This strikes me as a classy ad for Tamon Whiskey. Nice quiet uplifting music in a cozy local village pub atmosphere. Now start paying attention at the 0:25 marknote This was aired recently by IQ, a Swedish organization for "smarter views on alcohol"..
This camera commercial from HP features ''Pictures of You'' by The Cure, a song about missed opportunities and the sadness of having nothing at all left except the pictures.
This ad for a local digestive cure center has a backscore better suited for a late night phone sex hotline ad.
This 2012 advert for British Airways celebrates the London 2012 Olympics by using The Clash's London Calling. Because nothing says national pride like a song about a nuclear disaster. Also, extra points for whoever edited the advert allowing the line "Engines Stop Running" into an Airline advert.
One hast to wonder what the makers of This Peugot 208 car commercial wanted to tell the potential customers with that "Knockin' on heaven's door" cover. Maybe that the car was a deathtrap? Kind of a macabre choice in this troper's opinion.
Similarly, a German ad for Buko cream cheese used "Sunday Morning " by The Velvet Underground to show how happy and blissful the family enjoying their breakfast with their product was. Because nothing represents the image of a happy and wholesome family better than The Velvet Underground. it doesn't
It's really surprising how many different ads for sweets and candy-related products (such as jewelers advertising "candy-colored" gems) still use any of the various version of "I Want Candy," since a single listen to the song shows you it isn't about sweets, but about a girl named Candy.
Not quite an advertisement, but a "German video on forklift safety has moments of peppy, upbeat music in-between scenes of hilarious carnage.
In the world of (North American) commercials, Celebrity Cruises is still the reigning king of soundtrack dissonance.
Its first "wrong" song moment was with their commercial featuring Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", a song about heroin addiction.
Its second "wrong" song moment was with their commercial featuring "Fame" by David Bowie, a song he wrote about the perils and emptiness of fame.
"The 30-second spot, which premiered Monday during Everybody Loves Raymond, features images of gleaming skyscrapers, money changing hands, and businessmen on cell phones striding confidently down marble hallways. Notably absent from the ad is any footage of a shirtless, bleeding Iggy Pop in skintight leopard-print pants, repeatedly bashing himself in the face with a microphone onstage at the legendary New York punk venue CBGB's."
Literature
Invoked in The Hunger Games during the "highlight reel" of the games. Katniss thinks how inappropriate the cheerful music is in the scenes of the tributes training, given that all the people on screen except for Katniss and Peeta are dead.
Music Video
The Gorillaz video for El Manana depicts air-pirates destroying the band's floating windmill while a band member runs for her life. Most of the video is pretty action packed and it ends on a cliffhanger. Despite this, the song is very somber and soothing.
This also happens in the "sequel" video, On Melancholy Hill. The video fits the music for the most part except for the opening in which the aforementioned bandmate takes her revenge agaisnt the air pirates, shooting them down with a machine gun. The song is pretty mellow as well.
Devo's music video Beautiful World may codify this trope for music video—a song that sounds happy and upbeat, at first set to cherry images of dancing women and sci-fi future, quickly takes a turn towards war footage, and race riots. "It's a beautiful world," indeed.
My Chemical Romance's video for SING can be called a similar case to El Manana, the song itself is upbeat and somewhat encouraging, the video shows the Killjoys blasting their way through BL/ind HQ to save the little girl, the girl makes it out alive, but the Killjoys all die doing so.
The Mark & Brian Radio Program uses some stock advertising music as part of their "Kruger's Supermarket" sketch. The dissonance comes from the fact that the sketch Crosses the Line Twice, talking about how the butchers of the store's meat department really enjoy the job of killing animals.
Tabletop Games
The demons of Exalted are truly, thoroughly fucked up. How do we know this? Lots of reasons, really, but the most relevent to this page is the Organ of Agonies, a musical instrument that you strap innocent victims into before playing—which it will then slice, bludgeon, stretch, and mangle to death, making paradoxically beautiful music out of their agonized screams.
In Homestuck, there's a brief flash near the beginning of the series with peaceful wind chimes and the wind blowing. The same music is played in the end of Act 6 Act 1, but does so while Jane is seemingly BLOWN TO BITS BY A LETTER BOMB.
Also at the beginning of Act 6 Act 3, the incredibly peaceful and ambient Rain plays while Jane explores her land - where she finds the remains of a dead salamander civilization who spent their last days digging their own graves, and reads tablets that say how sad they are that they won't be able to greet her when she arrives, that the quest she and her friends are engaged in is futile, and that they will probably all die without divine intervention.
But please do note that divine intervention is, in fact, on the way and should arrive any moment (or something).
And then in Act 6 Intermission 4, Caliborn approaches Gamzee and the same elevator music plays as was heard over a funny little flash earlier when Jane and Gamzee met up. And then it continues to play even as he pulls out a machine gun and shoots him repeatedly in the chest. And continues to shoot. And continues...
Other
This actually became a fad on YouTube, especially with Youtube Poop, known as "X DOES Y WHILE I PLAY UNFITTING MUSIC". As the name suggests, the fad involves playing completely inappropriate music over a video clip. The first one was a clip of Luigi winding a jack-in-the-box accompanied with a snippet of "Don't Stop Me Now" from Queen.
Now there are videos to counter this, called "X DOES Y WHILE I PLAY QUITE FITTING MUSIC."
Used as a running gag in Devil May Cry: The Stupid Files. At least once in every video, there's a scene of Dante turning on a radio, which plays unfitting/fitting music, such as Kairi's theme song.
This video fits into that category, especially at the end. "We'll live in dreamland tonight" is maybe the most inappropriate lyric for those scenes.
An old Doctor Who comic features a mercenary who can't get an annoyingly cheerful song out of his head, later realising that he'd got his headset stuck on playing it after it comes off after he'd been shot after mortally wounding a friend of the Doctor. The Doctor shoots the headset.
The tune in question, just for the record, is "We'll Meet Again" by Dame Vera Lynn, already touched on on this very page.
An old drug PSA from the late 90s shows a man on heroin strung out on his bathroom floor, convulsing and vomiting. All the while, an upbeat jingle states "Everybody's doing it! Doing it! Heroin, for the rest of your life!" Another ad from the same series shows a woman on meth cleaning her bathroom floor with a toothbrush and scratching herself with a similar upbeat jingle about Meth playing. You could watch them both here and here.
In Red vs. Blue, Red Team's jeep always rolls into battle with bouncy Tejano music blaring, since they can't figure out how to work the radio. This gives certain pitched battles a surreal quality...
In the finale of the opera Carmen, the offstage chorus sings "Toréador, en garde!" in a victorious mood as Don José stabs Carmen to death onstage.
There's a video on YouTube called "Payatan and Punie" which uses Dai Mahou Touge footage to Queen's "Best Friend". It starts out cheerful but then shows the more gory scenes with the music staying the same.
The Internet meme of Rickrolling, which is the use of a falsely advertised video that, when viewed, actually runs audio of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", falls under this trope, because in a piece of irony in relation to the lyrics, the viewer is being let down.
When he LP'd Barbie: The Magic of Pegasus, he replaced the soundtrack with songs by Manowar.
During the credits of Brad from 4PlayerPodcast's Lets Play of Silent Hill 4 [1] he plays 'Come On Eileen' by Dexy's Midnight Runners, not only does this clash with the general mood of the game (though not of the Let's Play as it is Brad), he gets an ending where Eileen Galvin dies.
Though it can't actually be heard, one chapter of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac has Nny go on a murder spree... while listening to "Ode to Joy".
This occured (belive it or not) in the Newspaper ComicDoonesbury, when a pair of gay radio commentators wed on an airplane which just happened to hold a gay men's choir, who serenaded them with "I Want It That Way" by The Backstreet Boys — a breakup song. They divorced a few years later, though they still work together.
And a much sadder one: when Andy Lippincott dies of AIDS, the last panel of the comic shows him slumped in bed as the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" plays in the background.
XKCD provides an Important Life Lesson on why not to use shuffle on a background music player.
Goodbye To You an early 1980s song (by Scandal) covered some 20 years later by The Veronicas, used here to advertise birth control pills!
Used to deliberate effect in Devo's "Beautiful World" video: The lyrics about how wonderful humanity is were meant to be read as sarcasm despite the happy melody. However, it's still unsettling to see the prominently used stock footage gradually go from idyllic suburban life, fashion shows, and dance parties to Klan rallies, riots, starving children, and nuclear bomb test footage, all while the lyrics keep going on about how the world is a "sweet romantic place" backed by chirpy synthesizers.
The disturbingly calm and romantic background music in the 2 Girls 1 Cup video.
Legendary example of bad writing My Immortal has soundtrack dissonance in Bennett the Sage's Fanfic Theatre . As he's reading, you can hear Vivaldi's Four Seasons playing in the background. Amazingly, not even Vivaldi can make this fic sound any better.
A lot of the dramatic readings he does fit this trope, considering the content of the fics.
This seasons' MythBusters commercials — destruction set to the tune of Ave Maria.
Averted quite well in a seasonal commercial about the plight of homeless during the holidays. It begins playing the classic "I'll Be Home For Christmas", which seems rather dissonant considering the focus is a man with no home at all, but ends with the song's most poignant line "if only in my dreams".
Most people forget this song was echoing the thoughts of American troops during World War I, who had hoped in vain to return home in time for Christmas.
How about a literature one? In Dead Beat, Harry Dresden literally powers an undead Tyrannosaurus Rex using the power of polka, care of Waldo Butters, a little pathologist in a one-man-band polka suit.
The Nostalgia Critic did this in his review of Little Nemo. The film starts with Nemo himself dreaming about himself flying a bed, then all of a sudden the bed plumbets to the ground. Then, all of a sudden, a train appears and starts chasing Nemo. The Nostalgia Critic then edits the cheerful themesong in.
A commercial shows a group of kids tossing a baseball to an object or a drawing that is supposed to be a person while a glove is attached to it, all the while a simplified version of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" plays in the background. The commercial is about prostate cancer in men and how they need to be checked.
Occasionally done in the Classic Game RoomYouTube videos where cheerful music plays over scenes of extreme gore and violence. Here's an example.
This extended version of a scene in The Avengerswhere the Hulk beats the ever-loving snot out of Loki while banjo music plays in the background.
Mitch Hedberg had a joke about this phenomenon, where he jokingly talked about how We Are The World reminded him of the time he fucked his girlfriend in a pet cemetery.
YouTube user dprjones uses this trope to great effect (from time index 9:44 to the end of the video) when showing just how badly the religious gloss over the atrocity of Noah's Flood. If you don't have time to watch it, the music is a cheery children's song about loading animals onto the ark, overlaying documentary footage of floods and the resulting corpses.
Pro wrestling entrance themes can be pretty bad for this. It might be worse for the Divas, since their entrance themes tend to be a little more upbeat and pop-oriented compared to the more rock-based male wrestlers. For one example, Kaitlyn has been seeking vengeance against Eve for allegedly arranging to have her attacked before a Pay-Per-View and costing her a title shot. Despite being understandably pissed off about this, she still comes to the ring to this.
Michelle Phan's Zombie Barbie makeup tutorial. Hell, half the video's content is so far off from Phan's usual videos it counts more than just the soundtrack.
Where else can you get a violent Kaiju-type movie done in a strange pseudo-rotoscoping animation-style with Miles Davis' masterpiece, So What (yes, from Kind of Blue!) playing in the background? Why, in Cuboid Jazz Monster you can.
The short animation Diblert 3 juxtaposes Dilbert's shooting rampage and suicide with a mellow and romantic synthpop cover of the title theme from RoboCop for the Commodore64. It's disquieting, to say the least.
Real Life
The three best songs to set the beat of chest compressions in CPR to are "Row Row Row Your Boat", "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees and "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen. Which would you rather your EMT be humming?
Nelly the Elephant is a firm favourite for most first aiders This Troper knows. Herself included. Because it's easier to sing two verses than attempt the chorus of Another One Bites The Dust twice, because you always want to sing the verse afterwards, and then you lose count. (Incidentally, Nelly the Elephant is exactly fifteen beats. Which is why we use it.)
Sweden always seems to get "The winner takes it all" by ABBA as a background soundtrack, when the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is shown on television. Presumably the producers want to imply that the Swedish team is out to win (everybody else also gets winning songs, after all), but ABBA's song is actually focused on losing everything you once had, because the new winner took it. But hey, it's not like we win that often anyway.
Reputedly, at least one news company used David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the Apollo 11 landing. Which seems appropriate when you consider it's a song about an astronaut on a trip to space. Until, of course, you get to the final verse which seems chilling when you consider there was a real danger the two astronauts who landed on the moon might not have been able to back to the ship: Ground control to Major Tom/Your circuit's dead — there's something wrong...
Space Oddity gets this a lot. The BBC introduced a series of school-related programmes with an advert that showed a child being dressed as an astronaut and launched into a symbolic 'universe' while Space Oddity played.
Somehow averted in U2's most recent tour. Concerts begin with "Space Oddity" and contain a recording of astronaut Mark Kelly while in space. Kelly speaks to the audience and quotes "Tell my wife I love her very much she knows."
Similar to, and perhaps serving as inspiration for the Schindler's List example listed under the Films section, there are chilling real-life accounts of groups of Holocaust victims being forced to run nude in a field, then shot by Nazi soldiers, all while classical music or peppy, patriotic pop songs were played over a speaker system.
Way back during 'Nam, Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" was never played, even on Christmas time. The only time it was played was on the American radio station in Saigon during Operation Frequent Wind, on April 29th, 1975. Why? The song was meant to signal US personnel to immediately get to the various evacuation points, because the city was about to come under fire. Saigon fell the next day.
Somewhat similarly, the signal for Portugal's Carnation Revolution almost a year to the day earlier (25 April 1974) was Portugal's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. The revolution was nearly bloodless, but it could have gotten quite bloody if the forces loyal to the regime had opted to make it so.
Often happens with background music in stores.
"The Muzak wasn’t; it was an 80s selection with pop songs you’ve heard a million times, and leaves you with the haunting image of an old woman, elegantly dressed, studying a row of pickles while Michael Jackson insists that he’s bad." — James Lileks
This Troper once heard 'Shoplifters Of The World Unite' by The Smiths while browsing in a convenience store.
During the team intros for 2009 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies at New Yankees Stadium, The Imperial March was played for the Phillies while the Yankees got the intro theme. I'm sure there's a lot of people who think someone switched the songs since it's not the Phillies who're called the Evil Empire and just got a bigger, better, more advanced planet-destoyer baseball stadium...
Of course, some of us just thought the Phillies got the better song.
Philadelphia teams rally around "Eye of the Tiger," because 1. The Rockey movies were filmed in Philadelphia, and 2. Philadelphia teams are perennial underdogs, having endured a 25 year championship drought until the Phillies won the 2008 World Series. It even showed up in 2009 with the fact that the defending champions were considered the underdog, despite having a team nigh identical to the one they had just won the championship with. Yeah, the Yankees won, but they should never have been considered the favorites in that scenario.
The Yankees do that at every home game, regardless of who they're playing.
Wind-up and pull-string musical toys tend to go this way, particularly if they're of the cheap dollar store variety. This troper has seen tons of pull-string toys that plays Fur Elise, contrasting the cute antropomorphic shell of the musical toy. However, some of the brand name ones also fall into this category: this troper also owns a pull-string musical duck that plays How Much Is That Doggie In The Window that's made by Chicco. What does a duck has to do with a dog, this troper doesn't understand.
Interestingly, that's similar to the setup for the famous Only Fools And Horses episode "A Touch of Glass", AKA "the falling chandelier episode"; long before the chandeliers are even mentioned, Del Boy has just bought a massive shipment of gaudy cat ornaments which play How Much Is That Doggie in the Window, an incongruity which leads Rodney to be less confident than Del that they will be able to sell the cats at a profit.
And now, the same thing, with a Babar musical toy. This hits home as Soundtrack Dissonance because How Much Is That Doggie In The Window is the last thing you'd expect from a toy featuring elephants.
There's a peppy jazz number called "I'm gonna Kill You Just For Fun".
Apparently some older computers would play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" as an indication that your CPU fan or your computer's power supply was failing.
During the Olympics in China, there were some Visa commercials (I think) that showed the usually happy victory scenes. The Soundtrack was the piano "chorus" from Sia's Breathe Me, which is a song about a person who self-harms crying for help.
The Muzak remained on in the plaza at the World Trade Center on September 11. A cop described the eerie sensation of being there with no people around and no sounds except for that, sirens in the distance, and debris falling to earth...as well as people jumping from the windows.
There is a music box/water globe trinket that features ocean waves and happy dolphins that plays the song "Amazing Grace". Keep in mind that the man who wrote this song nearly died in a shipwreck....
On Christmas Day of 1975, Francisco Macías Nguema, dictator of Equatorial Guinea, executed 150 alleged plotters in a national stadium while a band played "Those Were The Days".
Susan Boyle's premier. As she sings a song about the death of dreams and how horrible real life is...well, you just have to look at the reactions to see the dissonance. Hell, Simon and Piers are smiling. That's mind-screwing dissonance in itself.
There is a Korean commercial advertising a beauty salon that has the Batman Beyond theme playing with it.
Coldplay tended to get this a lot in recent years, probably because TV producers know they're popular without actually listening to their songs. One particularly egregious example was during the 2008 Academy Awards, where "Viva La Vida" (a song about a tyrant's fall from grace) was played over a montage of Jerry Lewis' movies and telethons for disabled children. Uh, what?
Or not. Surely, there are times when you're just minding your own business while doing something, then some background music on the TV, computer, radio, or what have you starts playing. As an example, you're reading a mystery novel full of drama and suspense, then out of nowhere, you hear some silly and whimsical background music from a commercial on TV.
