Isn't It Ironic?: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Liz''': How are you not ''moved'' by this?!<br />

 

When a song having lyrics which are intended to be [[Irony|ironic]] is (ironically) [[Lyrical Dissonance|used unironically]] in the soundtrack of a show, demonstrating either ignorance or willful misuse by the producers.

== Advertising ==

* The use of [[Janis Joplin]]'s "Mercedes Benz" by the makers of Mercedes-Benzes. One of the better misuses.

** Even though it was written and performed by a woman whose drinking habit was so ingrained that had she ever been ''given'' that Mercedes-Benz, she'd only have totalled it on its first outing. And in this context, Verse Three is strangely absent from the adverts: ''Oh Lord/Won't you buy me/ A night on the town/ I'm counting on you, Lord/Please don't let me down!/ Prove that you love me/ And buy the next round/Oh Lord/Won't you buy me/ A night on the town!'' The use of a song by the poster-girl for over-consumption of Jack Daniels is especially ironic in the light of frequent government campaigns against drinking and driving....Presumably she'd have left the Mercedes-Benz in the garage and taken a cab home, eh, Janis?

** The use of the Pogues "Sunnyside of the Street" by Mercedes-Benz. Cheery sounding song until it cuts out right before Shane McGowan starts singing about his heart full of hate and a lust for vomit.

* A car commercial used the titular lines from "Move Along" by All-American Rejects. I mean, cars move you, so "Move Along" is the perfect line, if you ignore the fact that in the song, the singer is trying to convince his friend not to commit suicide.

** "Move Along" also turned up in one of [[LEGO]]'s ''[[Bionicle]]'' ads, when Lego had a deal with the band. At least ''there'' it was SLIGHTLY less out of place...but only just: on the one hand, the heroes of the story are trying to prevent a death. On the other, the song's still being used with kid's toys.

** How about the same band's "Tonight Tonight Tonight", a song about a paranoid junkie making a drug deal late at night, being used for a famous Michelob beer commercial?! (Did Michelob sponsor their ''Invisible Touch'' tour?!)

** After "Jesus He Knows Me" was released, the Christian TV station, the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), figured the band had discovered religion and picked up the song's video to air, but they decided not to after learning what the song is really about. It's about a televangelist who [[Sinister Minister|lives a decadent, corrupt lifestyle]] off the donations from his viewers.

* [[Bob Dylan|Bob Dylan's]] "The Times They Are A-Changin'," as sung by masses of children running through wheat fields, was used by a multinational bank.

{{quote| '''[[Rick Mercer]]''': If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Woodie Guthrie spinning in his grave.}}

* The song "All I Want for Christmas is You", featuring lines like "I don't care about the presents underneath the Christmas tree", is inexplicably popular in adverts trying to sell those presents.

* [[The Rolling Stones]]' "Start Me Up" was famously used by Microsoft for the Windows 95 launch. The lyrics include the well-known refrain "You make a grown man cry." Anyone who used Windows '95 would find that line ''very'' apt...

* The NFL Network recently started using a cover of Morrissey's "Every Day is Like Sunday" in its commercials. Let's just say that Morrissey didn't actually like Sundays that much.

* A 2008 commercial for the Ford Edge used the lyricless parts from a Band of Horses song to background a sweet scene of a girl driving through the city at night and then meeting up with her man for dinner. The song was The Funeral, about the inevitability of death.

* A commercial for the Ford Transit used an extract of Soul Coughing's "Disseminated"; while the segment used is from later in the song, the opening verse of the full song describes a goat that ate a tin can and "shat out a Ford Sedan".

** It was also used in tourist adverts for visiting London.

*** And then for [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14324385 promoting the 2012 London summer Olympics].

You will no longer be my daughter! }}

* A 2004 ad for the Volkwagen Touareg featured "Ariel Ramirez", a song by Richard Buckner about doing heroin.

* A Best Buy commercial a few years back used Sheryl Crow's "Soak up the Sun" for their summer sale. This is a song about a poor girl who "don't have digital...don't have diddly squat" and knows "It's not having what you want/it's wanting what you've got."

* Toyota used the [[Pet Shop Boys]] version of "Go West" in some car ads in the early 90s. While the song is infectiously upbeat, it was already a gay anthem to begin with, and the cover dealt with escapism from the AIDS crisis and the fall of the Soviet Union.

* [[Disney]] hired [[Bowling for Soup]] to redo "I Melt With You" by [[Modern English]]; it has worked its way back into advertising culminating in Hershey's Chocolate using it for a Kiss commercial with a mother and child. All of this ignoring the fact the first two lines are "Moving forward using all my breath/Making love to you was never second best." Yeah, sweet sentiment there Hershey's.

** Not to mention that said song is also about dying in a nuclear holocaust ("melt" being used literally, but it could also be a pun). It's about a couple that have sex as the bombs fall because it's their last moment.

** To be fair, Disney had them change the line in the remake to "Bein' friends with you was never second best." It was for a children's movie, after all.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36gW-IPV0aA "Beautiful Day"] by English folk-punk band The Levellers has occasionally turned up in adverts based on the chorus "What a beautiful day/I'm the king of all time/And nothing is impossible/In my all powerful mind." Whoever chose the song apparently missed the part after this when it proceeds to talk about instigating a political revolution, the titular "beautiful day".

* Many-a commercial for a hardware store, office supply store, or heck, even cars has made use of Bachman Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care Of Business: "Takin' care of business/and workin' overtime!" However, in the rest of the song, the singer is singing about how he's a lazy guy who's happy with how he's ''not'' working like every other workaholic out there: "And if you ever get annoyed,/look at me, I'm self-employed/I love to work at nothin' all day!"

* British restaurant chain Harvester produced a TV spot using the Isley Brothers' single "Harvest for the World" as its soundtrack. Behold scenes of smiling families tucking into plates of glistening, fatty food, all to the strains of a song about famine, greed and war.

* One TV spot in Mastercard's long-running "priceless" campaign, played in the run-up to Valentine's Day, used Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman". The song's lyrics detail the heartache and self-destruction that can come with love, and includes lines about how a man will "spend his very last dime trying to hold on to what he needs".

* The advertising campaign for ''[[Dragon Age]]'' was infamous for using ''This Is The New Shit'' by [[Marilyn Manson]], likely in an attempt to show that the game was [[Darker and Edgier]] as well as [[Hotter and Sexier]] than previous Western fantasy RPGs. The lyrics are mostly mocking fans craving innovation, while producers crank out the same old material with big helpings of sex, violence and grittiness in order to appeal to the audience's baser instincts.

* A current (late 2010) Subaru minivan commercial uses the Pogues' "If I Should Fall From Grace With God."

* A trailer for the 2010 version of the [[The Karate Kid]] movie uses the refrain from [[Linkin Park|Fort Minor's]] "Remember the Name", a song that has nothing to do with fighting and [[Boastful Rap|isn't particularly kid-friendly]].

* A cell phone commercial about how wonderful their new contracts are, using the refrain from Meatloaf's ''Paradise by the Dashboard Light:'' "I would love you to the end of time!" ignoring the next stanza: "So now I'm praying for the end of time / To hurry up and arrive / Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you / I don't think that I can really survive."

* GE used Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of "Sixteen Tons" for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1A146sANdg their advert for clean coal.] The song depicts life of a coal miner under the truck system. Under this system workers were paid with exchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. "St. Peter don't call me 'cause I can't go/I owe my soul to the company store."

** Though, Call of Duty has had a history of being anti-war, yet [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|simultaneously being pro-war, due to being a fun video game about the subject.]] So, while still contradictory, the advertisers were probably well aware of the song' meaning

** The game is also set during [[The Sixties]] and [[The Vietnam War]] particularly -- many of the soldiers fighting the war didn't particularly want to be there and would often play contemporary anti-war rock music being well aware of the irony. The producers probably knew exactly what they were doing.

* "Bring Me Down" by Lenka was used for a Dulux paint ad in Canada in early 2012, in which a woman is unsatisfied with her bleak looking living room and cheerfully paints it red while her husband is set aside. The lyrics tells of a woman drifting apart from her partner, criticizing him that he's done nothing while their relationship crumbled, and that she needs to leave before she falls right back into his arms. The lyrics are ''surprisingly close'' to what is being depicted... except for the happy ending of course.

* In 2012, Chevrolet Argentina (a GM brand) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFi_T0q5eGk put up a commercial] for their new S10 pick-up truck, picturing it in different country-fair expositions (coal-mining fairs, yerba mate fairs, etc; common events in Argentina's country), showing it being used in tough-as-nails jobs, with a voice-over narrating fragments of a poem describing how strong and powerful the truck was ("You are a superb and proud specimen of your kind/And whether taming horses /or killing tigers /You are an Alexander /Nebuchadnezzar"). The poem? "A Roosevelt", by Rubén Darío. The thing being described? The USA under Roosevelt. And what is it about? It's an anti-imperialist poem about how Latin America isn't going to fall to Roosevelt's USA without a fight. It is one of the most famous anti-American-imperialism pieces in Latin American left-wing literature. Considering that GM is an American brand, and even more, considering that it is now partially own by the US goverment, one wonders if the marketing people were being ironic or just didn't read the whole thing through.

 

 

== Film ==

* ''Lovefool'' by The Cardigans, which shot to fame through its use in Baz Luhrmann's ''[[William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet]]'', sounds like a fairly standard love song ("Love me, love me, say that you love me") until you listen to the lyrics, in which the singer pleads for her beloved to just ''pretend'' he loves her back because she can't deal with rejection.

*** Playing the song during the terrorist fight is somewhat fitting. He went on a journey, saw destruction, and tried to stop it. When people didn't listen, he started killing. Admittedly, he does it with a lot more purpose and direction than the rage-filled slaughter the song's Iron Man indulged in.

* Parodied in ''[[Anchorman]]''. When Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) tries to explain how his feelings for Veronica go beyond the desire for sex, he decides to sing "Afternoon Delight" to explain the feeling of love. The song however as about two people whose relationship is mostly sexual.

* ''Look For A Star'' from the movie ''Circus Of Horrors''. Those who have never seen the movie named it one of the best love/inspirational songs of all-time. Go figure.

* [[Con Air|"Define 'irony'; a bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash."]] Incidentally, the song in question is "Sweet Home Alabama" by [[Lynyrd Skynyrd]], making it a repeat offender on this very page.

 

 

* Sarah McLachlan's "Possession" was used a number of times in love scenes (including in ''[[Due South]]'', although that one turned out to be fairly apt).

** She also sang "I Will Remember You" during the ''in memoriam'' portion of the Academy Awards. Read those lyrics again people... it's not about missing someone who's died. It's about missing someone who's broken your heart and does not care about you anymore and wishing they'd reconsider.

** This happens ''twice'' in the same episode: Lindsay and George Michael (aunt and nephew) were away when Michael and Maeby figured out the nature of the lyrics, and idiotically decided to sing the ''same exact song'', coming to a similar, horrified revelation.

* The song "Shiny Happy People" by R.E.M is apparently a reference to a piece of Chinese propaganda that called the massacre in Tiananmen Square "shiny happy people holding hands". [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbGSDkvh8B0 Though, it's understandable why 90210 didn't know it was a protest song.]

* PBS's History Detectives uses a part of the song "Watching The Detectives" by Elvis Costello as their theme song. The song appears to be about a young woman's very violent death, in great contrast with the usually more family friendly content of the show.

* A commercial for ''America's Next Top Model'' once used "High School Never Ends", by [[Bowling for Soup]]. The song itself is about a teenager entering high school, seeing how pretentious and superficial people are, and waiting it out for four years. Then discovering that the rest of life is the same way. First verse: "Four years, you think for sure/that's all you've got to endure/all the total dicks, all the stuck-up chicks/so superficial, so immature/But then when you graduate/you take a look around and you say 'Hey, wait!/This is the same as where I just came from,/I though it was over, aww, that's just great.'"

* ''American Idol'' had last year's winner Kris Allen perform on stage accompanied by a montage of Haiti relief efforts. The song? "Let It Be". Talk about innapropriate...

** Someone should inform Jennifer Hudson, who sang "Let It Be" for the "Hope For Haiti" telethon. Also, [[wikipedia:Let It Be chr(28)Ferry Aid songchr(29)|these people]].

* Oh, David Copperfield, sweetie, you keep playing that song. [http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=749 I do not think it means] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ElNtH8i7O0 what you think it means]. [[Squick|Unless of course child molestation, insanity, and suicide were what you were trying to imply here]].

* Germany's ''Deutschland sucht den Superstar'' (you could say ''[[American Idol|German Idol]]'', it's the same branch) uses Melanie C's "Next Best Superstar" to celebrate their winner. ''"Crack a smile in denial; throw your morals on the fire"''.

* Elimination show and beauty contest ''The Swan'', which took ordinary-looking women and gave them plastic surgery to bring them closer to mainstream notions of conventional beauty made use of Groove Armada's "If Everybody Looked the Same", oblivious to the meaning of the song's refrain "If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other".

* Again with [[David Bowie]] music being inappropriately used! [http://unrealityshout.com/blogs/single-review-x-factor-finalists-2010-heroes This review] of ''[[The X Factor]]'''s 2010 Christmas charity single, a cover of ""Heroes"", goes into much detail about how a song that mocks the idea that [[War Is Glorious]] is a poor match-up to a charity supporting injured soldiers.

** ''[[The X Factor]]'' is guilty of this, too. "Heroes" has nothing to do with war in anyway, shape or form.

** Idina Menzel in a special mentions how during her appearance in the first season, the touching reunion song with her daughter being "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga seemed odd, to say the least. Special attention was given to the bridge's lyrics.

* The BBC used a reworking of Lou Reed's ''Perfect Day'' as an advert to demonstrate its commitment to bringing pleasure through music, each line of the song voiced by performers as diverse as rap singers and opera divas, in order to demonstrate the diversity of the Beeb's commitent to supporting and promoting musical talent. The subtext was that the BBC is a jolly nice organisation and you too can have a wholesome and indeed a perfect day with clean-living BBC radio and television. Yet wasn't Lou Reed's original a deceptively stealth little number, only superficially about two lovers enjoying a perfect day together - but deeper down it's about his destructive relationship with the love of his life - heroin - and what it can do to screw you up long-term?

* For a few seasons, the long-running BBC technology series ''Tomorrow's World'' used an instrumental portion of [[The Divine Comedy]]'s "In Pursuit of Happiness" as its theme tune. Anybody who heard the lyrics would realise the song is quite the opposite of the show's upbeat outlook on progress - the edit used on the show looped back to the start just in time to avoid the vocal coming in with "Hey, don't be surprised if millions die in plague and murder".

* The ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' episode "Family" ends with a scene of Willow and Tara dancing to the song "I Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" by Melanie Doane. The effect of this otherwise touching scene is somewhat marred if you know that the acompanying music is actually a love letter to {{spoiler|a television}}.

* ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' did a [[Lampshade Hanging]] of this trope in "Unknown Subject", in which the unsub likes to play songs from [[The Eighties]] when raping his victims. When one of his victims {{spoiler|(who has managed to kidnap him)}} tells him she has recognized that the song he played at the bar was the same he played when he was raping her, he explains that he played it because he was the music that he chose when he asked for his wife's hand. The victim doesn't buy it... because the song was "Total Eclipse of the Heart".

* Pity all the idiots who dance to "I Will Always Love You" at their wedding, without realizing that it's a song about breaking up!

** To be more accurate, it's a song Dolly Parton wrote when she and Porter Wagoner dissolved their professional relationship and she was very broken up about it because Wagoner was her mentor, a father figure, and her closest friend. Still, it's a song about losing someone you love and still holding onto that love.

* "Don't Leave Home" by Dido is supposed to be about addiction, and even without that [[Word of God]], lines like "You won't need other friends anymore" and "I arrived when you were weak / I'll make you weaker like a child" ought to be a tip-off. Dido has said that people have told her they played it at their weddings and that she finds this fact a little disturbing.

** On another note, "White Flag." Typically used by fandom to describe their support for an [[One True Pairing|OTP]] ("I will go down with this ship!"), it's a love song all right... regarding unrequited love. "White Flag" is actually about someone still in love with their ex and wanting to stay together with them, though it's clear the relationship is already over.

* Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" has been used as theme music for hopeful, perky young protagonists, despite the fact the song itself is about getting drunk and brawling in bars with your better days long gone by. (It was written as an ambiguous anthem for "[[British Political System|Old Labour]]" after [[Tony Blair]]'s "New Labour" had sucked the spirit out of the British left in the-mid 90s; Chumbawamba are left-wing anarchists. In short, the person "pissing the night away" is British Socialism).

* German group Die Prinzen's 1993 song "Alles nur geklaut", which mocks, among other things, cover versions of hit songs, has been covered by female singer Sha... with altered lyrics.

* German band Geier Sturzflug's 1980s hits "Bruttosozialprodukt" (a heavily ironic song about workaholics) and "Die pure Lust am Leben" (a genuinely upbeat song, but with an ironic attitude referencing social criticism, about the singer not losing his lust for life despite all the things thrown at him) have now been reduced to Carnival and party fun songs, both due to people not paying attention to the lyrics and because the lyrics (at least of the latter song) have lost their zeitgeist-specific context.

* "Have Yourselves a Merry Little Christmas," as originally written and as performed by [[Judy Garland]] in ''Meet Me in St. Louis'', was a melancholy "buck-up" song about having hope for the future in light of the lousy present. Understandably for 1944, it struck a chord with soldiers serving overseas. Today, arguably more people are familiar with Frank Sinatra's more upbeat arrangement, after he asked the songwriter to "jolly it up."

* The sheer number of people who think "Closer" (aka the 'Fuck you like an animal song') by [[Nine Inch Nails]] is a great song to have sex to is astounding. If having sex because its the only thing that takes you away from the psychological hell you've found yourself trapped in is your thing, then go for it. If not, don't. Honestly, the line "Help me get away from myself" ought to have given more people a clue.

* As described in [[Distant Duet]], the song "Somewhere Out There" from ''[[An American Tail]]'' is about two characters separated by thousand of miles that wish to reunite some day. The movie version? Was sung by two siblings. [[Brother-Sister Incest|Oddly, this does not deter people from using it as a love song.]]

* It would be difficult to describe [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awy4biqD_dA "White Wedding"] by [[Billy Idol]] as having [[Lyrical Dissonance]], given the dark melody is very fitting for a song about a man resenting his younger sister's fiancee, while the bride starts having second thoughts but is forced to accept her fate. Yes, it has been played at many many weddings since its 1982 release.

* Randy Newman's "I Love LA" tends to be played whenever the music director of a film / TV show set in Los Angeles needs a soundtrack for an "isn't it great to be in LA?" scene. A closer listen to the lyrics would reveal that the song is, if not outright cynical, then at least ambivalent about exactly how great a place Los Angeles (and the narrator of the song, who is at one point heard to be chortling over the suffering of a homeless person) is.

* Many [[Kidz Bop]] albums (probably all of them) give shades of this when you hear children cheerfully singing gems like "Oops!... I Did It Again" (about toying with another's emotions), "Burn" (about a devastating breakup), "Dirty Little Secret" (about cheating in a relationship), amongst others. Ostensibly, this is a good alternative to letting your kid listen to the songs as they're originally recorded by artists with dubious wholesomeness... but if they're covering unwholesome songs to begin with, what's the point? A few lyrical tweaks don't make most of them kid-friendly.

* "[[The Sound of Music|My Favorite Things]]" is not a Christmas song. It has at most two lyrics which bring wintertime to mind, and one of those lyrics is supposed to be [[Have a Gay Old Time|about groceries]]. Nevertheless, current popular culture has more or less superglued the song to the Christmas season.

{{quote| I set out to lose my heart,<br />

Now I've lost my mind instead.<br />

We show them we're the bold gendarmes! }}

* "You Are My Sunshine" by Jimmie Davis is usually used as an uplifting, upbeat song about how loving someone and how they make you happy. The song itself is about how the love of the singer's life has left him, and how miserable he is, and how she'll never be happy without him.

* Jason Derulo's sampled [[Imogen Heap]] for his song "Whatcha Say", wherein he sings along with the chorus about his apology. The problem is, in Hide and Seek, the singer was clearly sarcastic, about how the person in question ''didn't'' mean well. So, in this context, it's Derulo singing about just how unfaithful and spiteful he is ("I don't want you to leave me\Though you caught me cheatin'"). Oops.

** Derulo missed the point of the song he's sampling again in "Don't Wanna Go Home", where he samples "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", about a guy who's working so hard he can't wait to go home... to talk about a guy who's partying so hard he doesn't wanna go home!

 

== Politics ==

** I heard once that "Gasolina" is also Puerto Rican slang for general illegal/underground activity. Which makes it even funnier.

* American right-wing radio crank [[Rush Limbaugh]] has long used the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone" as his theme song -- it's ... not a very "conservative" song. Songwriter Chrissie Hynde eventually allowed its use on the condition that her royalty checks be directed to PETA. However, Limbaugh has stated he was well aware of the song's context and was using it as his theme as a [[Take That]].

** Of course, that's after John (Cougar) Melloncamp refused to allow Reagan to use his song "Pink Houses" which has a "patriotic" chorus, but similar disillusionment in its verses.

** The irony continued in 1992, when the ''Democratic'' National Convention played "Born in the U.S.A." as a patriotic anthem, following Bill Clinton's speech. By contrast, it was also used ''non''-ironically at the 2008 convention, where Barack Obama's theme was that he would restore hope to people like the song's protagonist (given the situation of the time, it was appropriate, and the Boss is a known Obama supporter).

** Joe Strummer famously wept when he heard that "Rock the Casbah" was being chalked on US bombs due to be dropped during the Gulf War.

** The BBC banned "Rock the Casbah" (along with some other songs) during Gulf War I and again after 9/11.

 

== Theater ==

** To make it even more hilarious, a review summary of the concert [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/305626/The-Mormon-Tabernacle-Choir-The-Joy-of-Christmas-With-Angela-Lansbury/overview (here)] says Angela "performs such holiday gems as "We Need a Little Christmas" and "Not While I'm Around"". Describing a song from Sweeney Todd as a holiday gem is something of a stretch.

* A [[YouTube]] video well-known among Sweeney Todd fans features a slideshow of horse pictures... the background song is "My Friends". Apparently the little girl who made it had no idea that the original song was about knives and murder. Especially the line "You'll soon drip precious rubies" caused hilarity to ensue.

* There's also a video of a little girl singing "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" from [[Sweeney Todd]]. The song isn't that creepy, if quite sad, on its own, but when you consider that Johanna is singing about cages as a metaphor for being molested by an insane ephebophile...

* Unless the singer is actually performing in ''Oliver!'', they will ''not'' perform "As Long As He Needs Me" as a battered woman making excuses for staying with the scumbag. The lines "Who else would love him still/When they've been used so ill?" never, ever survive a cover, needless to say.