Disproportionate Retribution/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


You take an eye, and I'll take you motherf* cking head!

  • Truth in Television: Rap feuds. Because nothing says "don't scuff my sneakers" like shooting you in the head.
    • Parodied in 30 Rock, where multiple rap personalities threaten to "eat [Tracy's] family" for slights like not being on a guest list or scuffing shoes... 20 years prior on a Nickelodeon show.
    • Lampshade Hanging in this line from Chris Rock's "No Sex (In the Champagne Room)":

"If you go to a movie theater and someone steps on your foot, let it slide. Why spend the next 20 years in jail because someone smudged your Puma?"

  • The Sentenced song "Vengeance is Mine" contains the line "Dozens of eyes for an eye", which seems slightly excessive, even for a band so depressed and angry they broke up by dragging a coffin all around Finland.
  • D12's "Get My Gun" someone on the street asks for Eminem's autograph so he takes a magnum shoots the guy, his best friend and girlfriend.
  • There seems to be an entire subgenre of music videos where a woman messes up a man for cheating on her. Makes one wonder why she doesn't just leave him, how stable she was in the first place, or what would happen if the roles were gender-reversed.
  • Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" is supposed to be a "female empowerment" song about getting back at a cheating boyfriend. However, anyone who actually listens to the lyrics can tell its actually about a malicious, paranoid woman who is so insecure about her relationship with man that she automatically assumes that any time he is spending away from her, he's cheating. And so she trashes his car. Which makes her actually worse off than him, because while (suspected but unproven) adultery is not a criminal act, vandalism of someone's motor vehicle is. "Hello, police? Someone ruined my car and I think I may have a lead on who did it. She carved her name into my leather seats."
      • This same thing is done hilariously in the video for "Love You" by Jack Ingram. Her vandalism includes keying "love you" onto the hood, slashing the tires, beating the crap out of the body with a golf club, then finding a shotgun in the back and shooting out the rear window and windshield, probably destroying the interior too. The hilarious part? It was the wrong car.
    • Lily Allen's "Smile" had the singer's character pay people to beat him up, ruin his means of livelihood, mess up his apartment, and put laxatives in his coffee, while she pretends to be comforting. The lyrics indicates that while he had been cheating, they aren't even going out anymore.
    • Blue Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up" has the singer's character sell all his possessions in a yard sale, then take her friends out on a shopping spree with his credit cards. Perhaps not as extreme as physical violence, but it's still pretty disproportionate to ruin a guy's credit over infidelity.
    • In the Garth Brooks song "Pappa Loved Momma", when long-haul trucker Pappa finds out that Momma's not only cheating on him, but has been for a while, his response is to kill her and her lover by driving through the motel room they are in with his semi-truck.
    • The role reversal is actually more common, with many examples of Murder Ballads where men kill both the woman cheating on him and the man she's cheating with.
      • Those usually aren't first person, though.
  • Weird Al Yankovic's song "I'll Sue Ya". "I'll sue ya, I'll take all your money! I'll sue ya, if you even look at me funny!"
    • Another track from the same album, "Don't Download This Song". "It doesn't matter if you're a grandma / Or a seven year old girl / They'll treat you like the evil hardbitten criminal scum you are..." (see the Real Life folder below)
    • In "Why Does This Always Happen to Me?", the singer stabs his boss in the face because he kept asking him to get some toner.
    • Turned the other way around in "Everything You Know Is Wrong", in which Saint Peter punishes the narrator for arriving at the Pearly Gates in a Nehru jacket in defiance of Heaven's dress code by giving him a room next to a noisy ice machine...FOREVER, and then running past every day screaming about how everything you know is wrong.
  • Theory of a Deadman's "Little Smirk." In retaliation for coming home to find his lover cheating on him, he throws her naked out of the house, burns her possessions, takes her money, steals her car, and kidnaps her baby. As well as gloating that he'd do it all over again in an instant, presumably if she had more stuff to burn or babies to steal.
  • The nursery song "little Bunny Foo-Foo." The titular rabbit gets threatened with getting turned into a ghoul (in some versions, a worm or other unpleasant creature) if he doesn't quit hitting field mice. Of course, he doesn't. Goodbye, being cute and fuzzy, hello robbing graves (or general repulsiveness).
    • In fairness, he is given multiple chances to change his ways. Further, as a rabbit is several times the mass of a field mouse, he is probably doing serious injury to the mice by bopping them on the head.
  • Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
  • In the video for Shakira's "Don't Bother", Shakira sends her cheating boyfriend's car to the crusher.
  • "The Watchmaker's Apprentice" by the Clockwork Quartet is about the titular apprentice being replaced at his job by a machine, and getting revenge on his miserly boss by creating a watch that messily kills a customer, frames the watchmaker, bankrupts his business and ruins him.
  • Miranda Lambert's "Gunpowder and Lead" is from the point of view of a woman about to murder her abusive boyfriend. However, the song in no way indicates that it's some "burning bed" scenario where she's trapped in an abusive relationship and this is the only way out. It sounds more like he just got rough with her once and she decided to kill him for it.
    • Another by Miranda Lambert. The MV for "Kerosene" has Miranda commit arson because her lover cheated on her.
  • The woman in Bruce Springsteen's "From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)" fatally shoots her lover and her only explanation is that "she couldn't stand the way he drove."
  • Owl City may be Adorkable but that doesn't help him in Deer In The Headlights where he gets maced just for saying Hello and later got a black eye and bloody nose from, apparently, another girl.