History HarsherInHindsight / Music

* [[Music/BeastieBoys MCA]]'s entire first verse on "Too Many Rappers" from ''Hot Sauce Committee, Part 2'' -- the last album recorded before his cancer diagnosis -- has become this, in light of his untimely death at 47:

* Italian rapper Music/{{Caparezza}} set up a ViralMarketing fake blog to promote his latest album. The blog is written from the perspective of a ConspiracyTheorist, in reference to one of the songs that mock conspiracy nuts, and its second entry is about natural catastrophes. The album came out on March 1, 2011, and on March 11 a massive earthquake hit Japan, triggering a colossal tsunami and a nuclear meltdown.

* The 1998 single "If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better" by Italian HouseMusic act TheTamperer featuring Maya Days, the title was a TakeThat at the consumerism of 1998. Now, though, 15 years on... it's a darkly prophetic, and the actors in the video (including a blonde with hair extensions wearing a gold bikini) are largely obscure actors now, although people actually want to know who is in the video.

* In September 1929, popular blues singer Bessie Smith recorded [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MzU8xM99Uo Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out]], a song about a millionaire who loses all their money and becomes a pauper. Barely two weeks after it was released, the stock market crash of Black October led to the Great Depression and the complete wreckage of the American economy, making this song a bitter reality for many.

* In Music/StevieWonder's song "Master Blaster (Jammin')" from ''Music/HotterThanJuly'', he happily sings the line "Peace has come to Zimbabwe". It was true at the time: the song was first released in 1980, not long after the end of the end of the Rhodesian Bush War. A couple of decades later, however...

* Rapper Mystikal rose to fame with the 2000 megahit "Shake Ya Ass", which contained [[IntercourseWithYou raunchy lyrics]] such as "[[ADateWithRosiePalms I came here with my dick in my hand]], don't make me leave here [[AssShove with my foot in yo' ass]]". Three years later, he was convicted of sexual assault and battery and sentenced to six years in prison, along with having to register as a sex offender for life. [[FromBadToWorse More recently]], as of 2022, he has been charged with first degree rape and faces life in prison if convicted.

* Music/TheFall:

* Electropop band I Am the World Trade Center in June 2001 released their debut album "Out of the loop." That album has 14 songs on it and the 11th one is called September predicting 9/11 purely on accident----

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* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuWQyfGa1yI The video]] for Run the Jewels' "Blockbuster Night Part 1" ends with an older man collapsing from a heart attack in a restaurant. That man was played by Bruce Hampton, a legendary musician best known as the frontman for the jam band The Aquarium Rescue Unit. Hampton would die of a heart attack for real in 2017, collapsing [[FatalMethodActing on stage]] at a concert held in honor of his 70th birthday.

* Jam band musician Colonel Bruce Hampton used to have a routine in his live show where he'd pretend to collapse during a jam and then would be revived by the power of the music being played. As a result of this, when he staggered and fell during the encore of a concert staged to celebrate his 70th birthday, everyone kept playing because they thought he was joking around. Minutes passed before people got concerned and stopped the song. It turned out that he had a heart attack that proved to be fatal.

* The Gits' "Sign Of The Crab" seems to be about being a victim of a serial killer - it was recorded two months before vocalist Mia Zapata was murdered, and released on an album the band had to finish without her. The lyric "Go ahead and slash me up / 'Cause you know you're the one who won't be found" can come across as particularly eerie since the case was cold for 11 years before stored DNA evidence led to a conviction.

** The last verse from "Piece By Piece" also counts.

* Music/{{Queen}}:

* One song from Music/{{Queen}}'s debut album, "Great King Rat," features an apparent AuthorAvatar who quotes several other songs on the album and "died syphilis, forty-four on his birthday." Two decades later, the writer and lead singer would be dead at forty-five from a venereal disease.

* [[Music/RushBand Rush]]: The bad guys of the 2022 music video for ''YYZ'' are vaguely Russian in appearance (e.g. one wears a fur cap, and another wears a headscarf). This was likely to invoke Cold War-era nostalgia, as the song was released in 1981. Unfortunately, the music video ended up being released less than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, and so the "nostalgia" part didn't hit in the same way.

* Music/RushBand: The bad guys of the 2022 music video for ''YYZ'' are vaguely Russian in appearance (e.g. one wears a fur cap, and another wears a headscarf). This was likely to invoke Cold War-era nostalgia, as the song was released in 1981. Unfortunately, the music video ended up being released less than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, and so the "nostalgia" part didn't hit in the same way.

* Music/SoulCoughing's "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", recorded in 1994, repeats the line, "A man drives a plane into the Chrysler Building." For obvious reasons, Mike Doughty refused to play the song after 9/11 for a long time, before he brought it back by surprise at a late 2008 solo gig. He has played it occasionally since then, mostly in 2010.

* Soul Coughing's "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", recorded in 1994, repeats the line, "A man drives a plane into the Chrysler Building." For obvious reasons, Mike Doughty refused to play the song after 9/11 for a long time, before he brought it back by surprise at a late 2008 solo gig. He has played it occasionally since then, mostly in 2010.

* Music/FrancoDeVita: The lyrics for the song ''Lluvia'', which tell about a city being ravaged by a downpour, was one of the earliest he wrote in his life, but he had never figured out an ideal background music until many years later when a legendary fellow Venezuelan musician (Simón Díaz) lent him a hand. The song would premiere as part of the 1999 album ''Nada es Igual''. In December of that year, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vargas_tragedy the Venezuelan state of Vargas]] was itself ravaged by a severe downpour, resulting in multiple deaths (a ''five-digit'' estimated toll) and historical material losses (including the total destruction of ''two'' towns).

* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNEb2k_EmMg video]] for "Gloria" by Laura Branigan kind of becomes this, as the lyrics of "voices in your head" as she touches her head and spins her hand in a circular motion, after her death from an undiagnosed ventricular brain aneurysm in 2004.

** Another Billy Joel example, the chorus of “We Didn't Start The Fire” (“We didn’t start the fire/It was always burning since the world’s been turning/We didn’t start the fire/No,we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it”) could be considered this due to climate change.

* A lot of the songs on Music/RelientK's album ''Five Score and Seven Years Ago''(Specifically "The Best Thing, "Must Have Done Something Right", and "I'm Taking You With Me") are rather hard to listen to; they're about how happy lead singer Matthew Thiessen was with his fiancee. After the release of the album, she called off the engagement and he suffered a mild CreatorBreakdown as a result.

* Music/DavidBowie's last album ''Blackstar'' (★), full stop. Released a few days before his death, most of the songs end up this way since they are basically him saying goodbye and [[YourDaysAreNumbered admitting he doesn't have much time left.]]