Oh, yeah, and Queen’s Radio Ga Ga and Don’t Try Suicide are both very catchy.
Willie Nelson’s Funny How Time Slips Away is a very clever song indeed, about a man who runs into his ex by chance. Willie sings the whole thing in the same blithe twang, but the title line is given a slightly different twist at the end of each verse - the first verse is polite small talk, the second is a pointed jab and the third is an thinly-veiled threat.
Someone did.
So is Helter Skelter. Ask Sharon Tate how that one turned out for her.
Neil Sedaka’s original 1962 recording of Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. Bouncy, upbeat melody paired with lyrics about the singer’s girlfriend dumping him.
Not to be confused with his 1975 remake, which he turned into a blues-ey piano ballad.
Western Union, by the Five Americans.
Nice catchy tune with good rhythm and harmony, but the song is all about how his girl Dear Johnned him by telegram.
“My Little Town” by Simon and Garfunkel sounds like a sentimental, “Penny Lane”-type song. Simon wrote it for Garfunkel, wanting something nasty to contrast the nice stuff he’d been singing (It appeared on both their solo albums in 1975). The lyrics, which I waited over 30 years to track down and read, contrast vividly with the sentimental music, hinting at fraudulent values, stifled intellect and environmental degradation.
Wow, maybe I should give “Penny Lane” a new listen…
“Hey Ya” by Outkast
Artificial Flowers is from an 1960 broadway show called “Tenderloin”, and is a huge comedy number. If you listen to it as a tragic song then it’s really a piece of c**p, it is the triteness of the lyrics that make it so funny, and of course the way it is performed.
Personally, I don’t think Bobby Darin got it, but Beautiful South definitely did.
The Postal Service’s first (and probably only) akbum included the upbeat and poppy song “we will become silhouettes”… about dying horribly in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Because the air outside will make our cells
Divide at an alarming rate until our shells
Simply cannot hold all our insides in
And that’s when we’ll explode
I just read the lyrics and now I feel ill
A happy little song about serial killing by Shel Silverstein Now with Muppets
Imagine You Were Mine-- Mitch Benn
Reading this lyric still brings tears. My son is 28. Waiting for a grand child so Puff can come back!
Outside of a Small Circle of Friends by Phil Ochs was done to a boppy rag-time tune for the sake of irony. It’s about the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese while witnesses looked the other way
Oingo Boingo made something of a specialty of up-tempo, ska-influenced songs with sinister lyrics; the first one that comes to mind is “Nothing Bad Ever Happens to Me”, in which Danny Elfman recites a litany of horrifying everyday tragedies he’s heard about (a family gets pistol-whipped during a home invasion, teenage suicide) while the band sings the sunny chorus “Why should I care?”
The Coventry Carol – a hauntingly beautiful Christmas song, actually about the Slaughter of the Innocents.
One of the best examples of this is Green Day’s “Time of Your Life”.
“More Than Words” by Extreme is NOT a love song either, and definitely not suitable for weddings. :smack:
You mean the song that’s actually called, Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)?
If only there was some sort of a clue that it wasn’t completely positive …
Jump by Van Halen was really about a real-life suicide jumper that David Lee Roth saw on the news. Bystanders were trying to talk him down so Roth used that as the inspiration to write a song saying that he probably should jump. “You might as well jump…Go ahead and jump.”
David Lee Roth in Rock Video Magazine, July 1984 :
“Jump” is a song that we wrote for several different reasons, primarily because it is leap year and secondly, because I was watching television one night and it was the five o’clock news and there was a fellow standing on top of the Arco Towers in Los Angeles and he was about to check out early, he was going to do the 33 stories drop - and there was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs yelling “Don’t jump, don’t jump” and I thought to myself, “Jump.” So, I wrote it down and ultimately it made in onto the record, although in a much more positive vein.
Country Death Song by the Violent Femmes. Fairly upbeat song about a guy who kills his daughter. Told from the father’s perspective. The song ends with him feeling so much guilt, he decides to hang himself.