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Scary Musician, Harmless Music: Difference between revisions

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Scary Musician, Harmless Music (view source)

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{{trope}}
[[File:ozzyosbourne.jpg|link=Ozzy Osbourne (Music)|frame| A kind man when you get to know him. The multiple crosses should have tipped you off.]]
 
{{quote|"There's nothing safer than someone who tells you he's dangerous."|[[Patton Oswalt]]}}
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== Played Straight ==
* [[Alice Cooper (Music)|Alice Cooper]]'s [[Spiritual Successor]], [[Marilyn Manson]], might be a bit "edgier" than Alice and Ozzy, but he's trying so damned hard to be "scary" and "shocking" that no music anywhere - and certainly not his music - could ever live up to the hype.
* [[Lady Gaga]] is known for her outrageous fashion sense and intimidating public image, but her music is relatively harmless pop (as long as you don't look into the metaphors.) Similarly, in interviews she comes across as more "[[Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind|eccentric but polite]]" than "[[Ax Crazy]]."
* When Cyndi Lauper debuted in the 1980s, she looked like a punk straight out of the East Village, with strange makeup and a checkerboard shaved into her pink hair. But her power ballads and pop anthems were accessible to music fans from all walks of life.
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* [[Bring Me the Horizon]] (although [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on how "scary" their music is; they ''are'' [[Metalcore]], after all).
** Same goes for Like Moths To Flames; they're your pretty average [[Metalcore]] band, so [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on how "scary" they are, but either way, it's pretty disconcerting it is to hear such big screams coming from their postively ''tiny'' lead singer.
* [[Visual Kei]]. Riffs that sound like [[Slayer (Music)|Slayer]] or [[Pantera (Music)|Pantera]] played by guys who look like gothic Barbie dolls.
* iwrestledabearonce look like [http://img.listal.com/image/1477442/600full-iwrestledabearonce.jpg pretty average hipsters] with a girl singer. They sound like [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrFTR9fucr8 this].
* The Gerogerigegege. He only [http://s.dsimg.com/image/A-78487-1232126820.jpeg looks] like a psychedelic rock frontman. The bulk of his music is somewhere along [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iD_LQiv9wE&feature=related this] vein.
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== Inversions (Mild-Mannered/Nice Musician) ==
* One that doesn't directly involve music, but look at any picture of Keith Moon and you wouldn't really think of him as someone who could put Keith Richards under the table twice without breaking a sweat.
* [[My Bloody Valentine (Musicband)|My Bloody Valentine]] are some bizarre cross between this and a subversion - they're all mild people, and their music is mostly [[Silly Love Songs]]. But they're legally obligated to give out earplugs at their concerts due to how loud they are, and their set finisher "You Made Me Realise" contains an incredibly long brutal noise-making middle (which [[Fan Nickname|fans call]] "the Holocaust section") that can last up to 30 minutes and has been known to cause people to hallucinate being swallowed by a giant vagina.
* Several [[Extreme Metal]] musicians as mentioned above. George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher and Alex Webster of [[Cannibal Corpse]], Fenriz of [[Darkthrone]], and Attila Csihar of [[Mayhem]] are a few examples.
** Karl Sanders of [[Nile]] write what is recognized as some of the heaviest death metal out there right now, with lyrics relating to [[Gorn|people being ripped apart by being essentially raped to death by statues]] ([[Truth in Television|which actually happened in antiquity]]), but in his interviews, he's fairly soft spoken, polite, and during concert tours, offers guitar lessons.
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** This is somewhat subverted considering that Trent Reznor helped compose the Oscar-winning score for the movie ''[[The Social Network]]''.
* Nivek Ogre from [[Skinny Puppy]] is one of the nicest, most gregarious people you could imagine meeting.
* [[J.G. Thirlwell (Music)|JG Thirlwell]]. Foetus albums, in their variety, include screaming and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSFYcKajb6A rhythmic white noise] - all made almost single-handedly by a soft-spoken, shy intellectual. He's good mates with Swans.
* William Bennett. He fronts a band who sounds something like [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkBmpxUF9_M&feature=related this.] In his blog and in interviews, he comes off as much more polite, and has even given lectures at the German Institute for Music and Media.
* The members of [[Avenged Sevenfold]] appear to be this, based off of their two live documentaries. They might be wild and little crazy, but they're actually pretty nice (although the polite tends to swing back and forth).
* [[Angelspit]] perform songs about cannibalism, anarchy and overall destruction, whilst resembling musical nightmares. They're some of the nicest people on the planet.
* [[Godspeed You! Black Emperor]] perform long, drawn-out, often atonal, minimalistic, and terrifying music. Just from their title, you'd expect them to be a bunch of angsty, long-haired, long-bearded, possibly quite muscular men wearing guitars strapped around their necks, sitting around looking depressed, reading [[Ayn Rand]] and [[Nietzsche Wannabe|speculating about the meaning of human existence]], but, no, they're actually a bunch of rather polite Canadians that seem to rather enjoy making orchestral post-rock music and mucking about with how music as we know it works. [http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/47455123/Under+Byen+underbyen.jpg Here's] [http://www.leedsmetsu.co.uk/files/u10/godspeed_you_1.jpg some] [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8YH4szgzQFc/TYABWjYScrI/AAAAAAAAEtM/tKGxRyqSzjQ/s1600/Godspeed-You%2521-Black-Emperor.jpg pictures] [http://blog.qubi.com/attach/922/1354182888.jpg of] [http://love-it-loud.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Godspeed.jpg them]. Not exactly threatening, are they?
 
== Other ==
* [[Ozzy Osbourne (Music)|Ozzy Osbourne]] has been calling himself the "Prince of Darkness" for decades, and his stage show is full of scary Halloween imagery. His music is vanilla heavy metal. Well-done vanilla, but vanilla nonetheless.
** "Vanilla" because he's the [[Trope Maker]], natch (with [[Black Sabbath (Music)|Black Sabbath]], which used to describe their work as "horror films turned into music") - he's victim along with [[Led Zeppelin]] of the [[Seinfeld Is Unfunny|Ozzy Is Unheavy]] effect.
*** He still counts, since his music got progressively softer, especially compared to Black Sabbath, while he still tried to keep the "evil" image. The guys in [[Black Sabbath (Music)|Black Sabbath]] and [[Heaven and Hell]] actually invert this, since they all are generally cultivating a rather laid back, nice image, but have actually been making music that's still pretty heavy and dark for guys who started out 40 years ago.
* [[Alice Cooper (Music)|Alice Cooper]]'s act has always been built on horror-show elements and special effects. Like Ozzy, though, his music is pretty mainstream. Sure, one could argue this to be an aversion, he did write ''[[I Love the Dead]]'' and ''Cold Ethyl'', both about <s>necrophilia</s> making love to corpses, or maybe an inversion, as he is now a golf-loving, born-again Christian, appeared regularly on a Phoenix kid's show, has been a guest on the Soupy Sales show, (he's friends with the host) and was pals with [[Marx Brothers|Groucho Marx]], but we're talking musical content, not lyrical content.
* [[X Japan]] since dropping their original heavy metal VK appearance is somewhat of a subversion of this. They performed some of their darkest lyrical material and one of their most overtly sexual performances (the BDSM-themed White Poem) while in more "average rockstar dress," and the [[Murder Ballad]] Week End (which is actually this very trope played straight since it is an argument for why murder and suicide are hopeless) became one of their biggest hits.
** [[Yoshiki Hayashi]] is, according to those close to him, this trope both subverted and doubly subverted. While feared for his nigh-legendary temper and control-freak tendencies and [[Hatedom|hated]] for allegedly being a male [[Rich Bitch]] and [[The Ditz|ditz]], most people who have actually gotten close to him say that he is very intelligent, as well as an incredibly kind and loving person. His music, on the other hand, is all over the map from heavy and dark themes of sexuality and violence to [[Deconstruction|deconstructions]] of violence and suicide to angsty [[Love Ballad|Love Ballads]].
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* Skyblue 100 are a strange case. They're a [http://myspace.com/skyblue100 Casio and guitar act] who play happy, upbeat, sometimes silly tunes, (They even do the music for [http://www.youtube.com/user/sabanasu a small-time kids show]) and their stage personas reflect it. However, [http://www.youtube.com/user/skyblue1000000#p/u/11/GPqlOtRZEdk an upload on their Youtube account] implies them to be fans of [[Harsh Noise|The Gerogerigegege]], which in itself brings up a storm of implications.
* An art example of an inversion: [http://tinyurl.com/3oonykj This] is Matthew Gray Gubler. He's adorable and is most well-known for playing Dr. Reid on Criminal Minds. He draws stuff like [http://gublernation.tumblr.com/post/3647119913/show-poster-i-just-made-for-the-talented-french this].
* [[Andrew WK (Music)W.K.|Andrew WK]] is a strange case of both playing this trope straight and inverting it. It's played straight in the sense that he uses a lot of violent imagery (for example, the cover of ''I Get Wet'' is just him staring into emptiness while blood pours from his nose and mouth), yet his songs are mostly about partying and generally enjoying life. It's also inverted in the sense that he does write some violent or [[Your Mileage May Vary|relatively]] shocking songs, and even the happy ones SOUND violent as they are very loud, over-the-top and energetic, yet pretty much anyone who ever met him agrees that he's one of the nicest guys ever. Heck, he's even one of the last musicians left to defend the Emo lifestyle!
** Oddly, he is fond of playing the piano. One of his albums is solely a calm piano-only album, made in defiance of his record company and touring demands.
* Revo of [[Sound Horizon]] by all accounts appears to be an unfailingly polite prettyboy klutz with a penchant for cosplay and writing pretty or epic songs about such lovely subjects as [[Lyrical Dissonance|death, incest, murder, decapitation, death, miscarriage,]] [[Yandere|yanderes]], [[Sanity Slippage]][[Lyrical Dissonance|, death, rape, war, the apocalypse, revenge, constantly repeating tragedy, and, of course, death.]]
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