I’ve always thought that this one is surprisingly un-creepy, considering the subject. Pathetic, yes, tragic, yes, but not really what I consider disturbing.
I’d nominate the Beatles’ “Run For Your Life”
It’s especially creepy because it just comes out of nowhere at the end of Rubber Soul. It starts out all catchy and upbeat, and you’re listening casually, but suddenly the lyrics you’ve been humming along with pop into focus (Catch you with another ma, that’s the ennn-d, little girl…) and the vocal harmonies take on a sinister sound that you hadn’t noticed before, and you’re a tiny bit shaken, because didn’t this seem like a pretty likeable album before now? Did they just go there? It works (the creepy, that is) because it sneaks up on you like that.
Most of the above are disturbing due to imagery involving violence etc.
On a totally different track, my personal nightmare is the song “Time” from Dark Side of the Moon. I re-read the lyrics just now in order to remind myself for the purpose of this post. Just reading them gives me a mild sense of panic and a desperate but useless and repressed urge to somehow grab onto something to stop my life flowing inexorably away before I get a chance to do all that I want to do.
I haven’t heard of most of the songs posted but the most disturbing I can get is Janie’s Got A Gun by Aerosmith.
Tell me now it’s untrue.
What did her daddy do?
He jacked a little bitty baby
The man has got to be insane
They say the spell that he was under the lightning and the
thunder knew that someone had to stop the rain
*
The album version had the lyric "put a bullet in his brain".
I love the comparison between Pink Floyd’s “Time” and They Might Be Giants’ “Older”. They both deal with the concept of inevitable death, but “Older” is a little more direct.
On the subject of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, it’s not the subject matter per se but some of the imagery is a little graphic.
The best approach for a song is to quote a stanza, and then provide a link to a site that holds the copyright and can legitimately display all the lyrics.
There’s a fair amount of ambiguity in the “fair standards” use when it comes to songs. We at the SDMB tend to be more strict than we perhaps might legally need to be. We don’t want others copying our stuff (especially Cecil’s Columns or Staff Reports, say) without permission, and therefore we don’t want our members copying the material of others.
I’ve deleted out, in a couple of posts above, all but the first stanza. That may not be what you intended as illustrative, but it’s straight-forward mechanical. If you’d rather that a different stanza or couple of lines be shown, please email me with exactly what you want (use REPORT on your post, if you want) and be specific and I’ll be glad to fix it for you.
Please be aware of our concerns with copyright material in future.
There’s just one problem with that: what if you don’‘t trust the site? I am forced to go to various sites for lyrics, but I don’'t dare post them here. I say post partial lyrics and let freedom be damned. Yeah?
You’ve deleted part of my post, you may not be aware but the song the excerpt is from is very long, I quoted only a small part of it. Here is the entire song http://www.purelyrics.com/index.php?lyrics=jhndaodk.
Lyle Lovett’s L.A. County. On first listen, it sounds like a love song (and some people have even used it as music at their weddings). But if you pay attention, it’s about someone who murders a bride and groom at the altar, then kneels down and prays next to their corpses.
I wasn’t aware of that, and I don’t know if C K Dexter Haven was. But the guideline here is that you post no more than about one stanza. We ask that everybody stick to that no matter how long the song is.
The Ninth Wave - a song cycle by Kate Bush about a woman lost in the water at night. She either drowns or doesn’t, and dies and is judged or not. The song Waking the Witch is especially disturbing.
I can’t disagree with you but for some reason it doesn’t strike me as disturbing. Perhaps because the music is so upbeat it is cancelling the effect of the lyrics. I mean you are right, but for some reason I don’t get the feel of disturbing.