Mythology Gag/Music

Examples of Mythology Gags in Music include:

In Lupe Fiasco's character biographies for The Cool, Michael Young History's birthdate is listed as the day Lupe's first album Food and Liquour was leaked. The Cool's is listed as six months later, a reference to the line in the song The Cool. Yes, there's a song, a CD, and a character all named The Cool.
In Voltaire's song Alchemy Mondays, in the middle he stops to say "Hold everything they're playing my song!" and he sings part of one of his most famous songs, When You're Evil, and then continues with the song.
The Beatles song Glass Onion is one long series of references to their earlier songs in the same surreal mode, mostly mainly-Lennon works: Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am The Walrus, Lady Madonna and The Fool on the Hill.
- - "Lady Madonna" is mainly-McCartney, "Fool on the Hill" entirely so: Paul is the only Beatle to play on the latter track.
- And I Am The Walrus, in itself, name-checks a song from the previous album: "See how they fly, like Lucy in the sky, see how they run..."
- Glass Onion also references the infamous "Paul is dead" rumors that some conspiracy buffs floated at the time with the line, "And here's another clue for you all,/The Walrus Was Paul". Post-Beatles, John Lennon wrote a line for the song God: "I was the Walrus, but now I'm John."
A few examples from They Might Be Giants:
- Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal name-checks The World's Address, Rabid Child, and Chess Piece Face.
- I'm Sick (of This American Life) cribs lyrics from Cyclops Rock and I've Learned the Value of Human Sacrifice.
- How Can I Sing Like a Girl? was inspired by John Flansburgh having to sing in falsetto during live performances of She Was a Hotel Detective.
  - And that song has been interpreted as an allegory for the band's transformation around that time.
- Managing to pull this off on their first album, Rhythm Section Want Ad details various things the band dealt with after their demo tape earned them attention from the NYC music scene -- the song title is a specific complaint one exec had about the (then-)drum machine-reliant band.
Veruca Salt's song "Volcano Girls" references their past hit song "The Seether", with the line "Well, here's another clue if you please/The Seether's Louise" (as in Louise Post, one of the band's former leaders). This is also a reference to the aforementioned Beatles song "Glass Onion".
Tommy and Gina, from Bon Jovi's "Living On A Prayer", are referenced fourteen years later in "It's My Life":

And this is for the ones who stood their ground
For Tommy and Gina, who never backed down.

- Tommy and Gina didn't have to wait 14 years for a name check. They're mentioned in "99 in the Shade" off of the New Jersey album.

Somebody tells me even Tommy's coming down tonight
If Gina says it's all right.

Steve Miller name checks three of his previous songs in the opening lines of "The Joker" ("Space Cowboy," "Gangsters of Love" and "Enter Maurice"). Of course The Joker became a much bigger hit than any of those, to the point mentioning the earlier songs often confuses people. (When Rock Band released both Space Cowboy and The Joker simultaneously, many were confused, thinking they were the same song.)
The Guns n' Roses song "Coma," has the lines "It's so easy to be social/It's so easy to be cool/It's easy to be hungry cause you ain't got shit to lose," a nod to their song "It's So Easy" from their first album.
- Additionally, the umbiquitous liner note "With your bitch slap rappin' and your cocaine tongue you get nothin' done" from the Appetite For Destruction album would later become part of the chorus for "You Could Be Mine."
- Not to mention the liner notes for the Use Your Illusion albums quote Steve Bator's "Ain't it Fun" which they would later cover.
Bad Religion's "21st Century Digital Boy" references two of their past songs near the end, "Suffer" and "No Control."
Hip Hop artist notoriously reference past songs, possibly the best example being Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's "The Next Episode," a reference to a throwaway line from the song "Nuthin But a G Thang."
In Men Without Hats' song "Pop Goes The World", the lines "And every time I wonder if the world is right,/End up in some disco dancing all night" are followed by about three bars of a distinctive melody from their earlier hit, "Safety Dance".
Gary Cherone of Extreme (and formerly of Van Halen and Tribes of Judah) has been known to reference lyrics from bands he's been influenced by. When Extreme reunited in 2008 with their album "Saudades de Rock" the song "Sunrise" featured the lyrics "She don't need to beg or borrow", a reference to "Runnin' With The Devil", by the David Lee Roth era Van Halen.
- While he was briefly sitting in as Van Halen's third frontman, the song "Dirty Water Dog" featured the phrase "under the sun", which is a throwback to an Extreme triptych (3-part song) entitled "3 Sides To Every Story". The second part of which was entitled "Everything Under The Sun".
  - Additionally, the Van Halen tune "How Many Say I", also written by Cherone, features the phrase "all you need is love". A Beatles reference if ever there was one.
- The song "God Isn't Dead?", again, by Extreme, begins with the words, "Aahh, look at all the lonely people". This one's an obvious shout-out to The Beatles "Eleanor Rigby".
The Beatles themselves were known to do this, most famously by singing "The Walrus was Paul" on the White Album
Eminem does this multiple times, particularly when he name checks Dr Dre. "My Name Is..." sets up the joke: "And Dr Dre says..." followed by Dre insulting Eminem. Cue "The Real Slim Shady" and the joke is cut short by Eminem claiming he has already killed Dre.
Ian Anderson references life as being a "passion play" in various songs. A Passion Play was one of Tull's most successful albums.
- The Passion Play album refers to "life's long song". A 1971 single of theirs is "Life Is A Long Song".
- The song "Mountain Men" on Crest Of A Knave has the line "And who am I to fast deny the right to take a fish once in a while", alluding to his real life salmon farming pursuits.
- "Christmas was my favorite holiday", a line from 1999's J-Tull Cot Com, may be ironically referring to his Anti-Christmas Song, "Christmas Song".
- In "Strange Avenues", he mentions "looking like a postcard from 1971", referring to Aqualung.
- Hares/rabbits were always in abundance in Tull imagery: "The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles", the columns about "Do Not See Me Rabbit" and "non-rabbits" in the newspaper of Thick As A Brick, the line, "you're a rabbit on the run" in "Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day", the band wearing rabbit suits onstage...
Fallout Boy's "What a Catch, Donnie" has lines from several of their songs ("Grand Theft Autumn", "Sugar We're Going Down", "Dance, Dance", plus others) sung in the background during the third stanza.
Pink Floyd's The Wall has a few of these. One of the most obvious is "Young Lust's" borrowing from "The Nile Song," an earlier tune, but there are others, including a sound effect in "Is There Anybody Out There?" mirroring one from "Echoes."
- The Division Bell is filled to the brim with musical and lyrical allusions to past works. "Cluster One" sounds similar to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (it was written as a tribute to Roger Waters), "Keep Talking" has a synth solo similar to "Run Like Hell" and a talk-box effect similar to "Pigs (Three Different Ones)", "What Do You Want from Me" has a groove similar to "Have A Cigar", and "High Hopes" is reminiscent of "Fat Old Sun" and "Grantchester Meadows". Allusions to "the wall" coming down on "A Great Day For Freedom" are by Word of God, not about The Wall, nor Roger's Berlin "Wall" concert, but it can be easily interpreted that way.
- Roger Waters has used an inflatable pig or two in The Wall tour and solo concerts post-Animals. For a few recent solo tours, he scrolled political/social messages (or anti-George W. Bush screeds) on the pigs.
One of Hannah Montana's earliest hits is called "Life's What You Make It". The chorus of a Miley Cyrus song from 2009, "The Time Of Our Lives", has the line, "Life is only what you make it, now."
- The verses of "See You Again" have "I knew you were something special", while the chorus "He Could Be The One" by Hannah Montana has "he's got something special". "Another line of "See You Again" has "I have a heart that will never be tamed". A song and album called Can't Be Tamed came out two years later.
Genesis has many:
- Tony Banks plays an electric grand piano part with the same over-the-hand technique he developed on a few of the track on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway for "No Reply At All".
- The lyrics to the "Willow Farm" section of Supper's Ready refers to the "fox on the rocks" (the album the song was on was called Foxtrot.) and "the musical box". "The Musical Box" was a track from Nursery Cryme.
  - The end section of of Supper's Ready has the line, "There's an angel standing in the sun". Phil Collins sang the line, "There's an angel standing in the sun, free to get back home" in the end of "Los Endos" as a tribute to Peter Gabriel in their A Trick Of The Tail album.
Emilie Autumn's song Swallow has the line "I'm not a fairy, but I need/more than this life, so I became..." referencing her Enchant era where she performed in fairy wings.
In a particularly meta form of the trope, the Dresden Dolls song "Backstabber" has the line "And don't tell me not to reference my songs within my songs."
Knife Party's "Centipede" opens with "Giant tropical Centipedes share their territories with Tarantulas." A nod to Tarantula by Pendulum

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