Soundtrack Dissonance / Other Media

Advertising

• This seems like 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 mark^note  This was aired 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. Then again considering how most Brits feel about their own country and the Olympics in General, this may have been deliberate.
• One has 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.
• Similarly, a German ad for Buko cream cheese used "Sunday Morning" from Velvet Underground's breakthrough album 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'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 same song was used in an advertisement for Cadillac.
  • The "Lust For Life" example was parodied by The Onion with an article about the song being used in a bank advertisement, which, as they note, is "notably absent [of] 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."
• The infamous "clean coal" ad from General Electric, scored with Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons." Yes, that "Sixteen Tons." The one about working yourself to death in a Company Town.
  You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
  Another day older and deeper in debt
  Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
  I owe my soul to the company sto'
• Hallmark had an ad for singing Mother's Day cards featuring EMF's "Unbelievable", which was meant to be a break-up song about a guy leaving his demanding girlfriend.
• Yaz, a birth control pill, once aired a commercial with The Veronicas' version of "Goodbye to You".
• A rather hilarious ad for the PS4 features gamers cheerfully murdering each other while singing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day".
• A commercial for Kraken Spiced Rum features the song "Beyond the Sea" by Bobby Darin playing over the titular sea monster destroying a sailing ship and dragging it under the water.
• If you hear "True Love Ways" by Buddy Holly ("Just you know why...") and there's a Panda staring in front of you because you just refused to eat his cheese, said Panda is just about to ruin your day.
• In a Toyota commercial, The Turtles' "Happy Together" plays as a couple makes various attempts to murder each other.
• There's a German anti-violence PSA for SWR Fernsehen that plays Brahms' Lullaby over scenes from horror movies like The Shining.
• Parodied in a memetic Spotify commercial featuring the band DNCE. Lead singer Joe Jonas talks about how some of their songs are in a playlist called "Play This At My Funeral", and after he states that the songs would sound out-of-place at an actual funeral, we're treated to some people dancing to one of their songs while holding a casket.
• Deliberately invoked in a radio ad for GEICO Insurance. A gruff-voiced Badass Biker-type talks about GEICO's policies for motorcycle riders over some fluffy, easy-listening music, then stops and asks "You sure this is the right music, bro? Really?" Still, he finishes the commercial.
  "This music don't make a lick o' sense!"
• A series of anti-drunk driving ads from British road safety campaign THINK! that played every holiday season for around two years featured famous Christmas songs such as Silent Night and Jingle Bells playing over live police camera footage of paramedics and firefighters at the scene of serious and fatal drunk driving accidents.
• Lipton had a tea ad which used the upbeat hand-clapping rhythm of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats' "S.O.B."— an uptempo song about heartbreak and alcohol withdrawal.

Asian Animation

• 3000 Whys of Blue Cat: In "Will Earth Be Destroyed?", right after we hear a lecture on how Earth could be destroyed, we hear a short, happy jingle play in the background. While we still see images of comets heading for Earth.

Comic Books

• Dan In Space: Komputer seems to have a habit of playing music at inappropriate times. For example, when Joules is pulling a barely-conscious Dan back into the ship, Komputer starts playing Classical Techno.

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.
• After a woman has her car stolen in The Salmon of Doubt, the narrator says he wishes the radio of a passing convertible was playing "How does it feeeeel" but it was actually playing "Sunday Girl" by Blondie which wasn't even remotely appropriate.
• In Encryption Straffe, some hacker has rigged Flowers On The Wall by The Statler Brothers to be broadcasted everywhere when things are about to go extremely wrong. The song was used as a brainwashing Brown Note.

Music Videos

• Black Gryph0n: "Jester" has Pomni curling up in despair on the floor while peppy, bouncy music plays.
• Gorillaz:
  • The 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 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 against 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. It's a song that sounds happy and upbeat, at first set to cheery 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.
• Rammstein's video for "Mein Land" is an inversion: music is your typical Rammstein, but it's set to a stereotypical American beach party from The '50s, with the band dressed as Hawaiian Shirted Tourists. Also, there are shots of Till as a lifeguard.
• The music video for War's Why Can't We Be Friends? is a downplayed example. It mostly follows the song's message, but features two scenes of a burglar stealing money and getting away with it. Not really something that makes you think of friendship or learning to get along with others.
• The video for Bob Dylan's "Duquesne Whistle" starts of harmlessly, with a young man trying to get the attention of a young woman, intercut with shots of Dylan and some others walking down a street. Along the way, though he steals a flower from a street vendor, setting off a horrific chain of violent events. This all culminates in Dylan and his crew stepping over the young man's beaten, unconscious body. All set to cheery, nostalgic music.
• "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People is certainly a catchy, even relaxing song with a music video seemingly designed to appeal to hipster kids. Of course, with lyrics like "All the other kids with the pumped up kicks, you better run, better run, outrun my gun," it appears to be sending the exact opposite message.
• "Lone Digger" by Caravan Palace is an infectious Electro Swing tune, with a music video set in a strip club full of Funny Animals which is later theater to a bloody Bar Brawl all while the strippers are still doing their routine.
• "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" by She and Him sounds like a pleasant melody without watching the video, but the light red blood and the scooby-doo like spooky graphics are a very good showing of mood Dissonance. The music video
• The New Order song True Faith is about the singer's struggle with a drug addiction ("I used to think that the day would never come that my life would depend on the Morning Sun"), but the video features dancers jumping around in colorful inflatable suits.
• The music video for Guns N' Roses's "November Rain".
• The original Music Video for Norazo's "Superman", song made popular by Pump It Up. The music is upbeat and is assumed to be a parody of the superheroes genre, but the video is made out of this trope, and opens and closes to Mood Whiplash. It's no wonder Andamiro chose to replace the music video with something more whimsical and delete the opening and closing.^note According to the someone in the comments, they just reused a music video of another song they did - 연극 - and overdubbed it with the new song. We're seriously not sure what they're trying to achieve, but the commenters agree that it's a huge helping of this trope
• Amon Amarth's song "The Way of Vikings" is about Jomsvikings holding a practice duel. The video inexplicably sets the song to first a Bar Brawl in a casino, then a Fight Clubbing scene.
• The music video for Jamiroquai's "Deeper Underground" enforces this trope full-stop. A movie theater audience is watching Godzilla in 3D, but once Zilla rises out of the ocean, he bursts through the screen, and water floods the theater with everybody running away in panic. Then, the music starts playing, and in comes Jay Kay dancing and singing on top of the chairs whilst cars, helicopters, and explosions come raining down on the remains of the theater. For extra measure, the audience was never told that there was excess water behind the screen, meaning their reaction was genuine.
• An alternate music video for The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me" was released prior to Christmas in 2021. The band was shown singing the song while skiing, riding Ski-Doos, and dressing up as Santa Claus.
• The music video for "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings" by Caroline Polachek, an upbeat, cutesy love song, largely consists of Caroline doing a choreographed square dance. It wouldn't be all that dissonant were it not for the fact that the video is set in hell, and, considering it begins with her marking in a book full of tally marks next to a Big Red Devil and ends with her looking exhausted and sweaty, is seemingly Caroline's eternal punishment. Needless to say, the song and its video have very different interpretations of the word "hot".
• MILGRAM:
  • Near the end of "I Love You", Mahiru's second song, she joyfully sings about how much she loves her boyfriend while she's feeding him dead rats.
  • "The Purge March", Amane's second song, has a very upbeat-sounding chorus over visuals of rain and drowning. Lyrical Dissonance is also at play; the lyrics are about punishment and the pointlessness of apologizing.

Podcasts

• Anime Slushie: The Eddy Rivas theme, from the episode "The Marrow Problem;" Eddy Rivas is one of the writers of RWBY and is known for his very bad forum posts in which he flat-out lies about what's in the show and/or manipulates the fandom. While Cube and Feen read these posts for the audience, a chill elevator music tune plays.
• The background music for the Cool Kids Table game Creepy Town rotates between various different Halloween-themed songs, which can lead to such instances as the Ghostbusters theme playing while people are horrifically murdered. The cake goes to when the last group of survivors stumble into the spooky forest room where "Believe" by Cher is playing on loop.
  • "Heat of the Moment" is playing in Bloody Mooney when the trio search Keri's house and find the half-eaten corpse of Keri's mother, and continues during the fight.
• Mom Can't Cook! Discusses this a few times:
  • The Thirteenth Year is noted for making some rather unusual choices in certain scenes, such as an overly emotional piece playing during a standard apology scene, or the rock piece, mostly unrelated to the film, playing during the credits.
  • In The Luck of the Irish, when Kyle's grandfather starts playing a dirge, Kyle starts uncontrollably jigging. Andy and Luke are both confused as to why that would happen in that context.
  • Jumping Ship is noted to have a lot of reggae music for a film set in Australia.

Radio

• 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.

Web Animation

• 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.
• Short animation Smoke Kills ends with a global nuclear war. The song that plays when the world is up in flames? Eurythmics - I Saved the World Today of course.
• This extremely gory music video for the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) (obviously NSFW), set to Andrew WK's "Ready to Die" (which is an upbeat, major-key song). Bonus points for extreme Mood Whiplash; to elaborate, scenes of Pinkie Pie mutilating Rainbow Dash are intercut with scenes of the two dancing happily.
  • Done again with a bubbly techno remix of "Smile Smile Smile" playing over Pinkie Pie sporting a disturbingly happy Slasher Smile, beginning with Twilight's brutal decapitation, showcasing the graphic deaths of the rest of the Mane Cast, and ending with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
• 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 Commodore 64. It's disquieting, to say the least.
• In the last episode of Llamas with Hats Carl has destroyed all of humanity, eaten all the hands, made all the meat creatures, eaten them as well and is now looking for Paul to get him to admire his work only to find out Paul is dead as well. Cue shots of destruction to the tune of Pachelbels Canon in D major, followed by Carl standing on a bridge tearfully screaming Pauls catchphrase and jumping to his death. The song apruptly ends when he hits the water.
• 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...
• RWBY:
  • Played for laughs at the end of the first episode, which has our protagonists flying to Beacon academy in an airship with suitably heroic and uplifting music, all the while the protagonists vocally freaking out due to Jaune getting airsick and vomiting on Yang's boots.
  • Played for considerably less laughs in the episode "Heroes and Monsters." A series of Wham Shots depicting Cinder killing Amber and Adam stabbing Blake and cutting Yang's arm off is set to Such Arrogance, a chillingly ominous, but quiet and slow piano theme.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Goku sings both "Put the Lime in the Coconut" and "Row, row, row your boat" while healing in the pod, with King Kai and Tien joining in, while Frieza beats Vegeta to within an inch of his life.
  • What better music than the "Ave Maria" to play over Vegeta getting kicked in the dick?
  • Doubly unnerving to watch Cell sing a jolly song to herald the end of the world as he revels in his perfect form.
  • Cell also asks two radio DJs to play "Video Killed The Radio Star" right before breaking into their studio and brutally killing them.
• Hellsing Ultimate Abridged has Episode 5, where the Nazis annihilate London to Edwin Starr's "War". The dissonance is entirely intentional in-universe, and that much more disturbing for it.
• Sword Art Online Abridged frames Kirito and Kuradeel's fight with "Thunder and Blazes", causing the former to comment that "even Kayaba thinks this is a clown show".
• These intentionally atrociously drawn and Fan Disservice-filled things are set to the unaltered, happy, and most contrastingly professionally produced and well-sung SPLASH FREE and FUTURE FISH.
• Most of the soundtrack of Timelapse of the Future is extremely somber, but after a voiceover of Stephen Hawking gives an explanation of Hawking Radiation, the background music changes to Hawking's Waltz, a very happy-sounding waltz which plays over what appears to be a fireworks display. There's just one problem... those "fireworks" are the ultranovae of black holes, which are at that point^note one unvigintillion (or one million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10⁶⁶) years from now; to put that into perspective, if "million" is one, "billion" is two, and "trillion" is three, "unvigintillion" is 21 the only things that remain of reality itself.
• "Short message." is a bizarre, grotesquely animated short about a man breaking into another man's bathroom, ripping off his shirt, and shooting lightning from a sword that turns the other man's head into his own, all while he sings a heartfelt, bombastic song taken from a Dutch soup commercial.

Webcomics

• In Ava's Demon, when Prudith Loone gets their skin and skeleton peeled off like a grape, the notes of a song are written out in midair, but not heard. Turns out the song is Tempo Di Valse.
• 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...
• Looking for Group's musical number, Slaughter Your World, takes the tune of Disney's The Little Mermaid's "Part Of Your World", exchanges Ariel for Richard, and exchanges the lyrics describing a young mermaid's wish to experience life with feet as opposed to fins for a Psychopathic Manchild's graphical descriptions of what he gleefully does to the people that unfortunately (for them) happen to cross his path.
• In Sam & Fuzzy, Fuzzy's accidentally turning on a museum's sound system during a heist results in Hazel being stalked by a murderous Mafia Ninja to the tune of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"
• xkcd explores the tendency for music player apps to produce this effect in real life in the panel "Important Life Lesson".

Web Original

• Lets Player DeceasedCrab plays with this in his videos of the Flash Games Don't Look Back and I Was In The War. He switches the games' soundtracks, having a jarring effect on their atmosphere.
  • When he LP'd Barbie: The Magic of Pegasus, he replaced the soundtrack with songs by Manowar.
• Filthy Frank indulges in this, one such example being Mulan's "Reflection" playing while Frank is coughing/screaming from trying the Cinnamon Challenge.
• In the lonelygirl15 episode "Home Invasion", Rachmaninov's "Praise the Lord from the Heavens" plays in the background as some Order mooks attack Jonas and his family.
• 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."
    • There's also a wonderful recut trailer for Mary Poppins.
    • There's also was one that combinend Totoro with Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy" music video.
  • Footage from The Devil's Rejects, set to Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill".
  • 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.
• A parodic AMV putting Rei's sillier Image Song over unflattering panels/screencaps of Noriaki Kakyoin, up to and including his gory death.
• It's become a bit of a meme online to show rapid-fire montages of people getting hurt, one beat after the other, to the tune of Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky".
• Episode 6 of Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure has an intro that uses "N Paku March", an upbeat and cheery song from the children's TV show Yume no Crayon Oukoku. This being, well, Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure, the visuals include Satori lying on the ground covered in blood and presumably dead, and a group picture featuring a headless Koishi in the center.
• Some videos featuring randomized Fire Emblem: Three Houses gameplay switch up the audio tracks. This results in "The Officers Academy," an upbeat theme that plays in the cinematic introducing the students, playing in the scene in which Jeralt, the protagonist's father is murdered(spoilers in link), or when the music for a character's death plays during tea time with Solon.
• In this video of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the scene in which Rhea learns of Seteth and Flayn's deaths on the Crimson Flower route and reacts with outrage and grief is given "Funny Footsteps," which plays for some of the more comedic and otherwise lighthearted support conversations.
• Truth in Journalism: The rather upbeat "You Belong to the City", by Glenn Frey of Eagles, plays over the horrific climax of Venom killing the film crew.

Other

• Sync Sarah Connor's nightmare from ''Terminator 2'' to "Scatman's World"
• ''Battleship Potemkin'', with a Parliament Funkadelic soundtrack.
• ''Phantom Of The Opera'' playing The Entertainer.
• ScrewAttack had a video of of the fatalities in Mortal Kombat II to the tune of Baby Elephant Walk.
• Les Trois Accords, a Québecois parody rock band, seems to embrace this trope and Surreal Music Video in their videoclips. Examples include ninjas and country music, hawaiian music in a winter background and just plain surrealism.
• Some Fan Vid makers appear to be deliberately Invoking or Stealth Parodying this by putting serious content to upbeat, even saccharine songs; For example, Hare Hare Halo anyone? How about Devil May Cry to Caramelldansen, as in Macabredansen?
• 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 made by the Partnership to End Addiction 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 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.
• American road beloooooongs to Buuuiiiiick
• 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.
• The entire point of Inappropriate Soundtracks.
• The whole Billy Herrington meme from Nicovideo. Anime and video game music combined with gay wrestling? Pretty dissonant stuff.
• AMV Hell derives a lot of humor from this.
• 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 Comic Doonesbury, 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.
• Don't Russian Me Now. A controversial level in Modern Warfare 2 set to Don't Stop Me Now by Queen. Though really, you can't spell slaughter without laughter.
• Goodbye To You, an early 1980s song by Scandal, was covered some 20 years later by The Veronicas. Their version was used to advertise birth control pills!^note the actual original ad is rather hard to find, since the link died out
• 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 infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup video.
• Chin-chillin...
• 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.
• The Battle of Hoth with the Coca-Cola X-mas theme.
• 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.
• NHL player Clint Malarchuk gets his throat cut on-ice (warning: very graphic) while an extremely ill-timed commercial for Buick plays over the arena sound system.
• How about a literature one? In The Dresden Files: 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.
• A Dragon Ball Z AMV with "Istanbul (Not Constantinopla)" from They Might Be Giants as the music? Yes, it exists.
• The Dear Sister meme makes Hide And Seek sound comical. The song is actually quite deep.
• Just to kiiiiss youuuu...
• Occasionally done in the Classic Game Room YouTube videos where cheerful music plays over scenes of extreme gore and violence. Here's an example.
• This extended version of a scene in The Avengers where 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.
• Zigzagged in #TRUTHINJOURNALISM, a "found footage" Fan Film set in the Marvel Universe. The film ends with the camera crew being brutally murdered by Venom...while the peppy 80s tune "You Belong To The City" plays on a nearby radio. The boom mike gets knocked over in the struggle, muffling the sound to creepy effect.
• An episode of Web Original Noob has two things happening at the same time : Omega Zell leaves the guild while one of the other members of the guild is playing joyful music and having a victory dance after being the first to reach level 100.
• Travis from Let's Play team TheStrawhatNO! likes to invoke this while driving vehicles in Sleeping Dogs (2012) by switching to the classical music radio station, especially if something ridiculous is happening. It makes even dorky scooters and chicken trucks seem awesome.
• This video combines Attack on Titan's gritty theme music with scenes from the Nancy Drew series. Scenes such as riding a carousel and a chicken attacking you.
• The first season of Third Rate Gamer uses the Dog Ending Theme from Silent Hill 2 as its theme song.
• The events of Pokémon Lost Silver and its Defictionalized counterpart bring Gold and the player to a 2x2 gray-scale room surrounded by graves, which we later find out is Gold's own tomb. (It should be noted that at this point Gold is missing his arms.) What's the background music for this somber scene? The cheerful, nonthreating Poké Flute music.
• Greenpeace, protesting LEGO's affiliations with the Shell oil company and the latter company's plans to drill in the arctic, released this video where a piano cover of Everything is Awesome plays over still figurines of LEGO animals and people living their lives as a Shout-Out to the "Believe" trailer until an oil drilling gone wrong drowns LEGO animals and people, including children and families, until all that remains is some ice and a Shell flag on top of it.
• Honest Trailers has a montage of Saw deaths set to upbeat circus music.
• Too Many Cooks by [adult swim] does this sometimes during scenes of the Killer, as well as the show going Off the Rails.
• During a multiplayer game of Call of Duty: Black Ops, one player, apparently not realizing his microphone was still on, started singing along to "Fix You" by Coldplay. Another player uploaded the moment to youtube for posterity, syncing up his vocals to an instrumental version of the song. As a result, we have a raging battle, complete with a soldier being set on fire ^note giving a disturbingly literal meaning to the lyrics "lights will guide you home / and ignite your bones", set to a tender ballad about offering comfort to one's lover.
• The clip montage combining The Hunger Games with the Friends theme song is obviously one giant example, but special mention goes to the lyric during which Haymitch is introduced- "I'll be there for you..."
• This happens a lot with laserdisc karaoke videos, as well as their Spiritual Successor, the VCD karaoke discs. As Oddity Archive discussed in their LaserKaraoke reviews, the ones found in Asian countries are far more surreal than the American ones - among the highlights are the Vietnam-era Protest Song "One Tin Soldier" playing over footage of happy-go-lucky people on a boat cruising along, and footage of Ms. Fanservice girls dancing around in tropical landscapes accompanied with songs like "The Tennessee Waltz" and "House of the Rising Sun".
• In Canada, there was a commercial for Spongebob Squarepants that stated that the show is so funny that even if they put random clips of it in slo-mo to sad music it would still be funny. Cue just that, culminating in a clip of Patrick having a butt cramp and rolling around on the floor.
• Speaking of Spongebob, there's The Lighthouse edited like a typical Spongebob episode, which makes excellent use of this trope.
• This edit of a scene from Agent Carter.
• The whole point of the Walk Of Life Project, which sets out to prove that "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits is the perfect song to end any movie. Any movie.
• A common gag in SovietWomble's Bullshittery videos is to play "I Believe I Can Fly" or "A Whole New World" over footage of glitches involving flight or levitation.
• Simon & Garfunkel invoked this with "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night", playing the Christmas carol over a radio news update reporting on police responses to civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, the indictment of serial killer and rapist Richard Speck, and the drug overdose of Lenny Bruce. A similar approach is taken in "Scarborough Fair/Canticle", which combines a traditional English ballad with the lyrics from an anti-war song "The Side of a Hill".
• Every episode of Tales of a Junk Town Pony Peddler is titled after a song, usually a cheerful The '60s song, and it usually plays just when the most dramatic stuff is happening.
• This montage of clips from End of Evangelion set to the MitchiriNeko March, a happy, bouncy parade song playing over clips of Body Horror, graphic violence, underage nudity, surreal Nightmare Fuel, Eye Scream, High-Pressure Blood, millions of people crying out in ecstasy while dissolving into orange juice, etc.
• Martha Stewart made a post on Instagram announcing that her peacock Blue Boy was killed by coyotes and asking for help in getting rid of those coyotes. This was accompanied by a video of Blue Boy which, for some reason, had "Let's Get it On" by Marvin Gaye playing. She acknowledged in that post that she had no idea how the song got into the video and admitted that it would have been a more appropriate song choice when Blue Boy was alive.

Real Life

• The four best songs to set the beat of chest compressions in CPR to are "Row Row Row Your Boat", "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees, "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen and Nelly the Elephant. The last one is better 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 would you rather your EMT be humming?
• 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 they 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 one U2 tour, where each performance began with "Space Oddity" and contained 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."
  • Addressed directly when Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded a music video for "Space Oddity" from the International Space Station, the first music video ever to be shot in space, before his return to Earth. Fully aware of the lyrics, he modified them to be a melancholy ode to leaving space, not an ode about staying there forever.
• 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 E Depois do Adeus, 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.
  • One memorable element of the failed August 1991 Soviet coup was state television's unscheduled broadcasts of Swan Lake, which were ordered by the coup plotters and aired on a continuous loop until the coup collapsed.
• 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
• 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. There were presumably a lot of people in attendance that day who thought someone switched the songs since it wasn't the Phillies who had just gotten a bigger, better, more advanced planet-destoyer baseball stadium - though others just thought the Phillies got the better song. Then again, the Yankees have done that at every home game, regardless of who they're playing.
  • Philadelphia teams rally around "Eye of the Tiger," because 1. The Rocky 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.
• Wind-up and pull-string musical toys tend to go this way, particularly if they're of the cheap dollar store variety. There are tons of pull-string toys that plays Fur Elise, contrasting the cute anthropomorphic shell of the musical toy.
  • 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.
    • And it’s not just cheap Chinese toys. Chicco made a musical duck that also plays the song, and Chico is considered an upmarket Italian brand.
• 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.
• A jazz funeral would appear to be this to those outside the culture.
• 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. One video captured a mellow instrumental version of Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman" playing right after the first plane hit.
  • The same thing happened during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Some of the songs played in the wake of the bombing fell into Isn't It Ironic? territory, like "Every Breath You Take", "Stumbling In" and "Ever Changing Times".
• 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....
  • Dolphins are known for rescuing sailors from shipwrecks.
• 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". Oh, and the soldiers were dressed as Santa, for some bizarre reason.
• 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, 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.
• Cracked presents: 6 Pieces of Music That Mean The Opposite of What You Think.
• Standard Snippet Oh/Ach du lieber Augustin is usually played while sterotypical Germans are eating drinking and celebrating. Despite the upbeat melody the lyrics are telling a story set in plague-ridden, late 17th century Vienna, mass graves included.
  Oh du lieber Augustin alles ist hin!/ Oh dear Augustin everything's gone!
• You can invoke this at any time.
  • 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.
• J.S. Bach wrote several motets. Okay, that's nice. But can you guess which ones were written for funerals? If one of your choices was Jesu, meine Freude, you are correct. After all, its dark, dreary tone definitely evokes the sadness of a funeral. But you would also be right if you picked the highly upbeat Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf. Yes, this incredibly happy piece was written to be played at a ceremony of mourning.
• A disturbing instance occurred the day John Lennon was killed; as the doctors pronounced him dead, the hospital radio supposedly played The Beatles' song "All My Loving".
• Possibly the most notorious and nastiest uses of this trope was during the earlier operations of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II Birkenau: the SS formed a small orchestral quartet from the inmates and forced them to play to mask the sounds of the operation and disguise the true purpose of the camp. They stopped bothering later on, when the sheer volume of "material" to be processed exceeded their ability to make the process anything other than horrific.
• One of the most damning pieces of evidence against Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the Moors Murders case was an audiotape of Hindley torturing one of their victims, 10-year-old Leslie Ann Downey, with "The Little Drummer Boy" being heard in the background. So horrific was the tape that a journalist covering the Brady-Hindley trial reported being unable to listen to the song decades later.
• Happened during the "In Memoriam" segment of the 2021 Oscar ceremony. Many noted how oddly upbeat the song choice (Stevie Wonder's "As") was for underscoring a slideshow honoring film personalities who had died during the past year.

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