Lampshade Hanging / Music

Lampshades hung in music.

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• The Cooper Temple Clause song "Who Needs Enemies" contains the lines "a killer key change, is all you'll ever need" to instigate the key change for the chorus.
• The Prince song "1999" features the lyrics "I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray" and "I was dreamin' when I wrote this, so sue me if I go 2 fast".
• The Swedish song "Värsta schlagern" ("Such a Schlager"), sung by Markoolio and Linda Bengtzing, lampshades a lot of the tropes and clichés appearing in the Eurovision Song Contest. The song itself is written and orchestrated like a typical "schlager", only the lyrics lampshade. Examples include a bridge going (my translation from the Swedish): "What they reward with twelve points, is a sumptuous chorus", part of the chorus going: "There are stars and they're burning, there's the world and it's disappearing, and the title should hit you like a punch in the stomach, it's such a schlager" and one memorable part going: "If you don't want to ruin your chances of winning, you can steal something from ABBA and see the risk disappear."
• Another Swedish song, this one by Ravaillacz, "En riktig jävla schlager" (A real damn schlager) follows a similar pattern but maintains a more upbeat and silly tone making it a clear parody.
• "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen contains the line, "It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift", referring to the sequence of chords played during that line.
• The Cat Empire song "One Four Five" contains a chorus which simply reapeats the phrase "One, four, five." over and over. When each word is sung, the music itself plays that chord progression associated with the song AKA a I-IV-V chord progression.
• The lyrics of the Frank Black & the Catholics song "Bullet" declare "And if you don't like my melody, I'll sing it in a major key..." at which point the song indeed changes to a major key. After a few lines of this the lyric continues "let's take it back to that minor chord" and of course the song reverts to its original minor key.
• The start of the video for If U Seek Amy spells out the 'hidden' message in the lyrics very blatantly before the song begins.
• They Might Be Giants, "Ana Ng": at the bridge of the song, the lyrics go "when I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge: "I don't want the world I just want your half"".
• Da Vinci's Notebook's "Title of the Song" is all about this.
• Fish (former singer of Marillion) has a song called "Cliché" on his first solo album. It's a collection of every sappy love song cliché in existence: the self-deprecation actually works beautifully, and the man manages to gets away with his love song and slap it on an album marketed to progheads. This is also where you start to get a glimpse of the Leonard Cohen vibes that will crop up often in his writing.
• In Tower of Power's "Diggin' on James Brown", one of the lyrics goes, "Take it to the BRIDGE..." and upon singing "bridge" the band starts playing the bridge.
  • Led Zeppelin includes a similar nod to James Brown in "The Crunge". Robert Plant unsuccessfully attempts to get the band to go to the bridge and says "Has anyone seen the bridge? Where's that confounded bridge?"
• In the Minutemen song "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing", the lyric claims the band, upon hearing "mortar shells" would "cuss more in our songs, and cut down on the guitar solos". A guitar solo, something uncharacteristic of the band, immediately follows.
• Ryan Adams' "Halloweenhead", right before the guitar solo.
• Bowling for Soup does this all the time. For instance, towards the end of No Hablos Inglas, Jaret asks "Do you like my band? (beat) Wait don't answer that."
• The entire text of "The Song That Goes Like This" from Spamalot is a blatant lampshading.
• The song "Must Have Done Something Right" by Relient K lampshades how cliched it is by chronicling the singer's attempts not to be cliched.
• The Beatles with "Only a Northern Song":
  "If you're listening to this song
  You may think the chords are going wrong
  But they're not
  He just wrote it like that
  When you're listening late at night
  You may think the bands are not quite right
  But they are
  They just play it like that"
• "Yes Sir I can Boogie" by Bacarra contains:
  Yes sir
  Already told you in the first verse
  And in the chorus
  But I will give you one more chance
• Elton John with "Your Song" details the process of writing a song ("a few of the verses, well, they've got me quite cross") and the excuses why it is the only gift he can give. He even explains why a rambling part of the song is because he is covering his bases about the color of the subject's eyes.
• The song "School's Out" by Alice Cooper lampshades how much he (and presumably the band) wanted to stick with the wordplay of the term 'principals' despite it being a hard word to match.
  Well we got no class
  And we got no principles
  And we got no innocence
  We can't even think of a word that rhymes
  • "Circus Fish" by Vermillion Lies does this as well:
  "You are my little garden trowel
  I don't know what to rhyme with trowel"
• In Luke Ski's Springsteen parody "Born To Lose", the music peters out shortly before the final verse, and Luke petulantly whines: "C'mon, guys, at least let's finish the song..."
• In "Hook", Blues Traveler deconstructs the pop song by explaining the process in the lyrics.
  Because the hook brings you back
  I ain't tellin' you no lie
  The hook brings you back
  On that you can rely
  There is something amiss
  I am being insincere
  In fact I don't mean any of this
  Still my confession draws you near
  To confuse the issue I refer
  To familiar heroes from long ago
  No matter how much Peter loved her
  What made the Pan refuse to grow?
  Was that the hook brings you back.
• In "Gold Soundz" by Pavement, the lyrics 'And they're coming to the chorus now' come just before the chorus.
• Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" has the lyric 'And the coloured girls go, doo dodoo,' etc. right before they do in the song.
• Bright Eyes' song "False Advertising" features the lyrics 'Now all anyone's listening for are the mistakes' right before a member of the band apologises for a mistake she's made.
• In the rather awkwardly titled Wire song "Map Ref. 41°N 93°W", lead singer Colin Newman actually sings the the word 'chorus' before the band dives into the first one. This maybe to flag up the unusually lengthy sequence of verses that appear before this, and is a good example of their experimentation with song structures.
• The Naked And Famous song called "Girls Like You". The chorus and hook being "Don't you know people write songs about girls like you?" (this being one of them)
• Lady Gaga's statement to her fans during her show "SURPRISE!! A pop show, and the bitch can SIIIING!!" Shouted during one of her shows. Also, due to context, heavily implied to be a no-so-subtle Take That at her contemporaries.
• Britney Spears
  • "Womanizer" has a conspicuous shot of a Nokia cell phone near the start. One of the appointments just visible in the frame is about a product placement meeting.
    • "Perfume" also has a conspicuous shot of Britney's latest perfume.
  • The start of the video for "If U Seek Amy" spells out the "hidden" message in the lyrics very blatantly before the song begins.
  • "Piece Of Me" is one long lamp shade hanging regarding her relationship with the press.
  • In the video for "Hold It Against Me" Britney pokes fun at a rumor from early in her career that she was an alien by crash landing to Earth as a pop star who shortly after takes the world by storm at the beginning of the video.
  • The Soprano and Gravel elements "Big Fat Bass (Feat. will.i.am)" is lampshaded with the lyric: "I can be the treble, you can be the bass".
  • Overprotected (Darkchild Remix) video has a woman obviously from a radio news channel saying how "Britney shows up at awards show half naked again".
• Lloyd Cole And The Commotions' "Forest Fire" remarks at the end that all the forest fire imagery in the song is "Just a simple metaphor/It's for a burning love".
• The Arcade Fire song "We Used To Wait" ends with a repetition of the chorus and
  We used to wait for it, we used to wait for it
  And now we're screaming, sing the chorus again
  I used to wait for it, I used to wait for it
  Hear my voice screaming, sing the chorus again
  Wait for it! Wait for it! Wait for it...!
• The original single version of "Forming" by The Germs ends with Darby Crash ad-libbing a self-deprecating critique of the song itself:
  You're playing it all wrong. The drums are too slow, the bass is too fast, the chords are wrong, we're making the ending too long...I quit.
• Robby Roadsteamer's "They Laid Your Father Off From The Dick Factory" has an intro with an obviously synthesized flute lead - during said intro, Robby starts griping in-character about how they couldn't afford to hire a professional flautist just for the song, so the flute "sounds like a fuckin' keyboard effect!".
• Dream Theater lampshaded their chart success by calling their Greatest Hits Album Greatest Hit (...And 21 Other Pretty Cool Songs), since they only had one radio hit ("Pull Me Under").
• Robin Thicke hung a lampshade in his song "Blurred Lines":
  I feel so lucky...Hey, hey, hey...You wanna hug me?...Hey, hey, hey...What rhymes with hug me?...Hey, hey, hey
• King Crimson do this in "Happy with What You Have to be Happy With" pretty much all the way through. The chorus beings "I'm gonna have to write a chorus..." until it is repeated, at which point it becomes "I guess we'll repeat the chorus." The verses are given similar treatment.
  • Likewise, in "Elephant Talk," each verse lists words related to talking beginning with the corresponding letter of the alphabet; e.g, the first verse has lines like "arguments, agreements, answers, advice." Early in the fourth verse, Belew says, "These are words with a D this time."
• Rebecca Black lampshades her most famous song, "Friday", in her sequel/follow-up, "Saturday". While there are several lyrical references to "Friday" in the "Saturday" music video, the most blatant is when she shows up to the party, and everybody is surprised to see her (i.e., that she would even show her face anywhere after the fiasco of "Friday").
• In "Dear John" by Taylor Swift, there's the line "The girl in the dress wrote you a song...you should've known," lampshading her infamous tendency to write songs about her exes.
• In Jesus Christ Superstar: Technology Marches On in the title song.
  If you'd come today you could have reached a whole nation—
  Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication!
• One Direction has "What Makes You Beautiful", where one of the lines is "To prove I'm right, I put it in a song." This particular song, actually.
• In "Füchse" the Beginner compare themselves to a pack of foxes. The album/video version ends with a short dialogue where a caller informs Eißfeldt that foxes ain't pack animals and the latter goes "Oh well, it's a phat rhyme".
• Bo Burnham's song "Country Boy (Pandering)" is a parody of stadium country songs, in which Bo explains how they're built, and is therefore full of lampshade highlighting, such as "A rural noun, simple adjective" or "Y'all dumb motherfuckers want a key change?"
• The Casseurs Flowters, a duo of French rappers, have a song called "Inachevés", which translates to "Unfinished". At the end of his first verse, Orelsan rushes it by saying "Et à l'image de tout ce que j'ai accompli jusqu'à maintenant je vais même pas finir mon couplet", or "Just as all that I've accomplished until now, I won't even finish my verse".
• Kids Praise: Probably because the target audience was young children, the series didn't really indulge in this much until later installments: in the ninth album, Psalty's pet dog is piloting the plane they're flying in. At first, Psalty was horrified, until he was reminded that he'd trusted Charity Churchmouse to pilot the plane before that...
• In Waterparks's cover of Green Day's 'Hitchin' A Ride', at the end, Awsten says, "Wow, not as good as the original," jabbing the people who'd say just that. You can look in the comments section of this upload of the cover for proof on that. Doubles as a Take That!.
• Pixies' "U-Mass" concludes its brief final verse with the lyric "...and here's the last five" - the chorus, consisting of the lyric "it's educational!", is then repeated five more times before the song ends.

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