Anti-Love Song

"When I said you oughta marry me, when I said that we should settle down,
Well, I was pullin' your leg there, honey, I was just foolin' around!
I never meant to upset you, darling, I never meant to hurt anyone,
I was only kidding, baby, why don't you just put down that gun?"

— "Weird Al" Yankovic, "I Was Only Kidding"

For anyone who has burned out after one sappy love song too many, the cure is obvious: the Anti Love Song. This medicine comes in several flavors:

• The hate song, where you croon about your heart-breaking desire to kill somebody.
• The overdone song, where the lyrics get so purple you have to laugh.
• The subliminal message song, which sounds like a love song... at first.
• The weird context song, where you sing a straight love song, in circumstances that really don't fit.
• The lovesickness song, which is more about being far away from the one you love and feeling lonely as a result.
• The mocking Bait-and-Switch song, where you sing to the person about how they are truly and wholeheartedly loved for all their character flaws by... well, someone who certainly isn't you.

It is likely that the subliminal song will be misunderstood by at least half of the people who hear it, who will think it's a straight love song. This is especially true of advertisers, who will often use it without realizing what the lyrics mean.

On the other hand, some people get the joke and love it so much that they still use it unironically.

Normal break-up songs do not belong here. They have their own entry. Look at Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone": it's a break-up song, and it talks about how happy and free she is now, so it must go here, right? Wrong. It's not humorous, and it's not a parody of a love song. This is about music with some humor about it, even if it's black humor.

Compare Anti-Christmas Song, Spoof Aesop. See also Lyrical Dissonance. Contrast Silly Love Songs.

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Examples:

Comedy / Parody

• Tom Lehrer was the pioneer and undisputed master of the Anti-Love Song. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, in his albums Songs by Tom Lehrer and An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, he traumatized generations with songs like:
  • "When You Are Old and Gray":
    Since I still appreciate you
    Let's find love while we may
    Because I know I'll hate you
    When you are old and gray
  • "I Hold Your Hand in Mine":
    My joy would be complete, dear, if you were only here
    But still, I keep your hand as a precious souvenir
  • The bleeding-purple "The Masochism Tango":
    At your command
    Before you here, I stand
    My heart is in my hand—Ecch!
• Virginia O'Brien sang the dysfunctional torch song "Say That We're Sweethearts Again", later covered by Dorothy Shay (the "Park Avenue Hillbillie") and Harley Quinn.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic does at least one of these on every album, such as "I Was Only Kidding" and "I'm So Sick of You". He's parodied every sub-genre, too, from Prince's leers in "Wanna Be Ur Lover" (I don't have a library card, but do you mind if I check you out?) to break-up songs in "You Don't Love Me Anymore" (I still remember the way that you laughed / when you threw me down the elevator shaft), "One More Minute" (I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue / Than spend one more minute with you), and "Since You've Been Gone" (I feel almost as bad as I did / when you were still here). He also wrote a mild-affection-song, "Good Enough For Now."
  • Possibly the funniest one of these is "Do I Creep You Out?", a stalker-related parody of overblown love songs (and specifically American Idol-winner Taylor Hicks' song "Do I Make You Proud"):
    I like to feel the warm spot on your chair
    Sometimes I drool
    And usually I stare
    My precious one
    I saved that gum
    That you threw in the garbage!
  • From the same album Confessions Part 3 continues the theme of confessions by being way too honest with his significant other.
  • "Melanie" was an earlier Stalker with a Crush style love ballad that ends with him jumping out of the 16th story window above her apartment to get her attention. He may be dead but he still loves her.
  • "Pancreas", about...well...a guy who loves his pancreas.
• The Arrogant Worms wrote the weird context "Log Into You," about a computer geek with pick-up lines like I gotta open up your motherboard — put my Pentium inside.
• The Axis Of Awesome's "How to Write a Love Song" is a parody of R&B love ballads, right down to commenting on a random spoken word section, a key change and the various elements in the music video.
• Mötley Crüe wrote a song called "This Ain't A Love Song" in their Saints of Los Angeles album
• The Capitol Steps did exactly the same joke as the Arrogant Worms in "Nerd Perfect Blues" and "Yuppie Love".
• Da Vinci's Notebook has the weird-context "Window-Washing Cowboy," which is by far the most tragic tale about doomed love you will ever hear if you only hear songs about window washers. They also wrote "Title Of The Song," the perfect generic love song for all occasions.
• There's a good reason Stephen Lynch rebuffs enthusiastic female applause when he announces he's going to sing a "song for the ladies..."
• Mitch Benn does a lot of these. In "Imagine You Were Mine" the singer is a Stalker with a Crush, and the final verse reveals he's composing this in prison, having broken the restraining order. "Now He's Gone" is a parody of 1950s Teenage Death Songs songs like "The Leader of the Pack", about a girl who kills her boyfriends before they can cheat on her. "These Ghoulish Things" is a gothic song with a man describing somebody as various horrible things in a complementary way, and then getting confused when she takes offense.
• Sam Kinison's infamous "You Fucking Whore" (preceded by his equally infamous "emotional tampon" rant) expresses how every guy has felt after a bad break-up, but wouldn't admit for fear of seeming like a Jerkass.
• Bill Bailey's love ballad, which "encompasses all aspects of love; betrayal, hatred and depression." It shifts from a traditional ballad to a vitrolic parody halfway through, (and the cute moment of watching a duck in the park comes back):
  The duck lies shredded in a pancake / Soaking in the hoi sin of your lies...
• The works of P.D.Q. Bach include a few such songs, such as "My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth", "The Queen To Me A Royal Pain Doth Give", and "Jane, My Jane" (For your hair is your crown (which you remove when you retire) / and your breath is like down (wind of a compost heap on fire)...)
• Also in the classical genre is Paul Sjolund's "Love Lost," settings of four great(?) anti-love poems.

  When you're away
  I'm restless, lonely, wretched, bored, dejected.
  Only here's the rub, my darling dear:
  I feel the same when you are here.

• On the album for A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, there's the song "A Cold, Cold Christmas". Colbert sings about a breakup wishing death upon the girl who broke up on him to extreme degrees. Sample lyrics:
  You hung up my heart like a stocking/Then went and stuffed it with coal/Now I want a cold, cold Christmas/To gnaw at the depths of your soul.
  • There's also Stephen and the Colberts' '80s hit "Charlene (I'm Right Behind You)", which has the subtext of being a song about a girl Colbert is stalking.
• Wilco's "Via Chicago" begins: "I dreamed about killing you again last night/ and it felt alright to me."
• Robby Roadsteamer's "I Hope You Get Ugly In Heaven" is a power-ballad duet where Robby offers up some already skewed romantic sentiment ("I hope you get ugly in heaven/ 'cause you might love someone, someone like me"), which guest vocalist Heidi Lee bluntly rebuffs:
  I hope you don't call me in heaven
  'Cause you were creepy back on earth
  I hope they have counseling in heaven
  'Cause maybe that'd help you take it down a notch
  • Even his complete non-sequitur reference to Pee-wee Herman is followed by her impassioned cry of "I love Pee-wee Herman/ but I doooooonnnn't love yooooooooouuuuu!"
• Lily Tomlin and Barry Manilow released the appropriately titled "Last Duet" as seen by the introductory lines:
  Lily: You creep
  Into my heart
  And make my heart burn
  Barry: You sneak
  Into my mind
  And make my head ache
  Both: There are things I long to tell you
  Lily: You're much too blond
  Barry: You snore
  Both: Look
  It's time to face the music
  Barry: Bye bye
  Lily: Don't slam the door
  And I don't want
  Barry: I don't want
  Lily: I don't want
  Barry: I don't want
  Both: No, I don't want your flowers anymore!
• "Jizz In My Pants". Anybody?
  • The Lonely Island also have "Dreamgirl", which starts out as a love song about an ugly, insane girl with bad fashion sense ("Yo, you're a vision in sweats with the neon pouch, half-eaten squirrel hanging out of your mouth"), and by the end suddenly becomes a love song about Chex Mix.
  • "Dick In A Box" may also be an example.
• "Happy Birthday Fungus Face" by Da Yoopers.
• Tim Minchin assures his love that if he didn't have her, he'd probably have someone else.
  • Although this one is less "anti-love" (he's at pains to express that he does love his wife, to whom the song's addressed) as it is "anti-stupid ideas about love like that everyone has exactly one soulmate with whom they fall in love instantly and permanently instead of forging a powerful connection over time with shared experience".
  • Minchin himself insists that the song is not about love at all, but about math. The lyrics are based on statistics, not cynicism.
    • Then of course there's his very genuine love song to an inflatable sex doll. And two-thirds of his other songs...
    • "Nothing Can Stop Us Now" is particularly effective thanks to the refreshingly realistic final line.
  • "You Grew On Me" might seem like this, but gets subverted, and you have to listen to it to see how comparing love to a tumor can describe true love and not come over as an Anti-Love Song.
• The German artist Farin Urlaub has a song titled "Phänomenal Egal", which narrates the singer's phenomenal indifference the singer feels towards his girlfriend.
  • Though if you read between the lines, it becomes clear that this is actually a true-blue love song in disguise. Word of God says Farin wanted to write a straightforward love ballad but thought he couldn't make it sound cool enough, hence the denying lyrics.
• It's the one-semester-of-Spanish, Spanish love song!
• This song compares a boy's laugh to a "constipated monkey".
• On SCTV, Dave Thomas and Catherine O'Hara do a brilliantly caustic, chipper impression of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
• Amy Rigby's "Cynically Yours", pretty much what it sounds like: "At the end of the day / I've got nothing good to say / But you don't suck / So I'm cynically yours".
• A possible Ur-Example of this type of song was written in 1913, "And The Green Grass Grew All Around", not to be confused with the similarly titled nursery rhyme "The Green Grass Grew All Around", although it's also somewhat a spoof of the latter, which was written just a year before. The song involves little Johnny Green and little Sally Brown, starting out all innocently enough like a cute little Edwardian era love song before we see hints of what's to come. Wealthy little Johnny promises to take care of Sally and share his wealth, seeing as how he already gave her a lot of gold. The second verse is a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment discussing Johnny and Sally buying a "Ford machine" and getting into a violent hit and run accident with a butcher cart. Instead of "green grass grew all around" it's "lamb chops/spare ribs flew all around", and the accident injured the poor butcher quite graphically possibly even killed him, apparently they heard his kidneys rupture, and his ribs were broken and his heart was physically damaged (although "broke his ribs and heart" could have been a heartbreak metaphor, although in the context it's unlikely). Third verse rejoins our lovebirds after marriage, and we find out that the meal they cook together isn't so tender of a moment when she poisoned his biscuits which kills him. The end is a sad version of the chorus with the last line an inappropriately happy version. So we have gold digging black widows, vehicular homicide, and graphic deaths described in great detail.Yeah, that's really a clean, wholesome innocent song about the 1910s.
• Just a couple of years before "And The Green Grass Grew All Around", H. H. Munro imagined a song writer who was so bored with writing endless glurge that he penned the following:
  How you bore me, Florrie,
  With those eyes of vacant blue;
  You'll be very sorry, Florrie,
  If I marry you.
  Though I'm easy-goin', Florrie,
  This I swear is true,
  I'll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
  If I marry you.
• The immortal Anna Russell recorded "Miserable", a Torch Song parody in which she sings of how awful it is to be happy without her lover and how she'd much rather be miserable (or as she renders it, "mizz-urr-ubb-ull") with him.
• "U Stink But I ❤ U" by Mucky Pup, which was originally credited to Billy And The Boingers, appearing on a flexidisk record along with "We're The Boingers" in Billy And The Boingers: Bootleg. The song is basically about how repulsive the singer's girlfriend really is ("I hate your polyester pantsuits, and your greasy hair, and the stuff between your braces, and your hairy derriere"), but he still loves her regardless.
• John Forster's "Way Down Deep (You're Shallow)" deserves a mention, as it's ostensibly a love song between two utterly-superficial people who claim to love one another because there's nothing in the other to love.
• Australian comedian Kat McSnatch's "Love" is a song of hatred towards love itself. She even wonders "why everybody wants it".
• Bo Burnham's "Repeat Stuff", which is all about taking the piss out of vapid commercialized "appeal to as general an audience as possible" pop love songs.
• Big Bad Bosses has two examples:
  • "Angel" starts out as a typical love song with Sephiroth picking up a woman at a club, but everything is sent completely off the rails when he summons Meteor to destroy the planet.
  • "Capture You" seems normal at first but near the end, it's revealed that the song's about Ganon wanting to have sex with Link.
• "My Baby Only Cares About Me" performed by Caroline Quinlan on John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme is a pastiche of Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me", which takes the premise utterly literally and concludes that a boyfriend with no interests whatsoever is boring and shallow.
  My baby don't read, or go to the flicks,
  My baby is as thick as a brick.
  I said, my baby,
  Is a bit,
  Of a prick.
• The Cantata Pansophical made a series of songs parodying Hamilton, following one of the story arcs from Critical Role. Their version of "Helpless", which was originally a love song, gets turned into a scene of a city being sacked by four ancient dragons, and the adventuring party Vox Machina are too powerless to do anything but run away and vow revenge.
• Flight of the Conchords: "The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)", in which the singer spends the song delivering backhanded compliments to a woman he's only mildly interested in.
• Amanda Palmer's "The Vegemite", which starts out as a for love song that becomes increasingly farcical as her partner's love of Vegemite becomes a wedge that drives them apart.
• Les Luthiers has "Siento algo por tí" (I feel something for you), a song from the fictional composer Huesito Williams.
  Ever since I saw you I feel something for you
  that I'm feeling for the first time;
  ever since I saw you I feel something for you
  something I've never imagined,
  and I want you to know [what it is]:
  I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!

Electronic

• Natalia Kills' song "Break You Hard". The opening lyrics are: "This is not a love song, honey if you want one better turn it off."
• Future Bible Heroes, "I'm Lonely (And I Love It)." I'm lonely and I love it / If only I'd dreamed of it / I'd have broken up with you so long ago...
• "Only This Moment" by Röyksopp can be interpreted in many ways, but these lyrics stand out:
  I know I might lose you by taking the chance
  But love without pain isn't really romance...
• La Roux's song "Tigerlily" is sung from the perspective of a Stalker with a Crush, though this might not become apparent until you get to the very creepy spoken-word section:
  Have you ever felt like you're being followed?
  Or watched the ones that held your stare?
  Turned around to see who's behind you to find there's no-one there?
  Lurking in the dark, there's someone who breathes you night and day
  There's a friend who wants so much more
  And if they can't have you, they'll never let you walk away...
• Frou Frou, "Close Up"
• IAMX's song "Missile" is about a destructive relationship.
• The Crystalline Effect, "When You're Asleep".
• Markus Schulz's "Nothing Without Me", which is sung from the perspective of a Yandere who claims her 'beloved' is nothing without her.
• Grimes's song "Flesh Without Blood," which is about a friendship falling apart.
  You hate, you bite, you lose
  After all, I just don't like you
  It's nice that you say you like me, but only conditionally

Folk

• The Flemish folk group Laïs had the very upbeat song "'t Smidje" (The Blacksmith) that chronicles the memories of a blacksmith who wants to get married but ends up with a worse deal than being alone:
  ''She's the most beautiful of all women
  but she's such a serpent
  She never shuts her yap
  She's never content

and

I've had it with being married

Why can't I be a widower

I'll stay in a corner

And keep myself out of danger.

• Ben Taylor's "Wicked Way"
• Surprisingly averted by Tom Waits with the song "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" about a lonely bar patron who falls for a woman who is also there alone.
  • Many of Waits' songs from his early years skit the edge between this trope and tender or touching love songs. His songs are often sad or gritty, depicting couples in rough points in their relationships, sadness after a relationship has ended, or lamenting what could have been.
• "Poison & Wine" by The Civil Wars is a rather poignant song about being in a caustic relationship with someone you can't help but love anyway. The majority of the song is just the mantra "I don't love you, but I always will" repeated over and over.
  • They did it again with "The One that Got Away", in which both parties wish they could go back in time and make it so that they'd never met.
• "Lemon Tree", written by Will Holt and performed by many other singers. (It was based on the Brazilian folk song "Meu limão, meu limoeiro".)
• "The Errant Apprentice" by Bill Watkins and Andy M. Stewart is about a man who becomes a soldier to impress his girl, only to learn she married another. He gets into a fight with the other guy, but upon learning he's outmatched quickly decides Screw This, I'm Outta Here His conclusion:
  For there's many things worth tryin' for,
  And occasionally worth lyin' for,
  But there's bugger all worth dyin' for,
  So I'll stick to the single life.
• "Don't Get Married, Girls" written by Leon Rosselon and most famously performed by The Dubliners, warns women against marriage in general.
• The traditional "When I Was Single." Despite his stated sentiment, the widowed narrator who supposedly rejoiced at his wife's death remarries several times.
  When I was single, oh then
  When I was single, oh then
  When I was single, my pockets did jingle
  And I wish I was single again.

Hip-Hop / Rap

• The Insane Clown Posse can arguably be said to have never done a straight-up love song. One rather notable example is "Another Love Song", which features Violent J singing, in full "romantic" style, about how he plans to murder his girlfriend because she cheats on him.
• The Rondo Brothers' "Still Your Ghost" features a sultry female vocalist and an up-tempo beat. Only a few lines in, it's clear that the singer is an obsessed Stalker with a Crush for a guy she didn't mean anything to.
• Eminem has multiple songs like this, ranging from funny to dramatic examples.
  • On The Marshall Mathers LP, "Stan" samples Dido's love song "Thank You" to serve as the thoughts of an Ax-Crazy Loony Fan who is homoerotically obsessed with his rapper idol. "Kim" is a Murder Ballad about murdering his on-again-off-again wife, Kim.
  • "Superman" borrows the flow of LL Cool J's "Looking For Love" to degrade and sneer at Groupies.
  • "Lady", a collaboration with Obie Trice, warns women not to get too attached because if he does he'll abuse and control them.
  • "Spend Some Time", "Crazy In Love" and "Love You More" from Encore are all Masochism Tango songs.
  • "Same Song And Dance" is produced to sound like a (rather haunting) love song, with a chorus in which Slim asks his sexy little thing to dance for him. It's about a Serial Killer murdering Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.
  • Recovery has several dramatic examples - "Space Bound", in which the relationship is a toxic mess that turns into a Murder-Suicide, and "Love The Way You Lie", a Destructive Romance ballad.
  • "So Much Better" has Slim taunting his girl about how much better his life would be if she died.
• Eamon's ''Fuck It''.
• Likewise, Cee Lo Green's Fuck You has a similar vibe.
• Tyler, the Creator from OFWGKTA made the ode "Sarah" from Bastard
  I wanna tie her body up and throw her in my basement
  and keep her there, so nobody could wonder where her face went...
  • 'She' might also count. Frank Ocean's vocals in the chorus make it sound like a slow jam, but Tyler's rap is about stalking the object of his affections:
  One, two, you're the girl that I want
  Three, four, five, six, seven, shit
  Eight is the bullets if you say no after all this
  And I just couldn't take it, you're so motherfucking gorgeous.
  Gorgeous, baby you're gorgeous
  I just wanna drag your lifeless body to the forest
  And fornicate with it but that's because I'm in love with you, cunt..
• Cage's "I Never Knew You", about a man who falls in love with a woman he sees across the street and proceeds to stalk and murder her.
• Reggae rapper Snow has a song called "Anti Love Song".
• CunninLynguists' "Enemies with Benefits" is about a friends-with-benefits scenario that has turned sour because the parties have developed feelings towards one another, but don't want to admit it and potentially destroy the setup, so they have largely adversarial interactions aside from the sex.
• Madvillain's "Fancy Clown" is a song featuring DOOM's Viktor Vaughn persona railing at his (ex-)lover after finding out she had an affair... with DOOM.
• TLC's "No Scrubs" is about how the protagonist doesn't want to date "scrubs" (i.e. men who horrendously fail at taking their side in relationships).

In Other Media

• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend loves this trope:
  • The song "Settle for Me" is all about how Greg knows that he's not what Rebecca really wants, but that she should settle for him anyway. "I know I'm only second place in this game. / But like 2% milk / Or Seitan beef / I almost taste the same!"
  • "A Boy Band Made Up Of Four Joshes" is, obviously, a parody of squeaky-clean boy band love songs, but also lampshades how Rebecca expects Josh to fix all of her mental health issues by making the boy band members "also a team of nationally-recognised mental health professionals trained in cognitive-behavioural therapy with specialties in personality and sleep disorders... and love!"
  • "His Status Is... Preferred" is a minor example in that the feeling is sincere, but all of the supposedly impressive things Paula croons about - like drinking whiskey, or staying at hotels where they do multiple kinds of omelettes - are really not.
  • "Romantic Moments" is...well, just see the lyrics: "Romantic moments you had that he didn't know were romantic / Or maybe he did a little, we're not really sure? / But most likely not."
  • "Clean Up on Aisle 4" is a more traditional example, being a love song that's just tortured into fitting the unusual theme of a supermarket.
  • "Oh My God I Think I Like You" involves an unwanted Love Epiphany occurring well into a Friends with Benefits situation where the singer is totally blase about all the kinky sex they're having but freaks out at the idea of catching feelings.
  • "I'm Just A Girl In Love" parodies the Love Makes You Crazy trope with a chorus line of girls insisting that because Rebecca's in love, she can't be held responsible for her actions.
  • "Love Kernels" is about Rebecca's status as a Love Martyr and how she grabs onto every slight indication of affection as proof of a deeper love, even statements as unrelated as "Where's my phone?" ("It's a stretch, but I'll take that, too.")
  • "Ping Pong Girl" parodies 00s era pop punk songs romanticising the independent, aloof girl - "She's so hot but she doesn't know it / She probably just found that outfit lying around (Like in the trash!)"
  • "Research Me Obsessively" is a seduction song sung by the characters' ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, huskily crooning at them to lose days tracking her down online and learn everything about her.
  • "Duh!" parodies the whole 'I'm an idiot for never noticing her' trope by leaning on how Josh is just kind of a Brainless Beauty in general - "Wait, I gotta go get her! I gotta get her, like, right this second! [cut to Josh running down the street] I'm coming for you baby! ...wait, I don't have my keys. I left my keys and phone at the club? ...duh.'"
  • "We'll Never Have Problems Again" is a Hakuna Matata type parody all about how clearly delusional Josh and Rebecca are to think that being in love will solve all of their problems for them.
  • "Let's Have Intercourse" sounds exactly like a soulful Ed Sheeran number, but is actually Nathaniel singing about how he looks down on Rebecca and really doesn't want to be attracted to her, but since he is, they might as well have sex and get it over with.
  • "Maybe She's Not Such A Heinous Bitch After All" sounds like a perky, happy Parental Love Song but is all about how relieved Rebecca is that her mother is actually acting kind of decent for once, and how relieved she is to be able to hate her "like normal girls hate their moms."
  • "First Penis I Saw" is a genuinely happy, excitable song all about Their First Time - just one that happens to focus rather more than usual on the specific milestone of seeing and touching a penis for the first time.
  • "Nothing Is Ever Anyone's Fault" is a moving Final Love Duet in which the singers opine that they fell in love when the other made them realize that since they had a sad childhood, they don't have any responsibility for their actions and nobody is ever really a bad person.
• "Icky Vicky" from The Fairly OddParents!.
• Wizard Rock band Split Seven Ways has a song called "Sour Grapes" which may or may not fit into this. In it, Draco Malfoy complains about Harry with lines like: It takes more to win the war than sheer dumb luck / If he's not got his friends around to think for him then he's stuck. But the song's full title is "Sour grapes, or a Passive-aggressive Love Song".
• Harley Quinn sings "Say That We're Sweethearts Again" (see Comedy/Parody) in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Harlequinade".
• Bart writes a quick one in The Simpsons episode "Stark Raving Dad", to the music of the "Colonel Bogey March" (AKA "The song from The Bridge on the River Kwai"), quoted above.
• On Phineas and Ferb, Doctor Doofenshmirtz and Perry the Platypus have sung multiple songs about their Foe Romance Subtext. Doofenshmirtz also did a song (called "Evil Love") about falling in love with another supervillain.
• In the Space Ghost Coast to Coast spinoff The Brak Show, Zorak suddenly acquires a singing voice in the episode "War Next Door". He uses it to croon out such tender ballads as "I'm Gonna Kick Your Ass" and "My Heart Is Full Of Hatred And Loathing". And the audience loves it. After the former song, he even tells the audience outright that "I mean it! I hate you all!"... and they still eat it up!
• "Free Love Freeway" by Ricky Gervais (or possibly David Brent, his character on the British version of The Office) is a bona fide and incredibly enthusiastic love song... and also an incredibly silly one.
• Adam Sandler's character in The Wedding Singer explains that he wrote the first half of this song when he was with his ex, and the second half after she left him at the altar:
  You don't know how much I need you.
  While you're near me, I don't feel blue.
  And when we kiss I know you need me too.
  I can't believe I found a love that's so pure and true.
  [key change]
  But it all was bullshit!
  It was a goddamn joke!
  And when I think of you, Linda
  I hope you fucking choke!
  I hope you're glad with what you've done to me.
  I lay in bed all day long feeling melancholy.
  You left me here, all alone, tears running constantly.
  Oh would somebody kill me please? Somebody kill me please!
  I'm on my knees, pretty pretty please!
  Kill me!
  I want to die!
  Put a bullet in my heeeeaaaad!
  • Not to mention "Casualties of Love" in the musical version.
  Cause, trust me, love always ends
  You'll be fat, divorced, and broke
  While she has sex with all of your friends
• In the South Park episode "Christian Rock Hard" Cartman embarks on a quest to get rich writing Christian Rock songs, using the formula of taking ordinary pop songs and replacing the word "Baby" with the word "Jesus". The result is a series of creepy songs that make it sound like the singer is physically in love with Jesus, with lyrics like "Crawl into my bed, Jesus, and let's keep each other warm tonight."
• Jason once wrote one of these to his sister Paige in FoxTrot. Hilarity ensues when it gets mixed up with a love poem his father wrote to his wife.
• On Metalocalypse, Pickles the Drummer's old band Snakes 'n Barrels recorded the song "Don't Make Me Kill You", which is on the special edition Dethalbum. The lyrics make it sound like it's about a guy who is horribly, horribly abusive, and is constantly this close to straight up killing his girlfriend. The music, however, makes it sound like your typical 80s-Early 90s love ballad.
• How I Met Your Mother has a tie-in website here with one of these on the home page. The singer alternates between seething hatred and being Barney's (who was masquerading as Ted) Stalker with a Crush. Oh, and it goes for twenty minutes, getting progressively crazier as it goes along.
• In That '70s Show Hyde tells Jackie an Anti-Love Haiku:
  My heart aches with pain.
  When I see you, I vomit.
  Die away from me.
• Most of the songs in Xenosaga are like this, which is quite appropriate, given that pretty much every member of the main cast has had their lives royally screwed up by love in the past one way or another.
• The film Team America: World Police features the song "The End of an Act". It's half love song, half dissing of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor.
  I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark
  When he made Pearl Harbor
  I miss you more than that movie missed the point
  And that's an awful lot girl
  And now, now you've gone away
  And all I'm trying to say is
  Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.
• Portal:
  • "Still Alive," the now-famous ending theme of the first game, is an unusually passive-aggressive example:
    I'm not even angry/I'm being so sincere right now
    Even though you broke my heart and killed me
    And tore me to pieces/And threw every piece into a fire
    As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you
  • The ending theme to Portal 2, "Want You Gone" is much the same:
    Goodbye my only friend — Oh, did you think I meant you?
    That would be funny if it weren't so sad
    Well you have been replaced/I don't need anyone now
    When I delete you maybe I'll stop feeling so bad [sung as the accompanying subtitles replace these last five words with "[REDACTED]"]
• Played With in Aladdin: The Return of Jafar. Iago sings "Forget About Love," but it's actually a ploy to get Jasmine to forgive Aladdin for lying to her. Naturally, it's transformed into a legitimate love song between the couple by the end.
• Inverted in Disney's Hercules, where Meg's song "I Won't Say (I'm In Love)" is meant to angrily indicate she's not only not interested in Hercules, but in men in general, but naturally by the end of the song she finally admits to herself she is.
  At least out loud / I won't say I'm in love.
• The Villain Song "Don't Fall in Love" from the Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas.
• In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the protagonist sings one to himself.
  Everybody hates you.../everybody wishes that you were dead/ 'Cause Peter you suck,/ Peter you suck/ Peter your music is fucking terrible...
• The title song for Diamonds Are Forever is an ode to love sucking and jewelry being awesome.
• The J. Geils Band's "Love Stinks" is a clear example. It was even sung by Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer, mentioned above!
• In Saki's short story, "The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope," the protagonist writes the following:
  How you bore me, Florrie,
  With those eyes of vacant blue;
  You'll be very sorry, Florrie,
  If I marry you.
  Though I'm easy-goin', Florrie,
  This I swear is true,
  I'll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
  If I marry you.
• In one The Dick Van Dyke Show episode when his usually-shy brother performed songs while sleepwalking, one of his personas was the teen rock 'n roll singing sensation Skid Row. One of his "ballads" was this song:
  My heart told me that I should get a wife
  My heart told me I was in a rut
  My heart told me I should get a wife
  I wish my heart would keep its big mouth shut!.
• Rock and Rule features Omar's band singing one of these at a talent night.
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest features a lizard singing a highly sexualised song about devouring a shrunken man. With no reason. And it never comes up again.
• In Kingdom of Loathing the Libram of Love Songs allows you to create love songs of Disturbing Obession, Icy Revenge, Naughty Innuendo, etc.
• The Looney Tunes Show: "We Are In Love", aka the Ode to Stalking, alternates between Stalker with a Crush Lola singing about how in love they are, and Only Sane Man Bugs singing about how it's friggin' creepy that she taps his phone lines and spends all night outside his house staring in through the windows with a terrifying grin.
• The musical numbers in Galavant thrive on Lyrical Dissonance, so it's no surprise that every love song in the first season comes in some flavor of this. To list a few, there's one where Galavant and Isabel affectionately list each other's flaws, another where Madelena sings about how she loves Galavant as much as any sociopathic narcissist can, and a third where Gwynne and the Chef cheerfully plot to murder their bosses:
  Let's spike the soup with some arsenic!
  Just a few droplets like thus.
  Serve, and each Blueblood will die as they spew blood,
  A happy ending for us!
• Homestar Runner
  • In the Strong Bad Email "making out", Strong Bad has apparently composed a make-out jam called "You're Really Ugly (But There's Nobody Cute Around)".
  • In "marzipan", Marzipan sings a song about Strong Bad... with the lyrics "Oh yeah yeah, and I really don't like him at all".
• La La Land's "A Lovely Night" is basically a Belligerent Sexual Tension song with lyrics about how said night is wasted on two people who have no feelings for each other.
• "Love is an Open Door" from Frozen sounds like a typical upbeat Disney love duet, but it retroactively becomes this due to reveals later in the film: Anna is genuine but so desperate for affection that she's not thinking straight, while Hans is just sucking up to her until he can claim her kingdom.
• Similar, but obvious to the audience right away: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has a duet between Baron and Baroness Bomburst on the Baron's birthday. The ditzy Baroness serenades her husband while wearing elaborate lingerie, while the Baron plays along with the sickeningly affectionate mood but repeatedly tries to kill his clueless wife while her back is turned.
• In Helluva Boss, Moxxie takes his wife Millie on a date to OZZIE'S, a famous lounge in the Ring of Lust in Hell. Moxxie goes on stage at the club to sing a love song for his wife only to be interrupted by the club's owner, Asmodeus. Asmodeus and his employee Fizzarolli then sing about how romantic feelings aren't welcome in the Ring of Lust and insist that Moxxie change his song into something more graphic and fitting for the establishment.
• VeggieTales features, in one of its Silly Songs segments, a performance by Mr. Lunt of "My Cheeseburger", a love ode to a cheeseburger that is unrequited because Burger Bell is closed.
• The Simpsons has "Baby on Board," a song from the episode "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" that Homer pens after being inspired by a sticker Marge buys for their car. It sounds just enough like a standard Silly Love Song that it might take a listen or two to realize that it's literally about the sticker, which Homer loves because it lets him drive in the carpool lane.
• In One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), "Cruella de Vil" is mostly a straight "The Villain Sucks" Song, but the bridge qualifies it as an Anti-Love Song:
  At first, you think Cruella is a devil,
  But after time has worn away the shock,
  You come to realize: you've seen her kind of eyes
  Watching you from underneath a rock.

Metal

• Skyclad's "Little Miss Take":
  You can't be accused of procrastination,
  one brief separation - the dream went stale,
  You sever all ties with a swift laceration.
  leave so many loose-ends- (thereby hangs my tale).
  Were you scared that the truth could have made you fatter?
  The Queen of Hearts - you dealt me a pack of lies,
  then laughed in my face like it didn't matter,
  that you'd crossed my head and I hoped to die
  Both sickened to learn (and yet glad to discover).
  that Venus once held me with (ch) arms so fake
  I'd have once sold my soul for this faithless lover,
  now I couldn't give a damn for my little Miss Take.
• Type O Negative has a fair amount of these, the best known of them being "Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity".
• Sonata Arctica have done four songs that tell the tale of a stalker, 3 of which are straight examples. "The End of This Chapter" is the original one, explaining why in "Caleb" he's stalking the woman and exploring his feelings. In "Don't Say a Word" he finally decides to kill his former love. In "Juliet" he has killed her, rejoices and takes a poison so that they can be together in the afterlife, only to find that she is Not Quite Dead.
  • Aside from that, there's "Letters to Dana" which is a Slut-Shaming song (his childhood crush grew up to be a Playboy model), "Shy" which is also a stalker song (he references Dana), "Misery" about an unhealthy relationship, "Paid In Full" about realizing and leaving an unhealthy relationship, "San Sebastian" which ends in breakup, "My Selene" which ends in suicide... Sonata Arctica likes this trope almost as much as they like wolves.
• Dream Theater's "Light Fuse and Get Away" portrays a cynical man who has been dumped so many times that he considers relationships a waste of time and one-night stands a more attractive option ("No gain no pain / When it's lust to dust you can crawl from the wreckage").
• Apocalyptica's "Anything But Love" doesn't even pretend for a moment to be a love song. lyrically the song details a female character talking to the man who is going to rape her. She essentially tells him to be as cruel and evil as he wants ("Go on infect me, go on and scare me to death.") and make sure she is traumatized and scared. Because she'd rather that than have him love her.
• Does Avenged Sevenfold's "A Little Piece of Heaven" count (certainly a case of Love Makes You Evil anyways)? Considering it's about a necrophiliac that kills his girlfriend, eats her heart and then gets killed by her resurrected corpse. Includes such lovely lines as
  She was never this good in bed even when she was sleeping
  now she's just so perfect I've never been quite so ***ing deep in
• Anthrax did a mock love-ballad, "dallabnikufesin", complete with the twelve-string acoustic and the tortured bridge that were stereotypical of the hair bands of the time. There was a line in there about "I didn't mean to hurt you / or sleep with all your friends..." and it ends with the couple reunited just before she gets hit by a truck, to which the singers start mock-sobbing and asking for tissues.
• Within Temptation: "What Have You Done Now" is both a Love Song and an Anti-Love Song, about two lovers who are now mortal enemies, but still in love with each other.
• Overkill wrote a song called "I Hate" about a disgruntled worker's utter contempt for his colleagues, bosses, and customers, and anyone else he comes into contact with.
  Think I know how you got this far
  Think I know how you got where you are
  Think I'll hate ya when you're dead? I know I'll hate ya!
  Smile to my face, know you'll lie
  Say I got problems? Ask yourself why!
• Testament cranks this up to eleven and beyond with their song, "Leave Me Forever." The lyrics end on possibly one of the most venomous and hate-filled rants against an ex-girlfriend ever.
  I can't get away
  I hope you suffer
  I won't let love ever drive me insane
  Unleash the pain laugh as you suffer
  You turned our love into my ugly shame
  Sick of your ways sick of the future
  I take my life back to live it my way
  Just walk away leave me forever
  You can't erase all the damage you've done
• "Love?" by Strapping Young Lad all but states that love is just a way to avoid loneliness and get sex.
• Where to start with Avantasia? The Scarecrow Saga has tons of these, such as "What Kind of Love" about rejection and "Your Love is Evil". A dominating theme in the trilogy is the inability of the protagonist to find love or acceptance.
• Psychostick has a couple of these, Throwin' Down is about an obsessive girlfriend, and Orgasm = Love is pretty self-explanatory.
• Megadeth's song "The Hardest Part Of Letting Go" according to Dave Mustaine "While everyone writes cheesy love songs, mine are a little different....boy meets girl, girl doesn't like boy, boy kills girl."
  • Also done with some humor in "1000 Times Goodbye".
• "One More Fucking Time" by Motörhead is about a man who is left bitter and cynical after being dumped by his woman.
• Halestorm's "Miss the Misery" is a rather angry song about how you don't miss your ex but all the pain and misery they caused you. "It's Not You" is basically a song in which the singer is taunting their ex about they're in a new relationship now.
• "Shallow Grave" by A Pale Horse Named Death is about a man who murders his girlfriend and buries her in a nameless grave.

Theatre

• The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Millennium Musical had "The Hitler/Khan Duet", a spoof of the obligatory Broadway love song by, well, Adolf Hitler and Ghengis Khan.
  Hitler: I guess that every show needs a song like this.
  Khan: Fine by me, as long as we don't have to kiss.
• In the musical version of Wicked, Elphaba and Glinda sing a song about one another (titled "What is This Feeling?") which could almost be a love song if only a few words were tweaked.
  What is this feeling, so sudden and new?
  I felt the moment I laid eyes on you
  My pulse is rushing
  My head is reeling
  My face is flushing!
  What is this feeling? Fervid as a flame
  Does it have a name?
  Yes... yes
  Loathing! Unadulterated loathing!
  For your face
  Your voice
  Your clothing!
• Subverted, weirdly enough, by "Yesterday I Loved You" from Once Upon A Mattress:
  Yesterday you seemed as lovely to me
  As anyone ever could be.
  Now I see what tricks my eyes can play.
  Yesterday I must have been totally blind,
  Or else I was out of my mind,
  For you seem so much lovelier today!
  My heart cannot be trusted,
  I give you fair warning.
  I openly confess
  Tonight I love you less
  Than I will tomorrow morning.
  • Similar to a line from the Renaissance poet John Donne: Methinks I lied all winter when I swore / My love was infinite if spring makes it more. He also wrote some Anti Love Poems, such as "The Apparition".
  • Another subversion is Jonathan Coulton's "You Ruined Everything", which sounds like it's going to be one of these for the first verse or so, except that it's an unironic song of parental love.
• In the musical Out Of This World, "Cherry Pies Ought To Be You" is first sung by Mercury and Chloe as a perky love duet in List Song format. It is soon reprised by Nikki and Juno, but with lyrics of a different mood:
  Nikki: Shooting pains ought to be you.
  Juno: Addled brains ought to be you.
  Nikki: Florida, when it rains, ought to be you.
  Juno: Pinchers in subway trains ought to be you.
• Thou Shalt Not's "True Love" is initially a Gothic cabaret-style depiction of former flames meeting for what would appear to be innocent drinks and reminiscences for old times' sake, picks up into a drunken, menacing waltz, and then, well, gets worse from there.
  I'll burn with your love like I was Birkenau,
  I'll conquer your love like you were Poland.
  I'll act on my love like Pontius Pilate,
  I'll give you my love like I was Brutus,
  I'll radiate love like Three-Mile Island,
  I'll prove you my love like I was Judas.
• The Cut Song "Happily Ever After" from Company.
  Someone to hold you too close
  Someone to hurt you too deep
  Someone to love you too hard
  Happily Ever After
  Someone to need you too much
  Someone to read you too well
  Someone to bleed you of all the things you don't want to tell
  That's happily ever after
  Ever, ever, ever after-
  In hell.
  • Many of the same lyrics are used in the first half of the song that replaced it, "Being Alive," with the second half declaring that the singer wants these things anyway because they accompany the good things in a relationship.
• "Love Song" from the musical Love Life is a rambling, strangely downbeat number sung by a hobo to no one in particular about how nobody listens to the love song he sings.
• Leonard Bernstein's Candide has "Ring-Around-A-Rosy" (incorporated into the "Auto-Da-Fé" number in the Final Revised Version), a song for the syphilis-stricken Pangloss. Its lyrics are along the same lines as Tom Lehrer's "I Got It From Agnes," with a refrain about love making the world go round.
• Rodgers and Hart's "To Keep My Love Alive" is not the sentimental torch song one might infer from its title (and that it was one of the last song lyrics Hart wrote before he died), but a List Song sung by a lady about the many, many husbands of hers she's murdered.
  • Rodgers and Hart wrote a few other Anti Love Songs, one being the duet "Ev'rything I Got" from By Jupiter, which has lines like "I'm not yours for better but for worse." (The reprise is a more standard sort of love song, though a highly martyred one.)
• Avenue Q's "The More You Love Someone (The More You Want To Kill Them)"
• Chicago has The Cell Block Tango, a song about six "murderesses", detailing their crimes. Their six reasons were, in order, "Popping" gum, Lying about being single, A reaction to a 'jealous rage', (an innocent Hungarian woman whose lover was killed), Cheating on her with her sister, and Cheating on her with random people. Some of the scenarios start out rather romantic.
  • Roxie's song "Funny Honey" starts out a bit like a conventional love song, but becomes this when Amos finds out that Roxie's planning to use him to cover up her guilt.
• In Blood Brothers, Eddie serenades Linda with how, if he were Mickey, he'd easily be able to tell her how much he loves her and show how much he cares... but "I'm Not Saying A Word".
  Eddie: "Because I'm not."
  Linda: "Who?"
  Eddie: "Mickey."
• "No One Will Ever Love You (Like You Do)" from Goldilocks.
• "Ooh, Do You Love You!" from It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman.
• "Without You" from My Fair Lady has Eliza Doolittle telling Henry Higgins that she's better off without him in her life. Although, the play does end on an ambiguous hint that they may get back together after all.
• "I'll Never Fall in Love Again", written by Burt Bacharach for the musical Promises, Promises, and famously covered by Dionne Warwick, in which the singer bemoans her own love life and warns other women off the topic.
• Hamilton has "You'll Be Back", a song where the singer gloats about how their love interest will regret trying to leave them and come back to them eventually, which is already rather Anti Love Song-ish enough, but with the added twist that the singer is King George III and the love interest is the American colonies.
  You'll be back, soon you'll see
  You'll remember you belong to me
  You'll be back, time will tell
  You'll remember that I served you well
  Oceans rise, empires fall, we have seen each other through it all
  And when push comes to shove
  I will send a fully-armed battalion to remind you of my love!
• "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an upbeat but amazingly cynical, misogynist, and misandrist song, stating that a man's romantic gestures and words mean nothing; as soon as his fortunes change or the woman he's with loses youthful beauty, he will dump the woman he's with, either for the next pretty mistress or to crawl back to their wife. Therefore, a woman should ask for tangible, appreciating assets (like diamonds) from her male admirers so that she can sell them to make the rent when she is too old to be considered attractive.
• "The Sound Of Money" from I Can Get It For You Wholesale begins as a flirty duet between Harry and Martha about their discovery of something they both feel passionately about. Of course, he's a Greedy Jew and she's a Gold Digger, the lyrics' Stock Rhyme of "tender" with "surrender" refers to legal tender.

Other

• In the Spanish language, Paquita la del Barrio seems to be the embodiment of this trope. "Rata de dos patas" is the most notorious example.
• The Baddest Girl, an original song by A Cappella group Pentatonix:
  Do you really love me? (Tell me that you love me, say it)
  Do you really care? (I won't hold you to it, put me through it)
  Do you really want me? (Don't worry, my heart is made of steel)
  Do you really.. at least pretend to love me girl,
  I don't care if that love is real.
• "If Your Heart Isn't In It" by Atlantic Starr. Here's the chorus:
  If your heart isn't in it,
  Why can't you tell me so
  If my heart wasn't in it,
  I'd have gone long ago
  If your heart isn't in it
  Why keep me hanging on
  Just tell me and I'll be gone
  From your life
• Lemon Demon’s "No-Eyed Girl" is a weird-context example. It's a song about a man declaring his love for a woman…who happens to be a Humanoid Abomination from another dimension. The singer describes his love for the being, despite the fact that she causes humans to implode by simply standing near them, and merely learning her name could drive him to madness.
• LTD's "Holding On (When Love Is Gone)" seems to be directed towards someone who is unhappy in their relationship, telling them to just give it up and leave.
  I betcha you're unhappy
  I know you gotta be
  ‘Cause it can drive you outcha mind
  There ain't no sense in crying
  It's time for you to leave
  And baby that's the bottom line
  I betcha lie awake nights, and never rest a bit
  And wish it all would disappear
  But still the bottom line is you got to deal with it
  And to yourself at least be fair
• The album The New Albion Guide To Analogue Consciousness has "The Deceit", which has a playful and flirtatious tone, but it's sung between Connor Morgan who is worried that his son Lee is being drawn into a cult-like corporation that took his first child years before, and Lee's lover Adrian who is pulling off a Zany Scheme by pretending that they have Lee in their thrall as leverage to stop Conner from blocking the funding for their big project.
• "Maybe I Was Boring" by Wilbur Soot is an upbeat-sounding song about a girl who has fallen out of love with her boyfriend, but can't or won't break up with him, so she quietly hopes he doesn't love her so much that he'll want to spend the rest of his life with her.
  And when you hold his hands
  It doesn't feel like flying
  And when you take his breath away
  He might as well be dying
  And you're dying to breathe
  You're trapped in his cage
  And it's shrinking

Pop / Punk

• Taylor Swift
  • Red:
    • "I Almost Do" open with the singer lovingly fantasize about what her lover is doing after a hard day of work... before revealed that they broke up and she was trying so hard to not call them because their relationship has left too many hurt on both side. The aforementioned opening lyrics is repeated at the end, implying that she still thinks about them.
    • "The Moment I Knew" opens with the singer fantasize about how happy she would be when her lover shows up as an event important to her. However, as the song goes on, she realizes that her lover won't show up and the title is referred to her knowing her lover won't show up and that they are not right for her.
    • "The Last Time" opens with the male singer going to the female singer house and show up as her door, with lyrics setting up as an intimate only to reveal that the reason he is going there to beg her for forgiveness.
  • folklore:
    • "august" had every verse and chorus started by expressing the singer's longing for the guy... Only to subverted at the end of each verse by concluding that "You aren't mine to lose".
    • "illicit affairs" starts with the singer setting up all the way the she and her love interest conducts an affair... right before revealing that all the lies and secrecy has eaten away and exhausted her for the rest of the song and ended the song stating that she can't end the relationship because she loves the man so much.
  • evermore: "ivy" opens with the narrator exclaiming and praising her lover... until the rest of the song revealed that she is very conflicting about this relationship affecting her current one with her husband (which mean either this is an affair or the lover she is exclaiming is dead and she still can't get over them) and compare their love to ivy that will destroy her.
  • Midnights: "Maroon" opens with the first verse painting a very in love couple, but the beat and background music are very dark and downbeat, and it was revealed during the chorus that the couple has broken up and the rest of the song explored their breakdown and the messy legacy her ex-love has left upon her.
• *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" is a rare example of an anti-love song sung by a boy band:
  Don't wanna be a fool for you
  Just another player in your game for two
  You may hate me but it ain't no lie,
  Baby, bye, bye, bye
  Don't really wanna make it tough
  I just wanna tell you that I had enough
  It might sound crazy, but it ain't no lie
  Baby, bye, bye, bye
  • "Bye Bye Bye" was the first single from the band's first album after an acrimonious breakup with their previous manager and record label. Whether there is a real-life subtext to the song is debatable, but if there is the video makes it really obvious, with a woman playing with the boys as marionettes.
• Pet Shop Boys' "I'm With Stupid"—on the surface, a fun little pop song about being in love with someone perceived as a dim bulb. The hidden meaning (cheerfully admitted by the Boys)? A satire of the relationship between Tony Blair and George Bush, sung from Blair's point of view. Contains the gem "Is stupid really stupid, or a different kind of smart?"
  • Their cover of "Always on My Mind" has the line "maybe I didn't love you" in the fade-out, which is a lot less subtle in the album version.
• "Desperado" by Eagles concerns the outlook of a young man who chooses the rough tough fast-lane life over sweet and gentle love.
• Mika's "Lollipop" is a happy little pop song about how love will ruin your life. "Erase" sounds like a regretful breakup song until you realize he's actually taunting his former lover and suggesting they kill themselves in order to get over him:
  When the pain won't go away
  You might as well put your finger on the trigger
  Erase my love
  I bet you can't erase my touch
• Ludo's "Good Will Hunting By Myself" starts as a standard whiny breakup song and quickly devolves into a spiteful rant about how awful the ex-girlfriend in question actually was. The spoken-word climax must be heard to be believed, but the final chorus is pretty great as well:
  You can watch Good Will Hunting by yourself (you bitch, please die)
  You can waste your life without my help (you bitch, please die)
  You can hang out with your friends, that is if you have any friends
  You can watch Good Will Hunting by yourself ‘til your eyes fall out
  You can watch Good Will Hunting by yourself – I hope your eyes fall out
  Why don’t you go watch it by yourself?
  Go to hell!
• Arguably, everything Fall Out Boy have ever written, or at least about 90% of it.
  • An example from "Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying":
  I used to obsess over living
  Now I only obsess over you
  Tell me you'd like boys like me better
  In the dark lying on top of you
  • Another from “The Music or the Misery”:
  I got your love letters, corrected the grammar, and sent them back
  It's true, romance is dead
  I shot it in the chest then in the head
• Belle and Sebastian's "You Don't Send Me" is upbeat and peppy, but is all about how happy the singer is that his girlfriend broke up with him:
  Since you went away, everything is looking great
  I'm a little bored
  When I see you out, maybe walking in the street
  You always cross the road
  Listen, honey, there is nothing you can do to offend me any more
  You don't send me any more...
  • So despite the suggestion that "the key is change, getting over all your problems", we're left thinking that he's maybe protesting a little too much.
• Most of what Reel Big Fish writes, when they're not mad at their label.
  • Perhaps the best example is "Your Guts (I Hate 'Em)"; The opening lines say it all:
  I wrote this song about you
  I wrote this song about you
  just to let you know... that I hate your guts
  and I think... you suck.
  • They also have "Suckers" Which at worst is mildly amused that there are still "Suckers who still believe in love. This one's for you!"
• "Ocean Deep" by Cliff Richard is a sappy 80s ballad about the narrator sulking in his room about how he can't get a girlfriend.
• A lot of Hello! Project songs.
• The Dropkick Murphys' song "The Dirty Glass" starts out sounding like a "lost love" song, but before the guitars even kick in Darcy gives herself away.
  "Murphy, Murphy, darling dear, I long for you now night and day./Your pain was my pleasure, your sorrow my joy./I fear now I've lost you health and good cheer."
  • Except that as the song goes on, it becomes apparent that it's not even a breakup song at all; "Darcy" is the Anthropomorphic Personification of a pub.
• The Offspring's rewrite of the song "Feelings", changing it from a sappy love song to someone singing about another person they absolutely hate.
• The Magnetic Fields. Examples include "I Don't Really Love You Any More" (self-explanatory) and "I Don't Believe You", which contains the lyric "You seemed to be / In love with me / Which isn't very realistic."
  • Much, if not all, of their three-album set 69 Love Songs falls under this trope.
    • In fact, it includes all four of the sub-categories listed in the trope description, and probably makes up a few more.
  • "I Don't Believe You" strikes me more of a song about someone with such low self-esteem that they can't believe the person actually loves them. It's what I get from quotes like
  You say you quote unquote love me
  Well, stranger things have come to be
  But let's agree to disagree
  Cause I don't believe you
  [...]
  You tell me of what once was
  And all about Buck, Butch, and Buzz...
  And how I'm not like them because...
  But I don't believe you
  [...]
  So you may set your charm on stun
  Say I'm delightful and fun
  But you say that to everyone
  So I don't believe you

  • And don't forget 'I Can't Touch You Anymore', with lines like
  I can't touch you anymore
  There's so much to hate you for
  You're asking the wrong questions
  You're opening wrong doors
  I love you, but I can't touch you anymore
  • Also, "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind" - A hate song about an ex including the lines:
  I want you crawling back to me
  Down on your knees, yeah
  Like an appendectomy
  Sans anaesthesia
  • "100,000 Fireflies" is, for the most part, an earnest (if bleak) love song, but then you get to the coda:
  You won't be happy with me
  But give me one more chance
  You won't be happy anyway
• Lit - "Miserable" has a series of lyrics which suggest this.
  You make me come.
  You make me complete.
  You make me completely miserable.
• Feargal Sharkey of The Undertones has a good one: "You Little Thief". With lyrics like, "How does it feel to make a grown man wanna die", it definitely qualifies.
• "Gunning Down Romance" by Savage Garden.
• "Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend" by The Mr. T Experience.
• Before writing the many romantic hit songs of ABBA, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote "Det Dar Med Karlek" ("That Thing With Romance"), mocking the amount of love songs dominating the top ten list. (A bad translation of the chorus follows.)
  That thing with romance
  Who invented it?
  We're never left in peace
  It's advertised everywhere
  That thing with romance
  What's so great about it?
  How can we all stand it anymore?
  Most of it's just a big pile of crap!
• "Goodbye Good Guy" by Frente starts off sounding like the typical pining-for-a-lost-lover-please-take-me-back number, but by the end of the song the singer has realised they've been tricked all along.
  Something was hovering over you boy, just then
  you scolded me, told me don't bother, and vanished again
  and everything perfect you said was just mirrors and wires
  you look left, I was right
  Here with my feet in my fire
• "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan. An intense, highly erotic song... based on mash notes from an insane stalker fan. (Who tried to sue her for plagiarism, then killed himself when he lost the case.)
• Zombina and the Skeletones' "Counting On Your Suicide."
  Baby, I hate you, I hate to tell you that I hate you
  I tell you, I hate you, baby
  'Cos I'm counting on your suicide
  I can't be happy while you're still alive
  And as the minutes crawl slowly by
  I'm counting on your suicide
• "Don't Bother" by Shakira. The video has her destroying her boyfriend's Ford Mustang.
• Many Only Ones songs fall under this, particularly "No Solution": "Some girls say they're loving ya/but love is just destruction disguised under another name...you stand for everything I despise, but when you hold me and look in my eyes I know I can't let you go..."
• Fiona Apple's "Get Him Back" is pretty much a hate song in its first two verses, then ricochets into an upbeat love song in verse #3.
• "Polly" by Captain Dangerous is an Anti Love Song in which the singer gleefully describes how utterly unenamoured he is with the titular young lady. It features the classic line "By the way: I'm gonna kill you", as well as the chorus:
  I've got condiments in my kitchen
  That kill people like you in the evening
  You look like something I've never seen before, see
  I've got three words, and they're "fuck you, Polly".
  • We can't mention Captain Dangerous in this section without mentioning "Boozehounds" either.
• 20 Fingers' "Short Dick Man" (also known as "Short Short Man" due to censorship) is a song about a woman turning down a man with micropenis.
  Isn't that cute an extra belly button
  You need to put your pants back on honey
• "Where Is The Love" by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway - a song about a couple having an affair with each other, each demanding to know when they were going to have the other to themselves, and both refusing to answer.
• How Kirk Thatcher's "I Hate You" took so long to be mentioned
• The Divine Comedy had one called 'Frog Princess', in which the singer recounts on a girl from his past who didn't actually believe in love, and drifted from partner to partner. His true feelings for her shine the most in these lines:
  And now I'm rid of her, I must confess
  To thinkin' 'bout what might have been...
  And I can visualise my frog princess
  Beneath a shining... guillotine.
• "It's Yer Money I'm After Baby" by The Wonder Stuff includes the adorable "Don't worry 'bout your heart/it's your bank I want to break"
• "Wind It Up" by the Barenaked Ladies:
  I can't believe that you'd believe that I would fake it...
  Wait! Unless you count the things I said when we were naked.
• "I Hate Love Songs" by GWAR. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• "Hate Your Guts" by McBusted.
  I hate your guts and I wish I didn't love you anymore
• Madonna and Prince's "Love Song" from Like A Prayer has it right in the words that it isn't a love song.
  • Prince also had "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man", where he is upfront and honest with a woman who just got out of a long-term relationship and is showing serious romantic interest in him about how he's only down for a hookup or friends with benefits, and isn't going to pretend otherwise because it wouldn't be fair to her.
• Space's approach to songwriting was summed up by one of their members as 'boy kills girl, falls in love'. 'The Ballad Of Tom Jones' (couple keep trying to kill each other), 'Bastard Me Bastard You' (boy loves girl so much he wants to kill her), 'Me And You Versus The World' (boy meets girl, they wind up dead), 'Begin Again' (boy keeps getting dumped), 'Influenza' (boy compares girl to various diseases), 'Drop Dead' (boys stalks girl), 'A Liddle Biddy Help From Elvis' (boy meets girl, Elvis Presley accidentally shoots them), 'I Love You More Than Football' (boy abuses girl), Pretty Suicide' (couple kill themselves), 'Kill Me' (boy wants girl to kill him), 'Diary Of A Wimp' (Dogged Nice Guy can't move on)...the list goes on.
• Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears

  It's just a crush

  Doesn't mean that I'm serious

  I'm not that innocent

• Little Voice by Hilary Duff is this

  I know I sound insane

  Like I'm playing games

  cuz all I really want is you

  But there's some things a girl won't do

• "In the Dark" by JoJo
• Crush by Jennifer Paige.

  say the word forever more

  that's not what I'm looking for

  All I can commit to is..maybe

• Barbra Streisand sang a couple of these. "Down With Love" suggests giving it back to "the birds and the bees and the Viennese," while "Love is a Bore" compares it to a number of useless and/or little-desired things.
  Love is a bore
  Love is a ball game without a score
  Love is a sail boat without a sail
  The lock on the candy store
• "I Saw Her Again" by The Mamas and the Papas. A song about someone who's stuck in a relationship with a girl who he doesn't love but keeps stringing along because "I'm lonely, too."
• Joe Jackson's LP's are chocca with this sort of song. The two most famous examples are Is She Really Going Out With Him? and It's Different For Girls. But the Look Sharp album is one where you could play any track and it will be an anti love song. Happy Loving Couples is quite possibly the most misanthropic and embittered of the lot.
  Happy Loving Couples make it look so easy,
  Happy loving couples make it seem so fine;
  But if I can't do my dancing with a partner -
  Love ain't a friend of mine!
• Masked Intruder's primary schtick is Obsession Songs played for humor... But since "Heart Shaped Guitar" is a duet between their lead singer Blue and special guest vocalist Maura Weaver, this time we hear the kind of response these romantic entreaties tend to get:
  Dude, you're freaking me out, seriously
  What the fuck's wrong with you?
  I don't even know you
  I'm calling the cops
  Why are you standing there
  At 3 am out in my front yard
  Singing stupid love songs on a heart shaped guitar?
  And I don't want to hear it, 'cause I don't even care
  The police are on their way, so just stay right there
• Carly Simon's "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be" is, at minimum, an Anti Marriage Song.
• "Easy" by the Commodores overlaps this with the Break Up Song; the singer's actually pretty relaxed about his impending break-up because the relationship has been unhappy for quite a while.
• Betty Blowtorch's I Wish You'd Die is a punk hate song where the singer voices her desire to see the other party dead.
• Kirsty MacColl's "England 2 Colombia 0" is about the singer's anger at being deceived by a guy she met in a bar:
  You lied about your status
  You lied about your life
  You never mentioned your three children
  And the fact you have a wife
  Now it's England 2, Colombia nil
  And I know just how those Colombians feel

It ends with "Now you can go to HELL... I'm going to Brazil / Still it's England 2, Colombia nil"

• A Camp tend to the darkly cynical at the best of times, but see especially "Stronger Than Jesus":
  Who told you love is the Alpha and Omega?
  And that your heart will lead you to the only one?
  It's a curse, it's the hammer that will break you
  It's a poison hidden in a bon bon
  
  Don't you know love is stronger than Jesus?
  Don't you know love can kill anyone?
  Bring it on; wars and diseases
  You know that love can do you like a shotgun...
• Bad Cop/Bad Cop's "Anti Love Song" consists of the narrator retracting every love song she's ever written.
• Billy Joel's "She's Always A Woman", where he sings about the worst things a woman can be, yet despite all that, he still somehow finds a woman appealing to him.
• Huey Lewis and the News' "Stuck With You", about a couple that finds themselves happy to be stuck with each other when they can't find something better.
• James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", in which a delusional drug addict insists that he has a deep romantic connection with a woman he's only seen once and has never spoken to.
• Being a Punk Rock band formed in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the troubles, Stiff Little Fingers naturally had their fair share of angry Protest Songs about the topic. When someone asked them why they didn't write a love song for once instead, they responded with "Barbed Wire Love", a song about falling in love in a war zone, using references to the violence of war as tongue-in-cheek metaphors for sex and romance:
  Blasted by your booby traps
  I felt the blow in both knee-caps
  Your eyes did shine, your lips were fine
  The device in your pants was out of sight
• Carpenters:
  • "Solitaire" is about a man who doesn't return the love that a woman shows him.
  • "I Need To Be In Love" is a classic lovesickness song.

Rock

• Electric Six have "She's White", "Rubber Rocket", "Kukuxumushu", "I Don't Like You", "Waste of Time and Money", "Simulated Love", "We Use the Same Products"... "Steal Your Bones" and "Watching Evil Empires Fall Apart", however, are Silly Love Songs in ridiculous settings.
• Post-punk band Public Image Ltd.'s "This Is Not a Love Song"
• Bright Eyes' "I've Been Eating (For You)":
  Yeah, you were just some song I wrote
  A poem on a page
  [...]
  But now you're more of a basketball
  Boys just pass you around
  They bounce you hard on the ground and dribble
  And then we all get high fives
  And you may think I'm an asshole now
  Well, that's probably right
  But at least I'm not blind to the facts
  [...]
  But I still hope you get everything
  That you care to possess
  And unbelievable sex with him
  Or any one of my friends
• Devo love these kinds of tropes, and evoke this one pretty well on "Gut Feeling (Slap Your Mammy)" from their debut album:
  Something about the way you taste makes me want to clear my throat
  There's a method to your movements that really gets my goat
  I looked for sniffy linings but you're rotten to the core
  I've had just about all i can take, you know, I can't take it no more!
  Got a gut feeling!
• The Killers have a few.
  • "Forget About What I Said":
  We used to tear it down
  But now we just exist
  The things that I've done wrong
  I bet you got a list
  Now I know how you remember
  All those moments that you choose
  Will define me as a traitor
  Stealing everything you lose [...]
  Forget about what I said
  The lights are gone and the party is over
  • "For Reasons Unknown":
  But my heart, it don't beat, it don't beat the way it used to
  And my eyes, they don't see you no more
  And my lips, they don't kiss, they don't kiss the way they used to
  And my eyes, don't recognize you no more.
  For reasons unknown
  • "All the Pretty Faces" (though, to be honest, he seems bothered by it)
  Help me out, I need it
  I don't feel like loving you no more [...]
  Well how did it happen
  I spent two years in a strange strange land
  Well how did it happen
  I'd do anything just to be your man
  • They also have the Murder Trilogy, inspired by the real story of a man who killed the girl he was having an affair with. It starts with "Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf", that tells the man's reaction to his lover leaving:
  Jennifer, tell me where I stand
  And who's that other boy holding your hand?
  Oh, Jennifer, you know I've always tried
  Before you say goodbye [...]
  And I've never liked your hair or those people that you lie with
  But I'm not satisfied until I hold you tight
  And I love you endlessly
  Oh, darling, can't you see? -> That I'm not satisfied until I hold you tight
  • "Midnight Show" has him killing her:
  I took my baby's breath under a chandelier
  Of star and atmosphere
  And watched her disappear
  Into the midnight show
  • And "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" is him lying to the police about her murder (Ain't no motive for this crime / Jenny was a friend of mine) with the lines 'She couldn't scream when I held her close' being changed to 'She kicked and screamed while I held her throat' in live performances.
• "Every Breath You Take" by The Police is a classic subliminal Anti Love Song, which was written during Sting's divorce — but lots of people only listened to the chorus and thought it was a love song, when it's actually about a guy stalking the woman who scorned him.
  • British parody group The Barron Knights did a version of this with the same lyrics but with the delivery altered, to turn it into a song about the KGB watching someone.
• Mötley Crüe wrote "You're All I Need" in Girls, Girls, Girls, which sounds like a typical love ballad, but in reality is about obsessively killing a woman and ending in jail.
  • They also wrote "Too Young to Fall in Love" which describes a bitter relationship (This song would be mentioned in their song "Don't Go Away Mad")
• For all of their straight-up love songs, Queen wrote a surprising number of these, ranging from "I'm in Love with My Car" to "You Don't Fool Me".
  "Told my girl I'd forget her
  Rather buy me a new carburetor"
• "Heavy In Your Arms" by Florence + the Machine is a pretty vicious Anti-Love Song about how the narrator is a dead weight around her lover's neck, always dragging him down until he decides to just let her drown in a river. It contains this lyric:
  This will be my last confession: "I love you" never felt like any blessing
  Whispering like it's a secret only to condemn the one who hears it
  • Either weirdly or fittingly, this song was featured on the soundtrack of one of the Twilight movies.
• "Up The Hill Backwards" by David Bowie, immediately after leaving Angela.
  • Years earlier (in his Old Shame days before Space Oddity) he had "Love You Till Tuesday", a deliriously cheerful pop number in which a Stalker with a Crush speaker implores a girl to return his endless love, and by "endless" he means "it will last for two days".
• Who could forget Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"?
  • "I swore that I would love you to the end of time! [...] So now I'm praying for the end of time!"
  • Also from Meat Loaf/Steinman, "I'll Kill You If You Don't Come Back":
  How do you abuse me - let me count the ways
  How many hours in how many days
  How does it amuse you - let me count the pain
  How many rules breaking how many games

  You got your ass out of gear and your soul out of whack
  Go on and take all your stuff - don't even bother to pack
  In every way I want you out of my life -
  But I'll kill you if you don't come back
  I'll kill you if you don't come back
  • Also, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad".
  I want you, I need you
  But there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you
  Now don't be sad
  'Cause two out of three ain't bad
• Frank Zappa's first album, Freak Out!, is almost fifty percent Anti Love Songs, with each one parodying a different sub-genre of doo-wop. "I Ain't Got No Heart," or "Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder," anyone?
• Paul McCartney actually made fun of this, possibly to the point of subversion, in "Silly Love Songs":
  You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs
  But I look around me
  And I see it isn't so
  Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs
  And what's wrong with that?
  I'd like to know, 'cause here
  I go
  Again!
• "Every Day I Love You Less and Less" by the Kaiser Chiefs. The title is pretty self-explanatory, really.
• Even The Beach Boys did this. "Here Today" starts off sounding like a conventional love song, but the lyrics take a turn for the worse real fast, with lines like:
  • "A brand new love affair is such a beautiful thing / But if you're not careful think about the pain it can bring..."
  • And more relevantly: "Right now you think that she's perfection / This time is really an exception / You know I hate to be a downer / But I'm the guy she left before you found her..."
  • Well, it was from Pet Sounds, the album where their subject matter got Darker and Edgier.
• Pulp seem to have at least one of these on each of their albums.
• 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" messes with the listener's head - on the surface it sounds like an anti love song, but on another level it sounds as if the narrator is unsuccessfully trying to convince himself that he isn't in love. The entire lyric is a Suspiciously Specific Denial, which according to Word of God was done deliberately.
  • About half of the band's output was "weird love"/stalker songs, very often featuring extremely odd symbolism
• One up-and-coming genius in this field is Jonathan Coulton. For example, from his evil-genius-in-love song Skullcrusher Mountain:
  I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
  But I get the feeling that you don't like it
  What's with all the screaming?
  You like monkeys, you like ponies
  Maybe you don't like monsters so much
  Maybe I used too many monkeys
  Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
  • There's also "A Laptop Like You," which is a country ballad-style love song sung to...a MacBook Pro.
  • And "Someone is Crazy":
  The world's against you so you think or maybe wish it was
  And at least that way someone would care but baby no one does
  Not even you
  Baby someone is crazy and it's you.
  • And "The Future Soon," where the narrator fantasizes about growing up to be a cyborg Mad Scientist and forcing his old school crush to marry him.
• The Beautiful South song "Song For Whoever" sure sounds like a love song, but it's actually a parody; the song is about a songwriter gleefully describing how he uses his relationships with women — good and bad — as inspiration, and how this brings him loads and loads of cash and critical acclaim.
  • This hits its peak where it becomes clear that he loves making his girlfriends cry, because that always leads to great materials for songs. ("Deep, so deep, the number one I hope to reap/Depends upon the tears you weep, so cry, lover, cry...")
  • They've done a fair few. "I'll Sail This Ship Alone" is essentially about a man accepting his ex-partner's decision to leave him, while still trying to win her back. However, the song ends with the line "Well they said if I burned myself alive/That you'd come running back." Another is "We Are Each Other", which sounds, on the surface, like a song about an intensely close lyrics, until it becomes clear that the relationship was suffocating for them and is now over.
  • Their most straightforward anti love song is probably "Something That You Said":
    The perfect love song it has no words; it only has death threats.
    And you can tell a classic ballad by how threatening it gets.
• A part of the reason why R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" became the band's first hit was because many people saw it as a love song: "this one goes out to the one I love". Their ears didn't pick that not only the particular loved one has been left behind, but the narrator also calls her "a simple/another prop to occupy my time".
• "Used To Love Her" by Guns N' Roses is a fairly blatant and obvious example. Sure is fun to sing after a breakup, though.
  • It's a subversion: it's actually about Axl's Dog.
  • "Locomotive", and how!
  • Also "Back Off Bitch".
  • "My Michelle" is this because Axl thought a straight-up ballad was not an homage that fit the titular Michelle (in fact, she loved the song because it was honest!).
• The Pogues', "Fairytale of New York" (also an Anti-Christmas Song, of course):
  You're a bum
  You're a punk
  You're an old slut on junk
  Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
  You scumbag, you maggot
  You cheap lousy faggot
  Happy Christmas your arse
  I pray God it's our last
• Sara Bareilles has become famous for songs of this nature. Her portfolio includes "Bottle It Up", about the downside of love and obsession; "Gravity", about destructive love; and the ironically titled "Love Song", which was heavily influenced by her label trying to force her into writing a peppy love song in order to become more successful. Ironically, it is her biggest-selling single to date.
  I'm not gonna write you a love song
  Cause you've asked for it
  Cause you need one
  Yeah, you see...I'm not gonna write you a love song
  Cause you tell me it's make or break in this
  If you're on your way...I'm not gonna write you to stay
  If all you have is leaving, I'm gonna need a better reason
  To write you a love song today
  • Also "Fairytale", about fairytale love and how it doesn't work.
• The Sisters of Mercy did this one in "I Was Wrong:"
  I was wrong
  I was wrong to ever doubt
  I can get along without
  I can love my fellow man,
  But I'm damned if I'll love yours
  • And "Ribbons", too, depending on how you interpret it.
• The Cardigans "Lovefool" (of Romeo + Juliet fame) is mistaken for a love song because of the upbeat tempo but the song is actually a woman begging her boyfriend to just pretend that he loves her even if he doesn't because she can't stand to be alone. There is the line
  I don't care if you really care as long as you don't go
  • And of course, the chorus:
  So I cry and I pray and I beg
  Love Me, love me
  Say that you love me
  Fool Me fool me
  Go on and fool me
  Love Me love me
  Pretend that you love me
  Leave me leave me
  Just say that you need me
  • Most of their songs actually tend to come under this heading, if you look at the lyrics more closely. And even the ones that look like straightforward lovesongs lyrically tend to be undermined by Nina Persson's delivery, e.g. the snarky monotone in which she sings "And now I've found a partner, no one could be happier than I am" (it doesn't help that the song is called "Happy Meal", which suggests less the anticipation of a romantic dinner the lyrics overtly deal in than cheap fast food)
• Maroon 5 songs do this sometimes.
  • "If I Never See Your Face Again" is about an unhealthy relationship between two people that kind of hate each other but have sexual chemistry that keeps them coming back to each other.
  • Songs About Jane and Hands All Over have heaps of these types of songs.
  • "Payphone" is a Break-Up Song, but it also has Silly Love Songs bashing. Radio version lyrics:
  If happy ever after did exist
  I would still be holding you like this
  All those fairytales are full of it
  One more stupid love song, I'll be sick
• Linkin Park:
  • Their second album Meteora has as a common lyrical theme which links psychological damage to staying in an unhealthy relationship.
  • Played more straight in Minutes to Midnight with the song "In Pieces", which could be a description of Chester Bennington's divorce. It's essentially the speaker telling his partner to do her worst, because he will endure and not "be the one" to abandon his vows before she does.
  • There's also "Valentine's Day" from the same album, which is instead of the lovesickness variant.
• "Where Were You When I Needed You", by the Grassroots (also done by the Bangles).
• Richard Thompson's "Shane and Dixie" seems to be fairly sweet love song about a Bonnie and Clyde-type bank robbing couple- until the guy in the couple decides to perpetrate a murder-suicide with the girl so he can get his name in the paper. He dies and is quickly forgotten, she lives and marries the reporter who comes to cover the incident.
• Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain": the "fool" is stood up and stands in the rain wondering where he went wrong...other than waiting on the wrong block.
  • Another anti love song by Led Zeppelin is "Your Time Is Gonna Come", in which the singer tells his lying and cheating ex-girlfriend that one day she's going to reap what she sows.
  • "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" is a genuinely sweet song about Robert Plant's love and friendship... for his dog.
• Ludo:
  • "Love Me Dead", a song to a girlfriend who the singer has… mostly unkind things to say about:
  You suck so passionately
  You're a parasitic psycho, filthy creature
  Finger-bangin' my heart
  You call me up drunk
  Does the fun ever start?
  • "The Horror of Our Love" fits this trope in a different way, being a completely serious love song... likening the singer's intense feelings for their lover to those of a murderous stalker, and their physical attraction to them to cannibalistic bloodlust.
• The Turtles' "Eleonore" is an example of the overdone sort of parody, complete with a line in the chorus lampshading how cliched everything is ("You're my pride and joy, et cetera"), though it's often mistaken for a straight silly love song. The band felt they were being forced to churn out simple pop songs by their record company when they wanted to go in a more progressive direction, and intentionally wrote the lyrics to be as cliched, cheesy, and behind the times as possible, hoping the result would point out how out-of-fashion this kind of song was. Of course, this backfired spectacularly: The record company loved it, and it became one of their biggest hit singles.
• Also, Good Charlotte's song "Bloody Valentine" is about a man who kills a girl's boyfriend to show that he loves her. It has to be heard to be believed.
  • The beginning of the song:
  Oh my love
  please don't cry
  I'll wash my bloody hands and we'll start a new life.
  I ripped out, his throat
  And called you on the telephone to
  take off my disguise
  Just in time to hear you cry...
• The Mountain Goats have a number of these, with the most notorious being "No Children:"
  I hope I lie
  And tell everyone you were a good wife
  I hope you die
  I hope we both die
  • Used to great effect in Moral Orel to highlight the hate-filled and miserable relationship between Stepford Smiler Bloberta and Clay Puppington.
• The Smiths' bitter song "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" features this memorable lyric:
  Nothing's changed,
  I still love you, oh, I still love you
  Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.
• The Who had "The Kids Are Alright," which is a fairly catchy, upbeat song about a man leaving his girlfriend. In a similar vein (and on the same album) there's "A Legal Matter", about a man who's been forced into marriage now that his girlfriend is knocked up.
• "Anthrax" by Gang of Four features two vocal tracks. One is a typical set of anti love lyrics. The other is (largely) this monologue:
  Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love, you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time - it's because these groups think there's something very special about it either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love. These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe anyway but these groups seem to go along with the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality and I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.
  • And it doesn't get much better in "Damaged Goods" or "We Live as We Dream, Alone", though at least the latter is marginally less caustic.
• Rammstein revels in songs like these. Most of their lyrics have hidden meanings and most of those tend to be cynical or sadistic in the extreme.
  • Du Hast, literally, is about a woman asking a man to marry her, with the man refusing to reply. However, the chorus is a pun - "Du hast, du hasst mich, du hast mich gefragt" should be translated "you have, you hate me, you've asked me".
  • Stein um Stein is about possessive love of the worst kind. It seems sweet enough at times, with lyrics like "I will build us a home with a garden outside" and "I will always be with you" - but then the details of the house are described... "No windows, no door, inside will be darkness", "with your feet in the concrete, you will beautify the foundations" - "Stone by stone I wall you in, and no one will hear you scream."
  • Amour Amour is an outright damnation of love itself, likening the feeling to a predator who cannot be tamed. At the end of the song the singer begs for a way out:
    Please, please. Give me poison!
  • Amerika, a cynical song about American commercialization around the world set to an upbeat melody, with a platonic example in the bridge:
    This is not a love song!
    This is not a love song!
    I don't speak my mother tongue!
• "All Sparks" by the Editors:
  Be careful angel, this life is just too long, all sparks will burn out in the end...
• "Die, Die My Darling" by The Misfits.
  Die die die my darling
  Don't utter a single word
  Die die die my darling
  Just shut your pretty eyes
  I'll be seeing you again
  Yeah I'll be seeing you in hell...
  • Many of their songs are pretty anti-love (like "Angelfuck") and pro...erm...old horror movies, really.
• Trio ** "Da Da Da" Those crazy Germans. The refrain is "Ich liebe dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht". It is only at the end of the song that they say it in English: "I don't love you you don't love me".
• GWAR has a few songs like this: "Sick of You" ("It's just your luck/You really suck/That's all—I'm sick of you") and "Hate Love Songs, which is about, well, hating love songs, among other things.
• Elvis Costello:
  Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the crazy things that you say
  I think somebody better put out the big light, cause I can't stand to see you this way
  —Alison
  • Pretty much every other song he wrote for the first ten years or so after that first album was this.
• "Telephone Line" by Electric Light Orchestra
• Bowling For Soup's "A Friendly Goodbye" fits this trope perfectly, along with another.
  Ain't that a "B" with an itch
  Ain't that a mother trucker
  You can go to H-E-Double-Hockeysticks and F yourself
  'Cause I'm so flippin' gosh darn
  Sick of all the S-word you put me through
  So F-U
  • As does "Here's Your Freakin' Song"
  • The Bitch Song ultimately subverts it, the entire song is about how much the singer hates his girlfriend but ends with
  You're a bitch
  but I love you anyway
  so why don't you stay
• The Coasters "Poison Ivy" is also about STDs, and the song was released in the 50's.
• Steely Dan: to name a few, "Dirty Work", "Reeling In The Years", "Rikki Don't Lose That Number", "Hey Nineteen".
• Breaking Benjamin's song "Topless" is a sexually charged hate song. "I love your face/Just Get away/ I'm on my knees/ fuck you fuck me"
• Faith No More's album closer on The Real Thing, called "Edge of the World." It starts out sounding lounge-swing romantic and heartfelt right up until "Come here little girl, would you like some candy . . ."
• Andrew Jackson Jihad has a lot of songs like this, most notably "I Love You" off of the album Candy Cigarettes and Capguns, which contains lyrics such as "I love you like the moon and stars, when little kids get hit by cars, girl you know its true," and "but I'll take anything, and I'll take anyone. I'll take an angry lesbian with a loaded gun. I'll take a whore with syphilis and gonorrhea too. But darling, I love you."
• Most Arab Strap songs.
• Jonathan Coulton is known for this enough that Paul and Storm imitated him for a competition (and doing so very well) by writing a song ("Live") about a mad scientist trying to create the perfect girl by making a female Frankenstein's monster.
  • Will she be friendly? / Or will she break free? / Will she terrorize the villagers? / — Will she notice me?
  • Paul and Storm also wrote a song called "Your Love Is (Love Song With Metaphor)" featuring a really demented view of unrequited love.
    • Your love is Christopher Walken...
• "My Future Ex Girl Friend" by Voltaire.
  • Voltaire also has "Stuck With You," about a married couple complaining about how their vows force them to stay together despite the fact they can't stand each other. Though after they die, they decide they prefer moldering in the ground together to alone.
• As a non-American example: the Ukrainian band Skryabin made several of those. Among the most memorable ones:
  • "Vidstan'" ("Let me be"), a song released in 2003 where the singer basically characterizes his girlfriend as bipolar and aggressive, and the chorus includes the lines "You moron, let me be, I'll kill you... I'll put poison in your tea". All that set to a lovely piano tune.
  • "Shmata" ("Whore") released in 2007 where the singer accuses his girl of cheating on him while he was away on his military service.
  • "Mumitroll", a song released on the same album as the above that starts as a love song... until its third line, then for the remainder of the song the singer threatens to mutilate his girl if she even disobeys him or cheats on him (basically a creepy song about domestic violence).
    • To add irony to that, the two songs were released on an album called "Pro lubov" ("About love") . Meanwhile, in real life, the singer/songwriter was happily married.
• "Taxidermy" by Erin Murray starts out as a normal lost-love ballad, until the singer starts explaining how she's going to keep him.
• Just about any song about relationships, sex or romance by The Buzzcocks.
• "Love comes in spurts" by Richard Hell and the Voidoids ("and it murders your heart/they didn't tell you that part")
• Psychobilly/Gothabilly bands seem particularly fond of singing terms of endearment at corpses, zombies, vampires, and other nasties, with tongues planted firmly in cheeks.
• Grace Potter and the Nocturnals' "Ah, Mary," which sounds enough like a normal love song, albeit a conflicted one to a terrifyingly disturbed woman, except is that the name is only used in the chorus, where it's always "Ah, Mary"... that's right. It's made clear in the last refrain:
  "Ah, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary-kaaa!"
• The Beatles have a soft, lilting ballad called "Norwegian Wood" about burning down a girl's apartment for being a cocktease. Apparently John Lennon was writing about an affair while trying not to let his wife know he was having one, and Paul McCartney thought it was a laugh to burn the place down at the end.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have "Where the Wild Roses Grow", which is about a tragic love affair. Of course, it's tragic because Nick Cave's character in the duet bashes Kylie Minogue's head in... Adding to the weirdness is the duet he and PJ Harvey recorded on the same album, "Henry Lee", where Harvey's character slits Cave's throat and dumps the corpse down a well mostly for spite. Depending on who you ask, this fits their brief relationship rather too well.
  • His album Let Love In has the songs "Do You Love Me?" and "Loverman" (the latter even covered by Metallica), which are sung from the perspective of an obsessive, almost murderous man.
• "Fool" by Everything Else is a good example. What makes it better is that it's a Sequel Song to "If You Loved Her".
• "The Final Cut" by Coheed and Cambria:
  In the final curtain call, / You left me here with the coldest of feelings,
  Weight, kind, depression, / Blessing the floors with the places you've stepped in.
  Will they ever measure up, / To the way you left me here by the roadside,
  The bloodiest cadaver, / Marked in your words, I'm the joke, I'm the bastard.
  Here, wait, so I guess that you knew, / That you're a selfish little whore,
  I'm the selfish little whore, / If I had my way I'd crush your face in the door.
  This is no beginning, / This is the final cut, open up.
  This is no beginning, / This is the final cut, I'm in love.
  • A few the songs from the above's album, Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV Volume One, fall into this, due to the narrator of songs like "Welcome Home" and "The Suffering" being a mentally unstable writer who has had a falling out with is girlfriend, and blames all of his problems on her leaving him.
• A large portion of Xiu Xiu's back catalogue has made great use of this trope, covering many, if not all, of the various angles mentioned above.
  • Jennifer Lopez is a sort of open letter to the eponymous singer, asking if she ever gets upset about the fact that her music soundtracks so many mens broken hearts and sexual frustration in (presumably gay) bars around the world every Friday night.
  • Sad Pony Guerilla Girl is surely in the running for "creepiest love song ever". Best case scenario is it's about a woman having a one sided affair with a married man, and being unhappy with the arrangement, but too in love with him to break it off. The song also alludes to him beating her up, and the line "I am your little girl" may or may not be intended literally.
  • Perhaps the ultimate example is Fabulous Muscles. It's about a young gay man with a muscle fetish who unromantically fellates a closeted jock, who then freaks out and kills him. However, the song is delivered in a tone that suggests he's relatively ok with this scenario. Sample lyrics: "cremate me after you cum on my lips, honey boy. Place my ashes in a vase beneath your workout bench".
• The Cult's "Love Removal Machine" is about the protagonist finding a quick hookup as a way of purging himself of his former SO.
• "The Truth Is...", the 2011 album by Theory Of A Deadman, is about 3/4 this. Mostly songs that are rather explicitly either "I hate my girlfriend I wish she'd leave" or "I hate that bitch, why did she treat me so bad before she left?"
• The Rolling Stones, "Stupid Girl", spits vitriol over a particular type of female
  I'm not talking about the way she gets her dough (Look at that stupid girl/Well I'm a talking about the way she grabs and holds! (Look at that stupid girl)
• "She is the New Thing" by the Horrors is one of these.
  I wonder how long it will be
  before I'm sick of her
  and I no longer care
  where she goes or has been.
  • "Little Victories" counts as well, and also crosses over into Love Makes You Crazy and Obsession Song territory:
  I press your hand in mine however cautiously
  I keep a smile right to myself
  and I lapse into the grasp of an overriding obsession
  and I get sick as I watch my interests fall in deep suspension
• Shellac's "Prayer to God", which is about a person begging God to kill his ex and her lover. The narrator pleads for a delicate, painless death for her, but asks for an unsympathetic murder of the other guy.
• "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi is basically a denunciation of The Unfair Sex.
  • No mention of their song actually called "This Ain't A Love Song?"
• The Format's "Inches and Falling" sounds at first like an overly sappy affair - it starts with the line "I love love, I love being in love" - but it soon becomes clear that the lyrics are incredible facetious.
  I love love, I love being in love.
  I don't care what it does to me.
  These pills are fine to pass the time 'til I find my new drug and
  We'll take advantage, I'll claim that's what I want! To be the new statistic!
  How I love being in love!
• Axl Rose's friend Michelle Young told him while both heard "Your Song" that she always wanted a song about her. He tried writing a pretty ballad... but then decided to write a rocker that translated her carefree life (with only a somewhat romantic message in the bridge), "My Michelle". She approved as it was honest.
• Garbage have a few, like the Obsession Song "#1 Crush", the Tsundere-in-love "Vow" and the self-explanatory "I Hate Love".
• Local H's "Lovey Dovey", although it's heavily implied that the narrator hates seeing loving couples so much because of jealousy - the chorus includes the line "It's not fair", and one verse discusses a couple that he constantly sees bickering with each other, and concludes "I kind of like that / I kind of need that".
• Brett Anderson's "The Empress" is may be a strange and melancholy song about a failed love affair, or it may describe some weirder sort of bad relationship. The first line is definitely "Didn't I try to love her?"
• Death Cab for Cutie has quite a few songs that could qualify. Some notable examples:
  • "You Can Do Better Than Me" is a jangly, cheerful-sounding tune about someone who clings to an unhappy relationship because he knows he'll never find anything better.
  • "The Sound of Settling" is an upbeat anthem about, well, settling for less than the best.
  • In "Someday You Will Be Loved," the narrator leaves a girl an encouraging note about how she will find love in time... as he abandons her after a one night stand.
• "Flowers of Flesh and Blood" by Nicole Dollanganger. Whole song, but a single line says it all:
  How come no one ever told me love was like
  Being fucked with a knife?
• The Reign of Kindo has their song "Romancing a Stranger", about the futility of unrequited love. From the second line, the singer is already fully aware that "She doesn't love me," yet he still wastes a lot of time and effort on the girl, which eventually leads him to realize, "How pathetic that I care for the romance of a stranger's wanting eyes/Oh, she doesn't love me..."
• "Everything About You" by Ugly Kid Joe fits this quite well.
  I... get sick when I'm around
  I... can't stand to be around
  I... hate everything about you
• The Cars' "Just What I Needed", upon closer inspection, comes off as being about being happy with a friends-with-benefits setup because neither party is in love and can have casual sex while not having to worry about the setup being complicated by one or both parties developing actual feelings.
• The Joan Jett song Jezebel, about a woman who's angry at her ex something awful they did and doesn't want to see them ever again.
• BIGMAMA's "Thank You is Fxxk You" starts out as a gentle song about the virtues of saying "thank you" instead of "I'm sorry"... until the narrator changed his mind about it when he met a girl who said "thanks" in response to his multiple love confessions. He curses her out for it once it's all said and done.
• Twisted Sister's "Love Is For Suckers", which is a rant about men who are total suckers that would do anything for love... even the singer during the breakdown, when he tries to resist Little Miss Perfect's attempt to get back together with him and ends up falling for it when he says, "You what? You will? With your heels on?"
• The subject of Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota's "Motorpsico", from Oktubre, is undergoing a Crisis of Faith derived from a bad love experience.
• “About a Girl” by Nirvana, which was about a toxic relationship. Cobain wrote it about his then-girlfriend, who used to complain he wasn’t contributing. The lyrics indicate some agreement with this sentiment:
  “I’ll take advantage while
  You hang me out to dry.
• Bruce Springsteen admits that he didn't have the emotional maturity to write straight love songs in his younger years. His early work is dominated by songs about casual sex ("Spirit in the Night", "Jungleland"), dysfunctional/doomed relationships ("Backstreets", "The River", "Racing in the Street"), and just generally writing about romance in the least romantic terms possible. Later in his career, following significant time in therapy and many years being Happily Married, he got quite a few Silly Love Songs under his belt. However, he also picked up a habit of using romantic relationships as a metaphor for the current political climate in the United States, often to rather unsettling effect ("Livin' in the Future", "Hey Blue Eyes").

Country

• Subverted by Trace Adkins' "This Ain't No Love Song". Although he says that he's driving by her house and can't sleep at night but isn't in love, the song's tone and lyrics make it obvious that he knows he's in love, and she knows he knows, and he knows she knows he knows.
• "You're the Hangnail in My Life" by Hoyt Axton.
• Johnny Cash sang a touching lost love ballad titled "Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart" (written by his producer Jack Clement). You can hear the convicts laughing during the song.
• Roy Clark's "Thank God and Grayhound (You're Gone)" starts as if the singer is sorry to see his former love leave. The lyrics soon make it clear that he's anything but.
• Alan Jackson's "Three Minute Positive Not Too Country Uptempo Love Song" is a parody of... well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Jaron and the Long Road to Love (really Jaron Lowenstein of Evan and Jaron) wrote a country song called "Pray for You". Though very few would mistake its meaning once the chorus starts.
  I haven't been to church since I don't remember when
  Things were going great 'til they fell apart again
  So I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do
  He said you can't go hatin' others who have done wrong to you
  Sometimes we get angry but we must not condemn
  Let the good Lord do his job, you just pray for them

  I pray your brakes go out runnin' down a hill
  I pray a flowerpot falls from a window sill
  And knocks you in the head like I'd like to
  I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
  I pray you're flyin' high when your engine stalls
  I pray all your dreams never come true
  Just know wherever you are, honey, I pray for you
• You might think just from the title that Jack Ingram's "Love You" is a love song, but the first verse makes it plain that it's not ("the heck with this, the heck with us"), and then the chorus starts: "Love you, love this town / Love this motherlovin' truck that keeps breakin' lovin' down."
• Jessica Lea Mayfield's song, "For Today" is a subliminal anti-love song:
  And while these words may sound so sweet
  I could care less about you
  Care less about you
  And I love the sound of you walking away
• "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks, which is a lighthearted, peppy song about an abusive husband and his deservedly unpleasant end.
• Kelsea Ballerini's "I Hate Love Songs", which has a traditional romantic melody but the lyrics are all about how "I hate Shakespeare and Gosling and cakes with white frosting; two names in a heart-shaped tattoo./I think cupid is stupid and violets are purple, not blue." She declares that she does love who she's singing to at the end of the chorus, but it's a weird way of showing it.
• Haley & Michaels managed to take the ultra-sappy hit Amazed and turn it into this by posing the question, what if that was "our song" and then we break up? Answer: it becomes Just Another Love Song to you.
• Jalan Crossland: "Bosler" at first appears to be a bare-bones cliche in which the country boy longs to return home from the city and begs his city girl to join him. Why is it here? Well, the singer is very explicit about everything living in Bosler would entail, such as drawing unemployment and sleeping together on a hide-away mattress that lives in the couch.

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