Narm/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
It Makes Sense in Context

I don't think that I can take it! Cause it took so long to bake it!

And I'll never get that recipe again! Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
—Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park"
"I think rock and roll is really funny when it's serious."
—Bowling for Soup, "I'm Gay!"

Some songs are just meant to be easy to listen to. Others try to tell a story. The story to some of these seems to be: "Why are you laughing or groaning? This is Serious Business, man!"

Remember that this is a Subjective Trope; moreso than usual because music is arguably the most subjective medium. One person's font of Glurge is another's genuine Tear Jerker. Please, please, please don't start an Edit War if your favorite artist/song/genre of songs is listed here.

Country

  • Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses". Meant to be a heartwarming tale of a father's thoughts watching his daughter prepare for her wedding, but delivered by such a Large Ham that it rapidly turns into, well, a font of Glurge. The song thus becomes all ye know or need know of Narm.
    • As it happens, the song can be done "right". Look for the Raybon Brothers' version.
    • As a bonus, it's (unintentionally) Hilarious in Hindsight if you know about the site by that name that was basically a lesbian version of NAMBLA.
  • This goes triple for NewSong's "The Christmas Shoes." The song is the -er- heartwarming tale of a little boy asking our narrator, who's a little cranky at Christmastime, to buy a pair of fancy shoes for his dying mom to wear to her own funeral. Thank Heaven for Patton Oswalt, who pointed out the Unfortunate Implications. The Nostalgia Chick combined her bashing with an Nightmare Fuel impression of The Joker.
  • Rather similar, but less popular, is Skip Ewing's "Christmas Carol". In it, the singer, who is playing a store Santa, meets an orphan "of three or four" who asks for a family. He ends up being the one to adopt her. The chorus alone will make your teeth ache:

"My name is Christmas Carol, I was born on Christmas Day.

I don't know who my daddy is, and Mommy's gone away.

All I want for Christmas is someone to take me home,

Does anybody want a Christmas Carol of their own?"

  • Rascal Flatts, and how:
    • Many ballads by Rascal Flatts are like this. They have the lyrical depth of a Dixie cup, but are presented as larger-than-life ballads with loads and loads of strings and screaming guitars (seems it is possible for a song to be a Large Ham). They are (over)sung as if the guy's life is over because his lover has left him (as in "Here Comes Goodbye"), or because he's so amazingly happy that he's found his lover (as in "Here"). Really, he's singing lyrics like "There's a place I've been looking for / That took me in and out of buildings / Behind windows, walls and doors" as if they were big, revealing truths.
    • "What Hurts The Most"? Watch the video... especially the framing story acting. Narmtastic! The song itself shows that a good amount of the blame can go to lead singer Gary Levox. His rather nasal, whiny voice and tendency to warble all over the song make them sound bloated and overblown. Case in point: "What Hurts the Most" has been covered several times (the first artist to sing it was Mark Wills). Jo O'Meara released her own, somewhat more subdued version in 2005, and it was arguably much better.
    • Even their novelty songs are Narmtastic because of the overproduction and oversinging. "Bob That Head," anyone?
    • "Skin (Sarabeth)" is about a girl who has cancer and loses all her hair. Her boyfriend shaves his own head to match her. Gagging ensues.
  • Ferlin Husky's "Drunken Driver" retired the Country Narm Cup way back in 1954. Granted, it gets points for being ahead of its time on the subject matter, but...uh...yeah. Don't miss the legendary closing line.
  • Johnny Cash's version of "Personal Jesus." Not that the original was any less Narmy—see below.
  • Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA." Narm and jingoism. Yay!

"'Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away-ay...
And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'll gladly stand up next to you
And defend her still today
Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA"

  • Billy Gilman's "One Voice." The song is Narmtastic on its own with its whining about all the violence in the world; it's made ten times worse because Gilman was twelve when he sang it.
  • Almost anything Martina McBride released in the 2000s. "Concrete Angel" (about an abused girl who dies), "God's Will" (about a crippled kid who inspires the narrator), "In My Daughter's Eyes" (childlike sugary vision of the world) and "This One's for the Girls" (ditto). The slick pop production and overwrought belting don't help.
    • "God's Will" has one of the best unintentionally funny lines in all of country music:

"I met God's Will on a Halloween night
He was dressed as a bag of leaves...

  • Craig Morgan's "This Ain't Nothin'", in which a man's just lost his house in a tornado and is being asked about it by a TV reporter on the scene, is so over the top, it almost seems like satire. It's not.

He said, "I lost my daddy, when I was eight years old,
That cave-in at the Kincaid mine left a big old hole,
And I lost my baby brother, my best friend and my left hand
In a no-win situation in a place called Vietnam
And last year I watched my loving wife, of fifty years waste away and die
We were holding hands when her heart of gold stopped pumping
So this ain't nothin'."

  • The Tammy Wynette song "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" sounds like it belongs in a Sesame Street special about why your parents are no longer together.
  • The song "Love Like Crazy" has a nice message in itself, but the verse that tells that the farmer sold his invention, the home computer to Microsoft and got rich off of it was ludicrously stupid.
    • To be fair, the song doesn't actually state that he invented home computers. The computer reference, "...them home computers, boy, they'll never take off," was probably a framing device to set up the line about selling his one man shop to Microsoft. Since Microsoft is known primarily for software and for buying out possible competitors, the guy could have been a lone software developer with a good idea. It's also reasonable to presume that the man described in this verse is not the same one in the previous verse, which is fairly common in country songs. None of which takes away from the narm, however.
  • Most of the song "If I Die Young" by The Band Perry is very nice and somewhat poetic, until you get to this utterly Painful Rhyme:

A penny for your thoughts, oh no, I'll sell 'em for a dollar
They're worth so much more after I'm a goner.

    • Do not use the word "goner" in a serious song about dying young, especially if it's at the end of a verse and doesn't rhyme!
    • Also...

Lord make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother
She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors

  • The horns on Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" sound funny for some reason, despite the song's serious lyrics. This is probably why it's used in a lot of comedies.
  • Most of the Don Williams catalog. His voice is just so sugary sweet to the point of aural sugar-shock, and his tendency toward equally syrupy lyrics (keep in mind he's not usually a songwriter) don't help. Witness this gem from "Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good":

You've been the King since the dawn of time
All that I'm asking is a little less cryin'
It might be hard for the devil to do
But it would be easy for you.

  • Much of Lonestar's repertoire from "Amazed" onward. They were basically doing 10 years ago what Rascal Flatts is doing now: lightweight, formulaic Power Ballad fluff with ridiculously over-the-top vocals and bombastic production — however, they sang about family and home instead of love, and Richie McDonald's voice was far less whiny. Witness such gems as "There's a carrot top who can barely walk / With a sippy cup of milk" in "My Front Porch Looking In", or the big one, "Them dang ol' hills will get you every time" in "Mountains". The latter line is particularly narmy, as the rest of the song isn't that bad. (If they didn't want to say "damn" in a song, why not just "You know those hills will get you every time"?)
    • McDonald left the band for a solo career, and continued to do the same thing he was doing in Lonestar. One of his first solo singles was titled "Six-Foot Teddy Bear".
  • Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" is a Narm/Fridge Logic sandwich (with a side of Double Standard—any male singer performing this song would be lucky to just get his car trashed). It's a great revenge song if you're into that sort of thing; but, in her vandalism of her (ex)boyfriend's truck—and she is quite thorough—she carves her name in the bucket seats. Yes, she wants her boyfriend to know she did it ("maybe next time he'll think before he cheats"), but that would also let the authorities know... The overwrought singing doesn't help. She's just too enthusiastic about this vandalism.
    • Vandalism as retribution for a crime that she has no evidence he committed! Even the singer herself isn't sure; she keeps saying, "He's probably (insert PG-13-rated infidelity here)" and presents no hard evidence that he did anything wrong to begin with.
    • "Jesus, Take the Wheel." It's a story song: the narrator loses control of her car on a patch of ice and asks Jesus to steer for a minute. It's Christmas Eve and her baby is in the back seat, making this really important. They're saved from certain death. She vows then and there to turn from her path of (unspecified) sin and let Jesus take the metaphorical wheel in all aspects of her life. Hey, the Lord does know to turn in the direction of the skid!


Electronica/Techno

  • While Rob Swire of Pendulum has a typically good voice (a rarity for this type of music, even), there are times where his Aussie accent creeps in. For some songs it works (like "Showdown" and "Different", which would classify as Narm Charm), for others it's pure Narm
    • "What are yeh WEETING FOOH?" (The Island)
    • "I'm looking for your hand in the roof, yoh coat in the wire..." (Witchcraft)
    • "Fo everathing that kewdive beeun..." (Encoder)
    • The entirety of The Tempest is a big Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping moment for Swire. Doesn't help that because of the accent slippage makes the line "Acting like it wouldn't happen" sound like "Acting like a wooden apple..."
    • "YYEEEEH IT'S NINE THOOOOOOOWWWWWWSAAAAANNNNDDD MIIIIIILLLLLESSSSS BACK TO YOOOOOOOOOUUUU." Seriously, Rob, chill out, there.
    • Comprachios is good until the line "Well I could stay here, but I might die, and all I want is to be the apple in your eye". SERIOUSLY?! Apple?!
      • On an unrelated note, The Vulture suffers because of Mount's British accent. "THE RISE OF THE VUL-CHA!!!!!")
  • "Yeeeer oooown. Poooisaannall. Jeeeesuuusss." It's the drawn-out style of nearly all the lyrics that make this Depeche Mode song so narmy.
    • Marilyn Manson's version of the song is much more Narmtastic because his voice doesn't suit singing Depeche Mode.

"Just one carrreessssssss, from you and I'm BLEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSEDDDDDDDD".

    • "Personal Jesus" is nothing compared to Old Shame stuff like "It's Called A Heart" and "More Than A Party".

"THEY TAKE ALL THE ICE-CREAM SO WE'VE GOT NONE!!"

    • No mention of "Blasphemous Rumors"? The plot of the song is of a girl who tries to kill herself, finds Jesus afterwords, and soon after dies from injuries she received in a car accident.
  • Most vocal trance songs that try to have serious lyrics.
  • Ultravox. "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes". The title says enough.
  • Japanese techno-pop artist Aira Mitsuki's ode to global warming.

"Amerikan! Japaniizu! Ah, Chaaaiii-niii-iii-zuuuuu!!"

"Papa tooooo mama no baaaBAAAAAAAYYY!"

"Zombie, zombie, zombie, zombie nation".

    • And one of the remixes:

"Munich, Zombie Nation. Paris, Zombie Nation. Geneva, Zombie Nation, My Parents, Zombie Nation."


Emo

  • Marianas Trench's video for "Fallout" is just rife with narm - from the singer's reactions to the explosions going off around him (making a face that looks... ahem, interesting), to the odd slow motion runs away from said explosions, to his habit of dropping to the ground melodramatically.
  • Simple Plan's "Untitled" is a sad song about a fatal drunk driving accident and how it affects the victim's family and the person who caused it. Thanks to the overdramatic vocals and its Memetic Mutation on YTMND (it's used in sites depicting EmoTeens), it's become a laughingstock on the internet.

"How could this happen to MMMMMEEEEEEE?????"

    • The music video is just as bad. The point of the music video is to show that driving under the influence affects the family of the victims. But this video presents the Space Whale Aesop "don't get in a car crash, or voodoo forces will throw your family around their house".
    • Simple Plan songs in general. Parodied in this XKCD comic.
    • That song is titled "Untitled." Nothing professionally published should be titled "Untitled." (Well, unless you are Cameron Crowe, and even then he had the good sense to ultimately give his "Untitled" a title.)
    • More Narmy than "Untitled" is "Welcome To My Life," which has more than enough Wangst for one hundred parents to put up with.
      • "Nooooouuu you dont know what is liiiiiiike to be like meeeeeeee" is probably one of the best lines to spontaneously laugh at while listening the radio.
  • "Welcome to the Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance suffers from Narm and Memetic Mutation in the same way that "Untitled" does, particularly with the exploitable, fill-in-the-blank opening line, "When I was a young boy..."
  • Tokio Hotel has a video for "Spring Nicht" that is hilarious. Perhaps it's all the slow-motion stairs-running. Or Bill's face. That there's three Bills, at least, running around in the film clip doesn't help.
  • From First To Last's "Waltz Moore" is chock-full of this.
  • The video for Dashboard Confessional's "Screaming Infidelities" (a cautionary tale about ignoring your girlfriend) is unfortunately hilarious, and not just because of a scene where a grown man plays with a toy racetrack set while his girlfriend leaves in disgust. No, it's ruined by the incompetent acting of the woman (the director's fiancee) playing lead singer Chris Carabba's girlfriend. In a serious moment when the woman looks at her boyfriend in disgust, the actress's expression makes it look like she's seriously thinking about going to the washroom.
  • "I'm a little leading maaaaaaan! And I'm also evil, also into cats! Also into caaaaaaaaaats!" the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricaaaaaaate!" Fall Out Boy's existence is unintentional hilarity to some. Almost all their videos turn out to be All Just a Dream. They appear to have some sort of bet over who can go longest without a haircut. Kanye West rapped about how white they are and how most of their lyrics are incomprehensible. One of them impregnated Ashlee Simpson?! It's almost as if Spinal Tap are real...
    • Kanye rapped about how white they are. Oops. And the song where he rapped about Fall Out Boy being very white and having incomprehensible lyrics was the official remix of their song "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race".
    • Actually, only one of their videos ('This Ain't A Scene, It's An An Arms Race') turns out to be all just a dream.
  • The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' "Face Down." The lines "Do you feel like a man/when you push her around" is sung in the most smarmy, narmy voice possible.
    • This song is climactically narmy. At the break of the song, the singer screams the lyrics in a fiery rage.
  • Panic! At The Disco has a good Narm moment in the music video for "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies" (and with that title, we're already in for a hell of a thing). The video is about a bride who cheats on her husband at their own wedding. At one point in the music video, the lead vocalist gives the groom a look of purest poison and drags him out to force reality into his face. The narmtastic part is that it's not a look of purest poison born of hatred and disgust, as the situation would suggest; it's a look of purest poison born of the fact that the situation calls for one. Instead of being a poignant moment, it looks like he's goofing around and only pretending to be angry.
    • While we're on the subject of Panic! at the Disco, "Northern Downpour" is an otherwise lovely song, but...the line "through playful lips made of yarn" is kinda incongruous...
  • In "The End is the Beginning" by Forgive Durden, "Adakias," a.k.a. Thomas Dutton, shrieks "BROTHER NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" in a completely narmy fashion around the middle of the song.
  • Chiodos' Expired In Goreville gets Narmtastic towards the end.

"I love youuu.. I'LL - LOVE - YOUUUUU! UNTIL MY LAST BREEEEEEEEAAAAAATH TAKES YOU FROM MEEEEEEE... FROM - MEEEEE!"

  • AFI's Love Like Winter would be a good song if it weren't for Davey Havok's poor, poor attempt to sound British...
  • 30 Seconds To Mars' "This is War" is only modestly narm-ish in of itself. Then, you start seeing the recent flood of AMVs made using it, and the song starts becoming wince-worthy. (Take a look on AMV.org—the videos made to this song are Sturgeon's Law in action.)
  • The entirety of Aiden's "Nightmare Anatomy" album is narmy. Just by listening to the first three songs, it becomes apparent that they like the word "nightmare" so much that it's in every single song even if it makes absolutely no sense in context. The fact that the "hidden track" on the album is the dictionary definition of "nightmare" doesn't help. Thinking about how fast one would become wasted if they made a drinking game out of the mention of the word "nightmare" makes the album all the more narmtastic.

"We pass through like a NIGHTMAAAAAAREEEE fallliiiinnnggg doooowwwwwnnn."


Folk

  • "Whiskey in the Jar". Okay, the subject is serious (a highwayman stealing a Captain's money, getting betrayed and arrested), and Thin Lizzy and Metallica's versions take it even further (he shoots the Captain and laments being in prison). But just hear it (the Irish accents make it even more hilarious if you're not Irish).
    • The vocalization just before the chorus has lyrics. It's "musha ring dum-a-doo dum-a-dah", indeed.
      • It's called Lilting, and it's actually fairly common in Traditional Irish music, used in a similar way to scatting in Jazz. What most people miss out on, however, is that the next line is also gibberish, and originally went something like "whack foll the dally oh". Thin Lizzy changed this to "what for my Daddy-o" as a tongue in cheek "update", which walks a very fine line between badass and Jive Turkey from Phil Lynott, but tips significantly towards the latter when being sung by your average pasty Irishman.
      • Though Metallica's version is sometimes funny, since James is clearly enjoying himself at parts.
  • Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is mostly superb—until it gets to "I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley." Literal Sad Clown = instant Narm.
  • "ANI-MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHLLLLL!!!!!!!"
  • A good majority of Korpiklaani's most popular songs - especially "Wooden Pints" when you add in the video.
  • Chile-based Uaral. The music is fine and sometimes moving; but the vocals are horrendously jarring, and then you hear a grown man crying...
  • "Willie O' Winsbury". The daughter apparently would rather get naked than just say she's pregnant; the father consequently comes across as a Pervert Dad; there is Ho Yay between the dad and his son-in-law; and the idiotic young couple has no reason not to get married. There is basically no conflict other than that these kids need her father breathing down their neck so they'll get around to getting hitched. Neither one seems reluctant; they just...didn't bother.


Heavy Metal

"The most loneliest day of my life
Such a lonely day
Shouldn't exist
It's a day that I'll never miss"

  • Christian Heavy Metal. Yes, it exists. There are songs where GRAAAACE! is shouted repeatedly.
  • Protest the Hero is ordinarily not very cheesy, but... watch the video for "Bloodmeat." Seriously, what is Rody doing?
  • Rhapsody (an Italian power metal band) have lyrics telling an original High Fantasy story. The extreme cheesiness of the story coupled with the writer's less-than-optimal grasp of English produce highly Narmful results on a regular basis. Also, the singers have thick accents. Let's think about it: a group of people with thick accents singing about somebody named "Nekron" conquering the "Darklands". The music is completely serious. Here's a hint, guys: if you don't have a good grasp on English, SING IN YOUR NATIVE TONGUE. It makes everything better.
    • Some might argue that the combination of magnificently campy high fantasy, the inscrutable accent of the singer and idiosyncratic grasp of English of the writer/guitarist, and the sheer bombast of the music's presentation is exactly what makes Rhapsody so awesome.
    • Christopher Lee wearing a Burger King crown while narrating how "Nekron would rule in the unholy name of cosmic chaos": How can you NOT find that awesome?
    • "Tears of a Dying Angel" has an especially awesome crappy narration in the middle.
  • Blind Guardian are a great band, but you should hear how they pronounce the titles of their songs: "Black Chamber" (Rhymes with 'jam burr') and "Time Stands Still (at the Iron Hill)" (they pronounce iron how it's spelled. Silly Blind Guardian! The O is silent!).
    • Add "Into The Storm" to that list.

"Gems of tree-light!"

      • They're referring to the Silmarils, but it's a strange line anyhow. Generally, the "Nightfall in Middle-earth" album relies on the fact It Makes Sense in Context; while some songs (such as Time Stands Still) are fairly cool even without that context, others end up sounding a bit... odd if you don't know what's being sung about, as said above.
    • Also from "Nightfall in Middle-Earth":

"The air's filled with tears full of sadness and grief!"

This FEEEEEEEELING... inSIDE me, finally found my love, I'm FINALLY FREEEEEEEEEEEEE....

    • And then there's a deep-voiced guy throwing out a buzzword-filled rap.
      • Any time Mike Portnoy tries to sing lead vocals. Apparently, he hangs out with the guy from Opeth and thinks he can do that.
      • That's even more depressing. If they would de-anvil the lyrics and replace the deep-voiced rapping guy with a guitar solo, the song would be pretty good.
    • "A Nightmare to Remember" is a decent song until Portnoy "sings" a verse in this strange half-shouted, half-growled voice. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't sound good, as if he wasn't sure how he wanted to deliver the lines. That's not the most ridiculous part. That honor goes to when he ends it by going "ROAAAAARRRR!!". In theory, it was a good idea; during one of their live shows, Opeth's vocalist did the growling, and that worked well. Mike Portnoy just doesn't have a deep enough voice to pull it off.
      • Which is also odd, because Akerfeldt didn't even seem to go that low in pitch. For a growl, it's far higher pitched than in some Opeth songs (Blackwater Park, The Grand Conjuration).
    • "Open your eyes Nicholas!" -girliest sounding man scream EVER-
    • Most, if not all of the Train of Thought album is narmtastic, but Honor Thy Father is without a doubt the kicker. Wangsty lyrics about Mike's step father, James rapping (it's more hilarious than you'd Imagine), System of a Down Style guitar riffs, James adding "Yyeeeaaaahhh" at the end f every chorus, the deep throated dude saying "Don't cross the crooked step", and the pre choruses:

On and on and on and on it goes
Chauvinistic, selfish... COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLDDDD!!!!!

    • Panic Attack is a So Cool Its Awesome song musically but the lyrics and the hammy deliveries sort of ruin it.

IIIIII AM PAAAAAAARALYYYYYYZED, SOOOOOOOO AFRAAAAAAIID TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEE

  • Immortal are the grim and frostbitten butt-monkeys of black metal, with lines such as this:

"At the mountains of madness
Unending grimness
These mountains which I heart".

    • Abbath posing menacingly with his fly unzipped.
    • "The Call of the Wintermoon", anyone? The archetypical black metal video featuring the band members running around in a forest in corpse paint and brandishing weapons for no reason at all. It's even funnier when the audio is replaced with "Good Vibrations".
  • Silent Call, a prog metal band, have the line "As darkness falls... It's dark. And cold."
  • Rammstein's version of "Stripped", while not horrible, is narmy because of heavily accented English and "television" being pronounced "telly-vision". Well, okay, the latter is in the original; but "telly-vision" sounds more natural coming from Dave Gahan than it does from a deep-voiced scary German guy.
    • Can something be awesome and Narmy at the same time? If so, "Du Hast" is—it's so Badass and Teutonically ominous that it loops into the territory of the ridiculous.
    • Till Lindermann's deep, thickly-accented voice is pure Narm for some.
    • The first minute or so of Spiel Mit Mir is just unintetionally hilarious, especially the part where Till goes "Schaaaaaf" (meaning sheep, It Makes Sense in Context ). After that however, the song is just awesome.
  • Hackneyed, a mostly teenaged German death metal band, sound Badass enough if you don't listen to their lyrics:

It's amazing what people eat
Everything from fat to meat
You are shocked about your guts
There aren't only pork and nuts

  • Nightwish's lyrics are a frequent source of narm, especially when they (or their pronunciation) reveal a limited familiarity with English. ("Deed" for dead from "Planet Hell", anyone?) Then there's every single word of "Creek Mary's Blood".
    • "Elvenpath" has some of the narmiest lyrical content. Although meant to be a tribute to JRR Tolkien and his works, it is just a mishmash of fantasy tropes all crammed into one song, not to mention Tarja's Finnish accent, which is especially clear in this song. This is just one example of the narmy lyrics:

The moonwitch took me to a ride on a broomstick
Introduced me to her old friend home gnome
Told me to keep the sauna warm for him

    • "Nymphomaniac Fantasia" from their first album has this:

The scent of a woman was not mine

      • And this:

Old love lies deep you said
Deeper shall be the wound between your legs

    • Even Marco Hietala's screaming singing can incite chuckles.
  • The rant towards the end of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness." Good song otherwise, but...

'Here it comes, get ready to DIE!'

TAKE A LAST LOOK AROUND WHILE YOU'RE ALIVE
I'M AN INDESTRUCTIBLE MASTER OF WAR!!!

    • "The Animal" is tongue-in-cheek in an Alice Cooper-like way. That notion doesn't prevent much laughter after this lyric:

"And now
We both shall dine
In hell tonight!"

    • "Warrior" manages to be even cheesier than "Indestructible." It includes lyrics such as these:

I am an instrument of violence
I am a vessel of immense ability
I cannot leave this undecided
Stepping down to battle another day
Determination is a vital part of me
Surrender now or be counted
With the endless masses that I will defeat

    • Then later:

I can't be told to compromise this
They'll never doubt the body lying at my feet
A most formidable reminder
They will speak my name for eternity
I have no need of any guidance
I am a weapon, powerful beyond belief
Seen through the warrior's eyes, I never need to question, how to defeat you

  • Quite a few of Dio's songs, but especially "Holy Diver." (Bonus points for the music video.)

RIIIIIDE THE TIGER! YOU CAN SEE HIS STRIPES BUT YOU KNOW HE'S CLEAN! OH DON'T YOU SEEEE WHAT I MEEEEAN!

  • Dragon Force (video game), and their cheesy, charging-courageously-into-battle High Fantasy lyrics, everything taken Up to Eleven - it's pure Narm. Their music is mostly Rule of Cool and not particularly serious; even so, they were probably going for "uplifting and triumphant", not "helpless with laughter".
  • Grim Reaper's "See You In Hell". A key moment is when Steve Grimmett's over-the-top melisma renders the line "can I make you an offer you can't refuse" as "Can I make you an offer you CAAAARAYOOOOOO!"). Then there's the video.
  • Dir en Grey's "Agitated Screams of Maggots" because of phrases like "I'll rape your daughter on your grave." And the guitar riff under the verse wouldn't sound out of place under a Benny Hill routine. Sad thing is, all that improves the song.
    • Also, in Withering to death, the lyrics for "-saku-" ("DICK HEAD!!! FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF AND WIPE!!! BRING BACK MY MERRY MEMORY!!!") and "Machiavellism" ("CRY ON!! CRY ON!! WRIST CUT SHOW!!!").
    • "Glass Skin" would be a lovely song if it weren't sung entirely in nigh-unintelligible English.
      • They also recorded the song entirely in Japanese, and it's much less narmy.
    • The song "Clever Sleazoid" contains the line "ONE DAY I WILL RAPE YOUR PARENTS."
      • WITHAIHATIHTAITHWIAWITHAWIHTIAWTHWAITHAWIHTIWAHTIAWHTI. Doesn't help that Kyo's English is a bit lacking.
    • RED SOIL, too. "It's pros-ti-TOO-shun to the kids who LISIWOOFROLAWALLELEF!"
  • In the middle of Nile's "Unas, Slayer of the Gods," a voice suddenly proclaims:

"Uuuunas hath taken possession of the hearts of the gods! Unas FEEDETH on their ENTRAILS!!"

"He hath GOOOOOORGED on their unuttered sacred words! He hath assimilated the wisdom of the gods!"

"HIIIIIIIS EXISTANCE.... IS EVERLAAASSTIIIIIIIING!!!!!"

    • Then there's "Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Bearer Against Attacks From He Who Is In the Water." Not that it's bad! But they ought to have called it "I Don't Want to Be Eaten by Crocodiles," since that's what it's about.
  • The Burzum song "War" appears to begin with Varg Vikernes saying, "This is war. Huh! Wow." In another part, he seems to be coughing in the middle of a line. Then again, Varg used the stage name "Count Grishnackh".
    • That line is more commonly misheard as "This is, huh... wow." Either way, the completely unintelligible screeching that immediately follows it is even more Narmy.
    • The line is just "This is war," according to his official page.
  • Everything Messiah of Candlemass does in their music video for the song "Bewitched." Most prominent is the doom stomping near the end.
  • Some lyrics in "Hand of Doom" by Black Sabbath.

Holes are in your skin
Caused by deadly pin

    • Almost all of the lyrics to "The Wizard", but especially:

Casting his shadow, weaving his spell
Funny clothes, tinkling bell

    • Some people feel that even "Iron Man" has narm.

IIIIIIIIII AAAAAAAMMMMM IIIIIIIIRRRRRROOOOOONNNNNN MMMMMMAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!

    • In "Electric Funeral" there's this voice that sounds strangely like Arnold Schwarzenegger chanting the song's title.
  • In an especially jarring example from an otherwise dark and serious album, the song "Junkhead" by Alice in Chains contains some truly narmy lyrics and rhymes.
    • A few lines from "Sea of Sorrow" are narmy, also.
  • Slayer's song "213" (about Jeffrey Dahmer) from their seventh album,Divine Intervention, has narmy lyrics, such as "My skin crawls with orgasmic seed" and "I need a friend...please be my companion." But the Moment of Narm isn't reached until the closing lyrics:

Here I stand
Above all that's been true
How I love
HOW I LOVE TO KILL YOOOOUUUUU!!!!

  • Most of the songs in Cannibal Corpse's catalog are so horrifically violent that they turn around and become Narm in and of themselves. But what takes the cake are the names of the songs. "Rancid Amputation?" "Meat Hook Sodomy?" "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt?" "NECROPEDOPHILE?!" They sound like Dethklok songs!
    • A sample of their narmy lyrics from "Post Mortal Ejaculation":

I baptize her face with my rot
Then venom forms in her throat
On my discharge she will choke.

  • Most of the catalog for German Power Metal band Wizard probably qualifies as Narm. The pinnacle of narminess would be in the chorus to "Our Hate Will Burn You," a song about how the band plans to attack all of their critics with swords. The singer warbles in a dramatic falsetto, "The day will come when we piss in your FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!"
  • There are two Nazi Black Metal bands called Jewicide.
  • The band Accept sometimes had problems with English pronunciation and English idioms. Some examples:

"He was a leader, malicious and wiolent" ("The King")
"I know you would like some light, but sorry, here is no lamp" ("Turn Me On")
"The force is too strong, it's breaching the chains" ("The Beast Inside")

    • Then, there are some of their lyrics that are just strange:

"Icicle brains, bicycle chains" ("Breaker")
"Write a letter, what's the matter? You'll feel better, write a letter." ("Losers and Winners")

All we need is lightning, with power and might
Striking down the prophets of false

    • Also, yes, he said "Arockalypse" and "Day of Rockening".
    • Furthermore, there's this video.
  • KMFDM's "A Hole In The Wall" not only brings to mind people in silver jumpsuits, but also has lyrics almost fit for Silly Love Songs. They are a mix of horrific and hilarious:

And when I have to die
I want to suffocate between your sweet breasts

  • Grave Digger is narmy. How so, you ask?
    • Singer Chris Boltendahl has two singing styles, an over-the-top screechy style and a melodramatic clean style. His singing has gotten better every album, (un)fortunately.
    • Then, we have the songs:
      • "Night drifter, CRIES IN HIS PILLOW!" from "Night Drifter."
      • "LOVE IS BREAKING MY HEEE-AAAART!" from "Love is Breaking My Heart."
      • From "Shadows of a Moonless Night":

"I hear you're near
Near by my ear
Kissing my ass
Stealing my breath"

      • "Wedding Day" is about newlyweds; the wife won't have sex with her husband. And the chorus is (so not) ominous:

" Wedding Day
All night we gonna burn
Wedding Day
The day of no return
It's my wedding day..."

      • Their song "Dolphin's Cry." Yes, a band called Grave Digger has a song called "Dolphin's Cry".
      • "The Spell," which is sung from Merlin's POV:

"There in the woods she taught me how to touch a girl
I taught her to enchant any person in the world
I feel my end is near
I think I have to die
I pay a high price feeling lust between her thighs!"

      • Just this from "Sword":

Steel by steel
The hammer falls
Shaping me - a deadly sword
With fire and power - I do well
I curse it with a magic spell!

  • Behold Damien Storm, the Holy Grail of Heavy Metal Narm: "Raven in the Courtyard".
  • Metallica's "Enter Sandman". A deep, metal voice yells, "HUSH LITTLE BABY, DON'T SAY A WORD." followed immediately by "...AND NEVER MIND THAT NOISE YOU HEARD." Of course, that's immediately followed by the best part of the song, so it balances out.
    • St. Anger is full of Narm.

"MY LIFESTYLE! DETERMINES MY DEATHSTYLE!"

      • "ALL WITHIN MAH HAAAAAAAANDS!"
      • "KILL KILL KILL KILL! KIIIILLL!" times 40
      • "GIMME FUE GIMME FAH GIMME DABAJABAZAAAAA UH!"
      • "BUT THE MEMOREEEEE REMMMMOOOOIIIYYYYYYYYNNNNNSSSSSS!!!!!!"
    • From the album "Death magnetic" He have this gem of a lyric on the song "The Day that never comes"

"LOVE IS A FOUR-LETTAH WORD!"

  • The Italian symphonic black metal band Theatres des Vampires has to hold some kind of trophy for narminess. While their music is generally well done, they shoot themselves in the foot by having ridiculous lyrics—their writing suffers from "English as a second language." For instance, "Angel of Lust" contains these immortal lyrics:

'He's so sad this moment
He'sa lookin' for you,
On God's soul you pray your prayer but for you.'

    • They also have a song called 'Curse of the Headless Christ' that is literally about zombie Jesus, with an axe, stalking the woods and looking for the clowns who stole his head.
    • They have a song with the lyrics 'Unholy Bloody Virgin Fuckers.'
  • The music video for "Stick Stickly" by Attack Attack!, which spawned the crabcore meme, which was in turn embraced/lampshaded by the band themselves as a marketing tactic. This video shows the group playing with a weird crab-like stance, and also has incredibly over the top and messy choreography of their constant bouncing and headbanging.
    • It doesn't exactly help that the song itself is a Post-Hardcore Cliché Storm.
  • Iron Maiden's "Quest for Fire" treats cavemen with the band's usual bombast performance ("“In a tiiiiiiiiiiime when dinosaurs walked the eaaaaaarth"). One review said this [dead link]:

"Everything in “Quest for Fire” is writ large, but doesn’t quite deserve to be. That disconnect places the song pretty high on the unintentional comedy scale."

    • The funniest part is definitely "And the woooolves, they howled INTOOOOOOOOOO THE NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!!!!!" The over-the-top vocals make it priceless.
    • The Alchemist is so badass it hurts... If you overlook this one line:

Know me, the magus, I am Dr. Dee, and this is my house

    • Judgment of Heaven is a bit of a Tear Jerker, until the end of the chorus, where Blaze breaks the mood by shouting "YEAH YEEAAAHHHHH!!!!"
      • From Blood on the World's Hands

IT'S OUT OF CON-TROL!!!!
BLOOD ON THE WOOOOOOORRRLLLDSSSS HAAAAAAAANDS!!!
SOME-ONE SHOULD KNOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!

  • Lacuna Coil crosses into Narm territory more often than not, especially when Andrea Ferro sings. On 'Within Me,' he tries desperately hard to sing a ballad, and the resulting product is...hilarious:

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU THAT MAAAAAAKES MEEEEE FEEEEEEL BAAAAAAD!

    • That's not his worst. Try "Fragments of Faith." The Cliché Storm lyrics are tolerable until he randomly death-growls this:

WHERE IS THE PAIN?
SOMEWHERE... DOWN!

      • His attempts at rapping in the verse are the clincher.
  • The Norwegian Black Metal band called Ancient has a song called "Lilith's Embrace." The song itself isn't Narmy, but the music video is. It has a blue close-up on the lead singer making funny faces and a couple of scenes involving a guy moving his tongue in random, uncontrollable sequences, amongst other Narmy things.
  • As awesome as Delain's 'The Gathering' may be, the fact that the male lead singer from Nightwish (see above) provided backing vocals can't help but make this song an easy narget target.
  • Doro's "Night of the Warlock" is a great song. Its intro is less great.

"I hear your heartbeat from miles away. And I know your skin you're scared. 'coz I smell your pain! Hahahaha!"

  • The attempts to describe absolute Gorn in Whitechapel's first album. This is an album about Jack the Ripper, mind you.
    • From the non-indicatively-titled "Fairy Fay":

"As I hack your lifeless corpse with my chainsaw
My heart leaps faster every swing I flay while smiling at your face
Don't fuck up the process; it won't be much longer until you die.
Just let me have my fun, and then I'll let you die in peace.
Oh wait, I Lied, false hope is my new trend.
Disgusting, I know, but that's the general idea of me."

  • Tristania is an awesome Gothic metal band with death/doom influences. Unfortunately, they're from Norway, so English is not their first language. Thus, the chorus for "My Lost Lenore". . . "Secrete": you keep using that word. Did you know that it's a biology term for when an organism's gland produces a substance?

"Winternight
Conceal thy precious angellore
I secrete my soul
Under thy wings of sorrow. . ."

    • Except Webster's dictionary gives it a secondary definition of "1. to deposit or conceal in a hiding place 2. to appropriate secretly: abstract - alteration of obsolete secret, from 'secret'." Perhaps another word would have been a clearer choice, but it's still the correct, albeit archaic, meaning.
    • Even if it's technically correct, the fact remains that "secrete" is now used almost exclusively in a medical/biology context, which also gives the word some icky connotations. (And they use it again in Aphelion, and with the wrong conjugation to boot.) Tristania does this with angina too, even making it the title of an otherwise awesome song. Sequel of Decay also has the wonderfully Narmy line "Hopefully you'll stop him and delay the conquering angina." That the word is reminiscent of "vagina" doesn't exactly help the lolz.
  • The folk metal band Elvenking, listen to "Seasonspeech" for instance. Here a male metal singer, a female singer, growls and a female operatic voice are mixed. Couple that with electric guitars, bass, drums and a violin.
  • NIIIIIIIIIGHTMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA~RE
  • Trail Of Tears' "Faith Comes Knocking": You'll either find this part to be Nightmare Fuel or high-octane narm when you hear it:

"I'm sorry to say
Now it's goodbye to you..."
[gunshot]
[manic laughter]

    • The bit at the very end, where the singer whispers "Are you dead now?", on the other hand, is definitely narm.
  • Some of Sonata Arctica's early material is extremely narmy. The combination of Lyrical Dissonance (depressing lyrics don't go well with sugar-coated, high-speed Power Metal), occasional Engrish, and Tony Kakko's thick Finnish accent (all of which vary song by song) leads to songs like "False News Travel Fast". Yes, travel. Unsurprisingly, they regularly tour with Nightwish.
  • Blood Stain Child occasionally fall into Narm due to a limited fluency with English. To take the song "Silence of Northern Hell" as an example:

It's necessary to stay this land no more.
Now all of matter not and corrupt.
Our hymn is gotten wet in the rain everyday.
That never reaches the sky.

  • This song by the UK band Hell is fairly standard trad metal, but the video has to be seen to be be believed. The styling is obviously meant to be scary, but the costumes look like they were bought from a cheap costume shop. The singer's movements don't help matters one bit.
  • Deicide has some pretty weird videos. Their main gimmick is basically "God is dead." Their videos on the other hand are generally "comically sacrilegious." In one video, there's a priest being chased by zombies. No explanation as to why, they're just there. Another video was to a song about how "God is dead, nobody loves you" but the video is about a fat guy in a cartoony devil costume sneaking around a city doing such heinous acts as tripping old ladies and stealing from children.
  • Slipknot can get narmy, especially in the way the lead singer does HARDCORE METAL GROWLS for the verses and then starts singing cleanly in the choruses...that is jarring. (Or awesome. A textbook case of Love It or Hate It.)
    • "Psychosocial" is one of the worst examples of this. When he's stopped singing with the musical equivalent of Bold Inflation...

GO DRILL YOUR DESERTS, GO DIG YOUR GRAVES
 THEN FILL YOUR MOUTH WITH ALL THE MONEY YOU WILL SAVE

    • He sings this in a melodic voice...

And the rain will kill us all
If we throw ourselves against the wall

  • Static-X are capable of bringing the narm with a vengeance. Wayne Static has a vocal style that goes back and forth between a screechy wail and a seriously over-the-top, guttural growl. That in itself isn't necessarily narm. But then you have a song like "Love Dump," featuring lines like "I've always loved you, love dumpling / Your shit's like chocolate cake and your ass smells like a rose." All screamed at the top of his lungs.


Musical Theater

  • "Looks like he fell on a rock and crushed in his head!" from Brigadoon. Worst Recatitive Evah!
  • One of the recurring songs in Blood Brothers tries for a sort of increasingly Dark Reprise in its use of the line "Just like Marilyn Monroe". Instead, the increasing contrivances required to set up the line make it unintentionally funny.
  • Several cast recordings have been marred by including spoken lines that sounded flat, over-emoted, or weird. The young actor who does Colin Craven on The Secret Garden Original Broadway Cast album is a major offender.
  • The Original London Cast album of Jesus Christ Superstar has a brilliant, beautifully enunciating Pilate threateningly sneering, "Who is this broken man/cluttering up my hallway?/Who is this unforunate?" It's fearsome and tense. Then the guard replies in Cockney so thick that it's painful, "Someone Chrois', Kin' of the Gee-ewwwwwws!"
  • Most of the soundtrack for Zumanity by Cirque Du Soleil. There's one song where half the lyrics are the words "sex is beautiful". Then to make matters worse, the TV Dance song has this chorus sung completely in histrionics.

I wanna be your hero
I wanna be your EEEEEVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRYYYYYTHIIIIIIIIIIIING
WHAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOAAAOAOAAOAOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOWWWW!!!

    • Mio Bello Bello Amore doesn't fare better either. Its attempts at sounding touching just fail horribly.
    • The ridiculously high-pitched, scratchy voice of Caiaphas can get this way sometimes. On the other hand, you can close your eyes and pretend that Starscream is singing it.
  • Many Sera Myu songs - they tend to be full of Gratuitous English. The choreography helps, too.

"All of you shall DIE! ...Dammit."

    • Sailor Mars' image song "Flame Sniper" (or better said, FRAME SNIPAH) has an Engrishy beginning between a bystander and her. It stands out painfully, and the bystander's speech is so slurred that he sounds drunk.

Bystander: Say... ah you da one... everrybody's talkin' bowwt?
Mars: Yesss... I am Sera Mars... They aw caw me frame snipah. Ah you weady?

"Witches can be right, giants can be good
You decide what's right, you decide what's good."

    • Somewhat justified in that the singers were addressing two exceptionally clueless and/or thickheaded teenagers. Sometimes you have to introduce subtle concepts with a clue-by-four.
    • Sondheim wrote "Send in the Clowns" too. It's gorgeous—arguably the highlight of A Little Night Music—and It Makes Sense in Context (the character singing it is an actress realizing her love affair has become a farce), but a serious song focused on something as fundamentally lighthearted as clowns is just asking for unintentional titters.

"So where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns
Don't bother, they're here."

  • Ruthie Henshall as The Younger Woman in Putting It Together—during the performance on the DVD, she frequently makes strange faces while singing, but the most ridiculous is near the end of "More".

"Nothing's better than more, more more...except all, all all!" Gonk!

  • In Jekyll and Hyde, Emma explains her reasons for marrying Jekyll to a thwarted suitor thus:

"What I choose to do is decided by me."

    • Wait, what?
    • Also in Jekyll and Hyde, at the end of "The World Has Gone Insane," Hyde just growls "Insane! Insane!" over and over. Then again, most of that song could qualify.
    • "Confrontation" consists of Jekyll and Hyde in a heated argument. Since both are portrayed by the same actor, one half of the actor has hair and makeup to look like Hyde, and the other made up normally to look like Jekyll. When they switch parts of the song, the actor turns so that either his left or right side is exposed to the audience - complete with lighting cues. The concept is already flawed - but in the hands of a bad actor, it is absolutely hilarious.
    • "Facade" is an interesting song when the audience first hears it, but it gets reprised so many times that it just starts to get silly.
    • David Hasslehoff played the title characters in one production of the show. Enough said.
  • "MARIAAAAA! I just met a girl named MARIAAAAA!"
  • The song Adam Lambert sings in The Ten Commandments, "Is Anybody Listening?", is so narmy it's almost impossible to listen to. Some choice examples:

"They say I've got no right to question life without hope
Or ask for anything more than to suffer and bleed at the end of a rope."
"Is anybody listening? Does anybody hear?
Does anybody out there see us drowning in our tears?"
"They try and make us think that we'll never have a chance
Can I fight for my own freedom with only these two hands?"

    • And the climax:

"You can tie a rock to my soul,
But you can't build a prison for my mind, no.
You can chain my body to the earth,
But still my spirit flies,
My spirit FLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIESSS!!!"

  • "The Big Black Giant" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Me and Juliet. Hammerstein chose to express his philosophy of the theatre through, as Dave Barry said of "MacArthur Park," a really stupid metaphor:

One night it's a laughing giant;
Another night a weeping giant.
One night it's a coughing giant;
Another night a sleeping giant.
Ev'ry night you fight the giant and maybe if you win,
You send him out a nicer giant than he was when he came in...

  • "Defying Gravity" is either this or Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • "Dancing is Not a Crime" from Footloose. It's Narm masquerading as Piss-Take Rap at best. At worst, it's Uncle Tomfoolery.
  • It's downright tragic that the English translation of the beautiful musical Kristina frÃ¥n Duvem Ã¥la (or simply Kristina) throws out all the glory of the original Swedish lyrics, replacing it with purple prose and repeating the same stuff over and over and over and over and over again. The one song that manages to go safe from this is the hauntingly beautiful Gold Can Turn To Sand, which in its English form may not have half the impact of the original Swedish lyric but at least it isn't narmtastic purple prose.
    • One particularly bad offender is the ballad In the Dead of Darkness, where the titular line is repeated countless times in a two minute song. The original lyric, simply called Stanna (Stay) never says a word about darkness and actually goes into detail of what Karl Oskar would be losing if Kristina died, rather than harp on about the stupid dead of darkness.
    • The show's most popular piece, You Have To Be There. The Swedish lyric tells you so much about the role God plays in Kristina's life, in every aspect of it. When they wrote the English version they chose a few selected lines and proceed to harp on about them to no end. And they do it narm-style. Just compare the chorus where in the English she just won't shut up about the water metaphor:

Kristina: (original) You must exist, You must. I live my life through You. Without You I am a wreckage on a dark and stormy sea. You must exist, You must. How can You then abandon me? I would be nowhere, I would be nothing, if You didn't exist.
Kristina: You have to be there, You have to. My life I have placed in Thy keep. And without You I am drifting on a dark and stormy sea. You have to be there, You have to. Without You I'd drown in the deep. Too far, too far from land. The waters drag me down, I reach for Your hand.

    • And mind you, that's one of the more creative bits. How about this piece of variated lyrics:

Kristina: (original) Who would feel my regret, and then grant me forgiveness? The peace in my soul, yes who would give that to me? Who would be there to greet me after death? If You didn't exist, who'd take care of me then?
Kristina: And when I die who'll throw open His arms to recieve me? Who will forgive me and take me and show me His face? When I have gone to my rest will you watch me and wake me? When my time comes at last will you grant me Your grace?

  • All ye who love music theater Narm, look no further than the Love Never Dies soundtrack. Take, for example, "Beneath a Moonless Sky," in which a significant romantic evening is described with lines like this:

"And I held you!"
"And I touched you!"
"And embraced you!"
"And I felt you!"

    • The histrionic manner in which the singers deliver these gems adds to the hilarity.
    • That's just the beginning, if the review of Love Never Dies by The Phantom Reviewer is any indication...
  • Opera has its fair share of narmy moments:
    • Even the most hardcore opera buffs will admit that the famous "madness scene" from Lucia di Lammermoor, where Lucia has stabbed the man she was forced to marry and stands around in her bloody wedding dress and fantazises about her true love, is comical if it's not done really well. The music is still awesome, though.
    • In Siegfried by Richard Wagner, the Idiot Hero Sigfried does not know fear until he accidently cuts open the armor of the sleeping valkyrie Brunnhilde with his sword.

Siegfried: THAT'S NOT A MAN!!!!!

  • "Funny" from City of Angels is about this trope. After Stine writes what he thinks is a dramatic climax, he sings this song out of disappointment and rage after Buddy says it's funny. Stine is depressed that he has written Narm.

Funny?
How'd I fail to see this little bedtime tale was funny?
I could cry to think of all the irony I've missed.

  • The Phantom of the Opera is the mother of big, over-the-top, cheesy, gratuitous 1980s spectacle musical theatre. And yet, it is so enjoyable just because of this. However, the official music video for the title song—directed by Ken Russell and made early in the show's development, long before its tone and look took their final forms—takes the narm and turns it Up to Eleven. Way up to eleven. You won't know where to start: Sarah Brightman's scary stare? Steve Harley gnashing his teeth? The Cape Swish? The very random close-ups? The skull on the boat with the dreadlocks on it? The ending screen? Holy crap!
    • And of course there are the orchestrations. The wailing guitars! The sythesizer hand-claps! The arrangement of the song in the stage version was a lot less narmy—up until a few years ago, when they brought back the single orchestrations in all their cheesy late 1980s-rock glory. General fan reaction might best be described as They Changed It Back Now It Sucks.
  • Andrew Lloyd-Webber's other big success, Cats, has potentially narmy moments, the fight with Macavity not least among them. The rest of the musical is eiter great at coming across as better for any narmy scenes, but the choreography of that scene is comparable to the infamous dance-fighting from West Side Story.
  • Titanic: The Musical: During the sinking of the ship, the ship's designer Mr. Andrews bemoans the problems with the ship that could have been fixed before the ship even set sail, with the song "Mr Andrews' Vision". As the ship sinks in the background, he pores over the blueprints and goes "And this! And this! And this! AND THIS!".


Pop

  • Diane Warren, the incarnation of Narm if there can be such a thing. Her songs run the gamut between this and Tastes Like Diabetes. That such a prolific writer of Silly Love Songs is apparently asexual may explain it all. A list of her more notable works is here.
  • James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." It's the voice and the line about the "Angel with a smile on her face (who)... thought up that I should be with you!" that does it. It may be interpreted as a Stalker with a Crush story—he is so madly in love with a woman that he has only caught a glimpse of at the subway! Then there's the music video, in which James Blunt spends almost the entire song slowly stripping down to his underwear (all in a single shot) and then throws himself off a cliff to these lines:

"But it's time to face the truth:
I will never be with you."

    • In the beginning, he sings "I've got a plan!" At no point does he say what that plan might be.
      • Made even more absurd when, seconds later in the chorus, he laments, "I don't know what to do..." -- You just said you had a plan!
      • The video makes sense of this: suicide IS the plan. <shudder>
    • The narmiest thing in the song has got to be the way he sings pretty okay in the verses, and then in the chorus he goes all helium and thinks he's having a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
    • "You're Beautiful" is vastly improved in its Sesame Street form. The video can be found on YouTube.
    • If you've ever watched the video about the meth-addicted Australian "Trent from Punchy", then the similarities between Trent's speaking voice and Blunt's singing voice make all of his songs hilarious.
    • Blunt sings this line quickly and somewhat incoherently:

"I saw an angel
Of that I'm sure."

"Wait! I already aaaaaaammmmmmmm!"

  • The Kidz Bop versions of such songs as "My Immortal", "In the End", and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." Just... what?
  • "MacArthur Park."

"Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!"

Dave Barry: "My 12-year-old son, Rob, was going through a pile of ballots [from readers voting for the worst song ever written], and he asked me how MacArthur Park goes, so I sang it, giving it my best shot, and Rob laughed so hard that when I got to the part about leaving the cake out in the rain, and it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again, Rob was on the floor. He didn't believe those lyrics were real. He was sure his wacky old humor-columnist dad was making them up."

    • The I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue version replaces that with "oh bugger".
      • Also, once, they were playing 'Singalong'. When Humph said MacArthur Park was going to be Tim's song, Graeme buzzed in, objecting with 'I thought you said we'd be singing!'.
    • It's not just about a cake out in the rain. The lyrics compare the protagonists to—a "striped pair of pants"!?

Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love's hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants.

      • It is—let's be clear on this -- "stri-ped". Two syllables, like "bless-ed". Narmtastic.
      • None of this is really Richard Harris' fault, as he obviously put in a lot of effort. It's beautifully sung, but brought down by the ridiculous lyrics.
  • Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You." Never has the Freudian Excuse, directed at its source, been presented so eloquently, so clearly, so directly. (Good thing the narrator isn't an outright villain—though she is a coward...) You laugh so you do not cry or squirm in your seat. Your Mileage May Vary but still.
  • From Chicago's "Look Away," the opening lines of the first verse:

"When you called me up this morning
Told me about the new love you found
I said I'm really happy for you
I'm really happy for you".

    • Then a few lines later, the opening lines of the chorus:

"But if you see me walking by
And the tears are in my eyes
Look away, baby, look away!"

    • From trying to be a good sport to shamelessly trying to guilt-trip the ex-girlfriend the singer is addressing....
  • U2 is often considered to have musical Narm throughout their career. The nadir is their Pop Mart Live From Mexico City concert video: their whole Satire Of Consumer Culture With Shiny Colours tends to wear thin after the first few numbers. Bono constantly speaks in Spanish and repeats the word "Mexico" - turning it into Mexico-mofo, Mexi-cola, etc.
    • The count-in at the beginning of "Vertigo":

Unos, dos, tres, catorce!

      • "Some, two, three, fourteen" indeed.
    • Bono's beyond-Large Ham stage patter in the live tracks on Rattle and Hum:

This Helter Skelter is a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. We're stealing it back.
This song Silver and Gold was written in a hotel room in New York City, right about the time Little Steven was putting together a record of artists against...A. Part. HEID! [...] Am I buggin' ya? Don't mean to bug ya. Okay, Edge, play the blues.

  • The grammatical redundancy trainwreck in Wings' otherwise great "Live and Let Die": "in this ever-changing world in which we live in". Weirdly enough, Chrissie Hynde's cover of it, where she "corrects" it to "in which we live", is even worse because it doesn't scan. "...in which we're livin'" would've made a great compromise (and still makes a great Mondegreen).
    • Its appearance in Shrek 3... The scene with the king's funeral would have been sad if it wasn't for this song being sung by a frog.
    • Another narmish highlight of Paul McCartney's solo career is a line in the album track "When the Night" from Red Rose Speedway:

"And the night (and the night)
is marvelous and yellow..."

      • Yes, the nights used to get yellow in London, but if you didn't already know that...
    • And then there is the Wings hit "C Moon." It was silly enough when Paul released it in the early 1970s. But Paul now has live Cover Versions out from The Nineties and even from 2005 - at which point the line "How come no one older than me ever seems to understand the things I want to do?" is either Narm or a Funny Aneurysm Moment.
    • The third verse of "Calico Skies." "Calico Skies" is a beautiful, delicate love song to the lovely Linda, his first wife. But he tries to make it a "protest song" in the third verse, and isn't much more successful at it than Nickelback (see below for that one). Keep in mind that there's no change in melody or tone from the undying declarations of love:

Long live all of us crazy soldiers
Who were born under calico skies
May we never be called to handle
All the weapons of war we despise...

      • Then again, if you're not into Silly Love Songs, it might be Narm anyway. Very beautiful, but...

It was written that I would love you
From the moment I opened my eyes...

  • New Found Glory's cover of "Tennessee" by Arrested Development. Jordan Pundik is black and proud.
    • The album that song can be found on, Punk Goes Crunk, has not one straight-up punk band, nor one single Cover Song with more than a tangential relationship to crunk. Possibly excluding the "Hey Ya" cover. What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome??
      • "Got Your Money" has a certain Narm Charm to it because Max Bemis' delivery makes it so bloody hilarious.
  • Feist's song "A Commotion" off her new album, Metals, is a decent song, with the exception of the weird male chant that makes up the chorus. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't sound good, ruining the song almost completely. When she performs it live, she has her female backup singers do the chant, and it sounds MUCH BETTER given the sassiness of their voices.
  • "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The "you" in this line has been mentioned in almost every stanza, almost every line; how could the song not be about "you"?
    • There are two ways of parsing the word "you"—the general "you" which Carly Simon is using throughout most of the song and the specific "you" that she sings in the chorus bit (the "you probably think the song is about you"). That's how there can be so many "you"s in the song while not being about the specific "you" Simon is directing the "you're so vain" at. (Though I don't buy that it was about David Geffen at all.)
  • Rihanna's "Disturbia" is a cool song. But watch the video...at the end, Rihanna revels in the "bum bum be-dum bum bum be dum bum" as if it were a cursed incantation.
    • "Under my umbrella! Ella! Ella! Eh! Eh! Eh! Under my umbrella! Ella! Ella! Eh! Eh! Eh! Eh!" She sounds like a hungry crow!
      • Or a malfunctioning synthesizer.

Under my umbErella!

  • The music video for the David Bowie and Mick Jagger version of "Dancing In The Street", especially if you've seen it in the cutaway gag for "Foreign Affairs".
  • "Iris," by The Goo Goo Dolls, almost seems like a respectable lament until you realize that it's supposed to be about how happy he is. The song was written for City of Angels (which is Narm-tastic in it's own right) and is about the protagonist's being happy about being able to be unhappy. As such, it makes very little sense divorced from it's in-film context:

"When everything feels like the movies
yeah, you bleed just to know you're alive!"

  • Neil Diamond's "I Am, I Said" includes Diamond reaching for a rhyme to "there" and ending up with "And no one heard at all, not even the chair". Because the chair might, in other circumstances... never mind.
    • Similarly, in "You Were Meant For Me", Jewel seems ticked off that her coffee cup doesn't answer her.
  • Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a great song, but it consists of references to historical events strung together in roughly chronological order with no real connection between them. This lends itself to certain issues because he fails to sing the commas; when he does pause, it's more for emphasis than for sense. This creates a reference to the "space monkey mafia" which has left more than one listener giggling uncontrollably. And hoo boy, the Mondegreens.
    • Even weirder now, because so many people miss 2/3 oif the historical references, and assume things like U2 and Sugar Ray refer to bands.
    • Speaking of Billy Joel, "Piano Man" contains the line "I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes". The thing is, "Piano Man" was written in approximately 1973, and Joel is still singing it in concert in this millenium. Not quite "C Moon"-level absurdity, but it's a narmy line in an otherwise brilliant song.
    • Another clunky Joel lyric: On his second album, he has a song called "You're My Home," which is a sweet, if somewhat undistinguished, ballad about how the love of his woman makes him feel at home wherever he is. It's all nice and pleasant up until "You're my castle, you're my cabin, and my instant pleasure dome/I need you in my house, cuz you're my home". Even a stock rhyme like "and wherever I may roam" would be preferable.
    • "My Life" is great up until the final stanza (just before the piano solo), where Joel (hilariously) snarls out the line "Don't get me wrong" where he'd sung it cleanly beforehand.
    • The singer's infamous freak-out out on stage during one of his historic 1987 shows in the USSR might qualify, as seen in this video.
  • Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" is a bittersweet tale set to a gorgeous melody. It's about old (ex)lovers meeting accidentally at a grocery store. OK, fine, but he probably didn't need to elaborate on that setting by including lines like "I stole behind her in the frozen foods" and these lines:

"We took her groceries to the checkout stand
The food was totalled up and bagged..."

    • They drink a six pack in the car...and then the singer's lover drives away.
  • The Killers - "Are we human... or are we dancer?" Yes, we all know the explanation, but what the?
    • Right, because being human and being a dancer are TOTALLY mutually exclusive.
    • The chorus of "When You Were Young." Yes, we know, he doesn't look a thing like Jesus. WE GET IT. No Jesus lookalikes need apply.

He doesn't look a thing like JEEEEEEEEEEEEYZUUUUUUUUUUUUS...

    • The mantra "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier". As Bill Bailey pointed out, it might as well have said, "I've got ham but I'm not a hamster".
  • In Brazil, a tacky band called Calypso turns every mention of a certain Greek goddess into Narm.
  • "You Raise Me Up", as covered by Josh Groban. You don't need to tell everyone that.
  • Hannah Montana. You got the party, you might even be a rockstar, and you also know that nobody's perfect. But seriously, you're FIFTEEN and on the Disney Channel. Come back when you learn how to rock out.
    • That can apply to almost any popstar who acts like their music is the hardest, most bad-ass rock ever (see also Nickleback in the Rock section). It's just extra points when the popstar is currently in a series on the Disney Channel.
    • How about "The Climb," which is an extreme failure to create an uplifting ballad. It makes it sound like she's on some incredibly epic journey, chock-full of suffering and misery, coming off as a serious case of wangst.

There's always going to be another mountain
I'm always gonna wanna make it move
Always gonna be an uphill battle
Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose...

    • Another narmy song is Party in the U.S.A., which tries to come off all Kids in America but ends up more like it's just seriously trying to tell you in what location the party will be held. And Miley, please don't mention good songs in your bad song.
  • Hilary Duff had an embarrassing number with the lyric "I'm living proof that a girl can rock." Janis Joplin isn't even bothering to turn over in her grave.
  • The end of the Cyndi Lauper video "I Drove All Night". What the?
  • Celine Dion and Luciano Pavarotti. "I Hate You Then I Love You". That's all.
  • Snap:

"I'm serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer!"

    • Made all the more amusing by his temporary inability to pronounce the word "rhythm" in the line immediately prior, despite saying it correctly in every other instance.
  • Utada Hikaru probably shouldn't make albums in English—case in point, Exodus. How could two generally-skilled producers (Utada and Timbaland) let a Narm-fest like "Let Me Give You My Love" out of the studio?

I was kinda like soul-searching, but your body's so jaw-dropping...'

    • Regarding that song, what about the first lines? The sudden change from "some boy died" to "lolsextime" is just narmtastic.

What a day, young boy next door passed away
Ooh, it makes me wanna say I don't wanna waste another day
Could you and I start mixing gene pools...

    • This One (Crying Like a Child) is a beautiful song with lines like...let's just say Utada can be very good at this trope.

We should get back on the road
Like Simon and Garfunkel
Let's get married.

  • Peggy Lee had a hit in the early '70s with '"Is That All There Is?" Points to her for longevity, but her world-weary observations of pivotal life moments sound like they're coming from a chain-smoking, fur-coat-wearing barfly... which gets truly weird when she's relating childhood memories of watching her house burn down or going to the circus.
  • "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting."

"A couple of the sounds that I really like
Are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike..."

    • Now imagine a song full of lyrics like this being sung by Elton John. Priceless. Aren't you glad Sir Elton went with a cheerful melody?
      • Now that Elton's come out, the line "I'm looking for a woman to treat me right" is hilarious.
    • For bleaker unintentional Elton John humor, we have "Empty Garden." It's beautiful, it's painful, it's meaningful, but it's over the top.

"And what's it for
The little empty garden by the brownstone door?
And in the cracks along the sidewalk
Nothing grows no more..."

    • "Your Song", which includes awesome lyrics such as "If I were a sculptor...but then again, NO!" and this amazing stanza:

"I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss
Well a few of the verses well they've got me quite cross
But the sun's been quite kind while I wrote this song
It's for people like you that keep it turned on"

    • The video montage played at Elton's "Red Piano" show for "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" involves Elton trying to commit suicide by sticking his head in the oven. A bizarre and maybe humorous sight...until you remember that this really happened and inspired the song.
    • Elton John's song "Rocket Man" was poignant until the moment William Shatner attempted singing it as beat poetry... or something. One has to wonder what the audience could have been thinking. It has been mocked by Family Guy in addition. Actually, just about any time William Shatner sings could count as either this or So Bad It's Good.
  • "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan has a gorgeous tune and Dylan's disgust at racism blazes in every note, but oh, some of the lyrics... "Don't forget that you are WHIIIIIIIIIIITE!!" and some of the William McGonagall-esque rhymes...

"But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse"
"The DA said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed" ...

    • Those aren't even the worst rhymes on the Desire album. In the closing song, "Sara", he tells his then-wife "you always responded when I needed your help", but only after singing "Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp."
  • "She-Wolf" by Shakira. While many critics gave high-scored reviews to the song, they still consider the howl goofy. And the lyrics are too weird for their own good.
    • Yes, but given the dubious nature of some of the lyrics in "Whenever, Wherever," it's hardly surprising that she's stuck to a theme. Seriously?

"Lucky that my lips not only mumble
They spill kisses like a fountain
Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
So you don't confuse them with mountains"

    • A lot of people assume that part of the Narm in "Whenever, Wherever" could be chalked up to her only just getting her footing with writing in English. However, "Ojos Asi" ("Eyes Like Yours") started the tradition back in Spanish. The verses dive into True Art Is Incomprehensible, with the most lucid line being "Crossed a River of salt/Just after I rode a ship that sunk in the desert" (If you take a river of salt as the ocean, but sand doesn't work that way.) The chorus turns the song into a gender-flipped version of Cinderella, with Shakira saying she travelled over the seven oceans... but later saying the came from Bahrain and got to Beirut (meaning the girl needs a globe and an abacus.) She says she's tearing down windows and doors (one or the other would suffice) and spends the entire time looking for someone with eyes like her lover's. It's an awesome song with great music, but when you sit down and really analyze the lyrics (in English or Spanish, since the lyrics were pretty faithfully translated,) it gets downright narmy.)
  • This wonderful temperance song from 1866:

Out in the gloomy night, sadly I roam,
 I have no Mother dear, no pleasant home;
Nobody cares for me--no one would cry
Even if poor little Bessie should die.
Barefoot and tired, I've wander'd all day,
Asking for work--but I'm too small, they say;
On the damp ground I must now lay my head--
Father's a Drunkard, and Mother is dead!

  • Taylor Swift's "Love Story" is a melodramatic sugary-sweet retelling of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending.
    • "You Belong With Me" is one of the worst offenders! It hits every high school drama cliche in one blast of country music. Oh I mean teen pop music.
  • "How Do You Love Someone" by Ashley Tisdale:

Mama never told me how to love
Daddy never told me how to feel
Mama never told me how to touch
DADDY NEVER TOLD ME HOW TO HEAL!!

  • Katy Perry's "Thinking Of You." This line pushes it into Narm:

You're like an Indian summer in the middle of winter
Like a hard candy with a surprise centre

    • Raising the question of whether Russell Brand's hard candy has a surprise center.
    • "Firework" is all right, but the video has the titular fireworks coming out of Katy's chest in a manner spectacularly reminiscent of a chest-burster. This Troper can never listen to the song with a straight face now.
  • Michael Jackson was no stranger to Narm:
    • He broke down and cried at the end of "She's Out of My Life".
    • "Earth Song" pushed the Narm Up to Eleven. Michael was passionate about protecting the environment, and sometimes his fervour got in the way of his better judgment. Most of the song is well done, mind you. But after the bridge and the rather awkward Truck Driver's Gear Change, something snaps; Michael begins screaming about things that we the human race don't care about enough. "What about the bleeding earth? Can't you feel its wounds?" is fine, but then Michael shrieks that we've lost the trust of elephants, follows it by lamenting "crying whales," and demands "What about Abraham?" (What?) And then he yells "DO WE GIVE A DAMN?" and begins crying and wailing in tune to the chorus. This goes just fast enough that we barely have time to register one outrage before he moves to the next.
      • The video makes the histrionics even better. It defies description. Suffice it to say, we need to retire the "Jesus pose" from all music videos forever.
      • When this song was performed on the HIStory tour, it had the setting of a bombed-out village and climaxed with a tank rolling onto the stage that Michael successfully stood up to. A soldier emerged with a rifle that he threatens the cowering rag-clad villagers with before aiming it at Michael. Michael simply takes the tip of the rifle and stands it down—whereupon the solider starts crying and takes off his helmet while a little girl gives him a perfect sunflower. The hammy acting didn't help at all.
    • This exchange from "The Girl Is Mine" is particularly hilarious if you try to imagine it occurring during an actual argument (thankfully, the song is silly anyway):

Paul: Michael, we're not gonna fight about this.

Michael: I think I told you; I'm a lover, not a fighter.

Paul: I've heard it all before, Michael. She told me that I'm her forever lover; don't you remember?

Michael: Well, after loving me, she said she couldn't love another.

Paul: Is that what she said?

Michael: Yes, she said it. You keep dreamin'.

Paul: I DON'T BELIEEEEEEEEVE IT!

    • In the This Is It film, it's revealed that the intro to "Smooth Criminal" was a sequence that placed him in classic gangster/film noir films. The first shot of him watching Rita Hayworth performing at a nightclub (taken from Gilda) with an almost-vacant expression on his Uncanny Valley face is worthy of a titter.
  • "Hey, Soul Sister" by Train. Features the lines "My heart is bound to beat right out of my untrimmed chest" and "I'm so gangsta, I'm so thug" sung by a whiter-than-white white dude.
    • Oh GODDDDD. The "hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio" bit? Ok, so "Broken Wings" was a great '80s power ballad and "Kyrie" was catchy, but if the radio station you're listening to is playing either, you're probably a huge '80s fan (complete with Buffy-Speak), not a "soul sister".
    • Protip: don't claim to be "gangsta" when the instrumentation of your song includes a ukulele.
    • Apparently, "Hey Soul Sister" was an attempt to sound like INXS. Er, not quite.
  • Dan Hill's 1977 power ballad "Sometimes When We Touch" features some of the most Narmish lyrics ever to come out of the decade, which is saying something. Just listen to the opening lines:

You ask me if I love you, and I choke on my reply
I'd rather hurt you honestly than mislead you with a lie

    • The entire song is like that. By the time he hits the Glory Note at the end, you half-expect him to burst into tears. Then again, this fella should be sad. This song is a beautiful, lyrical Obsession Song. To put things far less lyrically than the lyrics, the honest answer is "no"—but he doesn't want to give that answer. He does want her and need her, and he speaks of that in some detail. He also waxes eloquent about his inability to express himself... This is the chorus:

And sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I want to hold you till I die
Till we both break down and cry
I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides

I am a man who will fight for your honor
I'll be the hero that you've been dreaming of
We'll live forever, knowing together
That we did it all for the glory of love

  • Inevitable in Sorry, Sorry by j/k/c-pop group Super Junior, especially in the music videos. All Super Junior songs feature a dance break and elaborate music videos, where all THIRTEEN members wear like six different outfits each and jump through a couple of languages. Their English isn't necessarily incorrect, just a little off, dropping 'baby' and 'shawty' and eventually SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY.
  • Titanic's theme, anyone? Neeeaaarrr... faaaarrr... where-EEEVVVERR YOOOU ARRRE... Though, to be fair, take Celine Dion's voice out of it and you get a lovely instrumental song.
  • "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias is the Narmiest song to ever Narm. Features such scorching lyrics as:

Would you tremble if I touched your lips?
Would you laugh? Oh please tell me this
Now would you die for the one you love?
Hold me in your arms tonight

    • Be sure to check out the video, which has our "hero" Enrique slobbering all over Jennifer Love Hewitt and being beaten to death by Mickey Rourke. Because no love song is complete without some manslaughter.
      • Seriously, the end of that video is pure Narm. So he's singing all tearfully as he lays dying after Marv "roughed him up" several hours ago? COOOOOME OOOOOOON!
      • It's even Narmier since Enrique looks like a Nicholas D. Wolfwood cosplayer for that last minute and a half, and the scene could be right out of Trigun.
    • On the other hand, large portions of the video are Mickey Rourke pacing around in a black silk shirt and suit looking vaguely menacing. So, there's some Narm Charm in there.
  • Martika's Toy Soldiers. Quite possibly the funniest song of the 80's, thanks in no small part to Martika's gloriously over-the-top performance in the chorus.
  • "Where Life Begins" by the one and only Madonna. What starts out as an incredibly tacky tribute to cunninglingus ends up sounding like an ad for KFC.
  • "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" is an incredibly over-the-top cheesy ballad as it is, but then... you see the video. Bonnie Tyler floating about a boy's boarding school singing, all while random scenes of the boys doing the sports the school offers (swimming, fencing, martial arts, etc.) makes a bizarre montage to start with. And then, glowing eyes from the boy choir, and a young teen boy in nothing but tighty-whities. The pedophiliac undertones are bad enough as it is, but the execution of the video is just bizarre.
  • Tori Amos. The best example would be in her song 'Professional Widow' where the last lines go 'Peace, Love, and a Hard Cock!'
  • The Moody Blues' intended-to-be-ominous spoken monologues were a rich source of Narm, but it's difficult to surpass the sprawling drivel of "My Song":

Love can change the world
Love can change your life
Do what makes you happy
Do what you know is right
And love with all your might
Before it's too late
Where did I find all these words?
Something inside of me is burning

There's life in other worlds

Maybe they'll come to Earth

Helping man to find a way

  • The Rhythm Game O2Jam has "I Need Your Love" by Red Pulse, a lovely house song that throws in pointless rapping near the end of the song (1:45 in the video).
  • Jesse McCartney's "Invincible" passionately laments the death of a young drunk driver, and could work as a tearjerker. It's just that chorus...

Four or five drinks and you were on your way
Everything's cool on the straight away
But you took that turn doing eighty-five in a thirty-five
WHYYYY, BABE??

  • "I Started A Joke" by The Bee Gees. Meant to be a Tear Jerker, but goes straight to narm with it's overly dramatic lyrics...

I started a joke
Which started the whole world crying
But I didn't see
That the joke was on me


I started to cry
Which started the whole world laughing
Oh, If I'd only seen
That the joke was on me


I looked at the skies
Running my hands over my eyes
And I fell out of bed
Hurting my head from things that I said


'Till I finally died
Which started the whole world living
Oh, If I'd only seen
That the joke was on me

  • We R Who We R by Kesha. Try not groaning when you hear "DJ turn it UP-GUP-GUP-GUP-GUP" in all different pitches like it's something awesome.
  • "Grenade" by Bruno Mars. Mixing Painful Rhyme, Wangst and Romantic Hyperbole to come up with lyrics like this:

I would catch a grenade for ya
Throw my hand on a blade for ya
I'd jump in front of a train for ya

    • Additionally, it doesn't help that his pronunciation is so garbled the second line sounds like "throw my head on a plate for ya".
      • Wait, so that's not actually the lyric? Damn. I was hoping it was a Salome/John the Baptist reference.

I shoulda known, you was trouble from the first kiss. You had your eyes wide open, why were they open?!?

    • One could overlook the whining, the hyperbole, the odd reference to Traitor Shot and the Fridge Logic inherent in that,[1] but what really strikes a nerve is this:

Yes, I would die for ya baby
But you won't do the same

  • Selena Gomez And The Scene's A Year Without Rain is a pretty good song until Selena decided to add the lines I'm so glad you found me, stick around me, baby baby baby, ooooooo... This is actually cut out from the TV version of the music video.
  • "Say It Right" is a beautiful song. But the part Nelly Furtado says, "From my body I can show you a place God knows", going from romantic to... something else.... It doesn't help matters that the next line is "You should know the space is holy; do you really wanna go?"
  • Given Lady Gaga's propensity towards using made-up baby talk in her songs, she could have her own page on Narm. As far as conprehensible lyrics go, in "Born This Way" she repeats the line "Don't be a drag, just be a queen" during the bridges. In case it hasn't been obvious that she's pandering to LGBT listeners before, Not That There's Anything Wrong with That, it should be blatantly so now.
    • Since some people find her incredibly outrageous, for the people who don't find her outrageous, her attempts at provoking shock and horror can border on the hilarious. One example is the line from her song Government Hooker (hell, even the song title is funny) that goes "Put your hands on me John F. Kennedy," and her Despair Event Horizon scene in her Marry The Night video where she unrolls a sanitary towel and sticks it across her breasts - it's so obvious that she's trying to be shocking, so when it fails, it fails hard.
      • The aforementioned Marry The Night moment becomes especially funny because, well, who on Earth needs a pad that big? My roommates and I laughed about it for hours afterward when we watched the video premiere on Youtube.
  • Usher's song "OMG" has this gem, "Honey's got a booty like pow pow pow, honey's got some boobies like wow oh wow". Todd in the Shadows found this amusing in his review of the song.
  • Big Time Rush:

If you tell me yeah I'm waiting here
Every day like Slumdog Millionaire
Bigger than the Twilight love affair

I'll be here girl I swear

(Oh)
Wherever the wind blows me
You're still the one and only
Girl on my
MIIIIIIIIIIINE

    • All Over Again has a very weird lyrical dissonance in the chorus:

It's like I'm falling in love, all over again
For the first time
And I know that it feels right
I think I'm falling in love, all over again
Love at first sight
Do you know how I feel
To the left, left, left
On the right, right, right
To the back, back, back
On the side, side, side
To the left, left, left
On the right, right, right
To the back, back, back
On the side, side, side

    • No Idea:

Every time you come around
You put a lightning bolt on my face

  • "Afternoon Delight" by Starland Vocal Band, a famous piece of 70s cheese that tries and fails to be a sexy Intercourse with You song. What's narmy is that it's specifically about daytime lovemaking and that fact that it refers to that as Afternoon Delight. Also, the song has a very light folksy tune that does not sound like a sex song at all, something that was pointed out on Arrested Development. Due to the song's cheesiness, it has since been used for comedic purposes in several works such as Anchorman.

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
Gonna grab some afternoon delight
My motto's always been, when it's right it's right
Why wait until the middle of a cold dark night?
Sky rocket's in flight! Afternoon delight!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaafternoon Delight!

I'd lost my faith in love, now I believe again
My heart was a broken place, now I feel whole again
You bring me honesty,and that's worth believing in
and I believe, I believe again

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad, the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.

  • "Jar of Hearts" by Christina Perri contains the hilariously awful "You're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul". That at least has to be in the top 10 of the worst lyrics ever created.

Rap/Hip-hop

  • So many from N Dubz, with the most notable being this from "Ouch":

"Who's this woman in my bed?
My name's Shaniqua, and what?!
Naaaaa!

"Then he looks at the cabinet
getting close to the cabinet!
He's close to the cabinet!
And he opens the cabinet!
"Now pause the movie cause what I'm about to say to y'all is so damn twisted:

not only is there a man in the cabinet

but the man is a midget!

Midget, midget, midget, midget..."

    • It peaked with his '05 VMA performance. No matter what he does, he can't un-perform it.
    • By the end of episode 21, there's no question whatsoever. Just trust me.
  • Ja Rule's "Mesmerize" is a shamelessly narmy love song. The music video just makes takes the Narm level Up to Eleven.

"50, you gon get shot again,

by the M-U-R-E-D-R Inc"

  • "Cleaning Out My Closet" by Eminem would be creepier if they hadn't left in the studio talk at the beginning.

"Where's my snare? I have no snare on my headphones."

"If that bird won't sing and the ring don't shine, I'MMA BREAK THAT BIRDIE'S NECK,

I'mma find the jeweler who sold it to you, make him every carot, don't fuck with Dad!"

    • Overall, When I'm Gone is a good song, but it's impossible not to smile a little when Eminem sings the lyrics: But we're in Sweden / Baby, how'd you get to Sweden? To be fair, the subject matter of the song outright states that he was having a truly bizarre nightmare.
  • Any time Shaquille O'Neal tries to rap. His single "I Know I Got Skillz", between Shaq's terrible singing, various product plugs, and completely ridiculous lyrics, it is just Narmtacular:

I got a hand that'll rock ya cradle,
cream you like cheese, spread you on my bagel,
my Ford Explorer boomin' with the clumped-up funk,
all you jealous punks can't stop my dunks,
they're brand new like Heavy,
built like Chevy, Impala,
but Shaq's a smooth balla,
(yeah, but what about rhymin?)
I can hold my own,
knick-knack Shaq-attack, give a dog a bone

You look so good, I suck on your daddy's dick

  • In the early 90s in Dublin, some people performed onstage to raise money for the Rap Crisis—uh, I mean Rape Crisis Center. Behold the Rap About Rape! Their intentions were obviously great; it's a truly noble cause and they really were trying to help—but this is what happens when you try too hard to be hip and modern. * pinches nose* "What did aaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhhhAAHHAAHHaaaaaaaaahhhhh dooooo-oooo wroooo-ooo-ooong?"
  • As The Rap Critic pointed out, using a Verbal Tic in a Grief Song, as Master P does in "I Miss My Homies", is a bad move.

Sittin' at the ghetto thinkin' 'bout All my homies passed away (Uunngh)

  • "Rocketeer" by the Far East Movement was an otherwise good song, but one particular verse just sounds ridiculous:

Let's go the next level, Super Mario
I hope this works out, cardio

"MOOOOOOOOOVE BITCH, GET OUT THE WAY!"

I been on the low
I been taking my time
I feel like I'm out of my mind
It feel like my life ain't mine
(Who can relate? Woo!)

La di da di da, slob on me knob
Pass me some syrup, fuck me in the car
La di da di da, mothafuck the law
Chitty chitty bang, murder everything

Rock Music

  • Probably the most horrific example has to be Tim Capello's "I Still Believe", as seen in the movie The Lost Boys. It's not even the raspy-fart saxophone playing, nor that the man himself is a mulleted, unitard-wearing wrestler-lookalike; it's lyrics like "I'll take my place, Upon this stage, I'll wait till the end of time for you like everybody else!!" The last lines of this verse are sung in such quick succession, with such unbelievable gusto, that it sounds like Capello's about to explode, take off, foul himself, and orgasm all at once.
    • All that, and the fact that it sounds like he's actually fucking his saxophone, judging by the rythmic, shrieking blasts and final orgasmic shudder it makes as the song finishes.....
    • The original version of the song by Santa Cruz new wave band the Call is good and has a much better delivery; the potential humor of the lyrics is almost unnoticeable.
  • Many songs by Nickelback:
    • In "Photograph," the nostalgia of the lyrics is nullified by the over-enthusiastic tone of the band. In the beginning of the video, when the lead singer lifts a photo at arm's length to the camera and sings "Look at this photograph!" with a largely blank face, he looks like an enormous manchild. Marvelously parodied in this reinterpretation.
    • "If Everyone Cared..." is their spectacularly non-specific, crowd-pleasing, inoffensive protest song, in which Chad Kroger whines about how much better the world would be if, like, nobody ever had to be sad and stuff. If this counts as a protest song, then maybe The Sixties were all in vain.
    • Most of the album All The Right Reasons, from which those three songs came, is full of Narm.
    • Not to mention the fact that at least three of their songs sound identical, just with different lyrics.
    • The song "Far Away" is just as narmy and sounds just as much like every other Nickelback song.

"I LOVEEE YOOOOUUUUUU/I LOVED YOU ALL ALONG..."

  • Ringo Starr's "Photograph" has some of the same problems as Nickelback's song of the same name. It sure seems like he's cheerfully singing "But all I've got is a photograph, and I realize you're not coming back any more..."
  • Another sweet yet stalkerish song is Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Possess Your Heart". Lyrics include lines such as these:

"There are days when outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass
And I long for this mirrored perspective, when we'll be lovers, lovers at last"
"You reject my advances and desperate pleas
I won't let you, let me down so easily, so easily"

    • The title of the song: "I will possess your heart". But it is meant to be about a stalker.
    • "I Will Follow You Into The Dark." The sentiment is sweet, but the opening lines are hard to get past.

"Love of mine, someday you will die"...

    • What sort of non-comedic band deliberately names themselves after an Elvis Presley send-up by the Bonzo Dog Doh-Dah Band?
    • To be fair, Death Cab's lyrics are typically out there.
  • Any song from Silverchair's first album. Especially "Suicidal Dream". All of them were written when the singer was fourteen...
  • "Crawling" by Linkin Park.

CRAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWLING INNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN MY SKINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN...

    • The Vancouver Winter Olympics used that song for COUPLES. FIGURE. SKATING.
    • Valentine's Day by Linkin Park. Apparently they've started to abandon "Why didn't you love me, daddy?" in favor of "Why don't you love me anymore, baby?"
      • Made (Probably.) less narmy when you consider that is might possibly be a song about a funeral.
    • "The Little Things Give You Away":

" "All you ever wanted was for some to truly look up to you. And six feet underwater, I DO."

  • Meat Loaf's song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" features the Narmy chorus, "I want you, I need you, but there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you, but don't feel sad, 'cause two out of three ain't bad".
    • Then there's the song "For Crying Out Loud" with these lines:

"And don't you see my faded Levis
Bursting apart
And don't you hear me crying
Oh babe, don't go
And don't you hear me screaming
How was I to know?"

      • For the record, that first couplet is quite delicate; the four lines after are more intense each time they are sung. (Yes, that's right, that set of lines is part of the bridge!)
      • To be fair Jim Steinman has gone on the record as saying that he intentionally put that part in as a stealth boner joke.
      • The Bat Out of Hell album is full of narm.
    • The seriousness of Jim Steinman's writing should be taken with a grain of salt. Any man who writes "...There ain't no Coupe de Ville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack Box" is either writing tongue-in-cheek or is bloody loco.
    • The "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" music video.

ON A HOT SUMMER'S NIGHT, WOULD YOU OFFER YOUR THROAT TO THE WOLF WITH THE RED ROSES?!?!!

    • LIFE IS A LEMON AND I WAAAAANT MY MOOOONNNNNNEEEYYYY BACK!

There's desperation in the air
It leaves a stain on all your clothes
And no detergent gets it out...

      • And don't forget the end of the final chorus, where he randomly yells, "Back? BACK? BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!"
    • "I WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE... BUT I WON'T DO THAT!!!" What, exactly, wouldn't you do?
      • Either of the following:

"After a while you'll forget everything
It was a brief interlude
And a midsummer night's fling
And you'll see it's time to move on
...
I know the territory — I've been around
It'll all turn to dust and we'll all fall down
Sooner or later you'll be screwing around..."

    • STOP RIGHT THEEEERRE * powerchords*
    • The song "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" features the fantastic line:

"If you want my views of history then there's something you should know
The three men I admire most are Curly, Larry, and Moe.

    • One of Meat's less well-known songs is "More Than You Deserve". The singer who finds his wife cheating on him with his best friend (prompting him to declare, "LISTEN, BOY!"), then two of his best friends (provoking the same reaction), and finally a group of his best friends, who he addresses with the cry of, "LISTEN HERE, GROUP!"
  • The musical output of A Silver Mt. Zion (and all variations thereof) skirts dangerously close to Narm sometimes because the lead singer is honestly trying to sum up the bleakness of modern society, etc., with a voice that can only be described as a combination of Bob Dylan at his worst and Brak.
  • The majority of "Pretty Hate Machine" by Nine Inch Nails is hilarious. Also:
    • "With Teeth"

"Awitha teetha!"

    • The chorus of "Starfuckers Incorporated" is hilarious. There's also a fun game you can play where you watch this band's videos and pretend that Trent Reznor's house really looks like that.
    • "God Given":

"Come on, sing along, everybody now!"

"Grey would be the color if I had a heart."

      • Trent, stop bitching.
      • He's Trent Reznor, that's his thing!
    • "I wear this crown of shit..."
      • Johnny Cash even decided to change it to the more effective "crown of thorns"
    • "Closer" kind of drifts into this territory if you happen to mistakenly hear the chorus as "I wanna fuck you like an Elmo!" Now this troper can't listen to the song without picturing Elmo laughing in the background and cracking up.
    • The whole song is quite over the top, but the ending of "Happiness In Slavery" is plain overdone:

"Happiness in SLAVERYYYYAAAAAAGGHGHGHGHHHHH, happiness...SLAVERYYYYAAGGHGHHGBLBLBLRLRLRLLLHHH...happiness...SLAVERYYEEEAHEAWHEAYWEAWEAHHH"

    • "The Wretched" is the embodiment of narm

"The clouds will part and the sky cracks open, and god himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just t-t-to hold you down. Stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss...".

  • Regina Spektor's Fidelity has this unforgettable lyric:

"It breaks my hea-ah-ah-ah/ah-ah-ah-ah-art".

    • And goodness, the music video!
    • Or "Lady". She's done quite a few good blues songs. "Lady"... what happened there?
    • And who could forget "Laughing With"? God can be so hilarious, HA HA!
    • "Us" features a doubleshot of narm in quick succession, when Spektor unleashes a stream of toy soldiers from her mouth during a falsetto note (a la Peter Gabriel's stop-motion "Sledgehammer" video) and hilariously overemphasizes the word "contagious" (or, in this case, "Oh, it's con-TAY-gio-u-u-u-ussss!"). Coupled with her involuntarily lifting her upper lip as she says the word, it makes her look like she has some sort of speech impediment.
  • Nirvana has some Narmtastic gems, but special honors go to their song "Rape Me," which is about... exactly what it sounds like. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't extremely repetitive. This troper and her mother often find themselves laughing psychotically whenever it comes on the radio, yelling rebuttles like "somebody please rape this guy," "I think Jim has some daddy issues," and, "am I the only one who thinks he's a little too enthusiastic about this?" Seriously, check out these lyrics:

"RAPE ME! RAPE ME! RAPE ME MY FRIEND! RAAAAPE ME! RAPE ME! RAPE ME AGAIN!"

Discover. L-I-M-P. Say it.

      • No thanks, Fred. No thanks.
      • Also, that awkward make out session Fred Durst has with Halle Berry. Seriously, just watch the video.
    • Likewise, the attempted Careful with That Axe in their cover of "Faith".
    • From "Eat You Alive:"

DAMN YOUR SO HOT!!!

      • Well, pretty much the entire song too.
    • Not to mention the album title: Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.
    • "We don't, don't give a fuck, and we won't ever give a fuck until you, you give a fuck about me and my generation!" ...Weren't you guys in your thirties when you wrote this?
  • Interpol sometimes suffer from this. Most prominent example in "Obstacle 1":

"IT'S IN THE WAY THAT SHE POSEEEEES, IT'S IN THE THINGS THAT SHE PUTS IN MYYYYY HEEEEEEAAAAAD, HER STORIES ARE BORING AAAND STUUUFFF, SHE'S ALWAYS CALLING MY BLUFF, SHE PUTS THE SHE PUTS THE WEIGHTS INTO MY LITTLE HEART ANDSHEGETSINMYROOMANDSHETAKESITAPAAAARRRRT". Okay okay we get it dude, calm down.

    • NO NO NO! YOU MISSED OUT THE BEST ONE! Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down, from the same album. It's a song which uses scuba diving as a metaphor for depression, and manages to maintain a completely straight face throughout.

Stella I love you, Stella I love you, Stella I looooooooooove yooooooooooooooooooou!

  • Yoshiki of X Japan usually avoids this by writing lyrics in excellent English, but occasionally the English as Second Language problem catches up with him. "Tears" (written about his father's suicide) contains the line 'Never thought you'd leave me alone'; this, while grammatically accurate, doesn't mean what he thinks it does.
    • That line is forgivable compared to this lyric in the same song:

Love everlasting fades away
Alive within your beatless heart

    • "Forever Love", while insanely over-dramatic, isn't necessarily Narmy by itself, but it had the unfortunate timing of being paired with the ridiculously Narmy X 1999 movie, leading to it becoming the laughingstock and staple of drunken anime-fan karaoke. This only counts for the original version, though. The acoustic version is hilarious in any context.
  • The Smashing Pumpkins are blatantly narmy. A small sample of Billy Corgan's effervescent lyrics:

"Love is suicide"
"Living makes me sick
So sick I wish I'd die"
"Forever waiting on cruel death
You know I'm not dead"
"I'll tear my heart out
Before I get out"
"I don't live
I invade"
"Emptiness is loneliness
And loneliness is cleanliness
And cleanliness is godliness
And God is empty just like me".

    • Does "Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage" also count?
    • For the record, most of these lyric samples come from just one album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, whose very title oozes narm. But it's good anyway, with most of its songs leaning toward Narm Charm.

And into the eyes of the jackal I say ka-BOOM!

  • Stone Sour's song "Bother": the lyric "A zombie hides my face". Then again, this is the lead singer of Slipknot we're talking about.
  • The Automatic would be just another standard indie/electro pop-rock group were it not for one thing - their keyboardist, Pennie, screams constantly into the microphone. "Screaming? Lots of bands do that!" - but you haven't heard Pennie's screaming. Pennie recently left the band; despite releasing a good record in 2008, some fans believe that with Pennie's departure, the band lost the one thing that made them unique and are now just another Stereophonics rip-off.
  • IOSYS's "Border of Death", a remix of the song "Necrofantasia" from Perfect Cherry Blossom, opens with spoken lines (repeated later during the song) that would probably sound absolutely badass and unearthly if they did not consist of Gratuitous English. The flash music video also contains Gratuitous English ("POWOR[sic] OF SPIRITUAL BORDER").
  • Have you heard that Art Alexakis, lead singer of Everclear, has daddy issues? Oh, you haven't? Listen to one of his songs. Which one? Take your pick. He's not particularly subtle about it.
    • Also, almost every song he ever wrote refers to his dead brother or girlfriend in one way or another.
  • Lampshaded by P!nk at the end of "Misunderstood", which involves a long section of her yelling 'Unngh!' in time with the beat. At the end, she breaks off to talk with the studio engineer:

"What? No, this ain't no dammit Ex-Lax commercial."

    • Also from P!nk:

"This used to be a funhouse
But now it's full of evil clowns"

  • Fully expecting to be flayed alive...Bowie's progressively hysterical yelling of "FIVE YEARS!" gets Narmful by the end of the track.
    • While Station to Station isn't an entirely bad LP—and yes, Bowie was nearly psychotic from cocaine abuse, at the time it was recorded—still, parts are difficult to take seriously:

Here am I
Flashing no colour; tall in this room, overlooking the ocean
Here are we
One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth

[...]

The Return of the Thin White Duke

Throwing darts in lovers' eyes

The Return of the Thin White Duke

Making sure white stains

  • The Deathstars' "Cyanide" is quite good, except for the line:

"When the dark does what the dark does best... IT'S DARKNESS!!"

    • That's far from the worst offender. A striking example of Narm is "Opium" and its chorus:

"Zeit... geist! WOW WOW DARKNESS KINGSIZED! Zeit... geist! Opium...
Zeit... geist! WOW WOW THE END OF OUR LIVES! Zeit... geist! Opium..."

    • And on top of that? Both examples, but especially the one from "Opium" count as Crowning Moment of Awesome when perceived musically. Deathstars can sing just about anything and make it awesome, Narm be damned.
  • Trans-Siberian Orchestra, best known for their intense rendition of "Carol of the Bells" ("Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12-24"). Their other tracks feature powerhouse singers backed by gorgeous rock/classical fusion arrangements; but listen to the awkward and overwrought lyrics for a while, and you'll understand why their biggest hit is instrumental.
    • Now that they've released three Christmas albums, there are enough instrumental tracks for discerning listeners to compile one Narmless and pretty amazing album. It's undoubtedly the best way to enjoy the band.
  • Aerosmith's "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" is hilariously bad and enjoyable for this very reason. (Aptly, it was written for the movie Armageddon.)

I don't wanna close my eyes
I don't wanna fall asleep
Because I miss you, babe
And I don't wanna miss a thing...

    • It's a good Power Ballad, but it fails the logic test here.
    • The lyricist is Diane Warren, already mentioned in the Pop section.
  • HIM. The lyrics often balance between the prettily gloomy and the hilarious. Their breakthrough album is called Razorblade Romance.

And the devil inside is reading
The words of the saddest poem
To be engraved on the stone of my grave

  • Orange Range's song "City Boy" sounds harmless enough....until you listen to the words with the singer's heavy Japanese accent. Then,, "city" turns into "shitty"....
  • the gazettE's song "Defective Tragedy" could be a sad, beautiful song all the way through... if only someone didn't, about 3/4ths of the way in, sound like they were covering and uncovering their mouth... while screaming like they were dying. It's hard not to laugh.
  • Alice Cooper's music is usually tongue-in-cheeck, but it still sometimes contains narm:

"Chop chop chop
 I'm an engine of destruction..."

    • "Only Women Bleed." It's a serious song about about a woman in an abusive relationship. But then the titular chorus: Only women bleed... Even though it's most likely unintentional, one cannot help but think he is referring to "that time of the month," especially given his dark sense of humor.
  • Live tends toward Narm even at their best, but "The Dolphins Cry" takes the award. Aside from the title, the song features lines such as these:

"We are lost till we are found
This phoenix rises up from the ground."

    • The video for "I Alone", which features the group dancing around and miming playing their instruments against weird backgrounds. It doesn't help that their drummer didn't even have an instrument to mime playing (Beavis and Butthead figured he must have forgotten to bring his drum set to the video shoot). Whatever effect they were going for, it comes across as goofy.
    • "Freaks" has the line "You know your sperm is weak", as well as that odd moment before the last chorus where Ed Kowalczyk starts growling "laborlaborlaborlaborla...".
    • "Her placenta falls to the floor"
  • "Last Kiss", while sad in context, gets pushed into Narm territory by both the lyrics and, at least in Pearl Jam's cover, Eddie Vedder's rather upbeat singing.
    • The original (from the late fifties or early sixties!) was upbeat, too.

Oh where, oh where can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She went to heaven, so I've got to be good...

    • Some consider Eddie Vedder's voice to be heartbreaking on this.
  • The Posies (you get two of their songs free on any Vista laptop) managed a particularly bad example with "Love Comes", which appears to have been intended as serious.

Oh baby, you're too pure

You're too pure for this wicked world!

Your data's uncorrupted...

    • Ahaha, that's actually hilarious.
  • Neil Young's "Southern Man", otherwise a serious and moving commentary on racism in the american South, does a quick foray into Narm territory in the beginning of the first verse, which goes: "I saw cotton, and I saw black."
  • "The Only One" by Evanescence is, admittedly, a nice song. But wouldn't it have been scarier if they had left out the duck quacking in the opening?
    • Not to mention Amy Lee's voice when she hits that low note in "Lithium".
  • "The Northern Kings" are a band who do covers of various 1980's pop songs, turning these cheesy pop songs into epic rock songs. Of course, if you know/really like the original song then expect a fast paced rock version to be full of Narm, especially when they decided to do a heavy metal version of Kylie Minogues "I Should Be So Lucky" (seriously).
    • Well, of course. One of their singers is Marco Hietala, who's already on this very page. And he's only a quarter of the singers- this band also has Tony Kakko.
  • Tesla's song "Wonderful World" is a song about lost innocence, and is trying to be somber and wistful. Unfortunately, the tone is completely wrecked by this unintentionally hilarious couplet about the President being shot:

Didn't know much but I knew it wasn't funny
Everybody's crying like they killed the Easter Bunny

  • Greg Lake could write narmy lyrics with the best of them. For instance, the Emerson Lake and Palmer song "Still...You Turn Me On" plays as a completely serious romantic ballad, and then out of nowhere comes this line:

"Every day a little sadder, a little madder
someone get me a ladder"

  • "The Kill" is a pretty good song, but... sing this with a straight face.

CUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHMMMM BRAKE! MAY! DAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNN!
BURY MAY! BURY MAY!
I-HEEEEEEEEEE AM! FEHHHHHNISHED! WITH YEEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!
LUUUUUUUUUUUHK IN! MY! HEEEEEEE-YIIIIIIIIIIIIIES!
YAH KILLIN MAY! KILLIN MAY!
AWWWWWWRL I! WUN-TED-WUZ YEEEEEEOOWWWWWWWW!

    • Could you ratchet the overwrought down a few notches, Mr. Leto?
    • His Live Lounge cover of "Stronger" is awesome, intense and really kind of fetish-y. But then he sings "I'd do anything for a klondike." Kinda takes you out of the mood.
  • The Mars Volta's Cedric Bixler-Zavala makes his career on ridiculous, non-sensical Narms, which he pulls off with pure ballsy delivery

EXO SKELETAL JUNCTION AT THE RAILROAD DELAYEEEED!
IF YOU COULD SEEE WHERE I'VE BEEN, YOU'D TOUCH THE HAND THATS TOUCHING SIN
MY HEART IS DARKCLOTS
FREEZE WITHOUT AN ANSWERRRR FREE FROM ALL THE SHAME; MUST I HIDE
HAAAAAAAAVEEEEE YOU SEEN THE LIVIIIINGGG!
THERE'S TOO MANY REEEEEAAAASONS, TOO MANY REEEEEAAAAASONS, TOO MANY RAYAYAYAYAYAYAYSONS, TOO MANY RAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA WAAAAYYYYAAAAHHHYYAAAAA HAAAYYYYAYAAYAYAAYAAAHEEEEEYAAAAHHHYAAAAAA!

    • With Twilight As My Guide", off their new album Octahedron, finally brought his narminess over the edge after over a decade of toeing the line.
      • It's a brave man indeed who can hear Cedric screeching "THE KIOSK IN MY TEMPORAL LOBE IS SHAPED LIKE ROSALYN CARTER!" in the middle of Tetragrammaton and not burst into laughter.
      • The lyrics lose a lot of their Narmfulness if you get a lot of the references and meanings, like the Rosalyn Carter line...
  • I can overlook Skillet's "Monster" being a poor man's "Animal I Have Become", but nothing excuses digitally altering the singer's voice to emulate growling, especially when vocalists who can naturally switch from singing to growling/screaming are a dime a dozen.
    • It also doesn't help that the first line of the song sounds like he's singing "this secret sodomy".
    • Ever since Skillet moved from Christian garage rock to their current Christian-themed mainstream sound, their output has been afflicted with Narm to varying degrees. "Monster" just happens to be outrageously so.
    • In all fairness the fake growling in Monster wasn't on the original album version. If only it had stayed that way...
    • WORLDWIDE JESUS DOMINATION
  • Completely intentional in, and the entire point of, Tribute by Tenacious D.

And we played the first thing that came to our heads
And it just so happened to be...
THE BEST SONG IN THE WORLD!
IT WASTHE BEST SONG IN THE WORLD!

  • Nick Cave's lyrics sometimes tend towards this
    • Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars) - the title words which are repeated in the chorus, and the part where he starts buzzing.
  • Also, see "Babe, I'm on Fire." Specifically the part when he gets to the dog and the frog sitting on the log. And Nocturama is a narmy album in general. Just look at that title. All you need to know.
  • Placebo's Special Needs might be a bit over the top from the start but it falls straight into Narm with the one verse.

I guess I thought you had the flavor
  • Five Finger Death Punch's "Hard to See" is a decent song music-wise, but the lyrics . . . Oh God, the lyrics. . .

I'm growing so disturbed
Nothing makes sense to me anymore
I'm learning to resist
Becoming more than you ever were
Can't explain, what's come over me (come over me)
Can't explain, why it's so hard for me,
So hard to see your side.
Projecting all my anger
I can't seem to get this through to you
The walls are closing in
I dare you to walk in my shoes

    • "YOUR SIIIIIIIIIIIDE! I WON'T SEE YOUR SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE!"
      • And from the same album, "War Is The Answer" is a pretty good adrenaline pumping song until you hear the vocalist say "I'LL SMACK YOU SO FUCKING HARD YOU'LL FEEL LIKE YOU KISSED A FREIGHT TRAIN." Of course, this could also add to the song's appeal for some.
    • They also have one section of the song "Never Enough" where the singer breaks the music and delivers the dark, ominous, and hilarious line "In the end we're all just chalklines on the concrete."
  • Bush's "Glycerine" offers "We live in a wheel, where everyone steals. But when we rise, it's like strawberry fields." Narmy and nonsensical at the same time!
  • Kate Bush has a tendency to write great songs that are nearly ruined by a line or two of Narm, like "Mmm, yes, I said mmm, yes" from "The Sensual World".
    • It's an Allusion to Molly Bloom's "yes" monologue, which—in its stream-of-consciousness extremes—was a startling conclusion to Joyce's Ulysses.
    • How about "Wuthering Heights" and its video? "Heathcliff! It's me, Cathy, I've come home! I'm so co-o-old, let me in-a your window." Combine that with her extremely bizarre dancing, which eventually turns into random spinning, and her bright red lipstick and dress, and you've got an incredibly Narmy ballad.
    • The way she says 'GODDDDDD' in "Running Up That Hill".
    • What about when Kate stares at you in her music videos? Skip to 0:53 and say that's not narm.
    • In "Houdini" (an otherwise great song), Kate randomly screams, "With your spit still on my lip, you hit the water!"
    • There's also "Song of Solomon"'s eloquent line "I don't want your bullshit/I want your sexuality!". Sung in a high-pitched girly voice. Spit Take in 3... 2... 1...
    • Let's not forget the over-enunciated "never never never never let me go!" from "Jig of Life", the silly dog-howl imitations in "Hounds of Love" or the Improv bits of "The Big Sky", which seemingly answer the question "What would it sound like if Paul's scatting in 'Hey Jude' was just a bit sillier?".
    • The Director's Cut remake of "Deeper Understanding", apart from falling prey to severe Technology Marches On by not changing the lyrics, replaces the song's original vocoded chorus with an effect that can only be described as GLaDOS.
  • Many of John Lennon's solo songs border on this, perhaps because he sometimes acted like a Real Life Cloudcuckoolander.
    • "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" sounds cynical coming from anybody else, probably because it is scathingly cynical. A scathingly cynical Christmas Carol.
      • This troper believes that the producers added a chorus of children to drown out Yoko's screeching. It didn't work.
    • Then we have "Mind Games."

"Yes is the answer!"

      • What was the question?
    • "How Do You Sleep?" John may have valid points, but he gets over-the-top. Executive Meddling to remove one of the slanders didn't help the song as an artistic work.
    • Almost all of Sometime in New York City falls prey to this, but especially "Sunday Bloody Sunday."
    • "Imagine" can get this at the "Imagine no possessions" line. (Apparently, even John and Yoko couldn't for long.)
      • And from the same album, "Oh Yoko!" Perhaps the silliest of Silly Love Songs (even moreso than former bandmate Paul McCartney's, and one of his songs was that trope's Trope Namer!).

In the middle of the bath
In the middle of the bath I call your name
Oh...Yo...ko! (x2)
My love will turn you on (x2)
In the middle of a shave
In the middle of a shave I call your name...

I don't like you, I just hate you
I gonna kick your ass, oh yeah! oh yeah!

    • It doesn't help when you keep expecting the second line of the above to be "I'm gonna go eat worms".
  • Some of Rick Wakeman's solo output falls into this; the most notorious example is The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, where one of his performances of the album was accompanied by an ice show.
  • Rise Against's "Hero of War" manages to not only be Anvilicious and narmtastic, but also fails as a war protest song. The moral of the narrative is more along the lines of "DON'T JOIN THE MILITARY OR YOU'LL BECOME A BITTER OLD MAN WHO SHOOTS IRAQI WIDOWS WHO RUN AT YOU WITH WHITE FLAGS!"
    • "Make it Stop", which is otherwise well done song against bullying of gay teens, has this line which was a tad hard to take seriously: "And too much blood has flown from the wrists/ Of the children shamed for those they chose to kiss" which ruins the Tear Jerker of the lyrics completely.
  • The Beatles weren't immune to this. "She's Leaving Home" is a beautiful arrangement and it mostly succeeds on a dramatic level, but it lapses into melodrama with some pretty silly lyrics towards the end. "Sheeeeeeeeeeeee is haviiiiiiiiiiiiing fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun! (Fun is the one thing that money can't buy...)"
    • Similarly, "Helter Skelter". The hardest-rocking song of its time is sure to have extremely badass lyrics, right?

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide,

Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride,

'Til I get to the bottom AND I SEE YOU AGAIIIIIIIIIN!!!! YEAH YEAH YEAH, *chuckle*!!!!

  • Loverboy's Gangs In The Street from their sophomore album Get Lucky. The song was intended to warn about the perils of gang violence, but ended up so overwrought that it came across as unintentionally funny.
  • Faith No More have a reputation for being off-kilter and unusual, but the Chuck Mosely era had the narmhandle cranked firmly to "yes". Anne's Song is very much of its time, but the opening of Death March is... just... FUCK you , I'll SKATE to the... BEACH!
  • The Smiths had some moments, but the most laughable is "Meat Is Murder": a combination of a tuneless, two-chord dirge played at a molasses-slow pace, ridiculous synthesized animal death sounds, the sort of Anvilicious Animal Wrongs Group lyrics that probably led Robert Smith to boast that he eats meat because he hates Morrissey and will very likely provoke Don't Shoot the Message, sung deadly straight by the otherwise more humour-friendly Morrissey, and topped off with some irredeemably cheesy pitch-manipulated backing vocals that try to sound female but land in Uncanny Valley instead. AND A DEATH FOR NO REASON IS MURDER!
  • "Revelation", the 18 plus minute jam that took up the second half of Love's Da Capo, is widely considered this, mainly due to Arthur Lee's vocal hysterics which range from unintentionally creepy to downright hilarious.
  • There isn't a Foreigner song that isn't Narmtastic, but "I Want To Know What Love Is" is truly a crowning achievement.
  • Name any Afternoon Tea Time that DOESN'T go on this path. The Nu-Metal-ish (along with Piss-Take Rap) part in "Fuwa Fuwa Time" being the main offender.
    • "Don't Say Lazy" is such a hard rock song...yet look at the title. Try not to laugh. Also, this part before the chorus:

Oh crap, I broke a nail
But you fix it with glue
And just that can make you feel so accomplished

    • Then, before the second chorus:

Alright, I got a bit thinner
But in victory, you ate
And just that can make you feel so defeated

    • The Gratuitous English on "Go! Go! Maniac". ("We have fabulous bodies, soul and love")
    • What's "Early Summer Rain (20 Love)" about? Counting raindrops being quite a big deal.. Fall Out Boy should now be jealous in the category of strange lyrics.
    • The very first verse of "No, Thank You":

Crammed in front of a white board
We scribble our wishes freely
Even though the after school bell is echoing into the sunset
We can't diss on the power of dreaming, unfortunately

  • This may be a low blow, but Bon Scott's singing of the lyric "And you could hear the fingers pickin" on "Let There Be Rock" always makes me chuckle.
  • With their enormous, bombastic overproduced sound and occasional silly lyrics, Def Leppard can sometimes end up sounding kinda narmy. The crowning example has to be the song "Let's Get Rocked"; there are few words to describe Joe Elliot bellowing, "LET'S GET THE ROCK OUT OF HERE!" or asking (when the singer ends up getting turned off after discovering that his girlfriend only likes classical music), "I suppose a rock's out of the question?"
  • Most of the lyrics from the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration album, Lulu, including the infamous "I am a table" line.
    • Not to mention Lou Reed's vocal style on this album has often been compared to Grandpa Simpson..
  • Steve Vai whenever he sings. His voice and lyrics are dreadfully narmy, making otherwise good music laughably unlistenable. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Vai is an innovative and stellar guitarist who's probably in the running for greatest guitarist of all time. Please just stick to instrumentals.
    • Or have someone else sing. Then again, he was in Whitesnake for awhile.
  • Tonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At the Wheel is a good song that has much Lyrical Dissonance and Tear Jerkers, but hearing the line "Never seen so much BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOD" kinda ruins the moment.

R&B/Soul

  • Ruben Studdard's cover of Luther Vandross' cover of The Carpenters' "Superstar". Besides coming across as a bad karaoke version of Vandross' classic, Studdard's tendency to round out his "R's" and "L's" makes him sound like a tenor Elmer Fudd.
    • and the auto-tune. Dear lord, the auto-tune...
  • Stevie Wonder's Livin' for the City is an amazing song with a poignant message about hardship and adversity faced by impoverished African-Americans, and it's obvious that Stevie took the whole endeavor very seriously. With that in mind, why'd he get Animal to sing the second half?
  • Willow Smith's song "Whip My Hair". With the chorus line of "I whip my hair back and forth", Tumblr is having a field day with this song.
  • Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" is already bombastic enough. But the last chorus, with a dramatic drumbeat followed by the mother of all Incredibly Long Notes always cracks this troper up (this probably helped).


Other

  • Steven Seagal's frankly hilarious album, "Songs from the Crystal Cave", that are narmy, Anvilicious and painful. In the song "War":

You will sell us all these lies, like a can of soup.

"They tell me I'm an old man
They tell me I am blind
They took my driver's license
This house ain't far behind..."

  • "Diary of an Unborn Child". The supposed Downer Ending of the titular fetus's demise by abortion is more of a relief from the sickly-sweet Glurge it has seen fit to offload on us, but it takes a hard left into full-blown Narm when it starts singing.
    • The ending's on a bizarre borderline between narm and Nightmare Fuel: it's a fetus from beyond the grave asking "Why did you kill me, mommy?" In song, with a chipmunk-esque helium voice. Then again, it's probably supposed to cause nightmares. It isn't supposed to cause groaning...
    • Alvin? Nah, it's more like Gollum high on helium.
    • Here's a link.
  • Whatever this Vocaloid song is supposed to be about, it's (intentionally?) so bad that all the singing sounds like it's done on helium. And it's called "Women's Blues." It's also So Bad It's Good - the thing has four stars! (Or at least, so bad it's funny.)
    • In "Circle You, Circle You," a very creepy song otherwise, one of the lyrics translates to "You lost the game."
    • If you listen to them enough times, most creepy Vocaloid songs may become Narm.
    • Megurine Luka's song "Wash My Blood" was probably intended to be edgy and passionate—but it's much worse than the lyricist probably realized. One becomes caught between offense and laughter, hearing such vulgar lyrics being sung so earnestly.
    • "MUTEKI.SHOUJO 99" by Kaai Yuki, is insanely bad with the Narm. First off, the whole song is in Gratuitous English. "I'm not girl, candy girl"? Uh, yeah. Second, the chorus is ear rape, and the hard rock guitars come out of nowhere after the electronic sound the verse preceding it had. Third, the artist wants us to think that six-or-something-year-old girl is the awesomest person ever to walk the earth. Needless to say, she doesn't qualify, especially after the Gratuitous English and grating chorus. Fourth, the artist decides to throw in some ad-libs like "huh" and "yeah". However, since the ad-libs are 1) in English, and 2) being sung by a Vocaloid, it sounds more funny than awesome or edgy.
  • "CHOCOLATE RAIN! SOME STAY DRY AND OTHERS FEEL THE PAIN!" Yeah, "Chocolate Rain" is pure narm. So is most of Tay Zonday's music.
  • Too Much Too Young by the Specials; a song about teenage pregnancy featuring the silly lines:

Now you're chained to the cooker
Making currant buns for tea.

  • "I Am The Wind", from the closing credits to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Of course, pretty much every part of this game apart from the actual gameplay is just narmtastic.
  • Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State by Los Campesinos! is a poignant track, presumably about the death of a loved (maybe unrequitedly) one but this descends into narm with the lines "I fall to my knees / My piss-soaked jeans". One would assume it was from shock and fear but... yeah. It manages to recover from it though.
  • EXEC_CUTYPUMP/. is horribly, horribly narmy. Just listen. Or better yet, take a look at the lyrics [dead link]. But somehow, it manages to be awesome at the same time.
  • The sudden transition from droning piano chords to circus-synths in Enya's "Cursum Perficio" destroys the song's intended dark tone. But for others, of course, it might be more than a bit unsettling.
  • Hulk Hogan And The Wrestling Boot Band's album Hulk Rules alternates between So Bad It's Good and So Bad It's Horrible in general, but "Hulkster In Heaven" stands out as narm since it's the only song that's really meant to be taken seriously to begin with. It's supposed to be a sincere tribute to a fan who died at a young age, but the lyrics keep throwing in gratuitous references to Hulk Hogan himself ("I used to tear my shirt, but now you tore my heart/ I knew you were a hulkamaniac right from the very start"), to the point where it's almost more about him than it is his late fan. Then there's the cheesy synthesized backing music, and of course the fact that, well, it's Hulk Hogan singing what's meant to be a moving ballad (with some much more capable gospel-style backing vocalists helping out).
  • Abney Park, a rather dominant band in the Steampunk genre, manages to have a wonderfully Narmtastic song titled "Virus". Who can honestly hear the lines "If you're dead it will keep you alive, and if you're alive it keeps you really dead..." without wondering what the hell they were thinking?
  • Scott Walker's "The Escape" features a Donald Duck voice towards the end, which, if you're not totally in the moment, just scans as entirely incongrouous.
  • Artemis Fowl has Disney doing songs for him now. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary but to those that know him from the book, this seems rather contrasting with his personality, song style wise. Some find the lyrics kind of corny also. May fall into Narm Charm.
  • Oh boy, Sid Vicious' cover of My Way could well be one of the best examples available. It is well played, but the vocals are impossible to listen to without either turning it off and vowing never to listen to it again or listen to without fighting the urge not to laugh. At the same time, you can't help marvelling at his choice of lyrics (he didn't know all the lyrics, so he wrote what he didn't know, according to The Other Wiki). You can't help wondering how many drugs (and/or units of alcohol) were in his system when the idea came to him...yet it is still My Way done his way.
    • The video turns it Up to Eleven to the point where it becomes a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Sid is in France, singing to an audience of what appear to be rich Victorians (and his mother), then at the end he shoots the audience.
  • The 2010 version of "We Are The World" was a great idea for a noble cause, but was blown by Wyclef Jean yodeling over the rest of the singers for the last half of the song.
  • It can be said that many school songs and national anthems, while patriotic/heartfelt/sincere, are very narmy. This is particularly true of English translations of national anthems that were originally written in another language. What would sound poetic and poignant in one language can sound really silly in another, if the translation is done badly. Other times, over-the-top rhetoric is used, and it seems like every time the song is sung, it is a call to arms. No specific examples though, don't want to ruffle any feathers.
    • The translated opening lines of Senegal's national anthem have a certain Narm Charm:

Everyone, strum your koras!

Strike the balafons!

    • The anthems for Brazilian soccer teams. If you know some Portuguese, take a look here.
  • Music-related: Something Awful recommended Pit, a Death Metal magazine, for unintended hilarity, particularly the band names ("Lair of the Minotaur is a side-project of the guys from 7000 Dying Rats and Pelican. If you are into the tunes of guys like The Christpunchers, Rwake, Cult of Luna, and Earthride then this is your shit.").
  • Jon and Vangelis's music is awesome, few would discuss it. But the video for I hear you now... um, it has not aged well. The Ambiguously Gay classic dancer, the clowninsh mimes and Jon's horrible Eighties Hair really distract you from the great song.

Random YT commenter: "Great track but the video seems to have been inspired by a bad magic mushroom trip."

    • Some of the sound effect in The Tao of Love are bound to mae people chucle. 1:33 in the video linked here is specially bad about it.
  • VAJAS´s Sparrow of the Wind. Listen to it without cracking a smile.
  • A-ha's Stay on these roads. The music is rather pretty but the cheesy, wangsty and Purple Prose-lyrics push it to this extreme.
  • "Ordinary World" is a beautiful, introspective ballad by Duran Duran, and arguably one of the best songs of their career. The issue is not the song itself, but the music video—it depicts the band singing the song to a woman wearing the most ridiculous bridal ensemble in the free world. One of the guitarists even plays with it at one point.
  • Not sure what section, but pretty much anything by Barry Manilow likely falls into this category.
  1. ↑ How would he know that?
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