Brick Joke/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Canadian Progressive band, Rush, pulled something akin to a Brick Joke: the last song of their album, A Farewell To Kings, is "Cygnus X-1", the tale of an astronaut who pilots his vessel into the eponymous black hole, hoping to use it as an "astral door"; it ends with him seemingly torn apart. The "A" side of their next album, Hemispheres, details the struggle between the gods of Reason and Passion to "rule the hearts of man". The struggle erupts into all-out war, which is only interrupted when... the astronaut from "Cygnus X-1" emerges into their midst.
  • The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" details the road trip the narrator once took with his family to the eponymous attraction. Early on, he makes brief mention of picking up a hitchhiker named "Bernie". Numerous verses later, they finally reach the twine ball.. and ask Bernie to take their picture. He instead runs off with their camera.
    • Another Weird Al song, "Albuquerque", starts with him explaining that the only problem with his early life was that his mother fed him nothing but sauerkraut until he was twenty-six and a half. Over the course of the eleven minute song, Al details his move to the eponymous city and the changes in his life. Near the end, he finally admits the entire song was a roundabout way of saying "I HATE SAUERKRAUT!"
  • Peter Schickele did this with the PDQ Bach grand opera "Oedipus Tex". In the introduction speech at concerts, or alternatively in the introduction track on records/CDs, he mentions that, while concert halls and lecterns and various parts of theatres often get corporate sponsorship, it's generally considered uncouth for them to sponsor the songs themselves. This digression is completely forgotten until forty-five minutes (or six tracks) later when suddenly one of the lines of one of the songs is replaced with "Drink Pepsi."
  • The Dubliners' "The Sick Note" could arguably work as one of these. The song is sung by a man who calls himself "Patty" and in the first verse he states that this is a letter written to his boss to explain why he won't be coming to work today. Over the course of the song, he continues to get into various forms of accidents, such as darting fourteen stories to hit a trolly with his head and having broken bricks land on him. The final words of the song then go: "Me body is all black and blue, me face a deathly gray / so I hope you'll understand why Patty's not at work today."
  • The Lonely Island does this in their song "Dreamgirl". The song opens with a monotone voice stating "The following song is brought to you by Chex Mix". They then proceed to sing a song about a "dream girl" who's actually horrible in every way, and for the last couple verses of the song (and the final chorus), it switches to a full-on song about how delicious Chex Mix is.
  • On one of Christine Lavin's live albums, she performs her song "Doris and Edwin: The Movie", which has a rather dark ending. She offers the audience the choice of having it turn out happily due to Doris wearing something that saves her from her fate. They usually say 'no', and do here. Later in the show (about 20 minutes later), she performs "Shopping Cart of Love- a play" in which the song's protagonist passes an accident-scene and the song's love-interest suggests everything would've been okay if only she had a prototype airbag-dress.
  • "I Hope You Die" by The Bloodhound Gang has one of these.

I hope you flip some guy the bird,
He cuts you off and you're forced to swerve...

    • Then later...

And when you finally regain consciousness,
You're bound and gagged in a wedding dress,
And the prison guard looks the other way,
'Cause he's the guy you flipped the bird the other day!

  • The Genesis album Duke has a short track at the start called Guide Vocal where the eponymous character claims that "nobody must know my name, for nobody would understand, and you kill what you fear." At the end of the penultimate track the guide returns to complete his statement: "Nobody must know my name, for nobody would understand, and you kill what you fear, and you fear what you don't understand."
  • Captain Beefheart's album Strictly Personal begins with a blues parody called "Ah Feel Like Ahcid". The song goes into a phased section which leads into the next track "Safe As Milk", meaning we don't hear "Ahcid"'s real ending. Or so it appears at first. After the third track, "Trust Us", we hear more of "Ahcid", but it fades out and much later on, after the last (8th) track, Kandy Korn, we hear the final words of "Ahcid", "I ain't blue no more, wooo it's like heaven ahcid, ahcid" which close the album.
  • Power Metal band Dragonheart does this on their album Vengeance in Black. The first song on the album, Eyes of Hell, begins with a heavy, mid-tempo riff. The last song on the album, Spreading Fire, uses the same riff during the bridge section.
  • The video for Fall Out Boy's Thnks fr th Mmrs includes Pete Wentz getting a phone call from William Beckett of The Academy Is.... The video for We've Got a Big Mess on Our Hands, by The Academy Is..., has William making the call.
    • In the video for "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race" pretty much everything from their previous videos shows up at Pete Wentz's dream funeral, including Pete rising from the casket as a vampire, which he was in the "Less Than Sixteen Candles" video.
  • "Glass Onion" is basically a Shout-Out-Brick Joke-Mind Screw all at once.
    • The Beatles did several of these, Sgt Pepper (Reprise) being the most obvious. There's also the last note of "Mean Mr. Mustard" at the beginning of the 'hidden track' Her Majesty on Abbey Road.
  • Queen's album "A Day At The Races" starts with an "Intro" of which the last 20 seconds are exactly the same as the last minute of the last track "Teo Torriate".
  • The insert for the Alex Day album Parrot Stories include the out-of-nowhere line "No horses were drowned in the making of this album." You finish the last listed track... and you hear the secret track The Drowning Horse Song.
  • An odd one occurs on Pink Floyd's The Wall album. The last thing you hear at the end of the album is a quiet voice asking, Isn't this...?" This matches up with the first thing you hear on the album: the same quiet voice saying, "... where we came in?"
  • Jimmy Buffett pulls this off with two of his songs, released a year apart. 1986's "Who's the Blonde Stranger" (from his album Riddles in the Sand) details the travails of a husband and wife, Frankie and Lola, who each cheat on each other during a vacation trip to Galveston Bay, Texas. 1987's "Frankie and Lola" (from the album "Last Mango in Paris") returns to Frankie and Lola's life just as they're patching their marriage up after a short-term separation by taking "a second honeymoon in Pensacola", when each realizes that they truly do love each other.
  • Arlo Guthrie does this several times in "Alice's Restaurant".
  • New Age composer Vangelis invokes a Brick Joke structure in his Albedo 0.39 album. The first track Pulstar ends with the British Post time recording. A voice is heard intoning "At the third stroke, it will be ten-three and forty seconds" followed by three beeps. Likewise for "ten-three and fifty seconds". At "ten-four precisely", the second track kicks in right where the three beeps should be. Just before the ending of track eight, Nucleogenesis (Part II), the music pauses and the listener hears a rotary telephone dial. The dialing is followed by three beeps and the climax of the track.