Downer Ending/Music: Difference between revisions

** However, [[Lyrical Dissonance|the ''music'' is so upbeat]] that you may not realize this.

* The video for Junior Kickstart by The Go! Team. Where's a power pellet when you need one!? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[[F Mt LB Xl MZ]]-s

** She tears up the check, gets the main character involved in [[Five-Finger Discount|pickpocketing]], but {{spoiler|they end up getting arrested}}.

** He tears up the check, acts like a real [[jerkass]] to everyone, including the love interest, {{spoiler|resulting in the love interest seducing him one night and stabbing him}}.

* [[Pink Floyd]]'s last album of the Roger Waters era (or [[Your Mileage May Vary|Roger Waters' first solo album]]), ''The Final Cut'', ends with the song "Two Suns in the Sunset". One sun is the sun. The other 'sun' is a mushroom cloud. However, the soulful sax fade-out turns it from a wrist-slitting downer into a lingering melancholy.

** Speaking of Pink Floyd, the band itself had a [[Downer Ending]]. By the end of its recording Career, one member was partially insane, one member had [[Jerkass|run off]] with as many music rights as possible and remember all this while listening to the last ever song made by the band, "High Hopes".

* On the topic of mushroom clouds, [http://youtu.be/1uY5XlEX_Gc Follow The Sun] by Bedouin Soundclash is about two survivors of a nuclear explosion. It closes their Light The Horizon album.

* [[Tom Waits]]'s "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneanopolis" is an unnamed woman telling the reader of the card, a man named Charlie, how she's turned her life around by getting married and quit using drugs and that's she's finally happy. However, at the end of the card, she reveals she was lying about having a husband (and presumably everything else) and needs money to pay a lawyer since she's in jail.

* [[Dream Theater|"Open your eyes Nicholas." "AHH-" * static*]]

* [[Nirvana]] had two clear depressing album closers ("Something In The Way" and "All Apologies") and a borderline example ("Sifting" - though the mainstream reissue ends with one which ''is called'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc67atweLKI&feature=related "Downer"] but it's not a [[Downer Ending]]).

* [[Opeth]]'s album ''Still Life'' is about a medieval atheist, exiled from his community, returning for his love who has become a nun. It doesn't end well for either of them.

* ''[[Puff the Magic Dragon]]'' is somewhat of a minor example, but it does end with Puff going into his cave, lonely and abandoned by his only friend.

* ''Green Green Grass of Home'' tells the story about a man returning home after a long period and meeting everyone he knows, only to wake up in prison about to face the executioner.

* ''Tell Laura I Love Her'' by Ray Peterson tells the story of a fatal automobile race.

* A particularly notorious example was [[Michael Jackson]]'s music video/short film "Black or White", based on the hit single of the same name. It was shown on three basic cable channels simultaneously one night in the fall of 1991, so it was guaranteed to garner a huge audience with [[Hilarious in Hindsight|many children watching]]. The video, which included (among other things) African tribesmen, fur-capped Russian dancers, the Statue of Liberty, and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|Macaulay Culkin performing a rap]], seemingly concluded with a young black woman (who, in montage, had just been transformed into a variety of different people of various skin colors and body types, as well as of both sexes) miming to the end of the song. But then the camera cuts away to reveal that the girl is actually an actress in the studio where the video is being filmed, and pans away until it is following a black leopard as it stalks its way out of the studio and into the dark and rainy night. Once outside, the leopard transforms into Michael Jackson and begins to compulsively perform a dance that becomes more and more unnerving as it goes along, with a great deal of crotch-grabbing. Suddenly he begins smashing a car, shop windows, etc., screaming all the while. As this orgy of godlike destruction concludes, Michael's screams are mixed with the roars of his leopard alter ego. He finally rips off half his clothes and collapses into the rain-slicked street, whereupon he transforms back into the leopard, snarls, and stalks away. And ''then'' in a particularly egregious case of [[Mood Whiplash]], the scene cuts to an animated living room, where it is revealed that [[The Simpsons (animation)|Bart Simpson]] has been watching the entire time. His father bursts in and orders Bart to turn off the TV, prompting Bart to retort with one of his trademark wisecracks. Needless to say, this video left many in its television audience confused, traumatized, and angered. Jackson was forced to issue a public apology for the incident and the video was recut so that it ended just before the "black leopard" sequence. Later, the full-length version reappeared with CGI effects superimposing racist graffiti on the objects he smashed to provide justification for his rage.

* "Strange Kind of Woman" by [[Deep Purple]]; guy tries to seduce a high class call girl and eventually succeeds...only for her to die not long after they wed.

{{quote|"All this time you were pretending

So much for my happy ending" }}

 

{{reflist}}