Mundane Made Awesome/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Red Hot Chili Peppers make use of this trope at the end of "Under the Bridge", wherein the mostly chill Black Sheep Hit suddenly culminates in an epic climax, complete with a choir.
  • Lenningrad Cowboys and The Russian Red Army Choir. To put it succinctly, it's a Finnish Rock Band meets Ominous Russian Chanting. Also, Hair of Awesome!
  • The Jonas Brothers with their rock song using Triangles
  • All heavy metal automatically falls under this trope. With an entire genre defined by being more over-the-top and larger-than-life, there is no middle ground: it's either freaking epic or it's not.
  • Weird Al's parodies live on this trope, changing the lyrics of "epic" rock songs or "heartfelt" pop songs to be about riding the bus or buying crap on eBay or eating ice cream. How do you parody that which already borders on self-parody? You out-Mundane Made Awesome it, of course!
    • The song "Trapped In The Drive-Thru" acts as if getting dinner at McDonald's has the same impact as breaking up with a girlfriend.
      • The song is a parody of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet", which is an epic-length "Hip-Hopera" (22 separate chapters and counting...) about the inhabitants of an apartment complex doing little worthy of the drama. It features Kelly throwing his full vocal might into lines like "And then he said, 'I'ma heat this chicken!'"
    • Perhaps his most pure use of this trope is not in a spoof but in an original song, "Hardware Store", an ecstatic paean to the grand opening of a new hardware store. Also interestingly, his song "Jurassic Park" inverts this -- taking an overblown epic about love, loss and soggy cake and making it about fleeing giant killer dinosaurs.
    • "Albuquerque" made ordering donuts epic!
    • You do NOT mess with CNR... ever! Watch. It's a parody of the Chuck Norris Facts, but it's actually about actor Charles Nelson Reilly.
  • The Shy Child song "Drop the Phone" features fast-paced, anguished, barely intelligible yelling over an EPIC electro track -- until you listen closely to the lyrics and realise it's about a guy checking his voicemail: "Then I just used a landline, to call my phone and check on my voicemail. The message is wiped!". Even worse, the chorus is an angry Rage Against the Heavens... about the fact that everyone else's cellphone can get a signal and his can't!
  • James Blunt's music video for "You're Beautiful", as parodied on Mad TV. "Now I'm putting a bunch of stuff on a line on the floor, have you ever seen such a kickass video before?"
  • Grunt: Pigorian Chant sounds exactly like something from a Pure Moods compilation... until you read the liner notes and realize it's nursery rhymes about barnyard animals being sung in Pig Latin.
  • Parts of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio. There actually is some important drama of some sort going on in that sequence where the female lead is singing "Cancel my appointment to the squash club"--but it proved hard to get past that line. And if you don't already know the true implications of "making an appointment with the Minister of Love"--a section that really is meant to be climactic--you might get baffled.
  • The music video to the AnJ song "Gorbachov". Hot Russian women are under attack by Communist zombies, who get their asses kicked by a Conanized Mikhail Gorbachev wielding everything from his shield and axe to machine guns to laser eyes.
  • Eileen Ivers, who dares to ask the question, "Would you like your traditional Irish fiddling with a freakin' wah-wah pedal??" (The answer: Yes.)
  • Miley Cyrus has stated that her song "Bottom of the Ocean" is about her mother flushing her fish. However, you would never guess that by the lyrics of the song, which treat the death of the fish as if it had the impact of a sad breakup.
  • In Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Jack Black's character envisions himself literally blowing up someone's head with the power of the Pick. Even more awesome is that this doesn't stop him: he apologizes to the head-asplode man in the song:

Jack Black I did not mean...
Kyle Glass He did not mean...
JB To blow your mind...
KG To blow your mind...
JB But that shit happens to me...ALL THE TIME!!!!

    • Hell, the entire movie is pretty much made of this trope.
  • Do a Google search for Manowar. An image search if you want to see their album covers. These people tried to use the rule of cool and just ended up making themselves look downright stupid.
    • Manowar subvert this trope by making their music more epic than imaginable. Their image and lyrics are devoted entirely to attempting to match their music. And they succeed.
  • For that matter, try GWAR. They went so far as to dress up in slightly-more-intimidating Power Ranger villain costumes...
    • It helps when the band was formed by some guys going to school for costume and set design.
  • You will never find a more heart-rendingly anguished song about hockey goal-tending than The Tragically Hip's "Lonely End of the Rink".
  • Alestorm and Swashbuckle are Pirate metal bands.
    • And before them, there was Running Wild and Zed Yago.
    • Nanowar, being a parody of Manowar, obviously runs entirely on this trope. And ON STEEL!
  • Igor Keller brings you "Mackris vs. O'Reilly", a sexual harassment lawsuit in opera form.
  • Jonathan Coulton's song "Mandelbrot Set" is an epic rock ballad with an insanely catchy riff about one man's world-changing battle against the forces of chaos. The man? Benoit Mandelbrot. The forces? Abstract mathematics. The means of his victory? Well... You take a point called Z in the complex plane / Let Z1 be Z squared plus C / And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C / And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on...
    • It would be even better if he'd actually described a Mandelbrot set. What he described was a Julia set.
    • It Gets Better with the chorus. "Day-glo pterodactyl" indeed.
  • Behold the epic tournament of Hammerfall vs. The Swedish Womens Olympic Curling Team! Guess who wins.
  • The Lonely Island song I'M ON A BOAT!
    • Would you expect anything less of the guys who brought us Lazy Sunday? (Which is mentioned above under "Live Action TV" in its own right)
    • There's also "Who Said We're Wack?", which has an epic battle-rap backing complete with dramatic strings, and is written as though calling someone "wack" is the gravest insult imaginable ("How could a person up and call a person wack?/ How could the devil turn the blue sky black?").
    • LIKE A BAWHS
    • I just ate a grape and I JIZZED. IN. MY PANTS.
  • Sisqo's "Thong Song". And HOW.
  • "Canvas Bags" by Tim Minchin embodies this trope. An environmental ballad about taking canvas bags to the supermarket instead of plastic bags. It devolves into a rap-interlude by Minchin, the song becoming a massive Crowd Song with the audience waving canvas bags around, and then he brings on a fan, unbuttons his shirt, and lets it flap in the wind, finishing off with a Truck Driver's Gear Change to end the set. At some gigs, he even sets off the pyrotechnics.
  • John Cage's 4:33 consists of a pianist sitting down before a piano and spending the title time making no sound whatsoever.
    • Not quite. The piece is made up of the sound of someone not playing the piano, which is entirely different to someone making no sound whatsoever. Cage effectively wrote a duet for the awkward fidget and nervous cough.
  • Paul and Storm, formerly of Da Vincis Notebook, present: The Ballad of Eddie Praeger.
  • Bon Jovi -- "It's My Life" music video A guy takes out the trash and uses Le Parkour to do so.
  • The Meat Loaf songs "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" and "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)," among other Jim Steinman-penned hits about teenage flings, are so deliberately overstated in length, arrangement and vocal delivery that they make Romeo and Juliet look like a light Sitcom about two Friends with Benefits by comparison.
  • Several songs by The Beatles. "Helter Skelter" is often cited by music historians as one of the first metal songs. The basic purpose of the song was to be as loud, raucous, and heavy as possible. This is the song that caused Ringo Starr to throw his drumsticks across the room and shout "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!" Yet the lyrics are about a slide at an amusement park.
    • The most epic song by The Beatles is "A Day in The Life". It's about reading the news and getting up in the morning.
  • JAM Project can make anything awesome. This video demonstrates.
  • An ordinary band, playing a rather ordinary rock song at a rather ordinary gig? This calls for some epic drumming.
  • Lady Gaga would like to inform you that she wants to take a ride on your disco stick.
    • The mini-movie for "Telephone" is chock-full of this trope.

LET'S MAKE A SANDWICH

  • Also, Katy Perry would like to inform you that she kissed a girl and she liked it. (Partly due to the taste of her cherry chapstick, of course.)
  • "Dragostea din tei" (aka the Numa Numa song), covered by opera singers, with backing orchestra. The finishing touch is the camera pan over the crowd, a good number of whom are doing the dance.
  • The Presidents of the United States of America' song "Peaches" is a fast-paced rock song about, well, eating peaches. Particularly so that the most hard-rocking riff is set to such lyrics as "Peaches come from a can! They were put there by a man! In a factory downtown!". Also, in the music video, the band gets attacked by ninjas.
    • The Presidents more or less made a living off of this trope. Other songs of theirs cover topics like toy dune buggies and kittens.
  • It's the dad life!, a hip-hop parody made by Church on the Move for Father's Day.
    • I got DOZENS of dollars!
  • Annihilator's "Kraft Dinner" is a Thrash Metal homage.... to a microwave macaroni dinner?
  • Iron Maiden can lead to this, most notably "Quest for Fire", a song about cavemen.
    • Bah, "Quest for Fire" pales in comparison to "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner," which is about... well... a competitive runner.
  • The Raconteurs' song "The Switch and the Spur" is an epic song about a man in the Old West getting dying of a rattlesnake bite. The snake is compared to God; Brendan Benson even included bits of the Lord's Prayer (including a paraphrase of the doxology, "Thine is the power..."; yet another indication that the Catholic Jack White had little to do with the writing of the song).
  • Japanese musician No.305's music, almost all of it, takes this stance toward anime shows, driven home by his Large Ham persona.
  • Duelling Cellos playing Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal." Seriously
  • The video for Owl City's single Fireflies features shaking cameras of doom.... on various toys that have started functioning on their own from the music being played.
  • Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie's chorus covers a woman elegantly practicing her morning routine. The music video, however, is actually an awesome stop-motion sequence.
  • It's Friday!
  • How about turning up a thermostat? And a rock to wind a piece of string around? Or waiting for dinner?
  • Neil Young's A Man Needs a Maid, complete with dramatic crescendos and an orchestra.
  • The video for Brantley Gilbert's "Country Must Be Country Wide" arguably invokes this, turning a song about country having a surprisingly widespread and diverse fan base into.... something else. Tell me, does anyone buy country music as a subversively-cool underground culture?
  • The Filipino song "The Ordertaker" is a heavy metal riff about not finding anything good to eat at a restaurant, The Jimmy Hart Version mashup of two System of a Down songs, and the music video even features poorly-disguised pastiches of WWE wrestlers going at it.
  • Nine Inch Nails' video for "Head Like A Hole" shows, amongst other things, Trent Reznor washing his hair and shaking his head in slow motion. The result is surprisingly epic.
  • Kraftwerk largely subvert this trope. A cross continental train journey to go hang out with Iggy Pop and David Bowie in Dusseldorf is arguably pretty badass, but Trans Europe Express makes it sound about as exciting as taking a bus to the shop for some bread.
  • The Divine Comedy play with this trope a few times, largely through their use of an Orchestra making everything sound more epic by default. Sweden, from the album Fin de Siecle, takes it to it's logical conclusion however, featuring a full chorus of enthusiastic opera singers, sinister sounding brass stabs to rival John Williams and a creepy xylophone riff to demonstrate ... the singers wish to retire to Sweden when he's older, because they have such a high standard of living, lovely fresh air and they all seem to be such nice people.
  • The The Pillows song "Hello, Welcome to Bubbletown's Happy Zoo" is an explosive, massive, powerful song about...animals. In a zoo.
  • In the song "Pistola", Incubus singer Brandon Boyd apparently owns the most epic pen ever.
  • "She Don't Use Jelly" by The Flaming Lips IS this trope. It's about a girl who puts vaseline on her toasts, a guy who blows his nose with magazines and a girl who uses tangerines to dye her hair. Clearly this calls for Steven Drozd's massive drumfills, exaggerated quiet-verse-loud-chorus dynamics, Wayne Coyne and Ronald Jones crunching on the distortion pedals in the chorus, and an oddly happy slide guitar melody on top of everything.
  • The Voice Australia has already fallen into this with it's advert featuring Seal, Joel Madden, and Delta Goodrem, all in slow motion, with some epic music behind them. It's a talent show.
  • The White Stripes song "Jimmy The Exploder" is about a monkey jumping on a bed and destroying everything that isn't red.
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