In addition to the badly spelled title, the lyrics include the following gems:
  "Coming back into my life now, wants to be this madam I say WUU? WUU WUU?"
  "I know she wants me BAAAAAaaAACK"
• "My Heart Is Yours", the Norwegian entry for the Eurovision Song Contest 2010, is a nice pop ballad. Unfortunately, Didrik Solli-Tangen's pronunciation of the word "heart" might sound like "hard", resulting in the line "my hard is yours".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has a massive filk music scene. Some of the songs attempt to be tear jerkers, epic, or otherwise serious, and actually succeed... until you remember that the song is about brightly colored magical talking cartoon ponies. More specific examples:
  • "Promises" by Prince Whateverer has the lyrics "My name is Scootaloo" said in a dead serious tone, and the video shows clips from the show of the same character riding her scooter during the guitar solo (extra Narm: some of the clips still have some of the opening credits over them).
  • "Good Girl" by The Living Tombstone is a great and emotional song, but it's actually about a horse who thinks she's a dog. More specifically, it's based on a gag from the episode "Read it and Weep" where Rainbow Dash is being chased through town by hospital security after having stolen a book from the hospital, with the punchline being that the police dog that was heard barking through the scene was actually an insane pony who barked like a dog.
  • The Last Note Nightmare in "Luna (NIGHTMARE MODE)" by Eurobeat Brony, which switches from upbeat synths to orchestral strings and Death Metal style growled vocals, seems like an unnecessary forced attempt at being dark. Fortunately, there exists an alternate DREAM MODE version which lacks this outro.
• Filk songs in other fandoms aren't immune either:
  • This cover of Freya's theme from Final Fantasy IX by Italian musician Psamathes is good for the most part, but she overblows one of the lines a bit, making it sound more like "POWW-UHR MY SPIIAH HAD FOOR-GOT-TINN!" Not to mention the fact that she chose the most situational line in the song to emphasize, and while a major part of Freya's motivation in the game was her not wanting to be forgotten, it feels a bit like the cover is borderline-hamfistedly trying to hammer home who the song is about, as if she was worried about the fans forgetting about her rather than those she's close to. In addition, the singing style clashes a fair bit with Freya's quiet, stoic personality
• Most of the music provided by Crush 40, who do songs for Sonic The Hedgehog are pretty good, but a few have pretty shakey lyrics. From "Open Your Heart":

  You and I are the same in the way that

  We have our own styles that we won't change

  Yours is filled with evil and mine's not

  There is no way I can looooooooooo~se!

• "Undo" by Sanna Nielsen is a powerful ballad performed by a talented Swedish singer; however, anyone with decent knowledge in English grammar would cringe hard at these lines:
  Undo my sad
  Undo what hurts so bad

"Undo my sad"?! Seriously?

• Eurovision Song Contest entry 2014 by Albania, "One Night's Anger" by Hersi was originally in Albanian, but was translated to English for the sake of people in Europe catching the meaning behind the song. Too bad it wasn't translated by very English-familiar Albanians. Other than that, it is an outstanding song.
  So please say, say, say, say
  You'll be there when the words are done
  Don't give in your pride
• The music video for the Brilliant Green song "Ash Like Snow", which is best known for being the second opening theme for Mobile Suit Gundam 00. What's with the sniper pandas trying to assassinate the lead singer?
• This recording of an arrangement of the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem for recorder ensemble and chorus. The original orchestral version is written as fortississimo (Very, very loud). This gets no louder than mezzo piano (moderately soft), and replaces the bass drum hits with what sounds like a small toy drum. The chorus is obviously just one guy, a tenor, doing a multi- layer recording for the entire chorus, meaning he can't hit the lowest notes in the bass part and sings the soprano and alto parts in falsetto, or transposes them by octaves to fit his voice. Not to mention that he has only the slightest idea of how to pronounce the Latin lyrics. The entire version, for recorder ensemble and chorus, can be listened to here
• See the Video Games folder (specifically Gradius)? The "loser" boss's stage theme is an example too. You have funky beats and almost nasal brass instruments in a theme that's obviously trying to be ancient and mystical.
• Silver Forest's song "BLOOD ON BLOOD". The song itself is beautiful and tragic, but that doesn't change the melodramatic ALL CAPS title that tries too hard to be edgy.
• Hiroyuki Sawano is a great composer, making the soundtracks for several popular shows and games, but one recurring song type he likes to use can only be described as an Engrish rapper going at it over a phat beat. For example: "Before my Body is Dry" from ''Kill La Kill'' or "Black Tar" from ''Xenoblade Chronicles X''. It helps the backing song is pretty good.
• The otherwise passionate "サディスティックロリータ" ("Sadistic Lolita") by Starry Garden features the Gratuitous English line "Oh, Jesus! A Mystic Lolita awakes as a sadist!". The singer's awkward pronunciation doesn't help.
  Oh JEEsus! MYS-tic Lo-LEE-ta wakes as-a sah-dees-to!
• This wonderful temperance song from 1866:
  Out in the gloomy night, sadly I roam,
  I have no Mother dear, no pleasant home;
  Nobody cares for me—no one would cry
  Even if poor little Bessie should die.
  Barefoot and tired, I've wander'd all day,
  Asking for work—but I'm too small, they say;
  On the damp ground I must now lay my head—
  Father's a Drunkard, and Mother is dead!
• 12-year-old Jackie Evancho's performance of "To Believe" at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2011. No one can argue that she doesn't have a lovely voice, but the sappy lyrics about praying to God for a world with no hunger or war, sung by a backing chorus of cherubic children, are diabetes-inducing. The "humble prayer" in the middle feels especially sanctimonious, especially compared to the song "God Help the Outcasts" in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which has similar subject matter, but is softer and more heartfelt.
• The song "I Asked My Love", by an anonymous woman. It's meant to be a tearjerking song about a man feeling guilty for giving his girlfriend a cold because she died of pneumonia. However, the song has many technical terms like "disease transmisson" and "infected", making it seem unintentionally funny. Some sentences, such as "Infected the only girl I loved", also don't scan very well.^note And if you watch Star Trek: Voyager, it's even more unintentionally hilarious, since the singer's voice coincidentally sounds like that of Seven of Nine, who also uses technical words.
  He only wished that we could be
  Disease transmission free

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