Up To Eleven / Music

• In Camera Obscura's "Dory Previn":
  How I adore you, Dory Previn/I'll turn you up to eleven/for the band's ears to bleed
• Michael Jackson's "Black Or White" music video features this in the first two minutes, when the son retaliates against his dad.
  LOUD / LOUDER / ARE YOU NUTS!?!
• Buckcherry's cocaine anthem "Lit Up" alludes to this when making a comparison between the norm and the coked-up person.
  "Well you're on ten, but honey, I'm on eleven!"
• Peter Tagtgren from PAIN/HYPOCRISY.
• Citizen King's song "Better Days" features the line "Crank it to eleven/blow another speaker".
• Daniel Ekeroth demonstrates Swedish Death Metal guitar sound.
• In the documentary film Moog, Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman remarked that when the Minimoog allowed keyboardists for the first time to fill a role equal to that of guitarists in bands, all the guitarists started looking for the knob that goes to eleven.
• Murdoc of Gorillaz mentioned taking the bass up to thirteen in Rise of the Ogre.
• Die Ärzte demonstrate this in their animated music video for the live-performed song "Elke". This sarcastic song about a fat fangirl called "Elke" starts out calm, but when the amplifier gets up to eleven, this song rocks hard and the animated over the top violence begins. The "11" even glows red ! Here (with English subtitles)
• German Industrial Metal band KMFDM released WTF?!, an album featuring the song "Krank" which features the lyrics "Krank! Krank it to 11/Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid 24/7"
• Natasha Bedingfield's heart megaphone is set on eleven. It Makes Sense in Context.
• The song "Smack Down" by Thousand Foot Krutch mentions turning it to eleven.
  Come on everybody
  Gonna start this party
  If we turn it to 11
  Then we can't go wrong
• Punk band Templeton Pek (yup, an A-Team reference) turn up their speakers Up to Eleven...visually in "Barriers" (at the end)
• Rush fell victim to this trope with their 2002 album Vapor Trails. Coming out in the thick of the "loudness war" of the early 2000s, it was mastered so loud that most of the subtle details (including Alex Lifeson's acoustic guitar) were buried, distorted, or badly obscured. In February 2011, the band announced plans to remix the whole album.
• Ninja Sex Party's "Unicorn Wizard"
  "Sometimes I wish I was even more awesome than I already am.
  What would my life be like if I turned this shit up to eleven (out of a possible five)?"
• The Sacramento rock band Warp 11, whose songs are entirely about Star Trek, chose their name as a tribute both to Spinal Tap and to the Trek universe's ultimate speed limit of Warp 10.
• Australian radio station 2JJJ once released a compilation album of great heavy metal tracks. It was titled "Twelve".
• Mötley Crüe has a song outright titled "Louder Than Hell".
  "Some like it loud"
  "We like it loud, we like it loud, we like it LOUDER!"
  "LOUDER THAN HELL!"
• Deep Purple has been rated as the loudest Rock-band in the world, and that's not without a proper reason either. During all of their favorite songs, they tend to bring the volume up, just a bit... well, a lot, actually. "Average" songs, by their standards, are played loud. When they get to "Smoke On The Water", "Hell To Pay" or "Black Night" (or "Black Knight". They're not sure themselves), or any of their Audience Participation songs, for that matter, the volume goes up. If you didn't already need earplugs, you'll need them when those songs come around, and you get no warning before the songs start!
  I want everything louder than everything else.
• The song "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," recorded by Johnny Cash in 1993, starts out as a typical song of despair about a man down on his luck. As the song progresses the litany of misfortune thrown at the protagonist continues to build and build (loses his dog, his wife, his arm, his Broadway show is a flop, a prostitute laughs at him, his ex-wife dies of stretch marks, the earth suffers perpetual drought, etc.) to the point where it reveals itself as a spoof of "doom and despair" ballads.
• Halestorm's "I Like It Heavy", a tribute song to how much the singer like heavy metal, features a lyric about cranking the dial up "one louder than ten."
• The music video to Céline Dion's Ashes (on the Deadpool 2 soundtrack) has everyone's favorite Merc with a Mouth complain to Celine that she's too good and she should dial it down from an 11 to a 5-5 1/2. Celine's response? "This thing only goes up to eleven, so beat it, Spider-Man!"
• Cole Swindell's Flatliner.
  Sippin' on this seven-seven
  Never been this close to heaven
  Got the pretty turned up to eleven
  Droppin' them dead on the dance floor.

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