Hilarious In Hindsight / Music

Examples related to the music of "Weird Al" Yankovic have their own page.

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• The song "Twin Rocks, Oregon" by Shawn Mullins has a line that goes: I don't reckon I'll be makin' it big/You know, it's hard to get rich off a tout of coffee house gigs/ And he said "Yeah, but ain't it a blessin' to do what you wanna do." "Twin Rocks, Oregon" just so happened to be on the same 1998 album as Mullins' other hit "Lullaby", the song that very well made him a buttload of money. So, in other words, Mullins found himself making money doing what he wanted to do.
• In Alvin and the Chipmunks' 1982 album, "Chipmunk Rock", Alvin balks at the idea of having to do a girl's song (the song in question is "Leader of the Pack", originally by the Shangri-Las — Twisted Sister's Perspective Flip cover had yet to be made). Theodore's response: "So? You've never heard of the Chipettes?" Two years later, a Distaff Counterpart group by that name came to existence.
• Seth Putnam believed this regarding Anal Cunt's "You're In A Coma", based on his own experience. Ditto with "Your Wife Left You". Posthumously, fans consider "Don't Give Me Weak Drugs or I'll Kick Your Ass" this as well, since Putnam's years of superhuman drug abuse helped contribute to his fatal heart attack.
• In the eighties, the novelty song "Star Trekkin'" was a hit, and its single came with a B-side that used Star Trekkin's basic layout and lyrics to make a very vicious parody and mockery of Beastie Boys. As time went on, Beastie Boys began dropping more and more Star Trek references, and eventually got featured in the 2009 and 2013 films.
• The Bee Gees classic song, "Stayin' Alive" turns out to have a steady beat that is the ideal rhythm for CPR chest compressions. In other words, the song actually helps people stay alive!
• The cover of Argentine rock band Bersuit Vergarabat's album Hijos del culo ("Sons/Children of the Asshole") features a girl in pigtails with an unnerving gaze◊ that is strikingly similar to the poster of the horror film Orphan. One might think that it's a reference to said poster... if not for the fact that Orphan came out in 2009 and Hijos del culo came out almost a decade earlier in 2000.
• Bob Dylan
  • Lots of fun were had with the 1978 song "No Time To Think" during the Clinton impeachment, because it includes the line "In the Federal City you've been blown and shown pity."
  • On Before The Flood, his 1974 live album with The Band, when he sings the line "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked" in "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" from Bringing It All Back Home, the crowd absolutely roars, presumably because they're associating it with the ongoing Watergate scandal. The studio version came out in 1965.
  • In 1975 the New Musical Express ran a hoax article claiming that Bob Dylan recorded a Christmas album but never released it. In 2009, Dylan recorded a Christmas album for real. In fact, early rumors even claimed that it included one of the songs mentioned in the NME piece, "Frosty The Snowman", though it ultimately did not.
  • In a 1965 interview, Dylan was asked what he might be tempted to "sell out" for, and he joked that it would be women's underwear. In 2004, he did in fact appear in a Victoria's Secret ad campaign. It's been speculated that he did the ad specifically so he could turn that quote into the setup for a 40-year-spanning Brick Joke.
  • During his first "Christian" tour in 1979, Dylan told off a heckler who shouted "rock 'n' roll!" by saying if they wanted rock 'n' roll they could "go see KISS and rock 'n' roll all the way down to The Pit". In 2005 he co-wrote a song with Gene Simmons ("Waiting For The Morning Light"), and in 2012 a Simmons impersonator in full makeup makes a brief appearance in the video for Dylan's "Duquesne Whistle".
• Pink Floyd's "High Hopes" (the last track on The Division Bell) starts off with the the line "Beyond the horizon in the place we lived when we were young, In a world of magnets and miracles...". In light of a certain Insane Clown Posse song, the line comes across as a lot funnier than it was probably intended to be.
• When Lily Allen released her hit song "Alfie" in 2007, it was just a light-hearted pop tune about a girl whose younger brother is an underachieving stoner. Then a few years later, her actual little brother, Alfie Allen, got worldwide recognition for playing Alan Strang on Broadway and Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones. Ironically, as of Lily's hiatus in 2010, Alfie has a busier career than his big sister.
  • Her song "22" presents an amusing contrast to Taylor Swift's song "22" as it sounds like the aftermath of the latter song; the reality of Swift's expectation.
• The Who Sell Out by The Who was a mock radio program promoting products from the typical (cars, soft drinks) to the ridiculous (deodorant, baked beans, acne cream). Today, companies use rock songs for commercials, even if they have nothing to do with the products they're promoting.
  • Their song, "My Generation", with the line, "I hope I die before I get old" is this for Pete Townsend (77 in 2022), who wrote the line, and Roger Daltrey (78 in 2022), who sang the line. It is Harsher in Hindsight for Keith Moon, who died in 1978 at age 32. (John Entwistle was 57 when he died in 2002.)
• In a 1970 interview, The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger was quoted as saying, "I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five." Sir Mick, now in his eighties, continues to perform the song at every Stones concert.
  • John Lennon said similar things about not wanting to sing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" when he was 40. Which makes it also Harsher in Hindsight. Doubly ironic in that Lennon claimed in interviews in 1980 he was going to go on tour in 1981 and he was hoping to perform a rearranged version of the song.
• In their song "Paralyzer", Finger Eleven has the line "If 'One Thing' really means one", referencing their current status as a One-Hit Wonder for said song. "Paralyzer" ended up helping them shake off the One Hit Wonder label, and is now just as well-known as "One Thing".
• Still The Twelfth Man mentions "Wasee Acrim" ("Was he a crim?"), a pun on Pakistani cricketer Wasim Akram - several years before Akram was the subject of match-fixing allegations.
• The music video for Rage Against the Machine's song "Testify" prominently displays gas prices, intended to be shocking presumably...at $1.79. Oh, Mr. De La Rocha...
  • In 2000, the band recorded footage of them playing outside Wall Street to a roaring crowd. 11 years later and we have the Occupy Wall Street protests going on. Many fans wonder if Rage will come back to Wall Street for another performance.
  • The 2000 video for "Sleep Now in the Fire" features a man holding up a "Trump for President" sign. Flash forward to the 2016 election...
• In the musical The Music Man, the song "Gary, Indiana" was originally a demonstration of how much of a liar Harold Hill was, as he was singing about living in Gary several years before it was actually founded in real life. It's much more ironic now when you juxtapose Harold's joyful "memories" of Gary with how much of a craphole the city is today.
  • Given that it was specifically founded as a factory town for US Steel, it probably wasn't all that idyllic even then, which may have been part of the joke.
• During a mid-nineties fad of Uber-nationalism in Venezuela, singer Carlos Baute rose to fame by singing several pseudo-folkloric songs, one of them is dedicated to claim how much he loved the country no matter how bleak the future looked and included the lyric "I stay in Venezuela, because I'm optimistic". Suddenly, in 2000, he moved his career to Spain, and has been trying to distance from his past and the controversial political situation of his home country since then. Even better: years later it was revealed that the song's main lyricist was another Venezuelan musician that was living abroad at the time of the song's composition and release.
• In the "time makes it funnier" vein, Tom Smith has a folk song called "Tech Support For Dad", wherein he laments doing over-the-phone tech help for his father, a fairly clueless computer user. It includes the line "Turns out he'd bought his Compaq before Clinton was impeached," which Smith says "gets funnier every year."
• One of the last songs recorded by The Smiths, "Paint A Vulgar Picture," bemoaned the music industry's habit of continually rehashing of old material ("Best Of/Most Of/Satiate the Need!/Slip Them into Different Sleeves!/Buy Both, and Feel Deceived!"). After The Smiths broke up, the band's record label faced criticism for continually releasing compilations of Smiths recordings, each sharing most of the same songs repeatedly, including one poorly received Greatest Hits collection that was split onto two separately sold albums — Fans bought both and felt deceived.
• The Public Enemy song Caught, Can I Get a Witness? from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which features Flavor Flav remarking "Y'all can't copyright no beat," is a first-person narrative about someone getting "caught, now in court cuz I stole a beat." The song was already written three years before Grand Upright v. Warner established a precedent in the United States clarifying that "beats" are protected under copyright law and not to be used without permission.
  • That same song contains a second example, where Chuck D asks all of the members of Public Enemy if they think PE will sell out. When he gets to Flavor Flav: "Yo Flav, you think we're gonna sell out?" "I know if we do, we'll get the hell out!"
• For Mickey Mouse's 75th Anniversary, Disney commissioned an exhibit around Disney World called Insp-EAR-ations which featured Mickey Mouse statues of various garb designed by various celebrities before being auctioned off. One of the statues was "Mickey Nation 1928," commissioned by Janet Jackson, featuring Mickey wearing clothing based on that worn by Janet during her Rhythm Nation era. However, her notorious Super Bowl "Nipplegate" halftime appearance occurred and as a result, Disney had to pull the statue from the exhibit.
  • Speaking of the "Nipplegate" fiasco, this was posted on Newgrounds in 2001 - three years before Super Bowl XXXVIII.
• Paul McCartney once wrote, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On his 64th birthday, he was embroiled in a messy divorce with his second wife.
  • In an interview from 1964, 21-year-old Paul says that he'd like to retire someday. The host quips that it will probably be in the far-off year of 2010. He's still touring, songwriting, recording, and keeping an obsessively productive work schedule in general 46 years later.
  • The song's opening line is "When I get older losing my hair." Paul still had his hair by age 64.
• The New Musical Express spoofed Oasis's thrall to The Beatles and their tendency to plagarize with a fictitious interview in which Noel Gallagher claimed to be 'Bigger Than God'. Just one year later, in real life, Noel Gallagher made exactly the same claim.
• From a promo for Lou Reed's Transformer: "In the midst of all the make believe madness, the mock depravity, and the pseudo-sexual anarchists, Lou Reed is the real thing." That's right, Transformer - the one produced by David Bowie.
• In 1976 the retro/disco group Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savannah" Band had a hit with the song "Cherchez La Femme." The opening verse contained a Shout-Out to their manager, Tommy Mottola. Later Mottola became famous as the president of CBS Records and the mentor and husband of Mariah Carey. But after his bitter 1997 divorce from Carey, the song's lyrics about Mottola suddenly rang true: "He lost his lady two months ago/Maybe he'll find her, maybe he won't...I guess you could say the man has learned his lesson/Now he's alone, he's got no woman and no home."
• The band Garbage, led by Shirley Manson, recorded the title track for the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough; the music video featured a robotic duplicate of Manson killing her, taking her place at the front of the band, then blowing herself up at a concert for the rich and famous. Now that Manson's playing the T-1000, the music video takes on a slightly different meaning.
  • Also, this interview has Manson replying to the rumor that her name was "made up as a mixture of Shirley Temple and Charles Manson".
• Deep Forest's song "Desert Walk", from their self-titled album, features a rather unusual-sounding sample at about 3:30 into the song. Playing it backwards reveals a snarky message in French, claiming that the group made their own samples to avoid paying royalties to rights agencies. But the apparent reason the album has not been re-released is that Deep Forest failed to get full permission from the anthropologist whose work they did, in fact, sample. Oops.
• Tom Lehrer:
  • The opening lines of "George Murphy": "Hollywood's often tried to mix/show business with politics/from Helen Gahagan/to ...Ronald Reagan?" When the song was written, Reagan was just starting his political career, and hadn't yet run for Governor, let alone President.
  • Talking of "Smut", the song — which asserts that "when correctly viewed, everything is lewd", even children's stories like Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz — suddenly got even funnier given the appearance of Lost Girls.
  • His take on Wernher von Braun's future career plans has also gotten a lot funnier in later years: "In German und Englisch I know how to count down ... und I'm learning Chinese", says Wernher von Braun".
  • And then there's I Hold Your Hand In Mine which can hardly be listened to without finding similarities with other piece of media.
    My joy would be complete, dear,
    If you were only here,
    But still I keep your hand
    As a precious souvenir.
• In ''I Would Never'', Riki Lindhome sings "I would never have sex with you/ Believe me, you'd know it if I wanted to/ I already would have shown my boobs to you/ But that will never happen." Cue the 2008 version of The Last House On The Left...
• The folk song "Lizzie Lindsay" is a wistful romantic tune, but it loses something to modern audiences for the male character being named "Sir Ronald McDonald".
• In Starflyer 59's music video "A Housewife Love Song", Julie Marsuli starred—opposite the band frontsman Jason Martin—as the wife who, at the end, flips out against her distant husband and drives off into the night. As a result of meeting on-set, Jason and Julie started dating and soon married. However, they've so far avoided reenacting the end of the video, as they're still together.
• In a Christian youth magazine a music reviewer goes a question about the debut album of Clay Aiken. The reviewer was glowing in his report of some comments from the 2003 American Idol runner-up, particularly a statement where after complimented on how he could get any girl in the room, Aiken added, "But I'm not interested in getting any girl in the room—I want to find one I'm serious about". Fast-forward to September 2008, and the "not interested in getting any girl" part takes on a very different meaning.
• R.E.M.'s "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
  That's great, it starts with an earthquake,
  Birds and snakes, an aeroplane...
  • Made funnier when heard as "Snakes in airplanes".
• A few lines from David Bowie's early days seemed funny after he denied his bisexuality (which he has since reverted back to):
  • "We were gone / Real cool traitors / We were so turned on / You thought we were fakers." - "The Bewlay Brothers"
  • "Don't fake it baby / Lay the real thing on me / The church of man, love^note The comma is in the lyrics booklet, but there's no pause at all when sung, so it's very easy to hear it as a hyphen. / Is such a holy place to be." - "Moonage Daydream"
  • Also, unrelated from "The Width of a Circle": "...and a rumor spread that I was aging fast." Yeah. How'd that pan out, exactly?
• A minor one compared to some of the examples on this list, but on KoRn's sixth studio album, the booklet features a sort of scrapbook of the band's career, featuring all manner of gig photos, ticket stubs, flyers etc., one of which depicts the band playing an early gig. The band added captions, and pointed out that rhythm guitarist Munky "only had 3 pedals" (effect pedals which change the sound of the guitar). Evidently the band's commercial success left him with a few spare dollars...
• During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift after she won best Female Artist just to tell Beyoncé that she had one of the best videos of all time. Later that night, she would win Best Video of the Year.
  • Also, combining this and the "You Lie!" fiasco Barack Obama had, we get this.
  • Alternatively, Kanye humiliating Taylor Swift just to tell everyone that Beyonce had a better video and then Beyonce giving Taylor her acceptance speech time. Kanye must've been like "Oh shit. Even Beyonce thinks I screwed up."
• In "Getting Jiggy Wit It", Will Smith declares Met Ali, he told me I'm the Greatest, a few years before he would portray Muhammad Ali in Ali. It gets better when you find out that Smith originally turned down the role until Muhammad Ali personally asked him to play him. Yes, Ali literally told him he was "The Greatest".
• In an analysis of Journey's music video "Separate Ways", Brazilian comedian Marcos Mion compared Steve Perry to singer Andre Matos. Then Matos covered that same song...
• In 1973, folk/novelty singer Loudon Wainwright III observed his wife, Kate McGarrigle, breastfeeding their newborn son Rufus. It inspired him to write a tongue-in-cheek ditty called "Rufus Is A Tit Man". He came to regret it when it became more and more apparent with time that Rufus was probably not going to stay a tit man.
• In 1986, Elton John released the song "Nikita", whose music video featured Mr. John romancing a Russian woman, presumably Nikita. Several years later, Pop Up Video revealed that Nikita is a male name, made doubly hilarious by the fact that Elton John is openly gay.
  • That same album, "Ice on Fire," features a duet with George Michael called "Wrap Her Up," where both of them reflect on the vast numbers of famous women they fancy.
  • Years earlier in 1977 he was singing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" on The Muppet Show with Miss Piggy and got to kiss her. It's even funnier when you remember that Miss Piggy is voiced by Frank Oz, her male puppeteer.
    • He'd later redo the song with the famous drag performer RuPaul in the Kiki Dee role.
  • When fellow singer Rod Stewart asked him if he should take the part of the Local Lad in The Who's Rock Opera version of their Concept Album, Tommy, Elton told him "Don't touch it with a barge pole." (He had already declined taking the role at the time.) One year later...
  • A very obscure album track on 1973's Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player called "Texan Love Song" is an Affectionate Parody of Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee", with the protagonist redneck railing against a young, long-haired boy in a bar caught "messing around" with a cute female the singer has been eyeing. The singer goes on an Eagle Land rampage against the countercultural younger generations and their "drug-crazy songs" and their "communistic politics and them Negro blues" and promises to "run all you fairies right out of this town". This becomes HIH when not only keeping in mind Elton and Bernie's substance abuse issues but Elton's sexuality, the latter still a few years away from being made public.
• John Mayer has made several headlines in 2010 due to the controversial things he's said during interviews, including "I am the new generation of masturbator," "Yeah, that girl (Jessica Simpson) is like crack cocaine to me," and "My dick is sort of like a white supremacist." This is the same guy who once wrote a song about when to just shut up, called "My Stupid Mouth." (My stupid mouth/Has got me in trouble/I said too much again...)
• The back of Big Black's Songs About Fucking included the infamous quote on the back: "The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital." Steve Albini installed a Pro Tools rig in his recording studio which, while he never uses and is only there for the artists' use, makes this quote amusing looking back.
• The song "On the Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe" mentions an engine numbered #49, but there is no such thing as a Santa Fe railway locomotive in that number. Then in 2006, a diesel locomotive is repainted to Santa Fe's famous passenger paint and is numbered #49.
• Around 2007, LeAnn Rimes was a presenter at an awards show. She decides to poke a little fun at the various celebrity train wrecks of the time, and says something to the extent of "Just for the record, [I'm] twenty-five, no divorces, just the one marriage." She's being accused of being a home-wrecker and is involved in the collapse of two marriages, thinking about her saying that becomes even funnier. Although, as the situation between her, her husband Eddie Cibrian, and his ex-wife Brandi Glanville got ugly, it wasn't really funny in retrospect.
• Before Billie Piper became an actress she was a successful pop singer. Her first and possibly most famous song, "Because We Want To" begins with her getting beamed down from a spaceship before she begins singing. Fast forward to 2005, and... well, she's spending a lot of time in spaceships. Even a lot of the special effects look similar enough to stuff from New Who episodes to make it really funny, from the spaceship looking like the Slitheen ship from "Aliens of London", Billie shooting out regeneration energy, and a rhino that looks suspiciously like a Judoon.
• In 2006, Kimberley, Cheryl, and Sarah of Girls Aloud appeared on a sketch spoofing the popular talent show The X Factor with each girl impersonating one of the judges (Cheryl as Sharon Osbourne, Sarah as Louis Walsh and Kimberley as Simon Cowell). Two years later, Cheryl replaced Sharon Osbourne as one of the show's judges.
• In 1977, The Misfits bassist Jerry Caiafa was annoyed to see his surname misspelled in the credits of the band's first single and insisted on being listed on future releases as "Jerry, only Jerry", which became the pseudonym Jerry Only. Decades later, that stage name would take on different connotations when he became the only original member left in the band.
• The name of one of the first and most influential emo bands in the mid-80s was The Hated.
• When the holiday hit "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" came out, it was something of a novelty and the description of Rudolph as "the most famous reindeer of all" was ironic given that he was a newly made-up character in contrast to Santa's more commonly referenced reindeer. However, over the years the song has become so popular that Rudolph almost certainly is the most famous reindeer of all nowadays.
• In Queen's "Radio Ga Ga," Freddie Mercury's love song to radio is amusingly accurate in a round about way with his lament of music videos, "So stick around cos we might miss you/ When we grow tired of all this visual." Considering the rise of the MP3 player with its primarily audio function, often including an FM tuner, and the near disappearance of the music video from broadcast television, it would appear that Mercury was surprisingly right about us getting tired of all the visual in music.
• The "WHAM!" song "Wake Me Up Before You Go-GO" contained the line "I'm not plannin' on going solo". Guess what George Michael did?
  • In the MTV special 25 Lame, which featured the 25 worst videos as voted by viewers, Denis Leary pointed out how hilarious it was that George Michael could do this video and still remain in the closet another decade-plus.
• Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention's legendary anti-hippie album We're Only In It For The Money mentions a wannabe hippie going to San Francisco to, among other things, get crabs (i.e. a species of louse). Years later, the family restaurant Joe's Crab Shack had a psychedelic advertisement promoting "Peace, Love and Crabs", unaware of the double entendre related to the album.
  • In "You Are What You Is," they described a black man who learned to play golf and got a good score. It perfectly describes Tiger Woods long before he became a world famous professional golfer. In the same way "a foolish man of the Negro persuasion/ donated his life to become a Caucasian (...)/ now he says to himself: I ain't no Nigger no more" almost seems to predict Michael Jackson's face lifts almost seven years before he became notorious for it.
• The Moody Blues tribute to LSD guru Timothy Leary, "Legend of a Mind", opens with the line Timothy Leary's dead / no, no, he's outside looking in. After Leary's death, some of his ashes were launched into space, where they remained in orbit around the earth for a couple of years.
• The Catholic hymn "Sweet Child of Mary", after Guns N' Roses burst onto the scene with "Sweet Child O' Mine".
• One of the songs Nick Carter used to sing before getting his big break was Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". This is the first three lines: "Uptown girl/She's been living in her uptown world/I bet she's never had a backstreet guy"
• "Spontaneous Apple Creation" by "The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown" depicts a bunch of surreal events, culminating with everybody in the world with an apple in his hand, with new creations of apples being an common event. Years later, the Apple computer company had iPods and various spin-off products like the iPhone and iPad being released with much media fanfare.
• In Depeche Mode's "Behind The Wheel": thanks to MST3K, it's hard to hear the line "Tonight I'm in the hands of fate" without chuckling.
• A Pink Floyd bootleg was named Who Was Trained Not To Spit On The Fan?, after a line of the song "Dogs", since Roger Waters spat in the face of a disgruntled fan during a song (though it wasn't "Dogs" itself, but either "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" or the encore). This incident later inspired him to write The Wall.
• 1985. Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You," a song sung from the perspective of the "other woman," becomes a big hit. Fast forward ten years, to her film Waiting to Exhale. Guess what Whitney's role in the film is....
• Way back when, Black Sabbath made the titular character of the hit song "Iron man" a villain, so as to avoid a lawsuit from Marvel Comics over their Iron Man. Skip ahead to 2008. This song was used to promote the film adaptation.
• Primus' video for "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver" drew controversy for perceived reference to Winona Ryder, despite the names being spelled and pronounced differently, and was frequently compared to a disastrous ad campaign for batteries featuring the Puttermans. Primus quickly passed off on both, saying they meant no reference to Ryder, and that the cowboys in the video were meant to resemble classic plastic toys. Even fifteen years later, however, the lead guitarist's mask bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush, frequently accused of playing cowboy.
• Guns N' Roses bass guitarist Duff McKagan moved to Los Angeles, because you could "get to the top in Seattle and still be nowhere".
• When Seth and drummer Tim Morse came up with the band, they picked the title to be "really dumb and offensive". Years later, GG Allin would write a song parodying how people saw him as dumb and offensive, and, by pure coincidence, named it... Anal Cunt.
• Stan Freberg recorded a parody of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1957. Among other gags, Elvis rips his jeans during the fourth verse, lamenting that it was his "third pair today". Amusing enough when he was known for his pelvic thrusts, but considering how much weight he gained later in his career...
• "Complete Control" by The Clash has the line, "You're my Guitar Hero!" Funny enough as it is, but the song is also included in Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, and is also downloadable for Rock Band, whose creators created the original Guitar Hero.
  • The album Sandinista features children ^note the sons and daughter of Mickey Gallagher, who contributed keyboards to various tracks on the album singing musically Lighter and Softer versions of two of their earlier songs, "Guns of Brixton" and "Career Opportunities". At the time the joke was just the novelty of children singing about non-child-friendly subject matter - nowadays this sounds like a parody of Kidz Bop, a series of compilation where children sing cover versions of top 40 hits (many of which also have age inappropriate themes).
• Eminem has a plethora of examples that became this:
  • On his song, "The Way I Am", he raps, "I'm so sick and tired of bein admired/that I wish that I would just die or get fired/and dropped from my label and stop with the fables/I'm not gonna be able to top on "My Name is.."". The album The Slim Shady LP, which includes "My Name Is..." sold some 4 million copies in the U.S. The Marshall Mathers LP, which includes "The Way I Am," has sold some 10 million copies in the U.S. This song is preceded by the skit "Steve Berman," which is about the eponymous record company employee telling Eminem that he needs to "change the album or it's not coming out," because he "can't sell" an album full of "songs about homosexuals and vicodin."
  • During the third verse in "Without Me", Eminem takes a shot at Moby, claiming "Nobody listens to Techno!" Several years later, Kesha, Lady Gaga and other techno-based artists take over the charts, though techno was popular in the 1990s too, as Moby's Play (1999) was a gigantic success even then. Just as hilariously, the year "Without Me" came out (2002), Kylie Minogue and her electro-poppy "Cant Get You Out of My Head" take over the charts worldwide, as — of course — does Moby with "We Are All Made of Stars."
  • Also, Eminem is dressed up like Robin in the music video for "Without Me". Robin's inclusion in Batman: Arkham City has him looking like Eminem in that video◊. And in 2015, the Robin of Batman: Arkham Knight has a Comic-Book Fantasy Casting when he looks like Eminem in the similar look and feel.
  • Becomes equally hilarious as the "Rapmobile" in the Without Me video is a Lamborghini Murcielago (Spanish for "bat"). In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne himself would drive a Murcielago.
  • In "My 1st Single," Eminem suggests The Source would be so low as to find journalistic merit in child pornography. In 2004, this was a horrible accusation to make of anyone. In 2016... not so much.
  • In Skylar Grey’s “C’mon Let Me Ride”, Eminem says “I’m the cousin of Godzilla”. Skip to 2020, now he has a song called Godzilla!
  • All of his songs that mention weird beards, such as "Business" ("‘Til we grow beards, get weird and disappear / Into the mountains, nothin’ but clowns down here"), "Deja Vu" ("He’s acting weird again, he’s really beginning to scare me / Won’t shave his beard again and he pretends he doesn’t hear me"), and "Berzerk" ("Grow your beard out, just weird out") became this as of June 2017, when Eminem himself started growing a beard to the surprise of many people. As of 2020, he still sports it, so it's safe to say many are used to it now.
  • In "I'm Back", the bravura passage at the end of the second verse ("miiind with no sense-in-it, friiied schizo-phrenic, whose eyeees get so-squinted, I'm bliiind from smoke in-'em-with myyy windows tinted, with niiine limos rented, doin' liiines of coke in 'em with a bunch of guys hoppin' out all hiiigh and indo-scent-ed...") ends with a big gasp for air. Funny in 2000 - hilarious considering just how much more technical Eminem would get over the years. As early as 2002, "White America" and "Lose Yourself" contain far more complex passages that he manages without audible effort. And once you've heard his post-2010 material like "Rap God", "Vegas" and "Godzilla" (or even his not-ultra-technical cuts like "Untitled", "Cold Wind Blows" or "Venom"), on "I'm Back" he sounds like he hasn't even finished warming up. The gasp therefore goes from a Badass Boast into amusingly contrived overreacting.
  • Eminem did an interview with MTV in 1999 where he made fun of speed rapping ("I was like, drlbldrlbldrlbldrlbl... I thought that the faster you rapped, the better you was") and joked with the interviewer that when he had nothing left to say, that was when the love songs would come out. By 2004 (his retirement album) he was starting to make Masochism Tango-themed love songs which became a consistent theme in his later career. By the mid-2010s and early 2020s, he would arguably be most famous for his hyper-technical speed rapping (which is often criticised as pointless).
  • The video and single cover art for "We Made You" shows Slim Shady shirtless, in a fur deerstalker cap and facial hair, standing behind an American government desk (attempting to seduce Sarah Palin). It's difficult to watch it after the 2021 storming of the Capitol without seeing it as Shady parodying the Q Shaman, as several outlets noted.
• Negativland managed to put a real doozy in their "Dispepsi" album, written in 1997. "Why Is This Commercial" closes with a mention of Michael Jackson's partnership with Pepsi (and a snippet from a reworked "Billie Jean" from Thriller). Right up next is "Happy Heroes," a song about idol worship. This was written well after the debacle he got caught in, but when further allegations surfaced and fell in 2004-5, it became this:
  If someone told, no,
  Accused [me] of fu-*bleep*-cking teenaged boys and beating others cold,
  You'd side with me
  And enough of you would doubt it, which would likely set me free
  You'd say I didn't do it, and that anyone could tell
  "'Cause he's smooth and smart and pretty, and he reads his lines so well
  • Their "Moribund Music of the Seventies" radio series in the early '80s was mocking the idea of the 70's becoming nostalgic. If you listened to it today not knowing what the joke was, it's almost identical to present day radio stations that specialize 70's nostalgia.
• The Plain White T's song "Hey There Delilah" was originally released in 2005. It contained the line "Two more years you'll be done with school and I'll be making history". Two years later, it was re-released and went to #1.
• Simon & Garfunkel's song "Old Friends", from the 1968 Bookends album, includes the line "How terribly strange to be seventy." Paul Simon, who penned that line, turned 70 in October 2011; Art Garfunkel, who sang it, turns 70 a month later.
• In an interview from 1986, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell said that spending more than $500 on a guitar didn't feel right. Circa 2010, he bought a guitar that cost as much as a house.
• The 1967 Willie Nelson song "San Antonio" includes the line "I must admit I'm just a homeboy."
• In 2012, rapper Cory Gunz was arrested for carrying a gun illegally.
• Kesha's single We R Who We R, released in October 2010, has a moment in the video featuring two women (actresses/backing dancers) in the video who would get people guessing their identities. Much funnier now that the meme is still going on... and their outfits have become The Red Stapler to Ke$ha fans.
• Just listening to Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday" when the song itself has become it.
  • To whom? Make that "Yesterdays Hero" by the Bay City Rollers.
• The song Nigger Hatin' Me by Johnny Rebel. As of the election of Barack Obama, it sounds like he's begging rather than rallying:
  Hey! Mr. President! What do you say?
  When are we whites gonna have our day?
  The niggers had theirs such a long, long time
  I'm white, and it's time that I had mine!
• There's a song called Disneyland from an obscure 80's musical called Smile that's just chock full of these. First off, the lyrics were written by Howard Ashman from before he teamed up with Alan Menken to become one of Disney's greatest songwriting duos. Not only that, but the woman singing is Jodi Benson, most famous as the voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989). There's even a reference to a magic carpet!
• The Canadian prog rock band Rush have a song called "I Think I'm Going Bald" that muses on hair loss. It was based off guitarist Alex Lifeson's fear of losing his long blonde hair and going bald in the future. The song was released in 1974. Lifeson in the 70s◊. Lifeson circa 2007◊.
• Carly Rae Jepsen may have fallen into Memetic Mutation status with her Signature Song "Call Me Maybe" but the video proved to be Hilarious in Hindsight - as only a few months later, a 21-year-old girl in Nottingham, UK was seen doing pretty much the same thing (except to "A Change Will Do You Good" by Sheryl Crow). Same sort of dance routine, but not the same song.
• Miley Cyrus retweeted this post showing a YouTube video of an ABC News feature of her on her Hannah Montana "Best Of Both Worlds" tour in 2008, where the Disney star displays pictures in her dressing room of 1960s supermodel Twiggy and her short pixie haircut, commenting to the reporter that she would like to get a "Twiggy haircut" someday. Fast-forward to the summer of 2012, and Miley getting a short pixie haircut.
• Back in The '90s, there was a Star Wars Filk Song about Vader to the tune of "Mickey Mouse Club," with "Lord D-A/R-T-H/V-A-D-E-R" as the recurring line. Now the Mouse (or should I say the Vrelt) has Lucasfilm...
• Minneapolis rockers Soul Asylum released a song called "Never Really Been" in 1986, contaning the line "And where will you be / in 1993." Cut to 1993, when Soul Asylum, after years of commercial failure, is playing the song on MTV Unplugged after finally breaking through to worldwide fame the year before.
• Bob Sinclar's single from 2000 "I Feel For You", seen here is a trifecta of Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The actress Anna Geislerova (from the Czech Republic who appears in the video as "the girl who became a star at 23" looks almost like Jessica Chastain - and this was before Jessica Chastain became part of the Hollywood Hype Machine and Memetic Badass that she is now.
  • Her "showgirl" outfit was around before The Trafford Centre took the cowgirl, Miss Kitty and Ms. Fanservice tropes up to eleven. Fast forward to February 2013, and The Trafford Centre was running its BeautyShowdown event - which caused some controversy and had Unfortunate Implications.
  • Even more ironically, as of 2012-2013, Anna Geislerova has become somewhat more popular as a result of the video... and is considered to look like Jessica Chastain — although, shouldn't that be the other way round?
• Dido's song White Flag is especially funny if you're a troper as it contains the line:
  But, I will go down with this ship.
• Rihanna recently made a trip to a Miami strip club and reportedly dropped $8,000 on the "entertainment" there. Makes listening to the first verse of Pour It Up rather interesting nowadays.
• In "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", Bono sings "I have scaled these city walls only to be with you". 24 years later, Bono and the Edge would write the songs for the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, about a character whose speciality is scaling city walls.
• Talking Heads' song Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) which includes David Byrne's assertion multiple times that he's 'a tumbler' has gotten funnier after a certain website came into being.
• Britney Spears did this with her single "Womaniser" in 2008 which is a trifecta of this trope:
  • First of all, it reflects -gate scandals involving politicians. (Which Britney herself had one of)
  • The Hell-Bent for Leather waitress that Britney played ended up becoming a case of Life Imitates Art and The Red Stapler, with people looking on eBay for her outfit/
  • Then it looks now hilarious referring to the new Work Bitch! single - similar sort of video and sound
• The parody song How To Kill A Brand, which mocks the PlayStation 3, is this nowadays. The line "Use Blu-ray, which I don't need" is especially funny.
• The Splendora song "Busted" includes the line, "You like to watch Beavis And Butthead". Two years later, the band would perform the theme song to the show's spin-off.
• Amy Lee once sang a song called "My Cartoon Network" where she complains about how she can't watch the shows she loved on tour, like Samurai Jack and The Powerpuff Girls. Over ten years later, with all those shows having been finished for years, many of the little kids who watched those shows see the song in a different light then intended.
  • In 2016, this takes on new irony as both Jack and the Girls are returning to Cartoon Network with all new episodes.
• Taylor Swift's first single, released in 2006, was called "Tim Mcgraw". She would later sing a duet with him called "Highway Don't Care" in 2013.
  • Also, "Welcome To New York" probably makes the chorus of "Mean" a whole lot funnier than she initially intended.
• This video from Princess Superstar for her 2007 single "Exceeder" as seen at YouTube featured Casey Batchelor, better known for being in Celebrity Big Brother. It can now be seen in a different light now that Channel 5 aired Celebrity Big Brother, and is retroactively hilarious. Also Harsher in Hindsight too, in a sort of way, as people at the time thought she'd get overexposure in the media back then... which she did, kinda.
• Charlene's song "I've Never Been to Me" contains the line "I took the sweet life, I never knew I'd be bitter from the sweet." Recorded in 1977, the song did not become a hit until 1982 — by which time Charlene had left the music business and moved to England ... where she was working in a sweet shop.
• The first verse of DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince's 1988 Breakthrough Hit, "Parents Just Don't Understand", involves the fashion-conscious protagonist arguing with his mother about her making him wear embarrassingly out-of-date clothes to school, such as "bell-bottom Brady Bunch trousers" and a shirt which is "plaid with a butterfly collar". Not long after the single was released, trends in The '90s would swing back to the kinds of "retro" clothing that were a punchline only a few years before. Perhaps the Fresh Prince's mom was just ahead of the curve?
• In 2000, *NSYNC were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live and made a cameo on a 7 Degrees Celsius sketch as the newest boy band sensation No Refund. They performed a joke song ("Supersize It!") that consisted entirely of food innuendos. Fast forward to 2009, and we have "Carry Out", a song by Timbaland and former member Justin Timberlake, and the lyrics are nothing but food innuendos.
• In 2005, John Denver's song "Rocky Mountain High" was named the second state song of Colorado. Seven years later, marijuana was legalized there, giving the song a whole new meaning to many.
• In 1960, The Crickets released their hit song "I Fought the Law". Fast forward to the 90's, and Namco produces a Fighting Game series where you can indeed fight the Law.
• Elwood (or possibly Dan Aykroyd in an emcee persona) kicks of the "Briefcase Full Of Blues"-album with the phrase: "Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to the Universal Amphitheatre. Well, here it is, the late 1970s, going on 1985, and you know, so much of the music we hear today is... pre-programmed electronic disco, we never get a chance to hear master bluesmen practicing their craft any more. By the year two thousand and six, the music known today as the Blues will exist only in the classical records department of your local public library. So tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, while we still can, let us welcome, from Rock Island, Illinois, the Blues band of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues—The Blues Brothers!" We now live in the year 2014, and blues, jazz, soul and funk are still very much living genres, largely thanks to the pop-cultural impact of the Blues Brothers.
• The metal news site Metalsucks.net ran an article stating that Chris Broderick had left Megadeth, and had been replaced by Jeff Loomis as an April Fools Joke in 2014. Loomis actually DID join another band as a replacement guitarist later that year - he replaced Nick Cordle of Arch Enemy.
  • It became even funnier when Chris Broderick actually DID leave Megadeth - 9 days after Loomis joined Arch Enemy.
• In 1999, Kenny Chesney had a #1 hit with "You Had Me from Hello", inspired by a line spoken by Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. Six years later, Chesney was very briefly married to Zellweger.
• The Expendables: The Musical contains the lyric "PG-13 is for pussies!" Guess what rating the third film got.
• Katy Perry's single "Wide Awake", released in May 2012, featured her sending a flash of light out of her body, in the video here. Cue The Eleventh Doctor doing exactly the same thing, in Trenzalore, on Christmas Day 2013. Unbelievable how art imitates art. This makes the video a lot funnier than it was originally intended to be.
• Sam Obernik is prone to this trope as well. Her single (co-produced by Linus Loves) "Stand Back" was a club hit in 2003, now in obscurity, but as of 2003 the dance moves and video became an Internet viral / sensation as of August 2014. Definitely hilarious in hindsight, considering how the video was less well-known at the time (it was in the pre-YouTube age).
• A 1966 corporate memo discussing the idea of Star Trek stars recording albums jokingly suggested "Bill Shatner doing bird calls" as a possibility. That might have been better than his eventual "singing" experiments.
• When Estelle (best known to some now for being the voice of Garnet in Steven Universe, although that is seen as Flanderization by some.) released her single "American Boy" in March 2008, most saw it as a pop song about a transatlantic romance. However, the trend of British men dating (and marrying) American women became popular in the UK as of 2012, and now it becomes even funnier when the popularity of American Woman-British Man (AWBM or BMAW) relationships is in full swing, now in 2015.
• There were two music videos made for No Doubt's 1995 single "Spiderwebs", the first of which involved exploding telephones: The song was about an unwanted suitor calling at all hours of the day, so putting phones in the video made sense, but there seemed to be no reason for having them explode beyond the fact that explosions always look cool. However, around the start of The New '10s, the expression "blowing up one's phone", meaning constantly calling or texting someone, came into use, making the exploding telephones seem like a stealth Visual Pun for the lyrical theme.
  • "Tragic Kingdom", a song about the commercialization of Disney that includes references to Disneyland attractions, ends with a seemingly off-the-cuff musical quote from John Williams' Star Wars title theme: At the time, this was probably a nod to Star Tours, the Star Wars-themed motion simulator attraction, but now the reference is even more appropriate since Star Wars is now actually a Disney property.
• Billy Joel was involved in a series of minor car accidents in the Oughties. He wasn't seriously injured in any of them ^note  If he were, this would be Harsher in Hindsight. , but it does make these lines from "You May Be Right" a little funnier:
  And you told me not to drive.
  But I made it home alive.
  So you said that only proves that I'm insane.
• Country Music parodist Cledus T. Judd's "Hell No" (a takeoff of "Hell Yeah" by Montgomery Gentry) laments the decline of both country and rap, nearly a decade before the rise of oft-maligned "bro-country" (a heavily rap-influenced subgenre) in The New '10s.
• Similarly, The Bellamy Brothers' 1987 release "Country Rap" can be seen as this for many of the same reasons.
• Look through many of the singles, album titles and album cuts singer Lesley Gore recorded in The '60s, from "That's The Way Boys Are", "Wonder Boy", "My Town, My Guy And Me", the album titles Lesley Gore Sings of Mixed-Up Hearts and Boys, Boys, Boys, and especially the album cut "Sometimes I Wish I Were A Boy", along with many interviews and articles she'd participate in for teen magazines offering advice on dating boys, with the knowledge that by 2004, Lesley would come out as a lesbian. By Lesley's admission, to be fair, she hadn't truly discovered her sexuality until 1966 while attending Sarah Lawrence College, and mentioned she was as boy-crazy in her high school days as any straight female.
• During the bridge of Paul and Storm's "Write Like the Wind", a song begging George R. R. Martin to finish A Song of Ice and Fire more quickly, they claim "you'll hold up the HBO show!" As of Season 6, Game of Thrones has overtaken the books and started producing original material based on plot summaries provided by Martin, with The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring nowhere to be seen as of yet.
• Italian rapper Caparezza in one of his songs said "If the movie theater is full, the film sucks". The one and only movie he appeared in, What A Beautiful Day, was at the time (2011) the highest-grossing Italian film ever. No word from him on whether it sucked or not...
• German "Neue Deutsche Welle" hit "Ich will Spaß" by Markus. When gasoline price was still around 1.10 DM, he sang something like "and if it's 2.10, sod it, it'll have to work". Gasoline prices rose and rose, they recorded a second version with 3.10, which still got surpassed by reality soon (backconverted from Euro to DM). Of course, if you have to drive a car, it might as well be filed as Harsher in Hindsight...
• Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" begins with the immortal line "one pill makes you larger" — but considering how old they've gotten, that line has probably taken on an entirely new meaning for some of the male bandmates.
• Save Ferris's "Spam" includes the line "They said if I eat it for dinner, that I would grow up like Bruce Jenner". The singer is a buxom brunette named Monique Powell.
• The Grottomatic song "Avatar" was originally written out of Tim's fascination with reports of countless audiences watching Avatar and quickly getting depressed. The film itself started out as a hit but became a flop in the long run, making the singer sound even more pathetic.
• Joe Nichols' "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off" contains the line "Them pantyhose ain't gonna last too long / If the DJ puts Bon Jovi on". The week it hit #1, Bon Jovi's first country release "Who Says You Can't Go Home" entered the country music top 40.
• Agoraphobic Nosebleed addressed the issue of live appearances on "Question of Integrity" on 2009's Agorapocalypse with the lines "You wanna see ANb live!? We'll take the deposit and not show up! / Send over DJ Nevermind and a couple'a sluts, givin' lapdances and sucking dick / as the Honky Reduction ten-inch spins!". Guess who started doing shows six years later?^note not counting the impromptu surprise set that they gave during Pig Destroyer's set at the 2003 New England Metal and Hardcore Festival
• Bette Midler once approached Bruce Springsteen about recording a cover of his song "Pink Cadillac", but Springsteen turned her down on the basis that it wasn't a "girl's song". Four years later, Natalie Cole released her version, which became a top 5 Billboard hit and would eventually be regarded as one of her Signature Songs (and far more associated with her than Springsteen).
• In the fandom for the vocal synthesizer program Synth V, an in-joke involved taking Genbu's voicebank and changing his parameters to make him sound like the UTAU voicebank Kasane Teto. On April 2nd, 2023, Kasane Teto's Youtube channel released videos announcing a real Synthesizer V voicebank for Teto. Fans noticed and made videos comparing and pairing Genbu's Teto impression and Teto's genuine Synthesizer V bank.
• "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles laments that the rise of video technology had deprecated the music industry. The song was released in 1979. In 1981, it would be one of the first songs featured on MTV, the station that kicked off a revolution in the music industry. Part of that revolution was the popularization of the music video, which in turn contributed to the rise of some of the biggest superstars in modern music history.
  • Fast-forward further to today, and you can search for, listen to, and purchase virtually any song you want online through platforms that also cater to video content, such as YouTube and iTunes. And with the exponential rise of podcasts in the late 10s and the shift from cable to streaming services, it seems the radio star has risen from the grave!
• Gorillaz has referenced The Powerpuff Girls in the past (specifically, the artwork for G-Sides shows 2D wearing a Mojo Jojo shirt) and vice versa (an ad for a Gorillaz concert shows up in some newspapers in the Powerpuff Girls movie, and there's a side character in it drawn in the band's signature art style). Fast forward to 2018 and the band has to get a replacement for Murdoc while he's in jail. Who do they get? Ace, the leader of the Gangreen Gang. It gets funnier when you realize that some people have been comparing Murdoc and Ace's physical appearances for quite some time, and even more so when people at first confused Ace for a redesigned Murdoc.
• Gotye and his song partner Kimbra came out of left field with their "Somebody That I Used To Know", which became a huge hit in 2012. However, neither of them had any mainstream success afterwards and are remembered as another One-Hit Wonder. They quite literally became just "somebody that we used to know".
• Gladys Knight and the Pips' 1973 hit "Midnight Train to Georgia" has lost much of its meaning. The original song is about a would-be actor who abandons his dreams of stardom after much hardship in Los Angeles, and returns home to Georgia. In The New '10s, Atlanta has become a center of the motion picture industry, and moving from Los Angeles in search of work is a valid and increasingly popular lateral career move for young actors.
• The British Go-Gos from The '60s are best known for their novelty Christmas song from 1964, "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek." Two and a half years later, "The Evil of the Daleks" introduced such friendly Daleks as the song describes.
• In 2004, minor British electroclash group Soho Dolls released their debut single "Prince Harry", a satire on shallow American girls coming to study at British universities in the deluded hope of pulling a member of the royal family. Fourteen years later...
• The album cover◊ for Soundgarden's 1994 album Superunknown, which featured "Black Hole Sun", was a distorted photo of the bandmembers above an upside-down burning forest. On April 10, 2019, astronomers presented the first-ever picture of a black hole, and it looked incredibly similar to the cover. Even Soundgarden's Twitter account noted this.
• Thanks to the use of "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler in Short Circuit 2, the music video for the song somehow foreshadows the events of Red Dead Redemption II, especially with the final mission of Chapter 6. To quote The Nostalgia Critic: Never has a battle between a ratty, sick, dying cowboy protagonist and a frumpy old fat mole seemed so epic!
• The song "Bad Luck Sammie" from alternative rock band The Figgs' 1996 album Banda Macho is about an extremely unlucky man who, among other misfortunes, always had the New England Patriots as his "football favorites." Months after the album was released, the once-terrible Patriots made the Super Bowl. And that isn't even mentioning how the song came a few years before New England picked some guy named Tom Brady in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft...and only ended up winning six Super Bowls in the 21st century.
  • As noted in the comments in the YouTube video above, The Figgs did rectify this during a 2012 performance of "Bad Luck Sammie," where they changed the titular loser's football favorites to the much more apropos New York Jets.
• "Brenda's Iron Sledge," of Robyn Hitchcock's Black Snake Diamond Role, features the line "Please don't call me Reg, that's not my name." CD editions of the album come with "Grooving On A Inner Plane," where Robyn announces the bass solo with "Sock it to me, Reginald!" The bassist was named Matthew.
• Tupac Shakur's declaration in 1995 that "Though it seems heaven sent, we ain't ready to see a black president". Thirteen years later... yes, we were. Also counts as Heartwarming in Hindsight.
• Italian singer Francesco Salvi for his nationally broadcasted performance of his parody/novelty song "Esatto" surrounded himself with dancers in hip clothes and wearing big animal masks, and he's seen wearing in the beginning a yellow raincoat. The video is from 1989, by the way.
• Lloyd Cole's "So You Like To Save The World" can't be heard with a straight face anymore post-Greta Thunberg (even if the Granola Girl addressed in the song is obviously already a grown-up).
• Method Man by Wu-Tang is full of pop culture references, and you'd be forgiven to think the words "catchin' 'em all" would be one of them, even though the song came first.
• More like "Awesome in Hindsight", Argentinean rock band Callejeros wrote and released a song in 2003 called "Imposible". The song was about a bunch of seemingly "imposible" wishes by part of its singer, Patricio Fontanet. However, some of those things did materialize in real life:
  • "Que decir aborto suene a legal y que no sea un pecado mortal"^note That saying "abortion" sounds legal, and not as a mortal sin. Argentina legalized abortion at the tail end of 2020, with the law itself passing on the early days of 2021.
  • "Al fin van a dejar de rezarle a la televisión"^note At last, people will stop kneeling to the TV. While not entirely true, after 2008 Argentinean hegemonic media (especially those media affiliated with, or part of, Grupo Clarín and group La Nación) became heavily scrutinized and suspected of manipulating the information, thus breaking the illusion that media was telling the truth on a wider scale.
  • "Por fin el gobierno va a ser de una mujer"^note At last, a woman will lead the government. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner being voted as Argentina's president and her eight-year government which started in 2007.
• "B-U-T-T Out" from The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen: The Case of the Thorn Mansion. It's pretty much a diss track by the twins directed at their younger sister Elizabeth Olsen. They might have been doing their sister a favor, now that Elizabeth is best known for playing Scarlet Witch, who is a twin who has twin kids. After the release of WandaVision, many joked that the video was one of Wanda's traumatic flashbacks that Agatha overlooked.
• The Charlie Daniels Band released a song titled "In America" back in 1980. Nowadays, more people would think of Bandit Keith's infamous Verbal Tic from Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series.
• Sally Shapiro's intended farewell single was a Break-Up Song titled "If You Ever Wanna Change Your Mind". Sure enough, in late 2021, the duo got back together.
• In a case straddling the line between Hilarious and Harsher, David Lee Roth's video for "A Lil' Ain't Enough", ends with a time skip to October 10, 2021 (which was Dave's 67th birthday) and he appears as an overweight, barely mobile version of his 30-year-younger self. In 2021, Roth was indeed a far cry from the Hunk of 1991, albeit a skinny version, and it was also the year he announced his retirement.
• The Danish rockband Nephew had a hit in 2004 with the word salad song ''A Wannabe Darth Vader''. Then a decade later ...
• The Swedish ethnologist Richard Dybeck was not happy when he found out that a small song he had written for a festive occation in 1845 had been published as part of a collection: "The extremely mediocre lyrics for this song, which are clearly something that has been casually written down, should never have been published. Any right-thinking human should be appalled." The song in question was called ''Du gamla, du fria'', and is today the National Anthem of Sweden.
• The South Park 25th Anniversary Concert had a revised take on the song "Colorado Farms"^note The song that heralds the birth of the marijuana-producing Tegridy Farms where Trey Parker starts singing "Joe Biden terk ma jerb!". Less than two months after the concert, Joe Biden issued an executive order pardoning anyone convicted of possession of marjuana.
• The 2006 MC Lars song "Space Game" drops a Futurama reference — "Hey Fry, look, we can still be friends / I won’t ask Leela out again." The first direct-to-DVD Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score, released a year later, with a major plot arc being a mature older man asking Leela out and Fry getting jealous. Said boyfriend's name? Lars.
• In My Life, a 1998 The Beatles Cover Album produced by George Martin, included Jim Carrey singing "I Am The Walrus". The song includes the lyric "I am the eggman" - Carrey would later play Dr. Robotnik, aka Eggman, in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
• YouTuber Manacymbal did a Magic: The Gathering-themed "We Didn't Start the Fire" parody titled "Cards on the Modern Banlist", citing MTGRemy as an inspiration. MTGRemy would go on to write his own Magic-themed Billy Joel parody, though his revolved around burn spells.
• In 2006, Nick Lachey had just separated from his wife Jessica Simpson and released his single "What's Left of Me". While shooting the video for the song, he started dating the Jessica stand-in played Vanessa Manillo (who later changed her name to Lachey after marrying him). The two have been together ever since meaning she actually did take what was left of him.
• The Turn of the Millennium saw Eminem deeply embroiled in a feud with Insane Clown Posse, during which Em released a sketch in which Ken Kaniff receives enthusiastic oral sex from two men heavily implied to be ICP, as Kaniff refers to them as J and Shaggy (the members of ICP). Flash forward to 19 years later. Eminem and ICP had squashed their beef back in the mid-2000's, and Eminem later cited ICP as one of his influences on his own style in 2013. In 2019, ICP have put out a song called "Be Safe" that sees Shaggy getting so into his rap that he blurts out "I might suck a dick—" followed by a Record Needle Scratch as Shaggy realizes what he just rapped and then corrects himself, "—uh, I would never suck a dick!"

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