Angry Mob Song

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Wickedness must be punished!

"Raise the flag! Sing the song!
Here we come, we're fifty strong,
And fifty Frenchmen can't be wrong.

Let's kill the Beast! Kill the Beast!"
The Mob, "The Mob Song (Kill The Beast)", Beauty and the Beast

Musical Theatre is Serious Business. There's a lot of drama. And given that it's musical theatre, it's intense drama with a great soundtrack. So logically the angry mob with Torches and Pitchforks get their own Crowd Song about how much they want to Burn the Witch. If there's a public execution about to take place, you'll hear the same mob singing.

La Résistance also commonly get their own song, which falls under this trope since a lot of revolutions in theatre are angry mobs with a political agenda. Expect this to sound like a military march, or at least have a fife and some snaredrums.

Very rarely is an Angry Mob Song not a Crowd Song. It doesn't have to be a Villain Song, but it certainly often is.

Examples of Angry Mob Song include:

La Résistance

Music

Theatre

Western Animation

Real Life

  • Real Life French revolutionaries sang "Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira...les aristocrates à la lanterne!"; or, roughly, "string 'em up!"
    • The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise", started out this way too. Its lyrics are really bloodthirsty; it mentions a bloodstained banner on the fourth line, and the chorus (y'know, the part that you repeat and actually remember) urges citizens to form up into battalions and kill their oppressors "until impure blood drenches our fields."
      • In similar vein, the rarely-sung third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner mentions that "their [i.e. the invaders'] blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution." (There's probably a reason it's rarely-sung.)
      • During Red October the Bolsheviks had their own version, called "Worker's Marseillaise".
  • Horst-Wessel-Lied of the National Socialist party of Germany. The Die Fahne hoch became an unofficial Party anthem after the murder of Wessel and after the Nazi coup, an unofficial national song.


Torches and Pitchforks

Film

Music

  • "Stakes and Torches" from Voltaire's album To the Bottom of the Sea is a mob song about the poor rising up to overthrow their leader, the Robber Baron.
  • Dark folk artist Reverend Glasseye is especially fond of this trope, having more than a few Angry Mob Songs across his three albums. Notable tales include a song about man who incites a crowd to lynch the man courting his daughter ("Mother's a Carpegian") and some religious zealots killing a man who won't provide him wood for their temples ("Black River Falls").
  • The satirical song "The Angry Mob" by the Kaiser Chiefs is about a middle class angry mob getting riled up by things reported in the British press.
  • "Witch Hunt" by Rush is a typical example.

Theatre

Western Animation

Other

Fan Works

  • "Serves Them Right" from the Calvin at Camp episode "Champion Charlie Brown."

Music

  • "Burn The Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age. At least until the halfway-point.
  • "The Rise of Abimelech Dumont" by the Gravel Pit features an angry mob trying to overthrow the man who's taken over the town. They all get shot to death.
  • In The Protomen, an angry mob tries to lynch Dr. Light, on Dr. Wily's behest. Notable in that Light has been found innocent of murder and they still want to kill him.
    • The song in question is titled, quite appropriately, "Give Us the Rope".
  • Somewhat subverted by Black Sabbath's "Iron Man". The song is from the perspective of a rejected hero who turns against the people he once tried to save (but who rejected him).
  • "If You See Light" by The Mountain Goats is an interesting version- it's from the perspective of the person against whom the mob is rallying.

Theatre

  • "The Chase" from Brigadoon. The townspeople aren't intending to kill Harry Beaton, only to prevent him from leaving Brigadoon and condemning the town to vanish forever. Unfortunately, Harry meets Death by Falling Over.
  • The ensemble version of "Tonight" from West Side Story, with each gang anticipating its revenge on the other.
  • This goes back at least as far as the Passion oratorios of the Baroque period.
  • Variation: "Guinevere" from Camelot, "City On Fire" from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and "City Under Seige" from Der Glockner Von Notre Dame are more like choruses about angry mobs than the songs of the mobs themselves.
  • "Down with the Flowers of Progress!" in Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia, Ltd.
  • "Gira la cote" from the opera Turandot, sung by a mob breathlessly anticipating a beheading.
  • "Look down" - the very opening of Les Misérables. Though not so much an Angry Mob Song than a Resigned, bitter Mob song with angry tones about the long, dreading years of prison sentence.

Western Animation