BLAM / Music

If the lyrics themselves don't make you scratch your head, these parts of your favorite songs just might. (See also A Wild Rapper Appears!.)

Examples:

Big Lipped Alligator Moments within songs

• Many elementary school children have been taught the Gold Rush era folk-song "Sweet Betsy From Pike," which tells the story of a woman and her boyfriend/husband Ike traveling to California. They survive numerous hardships, almost starve, fend off hostile Indians and successfully arrive... only in the last verse to get a divorce. (See Bittersweet Ending.) Many recordings of the song don't include this, ending simply with the arrival. But an even odder verse occurs early in the song, just after they've crossed the Mississippi River and entered prairie country: "Out on the prairie one bright starry night/They broke the whiskey and Betsy got tight./She sang and she shouted and danced o'er the plain/And showed her bare arse to the whole wagon train." A adult woman Mooning a mixed crowd is quite rare for a children's song. How this affected Betsy's relations with her wagon train neighbors, whom she would presumably have to see every day, knowing that all of them had witnessed her public partial nudity when she was in a drunken foolish state, and whether she ever lived it down, are anyone's guess. The song never mentions the incident again, and the verse can be excised without changing anything else. One famous version, recorded by Burl Ives, changes the final line to the nebulous "and made a great show for the whole wagon train."
• German band Die Ärzte's "Leichenhalle" is a song about being a corpse in a mortuary, admittedly rather tongue in cheek, but with an appropriately deep atmosphere (being a pretty spot-on parody of 80s and early 90s gothic rock in the vein of The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim or Type O Negative). However, halfway through the final verse, the corpses announce that they are all Smurfs, and the last thirty seconds are of cheery la-la-la-ing.
• Kevin Ayers had a BLAM with "Town Feeling", where he lazily sings "banana".
• The Barenaked Ladies song "One Week" ends with repetition of the last line of the chorus: "it'll still be two days till we say we're sorry". But the very last repetition changes it to "Birchmount Stadium, home of the Robbie".
• Black Sabbath's "Supernaut" starts off as a typical heavy number before going off, without warning, into a Caribbean flavored acoustic shuffle, then going back to the main riff as if nothing had happened.
• Two Blood, Sweat & Tears songs could be considered to have BLAMs. The Western section ("Yee-haw!") in "And When I Die" and the Latin section in "God Bless The Child" don't have much to do with the rest of their respective songs, although they do provide an excuse to feature the horn section.
• The Beatles, well...
  • "Revolution 9" and "Wild Honey Pie" from The White Album are basically the BLAMs of the White Album.
  • "A Day In The Life" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ends with a piano chord, but if you leave the CD (or record if you had one that wasn't automatic) on rather than turning it off when the album ends, you'd hear—after a moment of silence—the Beatles chanting, "never could speak any of the words (badump bum bum)" over and over again.
    • It is repeated because originally, on vinyl, the sound was an endless loop, recorded in the lock groove. Word of God maintains they were saying 'It really couldn't be any other' but it was overall meant to be just random noise. Much backmasking 'secret message' conspiracy theory/fun resulted, naturally.
    • And for good reason. Paul McCartney admitted in the book Many Years from Now that backwards the loop does sound a lot like, "I'll fuck you like a Superman!" Although he maintains that it's completely unintentional.
    • It's actually two phrases looping: "been so high" and "never could be any other way".
    • Let's not forget the "freak out" sections of "A Day In The Life" itself.
• Blue Öyster Cult's hit single "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is famous for having an overall Byrds-esque feel (with a bit of added melancholy) in spite of dealing with a rather dark subject. However, it might be even more famous for the abrupt change in tone halfway through, when it switches to a sombre-sounding intermission crowned by an emotional guitar solo, only to change back to the more lighthearted jingle-jangle that makes up the bulk of the song.
• "Wasn't Born to Follow" by The Byrds is a sunny, rustic, sweet-sounding song...until the strange, discordant bridge that begins about a minute in and lasts around twenty seconds, only to give way again to the pleasant sound that dominates the song. The bridge also qualifies as a Moment of Awesome.
  • From the very same album (The Notorious Byrd Brothers), "Old John Robertson" also has a musically disconnected bridge. After the line "then she died" the band drops out and a string quartet plays an entirely different melody, then disappears and we're back into the song. Oddly enough, the inclusion of the baroque section might have been the result of a real-life BLAM; according to guitarist Roger McGuinn, while the bad was rehearsing the song, some classical musicians walked in, played some music, then left. The band eventually decided to put something like it in the version that made it in the album.
• Cirque du Soleil's Amaluna soundtrack ends with one. On the last track, titled "Run", the song finishes at the 3 minute mark only for a few pointless bars of a jazz rendition of the main theme. It's also quite unsettling. Earlier, "Ena Fee Alyne" also ends with a jazz interlude, which serves as a segue into the darker "Creature of Light".
• The Doors' song "The End" from The Doors specifically the spoken bit toward the end. "father yes son i want to kill you... mother i wanna f..... all night long!"
  • Another one occurs in "We Could Be So Good Together". At the end of the instrumental bridge, someone - most likely Jim Morrison - can faintly be heard singing "Do dapa de do, de doopa dapa de day" alongside an organ lick.
  • Their song "Hyacinth House" features the line "I see the bathroom is clear".
• "So Fine" by Electric Light Orchestra. It's a generic (but catchy) pop song, until the weird, jungle beat section in the middle. No transition, nothing to indicate that the section actually belongs there.
• "The Man Who Would Be King" by Iron Maiden, an otherwise downbeat and depressing tune, has a random upbeat and happy instrumental section in the middle of the tune.
• Right in the middle of Michael Jackson's "Morphine", the otherwise up-tempo and angry song totally changes. Which means that it suddenly becomes calm but eery, as Michael sings about drugs by needles and taking Demerol. And then, the song just goes back to being up-tempo and angry.
• Lady Gaga:
  • "Government Hooker" has multiple BLAMs. The song opens with Gaga singing in an operatic voice "Gaga.... Aaaaaaaah.... Gaga... Aaaaaaaaah... Government Hoo-kar-eh". There's also the random "Mojito!" in the middle of the song.
  • "Christmas Tree", which really isn't about a Christmas tree, has four bars of orchestral Christmas music near the end which come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with the rest of the tune.
• Yuri the only One by L33tStr33t Boys has the hilarious "Sephy's Mom Has Got It Going On" BLAM from 2:19 to 2:45. Made better when you realize who Sephiroth's mom is.
• In the middle of John Lennon's song "Hold On" from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band he growls "Cookie!" for some reason that only he, and maybe Yoko, knew.
  • Ringo Starr does the same thing in his song "Early 1970", which is a love song to the other three Beatles.
• Don McLean has the "eight miles high and fallin' FAAAAAAAST!" part of "American Pie".
• The album Axis: Bold As Love by the Jimi Hendrix Experience starts with a BLAM in the form of "EXP", a brief spoof radio show with Mitch Mitchell as a talk show host and Hendrix as UFO enthusiast/alien Paul Caruso, complete with sped up and slowed down voices and screeching guitar.
• The "Piltdown Man" sequence from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, where Oldfield howls and growls in what seems to be like a cross between werewolf speak and Klingon. Legend has it this was Oldfield's response to record company pressure to include a vocal piece on the album.
  • The song "Altered States" from Tubular Bells II.
• Queen's song "One Vision" — how many people who didn't already know to look for it were surprised when singing the track on Rock Band 2, and seeing that the last words were "fried chicken" instead of the repeated title? The story as to why they included it is well documented (it was a joke take that got left in), but the line still comes out of nowhere.
  • Similarly, in their song "I'm Going Slightly Mad", the line "I think I'm a banana tree!"
  • "Get Down, Make Love", a raunchy hard rock tune that breaks into a fit of electronic weirdness about 2/3s of the way.
• The album version of Serena Ryder's "Stompa" opens with a sombre, melodramatic piano intro with Serena singing lyrics that would seem more suited to an Adele breakup song. Then suddenly the song kicks into happy upbeat motivational song mode. Especially jarring when it's not visited any more during the rest of the song.
  • From the same album, "Baby Come Back". The first 3/4 of the tune is an upbeat and catchy song, but then the last bit throws in a hip hop drumbeat and sad melancholic strings. Strangely enough, it's already an awesome song to begin with, but it only makes the song more awesome.
• In the Squarepusher song, "Male Pill Part 13," there is a period where the music comes to a complete halt followed by a voice simply grunting "Hhuuuhh... hhhmmm... uhhhuumm" then the music continues right where it left off. This is especially surreal when you take into account the fact that aside from that line, the song, like most of Squarepusher's other work, is an instrumental.
• "Lady Godiva's Operation" by the Velvet Underground from White Light/White Heat. For the first half of the song, John Cale softly and smoothly sings the lyrics. Then, during the second half, he stops singing the last part of some lines, only to have Lou Reed shout or say the last word or so (Reed also gets a few complete lines to himself) and after Reed's "interruptions," Cale casually continues as if nothing happened. Another sort of BLAM in the song is an odd noise that comes in toward the end (in fact, it's the only audible noise for a brief period) that sounds remarkably like Chewbacca, though the song predates the Star Wars films.
  • Also, the lion's roar and breaking glass in "European Son" from The Velvet Underground & Nico.
  • The "lion" is John Cale scraping a metal chair across the studio floor, although it sounds FAR worse than you'd expect.
• Kanye West's "Runaway" from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has the music all of a sudden start to drop out - before an electric guitar drops in and performs a solo. This solo goes on for nearly a minute and a half before you realise it's not a guitar, it's Kanye's own voice, heavily put through a vocoder.
• Jhariah: The second line of The Great Tale Of How I Ruined It All's opening track, The Marching Dolls is "The trees don't grow, they kill instead!" Despite the album's focus on continuity and story, these killer trees are never mentioned again, and don't even mesh with the theme and plot of the album.
• Melvins' "Dry Drunk" contains a BLAM that is actually performed by an entirely different band: one and a half minutes into the track, it suddenly jumps from a Hardcore Punk-influenced collaboration with The Jesus Lizard's David Yow, to a Spoken Word in Music break that includes someone corpsing and having to start over, to a slow discordant drum, guitar, and saxophone jam performed by Godzik Pink that sounds like something out of Trout Mask Replica and is otherwise completely unrelated to the song. Then the David Yow section kicks back in as though nothing happened. The album it's on, The Crybaby, is themed around collaborations, but this particular example was clearly done just for the sake of screwing with the listener.
• Venetian Snares is fond of putting the odd BLAM into his songs. In "Pussy Skull", the instrumental completely drops out and a voice comes in, growling "Hours and hours of footage of two giraffes fucking," before the song resumes as normal as though nothing had happened. He pulls off a similar trick in "Horsey Noisers", except with the even more inexplicable phrase "I've made you a drawing of a giraffe fucking an elephant. Notice how his moustache looks just like mine."
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's R. Kelly parody "Trapped In The Drive-Thru" has a moment where the narrator turns on the radio after they've ordered their food. Cue a sudden and loud snippet of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" that ends just as suddenly as it starts.
• "Sound Chaser" by Yes features a random "cha-cha-cha, cha-cha!" vocal harmony part.
• On The Caretaker's Everywhere At The End Of Time: Stage 4, two thirds of the way through the track "H1 Post-Awareness Confusions", a horrifically slowed and distorted orchestra sample dubbed the "Hell Sirens" by fans suddenly blares out of left field, without any forewarning or official explanation.

Full songs that are Big Lipped Alligator Moments in the context of the album

• Alice in Chains "Love Song", from their EP Sap, basically just a series of Madness Mantras, set to music that alternates between goofy and nightmarish.
• "Make Sex" by Andrew W.K. from The Wolf. Andrew and a chorus of gang vocalists chanting "I don't wanna make life, I don't wanna make death, I don't wanna make love, I just wanna make sex! Wanna make sex, wanna make sex HO!" over pounding synthesizer noises until suddenly stopping under a minute, like the intro to a song that doesn't actually exist.
• "Bring the Boys Back Home" off The Wall. Who are "the boys" and what do they have to do with the main character, Pink? Is it a reference to the war Pink's father died in? If so, why does it show all the way near the end of the second record after that plot point has been buried? And what is this half-minute orchestral chorus bit doing in a rock album that's been the band themselves up to this point?
  • According to Roger Waters, in a November 1979 interview with Tommy Vance on BBC Radio One, it's "the central song on the whole album...because it's partly about not letting people go off and be killed in wars, but it's also partly about not allowing rock and roll, or making cars, or selling soap, or getting involved in biological research, or anything that anybody might do, not letting that become such an important and "jolly boys game" that it becomes more important than friends, wives, children, other people, you know?"
• Oliver!'s "The Arrangement", from his 1969 debut album Good Morning Starshine. It seems to come out of nowhere with a style that is noticeably different from the rest of the songs. In it, he assumes the role of an impish character with an Irish brogue, trying to make a deal with the listener for a sneezing remedy. At the end, he begins to whisper conspiratorially as the music fades away and then breaks into a fit of hysterical laughter.
• The "Red Riding Hood Rap", a song performed during Sarah Brightman's Symphony World Tour which has, as yet, not appeared on any albums. It was an entirely random and surreal number set to "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", featuring backup dancers dressed as Alice in Wonderland characters and Sarah as Little Red Riding Hood riding on a bicycle with holographic wolves (also on bicycles) pursuing her. All the while she would eerily chant that it was all in her mind. Abruptly the scene would end and "First of May" would begin as though nothing ever happened.
• The American Metaphysical Circus, a 1969 psychedelic rock album with proto-progressive electronic experiments by Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, features "Leisure World" as its penultimate track; a (mostly) spoken-word fake commercial for a retirement community, with the voiceover done by Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson.
• "Mother's Lament" from Cream's Disraeli Gears. After an album of heavy psychedelic rock, we get the three singing in over the top Cockney accents a really darkly humorous song about a skinny baby drowning.
• Summit High School once hosted a concert by The Myddle Class. One of the bands playing before the feature set was underground group Velvet Underground, which performed a three-song set that led most of the students in the auditorium to walk out in confusion and fury about the strange sound and foreign subject matter. Compared to what came before and after, the three songs performed by Velvet Underground sounded precisely like this trope, and hardly anyone except those who sat through Velvet Underground's brief set and enjoyed their music associated the concert with anything but The Myddle Class.
• The self-titled debut of Hair Metal band Giuffria consists almost entirely of synth-heavy Power Ballads. The penultimate track "The Awakening", on the other hand, sounds like...this.
• On Beastie Boys' 1989 album Paul's Boutique, there's "5-Piece Chicken Dinner", 23 seconds of hooping, hollering, country fiddle and Deliverance samples in between hip-hop songs "Hey Ladies" and "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun". The Mood Whiplash is enough to figuratively break one's neck.
• Nine Inch Nails' "Starfuckers, Inc." from The Fragile (1999) is a metal Celebrity Is Overrated song (and partially a swipe directed at both Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love), making it rather out of place from the rest of the album's themes of depression as well as its more Progressive Rock and Ambient influenced sound.
• Avril Lavigne's "Hello Kitty", from her self-titled album, has nothing to do with the other songs on her album and her discography in general. Besides being dedicated to Sanrio's cutesy character (but just as an euphemism for "pussy", which is uncommon for Lavigne as well), it sounds like a mishmash of genres being popular at the time (such as dubstep) instead of her usual brand of Pop Punk. And the J-Pop-inspired music video too seems more in line with Katy Perry or Gwen Stefani's output at the time, and Lavigne even sports a Skrillex-inspired hairdo.
• Tim McGraw's "Refried Dreams" is a Drowning My Sorrows song about getting drunk in Tijuana to get over a breakup and waking up hungover. It's goofy even by genre standards and would count as Early-Installment Weirdness except that it's off "Not a Moment Too Soon," his second album, which contains at least two of his Signature Songs. Even the other novelty song on that album, "Indian Outlaw," doesn't sound as out of place in comparison with the rest of his discography—and is probably why it's included on all the greatest hits compilations while "Refried Dreams" isn't, despite peaking lower on the charts.
• Miracle Musical: "Labyrinth" is a rap song featuring two guest singers, telling a story about a guy trying to hide from his relationships. It stands in heavy contrast to the calmer, more quiet tone most other songs on the album have. Nothing from "Labyrinth" ever comes up again in the album, and its placement right after the Signature Song "The Mind Electric" makes it that much stranger.
• Nicki Minaj - Stupid Hoe is one massive BLAM. Compared to the rest of that album, "Roman Holiday" also has shades of this.
  • Those two songs on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded are the outro and intro respectively.
• The track "Intermission" from The Offspring album Ixnay on the Hombre. It's a forty-five second track consisting of sixties-style elevator music with the words, "Aaaah...intermission" occasionally thrown in. Then it's back to late nineties punk music.
• Steely Dan's cover of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo", both in terms of its parent album (1974's Pretzel Logic) and the Dan's career as a whole.
• Venetian Snares' My So-Called Life an album described as "a collection of short stories". Its fifth track is Welfare Wednesday, which is a list of random activities and things in your punani.
• Post-Grunge band Presence's song In My Room. On an album filled with straightforward-for-the-time post grunge, including all of its usual theme. This song however, is a somewhat disturbing song about masturbating (to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen no less!) that ends abruptly for about a minute of silence, then the band just start goofing off on the microphone.... its out of left field to be sure.
• The They Might Be Giants album Apollo 18 contains one of their most infamous tracks - Fingertips. Fingertips is actually a collection of many mini-songs, each barely more than a few seconds in length, and each counting as a separate track. This was done so that listening to the album on any player in shuffle mode would result in random moments of "I found a new friend underneath my pillow" and "What's that blue thing doing here?".
• The (now broken up) band Winter Solstice has one on their only album, "The Fall of Rome." Every song is djenty with a pig-squealing type 3 metal scream, except the title track. It's all harmonized acoustic guitar and piano. A very good standalone track, but very out of place.

Big Lipped Alligator Moments in music videos

• In FT Island's "Hello Hello" MV, when Hongki is outside looking at the burning building and it gets to Jaejin's part, it switches to Jaejin on a TV screen while sitting on a firetruck and rapping. When he's done, it switches back to Hongki looking on uncertainly and no reference to Jaejin on the firetruck is made afterward. It makes no sense even as a performance aesthetic (all other performance shots are inside the building), and even less sense since he's actually in the burning building the whole time.
• Michael Jackson
  • The middle of the Smooth Criminal music video from Moonwalker. About four and a half minutes in...this happens.
  • The video for Black and White begins and ends with a BLAM. Macaulay Culkin guest-stars as a "cool" young boy whose Straw Loser father keeps demanding that he turn down his rock music. The kid responds by using The Power of Rock to blast his dad clear through the roof and several miles up into the sky, only for him to come crashing down on a plain in Africa surrounded by lions, whereupon some Masai tribesmen begin dancing and Michael Jackson launches into the lyrics. The dumb father is never seen or heard from again (and no, it's never implied that the lions ate him). Culkin does reappear later in the video, but only to lip-sync some rap lyrics. The song itself ends with the then-awesome morphing models sequence, but after an On a Soundstage All Along reveal, a random black panther wanders onto a city street set, morphs into Jackson, and a music-free solo dance number ensues. He smashes up a car and storefronts along the way, and grabs his crotch many times (even zipping up his fly at one point) before transforming back into the panther. And then there's major Mood Whiplash as the scene is revealed to be on a TV in the animated world of The Simpsons, with Homer interrupting Bart's viewing. Other than the fact that the ending mirrors the theme of the similarly BLAM-y opener, there's no reason for it. Not surprisingly, many viewers were offended and confused by the "panther dance" coda, resulting in a recut.
• The video for Lady Gaga's "Judas" stops its parade of religious imagery, as well as the song itself, to show Lady Gaga posing on a rocky shore at night time and getting splashed by waves. After this, the song and video continue as normal. However; the scene itself is also reminiscent of "The Birth of Venus", meaning it might not be as random as it seems. If anything, given that "The Birth of Venus" is a common theme in her following album ARTPOP, that scene could count, on some weird, meta level, as foreshadowing.
• New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle's music video has a short scene at around the 2:41 mark where, out of nowhere, actress Jodi Long states in an argument with E. Max Frye that "I don't believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit!" Totally unexpected and unrelated to the rest of the video.
• Amongst the many metaphors for life, aging and death in the Talking Heads's "Road to Nowhere" video, there is a single sequence where two businessmen in luchadore masks grapple with each other. This has no thematic resonance whatsoever.
  • Maybe it was accidental
• Taylor Swift's music video for ME! opens with her bickering with featured artist Brendon Urie in (very bad) Gratuitous French about their cats, as if they were an unhappily married couple. Neither French, nor cats, nor any acrimonious relationship between the two is at all relevant to the rest of the song or video.
• Kylie Jenner's out-of-nowhere appearance in Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP" music video.
• Hot Chip's music video for "I Feel Better" contains two BLAMs for the price of one. It starts out like a generic Boy Band video and then...
  • The fact that it starts off with a Boy Band lip synching the song is itself a BLAM compared to the Hot Chip's other videos, which are far heavier on featuring the band's members. The actual members of Hot Chip are those nerdy looking guys in the audience that the camera keeps going to at weird intervals.
• The music video for Starship's single "We Built This City" is loaded with BLAM; a few notable examples are when they are staring at the Lincoln Memorial and then it suddenly gets up, then the giant rolling dice.
• At the end of the Sum 41 video for "Fat Lip" there is a random sequence of the band dressed up as heavy metal rockers and they play a short bit of music completely separate from the "Fat Lip" song. This added bit isn't on the single.
  • The added bit, however, is part of another song on the same album, titled "Pain For Pleasure".
• At the end of her video for "Sk8er Boi" Avril Lavigne decides to smash her guitar through a car windshield and a SWAT Team and Police helicopters surround her for no reason at all.

Uncategorized

• Jethro Tull's album Thick As A Brick (and even more so, the stage show during that time), was full of these, and intentionally so, as the album was supposed to be a parody of "concept albums", which their previous album Aqualung (Jethro Tull Album) had been labelled as.
  • The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles, from A Passion Play, is widely considered by many fans and critics to be this.
• Late 1960s pop songs often contained BLAMs of jarring psychedelic effects in order to keep up with the prevailing trends of the time. Two that come to mind are "It's Wonderful" by the Rascals and "Susan" by the Buckinghams.
  • Another good one in this genre is the frantic, five-second long harpsichord solo from Pink Floyd's "See Emily Play" from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
  • The most extreme example is probably "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius, which has a middle section made up of an ambient sound collage (including a baby crying, a horse race and a marching band) that actually predated "Revolution 9" by about 18 months or so. Between this and the two Byrds songs mentioned above, producer Gary Usher sure loved musical BLAMs.
• Pete Seeger often sings his popular fairy-tale folk song to kids at concerts, but it's a crapshoot whether or not he'll remember to replace the single "damn" in the song with "darn." When he doesn't, it's pretty BLAM-y for a kiddie song.
• When performing live, Misty's Big Adventure start playing their first song... And then this guy◊ just runs onto the stage and dances frenetically to the music. And no one in the band acknowledges his presence.
  • Also, his name is Erotic Volvo.
  • A similar incident occurred during a Bob Dylan performance at the Grammys, featuring the interpretive dancer known as Soy Bomb.
• "Chopsticks" being played towards the end of Manfred Mann's cover of "Blinded by the Light".
• Halfway through the album Colors by Between the Buried and Me comes the track "Ants of the Sky", an Epic Rocking 13-minute track which twists, turns, and eventually builds up to... an utterly inexplicable bluegrass section. The very next track of the album features an accordion breakdown, complete with vocalist Tommy Rogers growling in a French accent.
  • Hell, the whole album is full of those. Informal Gluttony and Decade of Statues come to mind.
• The title track to Van der Graaf Generator's 1969 debut, The Aerosol Grey Machine. While the rest of the album is folk-based prog, this one is a forty second jingle parody advertising fume huffing.
  • They never stopped being bonkers if "The Sleepwalkers" from Godbluff is anything to go by. A 10-and-a-half minute song about a zombie outbreak still manages to squeeze in a little break to play... elevator music?
• George Harrison's All Things Must Pass has "It's Johnny's Birthday", a weird carnival styled piece congratulating someone for their birthday, with no connection with either the spiritual songs from the first two LPs or the jams from the 3rd.
• King Crimson: a rather disturbing BLAM occurs in the studio version of "Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Pt. 2", where it sounds like a Disney character is murdering his friend, all while the music continues to play as if nobody notices or cares.
• Quack Quack Quack, in The Only One by Evanescence.
• Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come was very fond of this trope. For example, the song "Whirlpool", from their self titled second album, randomly jumps to the ticking of an alarm clock.
• MTV Brazil's show Piores Clipes do Mundo (The Worst Music Videos in the World) once showcased a video which featured a sudden appearance of a dancing Indian, which even cuts the song and puts some tribal drums in the BGM instead, only for it to never appear again (the presenter was baffled and even asked to replay that part to see if he could understand). One of the comments on the link above even points out it is a BLAM...
• "Rhamadan" by Syd Barrett is a 20 plus minute jam that, for some reason, has a motorcycle driving by about a third of way into the piece.
• In the Opeth song "The Lotus Eater," the song for the most part is a straightforward metal song, or at least as straightforward as most Opeth songs go, but during the bridge, a long, dissonant chord is played on a keyboard, with a drum fill that you would normally expect to lead into a big guitar solo, but instead, it's jazz-boogie time! And it is awesome.
• In "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes, from Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs there is an instrumental solo following the main melody that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the song. It goes on for a few minutes till it ends. "Layla" (written by Eric Clapton) and the instrumental (written by Jim Gordon) were originally two separate songs, but they decided to combine them into one piece.
• Directly from being a non-melodic and heavy song by their standards, the instrumental section of "Lost In The Future" by Gamma Ray bursts immediately into "Oh! Susanna," complete with background whoops and eventual humming along, then dives right back into the solo as if nothing had happened.
• Nightwish has done something similar in recent live shows: during the instrumental section in the middle of "Sacrament Of Wilderness," Tuomas now plays an Homage to "Moskau" on the keyboards.
• The scat-singing part of Van Halen's "I'm The One".
• Tori Amos has many songs where the musical tone abruptly changes for a minute and then goes back to normal. Examples are "Pretty Good Year", a calm song with a random dramatic section including lyrics that seem irrelevant to the rest of the song, and "Professional Widow", which goes from messy and dramatic to clean piano and crisp high register vocals for a few bars in the middle. Lyrically Amos is known for being inpenetrable, so trying to point out all the lyrical BLAMs would be a waste of time.
• The second movement of Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 94 has a soft intro with a single fortissimo chord stuck in the middle (hence the nickname, 'Surprise Symphony').
• Dream Theater's "The Dark Eternal Night" is, for the vast majority of its duration, a horror themed heavy rock piece. However during the band's trademark overly long bridge the music suddenly stops so Jordan Rudess can play a ragtime piano solo for no apparent reason.
  • It wasn't the first time they'd done it; the same thing happens in their (similarly heavy) instrumental The Dance Of Eternity from Scenes From A Memory. In that case though, it's marginally less BLAM-y, as the plot of the album takes place in 1928.
• More recently, in the Korean artist Hyun A's song "Bubble Pop", there is an inexplicable dubstep part in the middle. The whole song is sort of cutesy and then you get hit upside the head with bass.
• Metallica and Lou Reed's collaboration album Lulu in its entirety.
  • "I am the table!"
• Blue Swede's cover of "Hooked on a Feeling" opens with a out-of-place chant of "Ooka Chuka! Ooka! Ooka!" (which reappears during the last verse).
• Showbread's discography is spattered with a few of these, most notably on their first studio album No Sir, Nihlism Is Not Practical. Moments such as the totally-unexpected Doo-Wop-inspired bridge on So Selfish It's Funny and the odd sound bite of air raid alarms and people shouting followed by vocalist Josh Dies saying, "Fire!" and what sounds like a muffled nuclear explosion at the end of And The Smokers And Children Shall Be Cast Down are certainly BLAMs. However, the biggest BLAM on the album is probably track 5, Sampsa Meets Kafka. It starts with some echoey electronic warbling, then a throbbing bass starts up, followed a few seconds later by screeching techno and Josh Dies screaming the line, "Gregor starved to death, no one dies of loneliness'' twice, and the song ends with a bit more drippy techno and a couple seconds of static. Weird.
• The early Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra released two albums containing quirky, innovative electronic music—and then their third release, x∞Multiplies, was practically a BLAM album. It contained significantly more bizarre music (including a cover of Archie Bell and the Drells' "Tighten Up" with a high pitched voice repeating "Japanese gentleman, stand up please!" throughout the entire song) and was filled with arbitrary comedy acts, predominantly in Japanese (which made it especially confusing for English-speaking listeners). After this, they returned to a more conventional style.
  • Same with the original version of Service.
• English doom metal band Cathedral drops in the middle of "Utopia Blaster" four rimshots, a bass slide, and Lee Dorrian going "Huggy Bear, Oh Yeahhhhh!!!" then picks up where it left off.
• The Avalanches' album Since I Left you has one during Flight Tonight; the Saïan Supa Crew's rapping which prompts the beat of the song to completely switch up. They finish rapping, and back to the normal beat.
• In Neutral Milk Hotel's "Oh Comely", someone decides to shout "holy SHIT!" at the very end of the song. It Makes Sense in Context: It's Robert Schneider of The Apples In Stereo, the producer of the album, who assumed that the band were doing a run-through of the song. After Jeff Mangum and his bandmates ran through the entire eight-minute song in one perfect take with no mistakes, Schneider yelled the aforemetioned "Holy SHIT!", and nobody bothered to edit it out.
• Anadivine's early version of "Alcohol and Oxygen" has a shattering bridge that has less or nothing to do with the song, but will still terrify any unsuspecting listeners, with sharp, high pitch screams akin to someone getting burned alive. The band left it out when they re-recorded it for Zoo.
• Gary Young's "Plant Man" is fairly surreal to begin with, but the lyrics at least mainly stay on the topic of "the plant man"... Until he decides to kick off an instrumental break by muttering "shirts".
• Mclusky's "She Will Only Bring You Happiness": What's with that bit in the middle about their old singer being a sex criminal?
• More "Weird Al" Yankovic examples:
  • In his live performances of his The Kinks parody "Yoda", towards the end the band stops playing and goes into what has been dubbed the "Yoda Chant", which starts off as a series of mnemonic syllables and segues into a cavalcade of references and shout outs, including snippets of other songs such as "Frère Jacques" and "Grim Grinning Ghosts". Once this is over, the band starts up again as if the chant had never happened.
  • Both the song and video for "This Is The Life" revel in anachronistic interludes during the instrumental breaks, including a Van Halen-style guitar solo and a breakdancing section.
• The scream from Aerosmith's "Dream On", as soon as it's over Steven sings the chorus like nothing happened.
• Pendragon's This Green And Pleasant Land is a 13 minute, musically excellent, prog-rock style meditation on the state of the nation. Which ends with 45 seconds of yodelling.
• The infamous "free jazz" section of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" from Led Zeppelin II.
  • "Fool In The Rain", especially that samba breakdown in the middle.
• Due to their avant-garde nature, the avant-garde black metal band Sigh is prone to this, especially on their 2001 album Imaginary Sonicscape. BLAMs include the ending of "Scarlet Dream" breaking into reggae near the end before a final chorus, "A Sunset Song" having a random disco moment in the middle of the song and the last 45 seconds of "Requiem - Nostalgia" being rather strange and creepy sounds of children and babies laughing, over and over again.
• Thisonionring's parody of "Jack Sparrow" is supposed to be strange, but having a line about Lebron James in a chorus about Sylvester Stallone is just bizarre
• Sound Horizon has a particularly egregious one in The Princess Sleeping In The Glass Coffin, in which Idolfried Ehrenberg, who never appears again, has a conversation which has nothing to do with the plot.
• The music video for Bastille's "Laura Palmer" stops completely about midway to show cheap-looking video footage of a dog barking (with sound). While the dog does show up towards the beginning, if briefly, it has very little to do with the rest of the video's plot involving singer Dan Smith being kidnapped, and nothing like this shows up again in the video.
• Avant-garde Metal band iwrestledabearonce are extremely fond of BLAM's in their songs. Some notable examples include:
  • "You Ain't No Family", a pretty straight forward Metalcore-like song until it suddenly breaks down into a cheesy Country part for a few seconds, plays a sample of a horse whinnying, and then goes right into a Death Metal breakdown
  • "Tastes Like Kevin Bacon", already a pretty huge blend of different genres, have a completely out of nowhere harp solo ending with a horn sample before going into Metal like nothing had happened
  • "You Know That Ain't Them Dog's Real Voices", mostly a Alternative Metalcore song, then out of nowhere goes Surf Rock (complete with a bad Elvis Presley impersonator singing lyricles words) before going back to Metal
• BABYMETAL, as if mixing J-Pop with Metal wasn't odd enough, have some of these on top to make it even weirder. Their song "Iine!" goes so far to have a double BLAM, being in general a J-Pop song with Metal guitars, then suddenly turns into a cheesy Rap song, and THEN again turns into a bone-breaking Death Metal breakdown before turning back to normal.
• Waikiki by Ska band Suburban Legends is an otherwise normal song about Waikiki, but in the middle has a Mad Scientist exclaiming about his "precious time machine" for a few seconds.
• Edguy is quite fond of this.
  • At the end of the title track of Theater of Salvation, the final track of the album, there's about two minutes of silence before an oddly upbeat song begins playing and Tobias Sammet begins screaming in gibberish.
  • The track "Lucifer In Love" from Hellfire Club. A little over thirty seconds of demonic sexual groaning (which, it turns out, is Tobias Sammet's voice distorted) set to beautiful piano music...before immediately cutting to the next track.
  • The "progressive version" of "Space Police" from some versions of the album of the same name. At first it's exactly the same as the regular version, until the second verse begins and Tobi begins to sing in a bizarre over the top falsetto. Afterwards, the song resumes as normal without any further deviations.
• Fates Warning's otherwise excellent "Monument" features a piano bit at the end of the song that sounds like Schroeder of Peanuts fame jamming out on one of the animated specials.
• A lot of songs include random guest rappers that are this. Great cases are Wiz Khalifa section of the Maroon Five song "Payphone" and the surprisingly violent remix of Katy Perry's "E.T." with Kanye West.
• At around the 2:20 mark on Turisas' cover of 'Supernaut', we're treated to a monologue from someone (it sounds like the band's guitarist) regarding the precise meaning of the word 'Supernaut', and its origins:
  • What is 'Supernaut', anyway? They have, like, astronauts, and, um, takionauts, and spationauts...maybe it's from Sweden. IKEA is from Sweden. They have great meatballs at IKEA. I like meatballs. Meatballs come from cows. I once saw a cow in Denmark. Maybe it's from Denmark?
• A brief lyrical example of this trope happens in Reunion's "Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)". It's a List Song that rattles off Top 40 singers, songs, and personalities in rapid-fire motion. At one point, the singer blurts out "JACK THE RIPPER!" in the middle of the song. Other than looking for something that rhymes with "Nightly Tripper", a 19th century serial killer isn't exactly a good fit with the song's actual subject matter.
• The Ohio Players song "Love Rollercoaster" has an infamous part where there is suddenly a high pitched scream which seems completely out of place in the otherwise very upbeat and jovial song, which almost sounds more like background noise than an intentional part of the song. This lead to Urban Legends such as saying they accidentally recorded the screams of a murder victim on the streets (which would probably be impossible, as songs are almost always recorded in soundproof chambers, for obvious reasons.) In truth the scream was just made by band member Billy Beck because he thought it was cool, although after the urban legends started the band decided to remain silent on the issue as the rumors got more people interested and wanting to buy their records.)
• Vince DiCola, he of The Transformers: The Movie fame, once released "Artistically Beatles", an album of ten instrumental covers of Beatles songs. The second half of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" suddenly becomes an 80s-inspired synth-rock number that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Transformers, only to turn back into the original song as if nothing happened.