This wreck happened in the early 60s. My first BF was riding in a car with his mom right behind that truck When I met him ten years later in HS, we always ate lunch together, and one day I pulled a banana out of my lunch bag and he freaked! He told me the story later, and played the record for me one night. His mother had grim memories of it, too. Neither could stand the smell of bananas, and said once you smelled burned ones you never forgot it.
The Smiths? Really? I’ve never heard Morrissey singing and thought he was happy.
Some Smiths tunes are true dirges, but those cited above have music that sounds kind of lighthearted and upbeat to many ears, and lends a fair amount of irony to the lyrics. I always took this to signify that Moz, while quite clinically depressed, had a rather darkly sarcastic sense of humor.
“Jane Says”, by Jane’s Addiction. An absolutely chipper, upbeat, bouncy song with some of the most depressing lyrics I’ve ever heard.
“Hatred” by the Kinks is so bouncey you could dance to it.
Look for a song called “All You Need Is Hate” by a band called The Delgados.
The Worst Pies in London, from the (very dark) musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the song that sprang immediately to my mind; it’s awful, sickening and even depressing, lyrically, but it sounds cheerful enough.
Another one is Jimmie Rodger’s “The TB Is Whippin Me.” Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco fame) does a pretty upbeat cover on a… um, I’m not sure if it was a legit release, but I have it on something called “Outta Print Outta Sight”
While I agree that “Jane Says” is totally maudlin, I’ve certainly never noticed it being even remotely chipper or upbeat. It’s almost heavy.
Check out “Charlie Horse” by the amazing Canadian band Great Big Sea. It’s a peppy song with a chorus that’s fun to sing along to, but it’s about a horse that fell through thin ice and died, and a group of people who go to get the corpse.
“What A Way To End It All” by Deaf School is a peppy, enthusiastic song about a guy who is going to commit suicide. On the same album, “Second Honeymoon,” are upbeat songs about getting stood up for a date, and a crumbling love affair.
Sting and The Police have a lot of dark lyrics matched to bouncy (or at least major key) melodies. One of my favorites is “Murder by Numbers,” a jazzy riff about gettin’ down with your bad mass-murderin’ self. Sample lyrics include:
There really isn’t any need for bloodshed
You just do it with a little more finesse
If you can slip a tablet into someone’s coffee
Then it avoids an awful lot of mess…
and
*Now if you have a taste for this experience
And you’re flushed with your very first success
Then you must try a twosome or a threesome
And you’ll find your conscience bothers you much less
Because murder is like anything you take to
It’s a habit-forming need for more and more
You can bump off every member of your family
And anybody else you find a bore*
Then there’s the charming love song “Once upon a Daydream,” featuring a pair of teenage lovebirds who expect a kid out of wedlock, the revelation of which leads to child abuse, forced abortion, and homicide. Yay!!!
*Once upon a daydream
Doesn’t happen anymore
Once upon a moonbeam
This is no place for tenderness
Once her daddy found out
He threw her to the floor
He killed her unborn baby
And kicked me from the door
Once upon a nightmare
I bought myself a gun
I blew her daddy’s brains out
Now hell has just begun*
Definitely a love song for the ages! Finally there’s “The Lazarus Heart,” from Sting’s solo years. The music is breezy, jazzy, joyful. The lyrics? Not so much. This has gotta be the most cheerful song EVAR about obsessive maternal/filial codependency, portents of death (“birds on the roof”), and sarcrifice! Samples:
He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast that burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother’s hand
and
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
I’ve no stones that chase them away
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
Will sit on my roof some day
They fly at the window, they fly at the door
Where does she get the strength to fight them anymore
She counts all her children as a shield against the pain
Lifts her eyes to the sky like a flower in the rain
Really, there are too many other examples among Sting’s output (and The Police too) to cite, which is probably why he also rated [url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=368295&highlight=sting]this recent thread* about why so many of his “love songs” are rather … disturbing.
Sting and The Police have a lot of dark lyrics matched to bouncy (or at least major key) melodies. One of my favorites is “Murder by Numbers,” a jazzy riff about gettin’ down with your bad mass-murderin’ self. Sample lyrics include:
There really isn’t any need for bloodshed
You just do it with a little more finesse
If you can slip a tablet into someone’s coffee
Then it avoids an awful lot of mess…
and
*Now if you have a taste for this experience
And you’re flushed with your very first success
Then you must try a twosome or a threesome
And you’ll find your conscience bothers you much less
Because murder is like anything you take to
It’s a habit-forming need for more and more
You can bump off every member of your family
And anybody else you find a bore*
Then there’s the charming love song “Once upon a Daydream,” featuring a pair of teenage lovebirds who expect a kid out of wedlock, the revelation of which leads to child abuse, forced abortion, and homicide. Yay!!!
*Once upon a daydream
Doesn’t happen anymore
Once upon a moonbeam
This is no place for tenderness
Once her daddy found out
He threw her to the floor
He killed her unborn baby
And kicked me from the door
Once upon a nightmare
I bought myself a gun
I blew her daddy’s brains out
Now hell has just begun*
Definitely a love song for the ages! Finally there’s “The Lazarus Heart,” from Sting’s solo years. The music is breezy, jazzy, joyful. The lyrics? Not so much. This has gotta be the most cheerful song EVAR about obsessive maternal/filial codependency, portents of death (“birds on the roof”), and sarcrifice! Samples:
He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast that burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother’s hand
and
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
I’ve no stones that chase them away
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
Will sit on my roof some day
They fly at the window, they fly at the door
Where does she get the strength to fight them anymore
She counts all her children as a shield against the pain
Lifts her eyes to the sky like a flower in the rain
Really, there are too many other examples among Sting’s output (and The Police too) to cite, which is probably why he also rated this recent thread about why so many of his “love songs” are rather … disturbing.
While I’m not entirely sure what They Might Be Giants’ Don’t Let’s Start is about, it does have these lines:
No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
There’s a song form the '70s by Eric Clapton – maybe “Peaches and Diesel”? – which is sung in a light, cheerful, folksy style, but the lyrics include things like “Boy, you’re gonna be dead!”.
“Assassin’s Song” from the little known musical “Blondel.” He’s an a-double-s, an
a-double-s-i-n.
Oh, and there’s the London Underground song by Dr Suman Biswas and Dr Adam Kay (Google “underground song”). A chirpy (sweary) song about not enjoying travel on the Tube.
Going back a few years, the first song I thought of was a snappy littly ditty by The Buoys called “Timothy” about a mine cave-in and the ensuing cannabilism on the title character.
The first verse:
Trapped in a mine that had caved in
And everyone knows the only ones left
Were Joe and me and Tim
When they broke through to pull us free
The only ones left to tell the tale
Were Joe and me
Looking Glass’s “Brandy” is a very sad tale:
At night, when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man who’s not around.
And what about Manilow’s “Copacabana”: Murder, mayhem, mental illness, all to a Latin beat.
I don’t think “Brandy” is all that upbeat, musically. In fact, in terms of relentlessly depressing songs, it’s right up there in my mind with “Ode to Billy Joe”. But its music is less maudlin than its lyrics.