Refuge In Audacity / Music

In-Universe Examples Only:

Music taking Refuge in Audacity.

---

General:

• Most Almost all Heavy Metal relies on this. A song detailing the horrors and crimes perpetrated by Dr. Josef Mengele? Album covers with cybernetic metal messiahs riding above a ruined Earth on a motorcycle with sawblades for wheels and a fire-breathing dragon as the chassis? Alien monsters who slay humans and other monsters onstage nightly? Guitar and keyboard solos that have more pitches in one second than there are in a normal rock song? Music that has an atmosphere of sadness depression horror A SOUL CRUSHING DARK VOID OF DEATH AND DOOM?! All these and more are to be found within it.
• This was the very intention of Punk Rock and its associated culture in the 1970s. Special mentions go to John Lydon, Jello Biafra, and Steve Albini
• A video about somebody becoming a rapper. Say, Adolf Hitler (who has an inexplicable Scottish accent. Or this one, starring our friend Mel Brooks again.

By Artist:

• Amanda Palmer's Oasis Crosses the Line Twice by itself, being a peppy song about rape and abortion, ("I've seen better days, but I don't care/Oasis got my letter in the mail!") but the music video brings in the true audacity to take refuge in.
  • After she suffered from a Wardrobe Malfunction at a show and the Daily Mail did their typical lurid, misogynistic sensationalism about it, Palmer responded by writing a song that epically deconstructs the trope's misogynistic overtones. During performances of the song, she defies the trope by outright stripping completely naked onstage. Link NSFW, obviously.
• The Ball of Kerrymuir. Jim Croce is a family musician really - except for this one song, which is quite possibly the raunchiest thing you've ever heard. And it is absolutely hilarious. Definitely NSFW.
  • That's a relatively clean version of the song.
• Anal Cunt.
  • If nothing else, 'Al Stankus Is Always on the Phone With His Bookie' must be the most breathtakingly facetious name for a song ever.
    • "I Snuck A Retard Into A Sperm Bank" doesn't count? I mean, what?
    • "Hitler Was a Sensitive Man" and "Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck" (addressed to Eric and Conor Clapton).
    • One typo somewhere has "Hitler Was a Sensible Man". Which is kinda funnier actually.
    • The second song was originally titled, "Eric Clapton's Kid Committed Suicide Because He Sucks." Seth Putnam, the man behind Anal Cunt, felt this was going too far. Both played straight and subverted.
    • "I Became A Counselor So I Could Tell Rape Victims They Asked For It" and "You Converted to Judaism So A Guy Would Touch Your Dick" and and... actually, all of them.
    • And for all those titles, the lyrics themselves are worse. Many of those titles had to be toned down for legal reasons. Just click the link above and see.
  • At the same time, this band explicitly avoids this by NOT spelling out their name on the album covers, abbreviating it to AC.
    • Even their logo is meant to be offensive—it's an anus and vagina, respectively, which get around the abbreviation.
• Arab On Radar. A noise rock band with guitarists who didn't actually play real musical notes, a drummer that didn't play a smooth continuous drum beat, and a vocalist who yelled copious obscenity like a tone-deaf 10-year-old. YMMV, but this troper thinks they set a standard for awesome noise rock.
  • Mars did the same thing in the mid-1970s, the key difference being the tone: Arab On Radar are kind of hilarious; Mars are utterly terrifying.
• Avenged Sevenfold has "A Little Piece of Heaven", a song in which a guy kills his girlfriend, has sex with the body, she comes back to kill him... and then they get married. If that's not enough, the lyric "I really always knew that my little crime would be cold, that's why I got a heater for your thighs", complete with an image of the "Super Thigh Heater 300043" tips it over the edge.
• Songs About Fucking by Big Black. 'Nuff said!
• Tons of songs by blink-182. See "Family Reunion", which consists of this:
  Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd and twat.
  Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd and twat.
  Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd and twat.
  I fucked your mom!
  Waah, I wanna suck my dad, and my mommy too... Oh wait, is this still on?
  • "Happy Holidays, You Bastard", a 44-second track which contains lines like:
    Unless your dad will suck me off (I'll never talk to you again)
    Unless your mom will touch my cock (I'll never talk to you again)
    Ejaculate into a sock (I'll never talk to you again, I'll never talk to you again)
    It's Labor Day and my grandpa just ate seven fucking hot dogs
    Labor Day and my grandpa just ate seven fucking hot dogs
    And he shit, shit, shit his pants
    He's always fucking shitting his pants
    And I'll never talk to you again.
  • "Fuck a Dog" is about... well, bestiality:
    I... wanna fuck a dog in the ass
    I wanna fuck a dog in the ass
    I wanna fuck a dog
    I tried to fuck your mom in the ass
    Tried to fuck your dad in the ass
    Could only find the dog
  • "When You Fucked Grandpa" has gems like this:
    He seems like a total asshole
    Grandpa is a total fucking asshole
    Who would ever want a dirty greasy finger in his ass?
    He rubs his dick in broken glass
  • And in the end, we get Mark Hoppus yelling this over Tom Delonge's reprise of the chorus:
    And this is fucking stupid man! I can't believe you'd have sex with your own grandfather! I mean, you guys are related! What's he gonna do, take out his false teeth and just leave them on the side of your bed? Man, he'd like to fuck you on the bottom, and grandma would come in and watch and masturbate and cum all over the place and, this is stupid! I hate you all! I'm not even going to have sex with my mom tonight! Man, this is stupid! I hate you!
• Chico Buarque's 1971 album Construção was one of the most explicitly political of the era - a military dictatorship which heavily punished dissent. The first song quite literally is about God judging the dictatorship for its wrongdoings against the Brazilian people, and the rest of the album follows suit. It's an absolute mystery as to how this managed to get past the government censors, but considering that it is among the most acclaimed Brazilian albums of all time, it is very fortunate that it did.
• Devin Millar has two songs. The first one is titled "Hoody", which is about the hood and uses almost every offensive stereotype for African-Americans. "BFD" is about loving huge penises and their functions. These songs are so offensive with the lyrics that it's almost impossible to take these seriously.
• Die Ärzte are possibly the most famous and successful band in Germany of all time. Since their first days in the early 80s almost every song and music video is a Refuge in Audacity, and two of their early albums have been banned from being displayed on store shelves and played on concerts. In the face of changes in public perception and a rare instance of Reasonable Authority Figures, the responsible agency recognized that they Crossed The Line Twice, and repealed the ban on one in 2004.
  • Though to be fair, with "Sibling Love" and "Claudia has a German Shepherd" they were really asking for it. But "Lullaby" is just Bloody Hilarious.
• The music video for DJ Snake's "Turn Down for What" is a relatively mild example. More than one person has pointed out that the scene it depicts could easily be interpreted as sexual assault, but it's so damn silly about it that it's hard to get upset.
• The United States Air Force fighter pilot band Dos Gringos makes this the main ingredient of many, if not most, of their songs.
• The band DragonForce crams so many fantasy cliches into every song that it becomes awesome.
• Elvis Hitler: "Black Babies Dancing on Fire".
• Eminem built much of his early career on this trope, with almost far too many examples to list, but "My Name Is", "The Real Slim Shady", and "Role Model" are good places to start..
• Erykah Badu seems to like doing this a lot.
• Flight of the Conchords - "If You're Into It". Writing a song to a girl? Cute. Suggesting, in said song, that you should get naked? Weird. Going on to suggest a food sex threesome? Hilarious!
• Frank Zappa, hands down, including, but not limited to, "Brown Shoes Don't Make It", "Dinah Mo Hum", "The Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit", "Bobby Brown Goes Down" and "Jewish Princess".
• The album Transient by R&B singer Gaelle Adisson is, for the most part, pretty standard in its subject matter, but the second song, "Parkway"...isn't. Gaelle finds her boyfriend cheating on her, so she proceeds to kill the other girl and frame the man for it. This is also the only song on the album to contain profanity, and an absolute ton of it.
• The Fugs applied this with an intensity that still shocks people to this day - And they were still at it as late as 2008, a pretty amazing feat itself for a garage band formed in 1965. While they did release a few songs that actually got airplay in the US, such as "Ramses the Second is Dead, My Love", most of their work - which was much performance art as music - used language and attitude that would get them barred from not only radio but most live venues of the time. Songs like "Wide, Wide River" and "Virgin Forest" (in which a caveman explicitly has sex, first with a woman, then with a chimpanzee) are among their better know pieces, and they aren't even close to the raunchiest they get. And, oh yeah, later releases of The Fugs' First Album include a recording of the signing party for their first album with Atlantic Records, on a track titled "In the Middle of Their First Recording Session the Fugs Sign the Worst Contract Since Lead Belly". Now that is a Take That! of legendary proportions.
• #Rihanna by Glasses Malone. The chorus has to be heard to be believed.
• G.U.D seem to rely on this for their songs about anything. For example the song "Killing Pandas for Fun and Profit"
  Killing
  Pandas
  For fun and profit
  Turn their
  Scrotum
  Into a wallet
  And it's fun
  To pretend you're killing nuns
  Because they're black and white
  But don't believe in an afterlife
• Guns N' Roses: Slash's video for "World on Fire" starts with Satanic imagery and moves on to a topless porn star dry humping the POV character, taking drugs with him, and setting the set on fire. Basically everything Moral Guardians think heavy metal is supposed to be. The fact that the singer is associated with a band which is sometimes accused of being Ambiguously Christian makes the whole thing that much more audacious.
• John Zorn's music changes styles and moods so abrupt that his work is bound to polarize people. Some of his album covers have also pushed boundaries by showing scenes of violent deaths or creepy sexual images. His song titles can sometimes be audacious too: "Igneous Ejaculation", "Fuck the Facts" (from "Naked City" (1990), "Perfume of a Critic's Burning Flesh", "Jazz Snob Eat Shit", "Pigfucker" (from "Torture Garden" (1990)), "Sweat, Sperm + Blood", "Coprahagist Rituals"(from "Heretic" (1992)), "Guts of a Virgin", "Handjob" and "Purgatory of Fiery Vulvas" (1991) with Painkiller.
• Australian comedy singer/songwriter Kevin 'Bloody' Wilson was about to tour in Canada when he was warned not to use the c-word on-stage. His response? You Can't Say Cunt In Canada.
• This music video parodying "Tik Tok" By Ke$ha.
• KISS - tame now, but over-the-top when they first appeared. Beyond their image◊ and theatrics (blood-spitting, 12-inch platform boots, fire-breathing, explosions...), KISS' songs included "Nothing to Lose" (about anal sex, on their first album - in 1974!), "Goin' Blind" (a 93-year-old man in love with a 16-year-old girl who's also in love with him), "Larger Than Life" (Gene Simmons bragging about the size of his... "love"), "Shock Me" ("We can come together..."), and "Rocket Ride" ("Come on - grab ahold of my rocket!"). Drummer Peter Criss compared a KISS show to "surviving World War III." They ended up inspiring other bands to go even further, like...
  • Gwar.
• G.G. Allin. The Mentors. The Macc Lads. Cannibal Corpse. For starters...
  • Just LOOK at the sort of things he did onstage. Brain Bleach will rapidly be called for.
• The music video for "Straight Face" by K.A.A.N is animated and features him driving drunk, harassing women, stabbing a college teacher, and hijacking an airplane while wearing a stereotypical Muslim outfit.
• Knorkator, another Berlin band known for even more ridiculous lyrics, also gets very close to crossing the line in about half of their songs. Some consists almost entirely of swearing or a overly poetic musings about masturbation or feces. "Schwanzlich Willkommen" (dickish welcome) tells that expression Herzlich Willkommen (hearty welcome) doesn't make any sense since a penis is much more suited as an organ to express happy feelings and in fact you can replace the word heart with dick in all expressions.
  • This life performance in which the two vocalists dressed up in tall, stripped cardboard boxes for the last song. At the end of the song, the guitarist appears back on the stage and, well, see for yourself.
• Lady Gaga. Please to be seeing the Alejandro video. She has quite probably executed the above description to Refuge in Audacity.
• Lou Reed's legendary "Walk on the Wild Side" from Transformer: while his peers were filling their albums and b-sides with shocking tracks, Lou Reed was the only one with the balls to release a single touching on full-time crossdressing, prescription drug abuse, male prostitution, a transwoman buying favors with oral sex (in a verse sometimes cut even today), and (perhaps most shockingly to modern audiences) a racial slur in the chorus, all in what's almost a bored monotone. And the song made top 40.
  • That's nothing. Ever heard "I Wanna Be Black"?
  • Or "Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II". The gist of which is that all republican politicians are the way they are because, well, "When they looked into their lover's eyes, they saw MOM!"
• Mastodon got into it with their song "Cut You Up With A Linoleum Knife", from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters soundtrack, which is a how-to guide on theatrical etiquette:
  Did you bring your baby? Babies don't watch this!
  Take the seed outside!
  Leave it in the streets!
  RUN OVER IT AFTER THE SHOOOOOOOOW!
• Mr. Bungle's whole debut album (produced by the above-mentioned John Zorn) applies this quite heavily. Songs like The Girls of Porn (which for a good 90 seconds turns into a List Song of various different depraved sexual acts) and Squeeze Me Macaroni (which is incredibly sexually explicit for a song that mainly uses food metaphors) take it to another level.
• The Muse music video for "Knights of Cydonia" is simply indescribable. It starts with Kung-fu cowboys and works its way up.
• When an actor needs to establish themselves as "serious", they'll usually play a role that includes lots of sex, drugs and profanity. Natalie Portman had already done that and now needed to show that she wasn't all serious all the time. To do this, she took the road less traveled and rapped a song so absolutely violent and rude that it was just hilarious. With The Lonely Island. See here.
  All the kids lookin' up to me can suck my dick
  It's Portman motherfucker, drink 'til I'm sick!
• It was back in '32 when times was hard, he had a colt '45 and a deck of cards, Stagger Lee
• OFWGKTA's lyrics. Especially the ones by Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt.
• The entirety of OL Remix Senor Poonwallis Sacardote Vix the Abominable Snowman (Stig the Horsethief)
• The Ozzy Osbourne song I Don't Wanna Stop seems to be about this trope. the chorus goes:
  All my life I've been over the top
  I don't know what I'm doing, all I know is I don't wanna stop
  All fired up, gonna go to the top
  I'm as real as the world will make me, I don't wanna stop!
• ppcocaine is known for his overly sexual songs which she sings overly loud, and always talks about butts and genitalia generously. She also has a song called "DDLG" which is about having a daddy-domineering fetish.
• Pansy Division, not surprisingly, have plenty of songs whose sole aim is to shock the socks off of straight listeners. Among these are such gems as "Cocksuckers' Club", "I Wanna Be A Slut", and "Your Asshole Is Political".
• Passenger of Shit - just the name alone should tip you off.
• Italian indie band Pinguini Tattici Nucleari have "Ninnananna per genitori disattenti" (Lullaby for distracted parents), which starts innocently enough but halfway into the song it gets very vulgar very quickly. The fact that it's a song about how parents don't pay attention to what their children are listening to makes it even worse.
  Because fucking is like paintball
  You can't say you've played
  If you're not dirty of at least
  Three different colours
  Because pussy is like the moka pot
  If you use it often you don't have to wash it
• The Plasmatics: The spectacle during their shows was amazing: chainsaws ripping up guitars, band members performing in masks and dresses, automobiles blowing up, televisions being smashed, shotguns being fired and Wendy O. regularly performing (half) nude, simulating sexual acts. They were arrested a couple of times because of public indecency, greatly increasing their notoriety.
• At the end of Queen song "One Vision", mostly an uplifting people anthem, the last words of the song?
  Freddie Mercury: Just gimme gimme gimme fried chicken!
  • Mercury and his then-boyfriend John Hutton had the food for lunch that day.
• Lots of songs by Brazilian experimental rock musician Rogério Skylab are made of this, especially in his Skylab series of discs:
  • In the Carnaval-samba-styled "Arrebentados" (Busted):
    I pissed in your mouth
    I defecated in your face
    I whipped your ass
    I cuffed you to my bed
    I called you a son of a bitch
    You said: "thank you very much"
    I gave you then a punch
    That left you askew
  • In "Semana Passada" (Last Week)
    Last week I quartered my dad and put his head in the dinner room. Friends ask me: "Why did you do this?" I say I'm cold, very weird and insensitive. Then I got the one that one day gave me birth; she screamed "my son", I answered "mommy". What an empty century, science is a vain thing, what is certain is this: I raped my mom.
  • In "Dedo, Lingua, Cu e Buceta" (Finger, Tongue, Ass and Pussy)
    Finger, tongue, ass and pussy
    Finger, pussy, tongue and ass
    Finger on tongue, tongue on finger
    Ass on pussy, pussy on ass
    Finger on pussy, tongue on ass
    Tongue on pussy, finger on ass
    Finger, tongue, ass, pussy too
    Pussy times finger, nines off ass
    Tongue, tongue, tongue, finger in ass
    Finger of pussy, tongue of ass
    Finger, tongue, ass and pussy
    Finger, pussy, tongue and ass
  • In "Meu Diário" (My Diary)
    Night of terror and panic, my wife was pregnant, so I decided to birth the child myself; the baby was stillborn, so I held it by its umbilical cord and spun it in the air, forming concentric circles until I threw her far, far away. Meanwhile, my wife was losing too much blood, so, with my own hands, I ripped out her uterus, her ovaries, her bladder, her intestines, her pancreas, until all there was left was a body without organs.
• Godwin's Law: Reichroll, the disturbingly funny hybrid of World War II Germany footage and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", aka the "Rickroll" music.
• Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine is a comedy music group that takes songs - mostly ones with violent, dark, potentially offensive lyrics like Rape Me and People = Shit - and makes upbeat, cheesy lounge covers of them.
  • The Chaser's War On Everything did the same thing to Cannibal Corpse's "Rancid Amputation".
• The song "Underwear" Royal Republic wrote about, well... Used in an AMV to great effect. Might be NSFW.
• Anything and everything by Rucka Rucka Ali.
• Serge Gainsbourg basically lived this trope. Though "Les Sucettes" merely gets past the radar, later songs would go much further, with the extremely sexual "Je t'aime...moi non plus" making it to #1 in multiple countries despite being condemned by the pope himself. He would only get more extreme from there, releasing an entire concept album about romancing an underage girl inspired by ''Lolita'', followed by an album which combined Nazi Germany with retro rock 'n' roll, and in 1979, a cover of the French national anthem in a reggae style, which got him death threats from war veterans for being perceived as "unpatriotic".
• "The Good Ship Venus (Frigging in the Rigging)" as sung by the Sex Pistols and others, is an Older Than Radio example, with documented versions going back to the late 19th century; it is likely much older.
• "Silent Night" covered as a thrash metal song with a prominent death growl and a wicked guitar solo, while including Chuck Billy, Scott Ian and Jon Donais playing on it. Refuge in Audacity is the only possible explanation for this existing.
  Jesus, Lord, at Thy Birth
  Jesus, Lord, at Thy BIIIIIIRRRTH!!!'
• This video of Spike Jones and his City Slickers performing "Der Fuhrer's Face." It's amazing that in 1942, they would allow the hand gestures shown when they "heil!"
• Springtime For Hitler. At first everyone looks on in uncomfortable horror, but around the time the actors start dancing around in the shape of a swastika, it becomes almost impossible to helplessly laugh.
  • It's the in-movie "horrified reaction" shots which truly put it over the top: "yes, we know exactly how appalling this is, and we're doing it anyway!"
• Sublime did this alot. Wrong Way is about a 12-year-old prostitute, Date Rape is also a good example. Although Bradley Nowell was trying to say that these things were wrong. Other songs used profanity, drug references, etc, etc just for fun.
• Tim Minchin in general, but (NSFW - cartoon penis) The Pope Song has got to take the cake. "Storm" is up there, too, with an anecdote about dinner ultimately becoming a ten-minute rant against all things "spiritual." "Come Home (Cardinal Pell)" also uses this at the end, pointing out that while all of his accusations against Pell might be defamatory, Pell would have to come home in order to sue him for it, which is exactly what he wants.
• The hit of gay-as-a-maypole singer Thomas Bickham.
• Tom Lehrer:
  • On his debut album, Songs by Tom Lehrer, he included a ditty singing the praises of the neighborhood dope peddler. This was in 1953.
  • Then on his second album, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, there's "The Masochism Tango", which is exactly what it sounds like, and includes such romantic exhortations as
    My heart entreats
    Just hear those savage beats
    And go and put on your cleats
    And come and trample me.
  • Lehrer himself says that probably his most controversial song is "The Vatican Rag" which pokes fun at the Roman Catholic Church (specifically at Vatican 2's allowing 'modern' music to be used during Mass). Even if you don't come from a religious background, it is downright hilarious, even more so if you're a former Catholic. The recording on the live album That Was the Year That Was has the audience breaking out in laughter every few seconds. They really did find it just that funny.
    • Tom's introduction for the song gets quite a few laughs, too, especially when he says that the song he's about to perform is "a modest example". When it comes to Tom Lehrer, there is no such thing, and his audience is clearly well aware of that fact.
  • "National Brotherhood Week", from the same album: "Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants. And the Hindus hate the Muslims, and everybody hates the Jews."
    • From the same song: "National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week: Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek-to-cheek. It's fun to eulogize the people you despise as long as you don't let 'em in your schools...."
• On the face of it, the popular Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch" is a tactless solicitation of sex. But it gets away with its plethora of overtly sexual imagery because it's so ridiculously over-the-top, it becomes entertaining.
  • Their song "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" composed of sexual innuendo. And yes, the title DOES spell 'Fuck' in NATO phonetic spelling. The music video takes it even further, with such things as a car shaped like a banana becoming unpeeled as it goes through a tunnel.
  • ...Aren't ALL of their songs and videos Refuge in Audacity?
• Tom Maxwell's song "Ham" has an in-universe example crossed with Rule of Funny. A very large woman comes up to a cash register in a grocery store. Then a ham falls out from under her dress. She turns around and yells, "Who threw that ham at me?"
• Warren Zevon was simply in love with doing this. "Mr. Bad Example" pushes the line, hard; "Excitable Boy" crosses it.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic deserves a mention here, as not many male performers would have the gall to dress up as Madonna and re-enact her own video's moves, shot for shot. Also, he always asks permission to write the parody, so the original artist ends up being complicit to the weirdness!
  • One of his Christmas songs, "Christmas at Ground Zero" (actually a parody of Yogi Yorgesson's "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas") now counts as Harsher in Hindsight. (The song is actually about Communists rather than terrorists.)
• At the age of fourteen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart went to the Sistine Chapel for Easter in 1770 and heard this choral setting of Psalm 51 for the first time. Thing is, the Catholic Church had forbidden anyone from transcribing the music for it over a century, and Holy Wednesday and Good Friday were the only two days in the year the piece was ever performed. Cue Mozart transcribing the piece from memory later that Wednesday, going back on Good Friday to make corrections, and then achieve great fame after performing the piece himself over the next three months. Rather than throw the book at Mozart for breaking a command of the Catholic Church, Pope Clement XIV praised the young composer for the feat and inducted him into a knightly order in July that year.
• The only possible explanation as to how this woman not only got through the first round of X-Factor, but even went all the way to the finals!

---