Harsher in Hindsight/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Martina McBride's Concrete Angel is bad enough, noting an abusive relationship that ends in death, and the memorial as a concrete angel. But after hearing about the "Concrete-encased high school girl murder case" and the resulting guro manga made of the incident (no links, please), it becomes particularly chilling when you realize none of the lyrics suggest that it was her parents that did this, and the entire song could just as easily describe this incident. It wasn't intentional, not that it matters.
  • "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse sounds a lot more disturbing since she passed away after a lifetime of drugs and alcohol abuse.
  • "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is a perfect example of this trope. "If I leave here tomorrow..."
  • Taiji Sawada. Here's just a few of them...
    • In the video for "Week End" for X Japan, he was killed. A Conspiracy Theory with arguable validity (more validity than the official statement that he committed suicide) state that his death was an intentional homicide.
    • One of the songs he co-wrote was "Voiceless Screaming," a pained reflection on depression and its related suffering, somewhat modeled on Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. He would later release this song in his solo work as "Voiceless," as a tribute to his late best friend, hide.
    • With Loudness he wrote, among others, the songs "Black Widow" and "Racing The Wind," which were Exactly What It Says on the Tin for the first, and an angry Religion Rant Song for the second. Arguably, two of the people who contributed to his death were a Black Widow and a shadowy religious guru who he had began to follow.
    • Many of the songs in his career with D.T.R. referred to his experiences with drugs and mental illness...both of which would become constant companions in his life.
  • Smiley Culture was a UK reggae artist who had a few hits in the 80s. His most famous song was called "Police Officer", and is about how he was about to be busted for drugs possession when the police realised who he was (their family members were big fans of his previous song "Cockney Translator"). The arrest was more or less called off on the provision that he sign some items for them. In 2011, police performed a drug raid on his house. As he could no longer use his fame or money to get himself out of being sent to prison, he committed suicide. The very subject of his biggest hit came back to haunt him and resulted in his death.
  • Warren Zevon has a couple of these; most noticeably "My Shit's Fucked Up", and "Life'll Kill ya." The former is about a patient finding out he's terminally ill (in a decidedly un-clinical way), and the latter includes the lyrics "Some get the awful, awful diseases." Warren died in 2003 of Mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer.
  • The last song on the final Elliott Smith album released in his lifetime is titled "Bye." His first posthumously released album features "King's Crossing", which is basically a musical suicide note. Depressing when he used to perform it live, now it's just chilling.
  • The Notorious B.I.G. named his first two albums Ready to Die and Life After Death. He was gunned down in Los Angeles just weeks before the release of the latter, which ends with a song titled "You're Nobody ('Til Somebody Kills You)".
  • German bubblegum dance group Passion Fruit released their first (and only) album, Spanglish Love Affairs, in April 2000. One of the tracks on the album is "Do You Remember", a haunting song about missing someone during Christmastime, complete with a sample of their normally upbeat first single, "Rigga Ding Dong Song", that sounds like a broken down carnival ride. Tragedy hit when the band was involved in a plane crash, killing two of the three members, Maria Serrano and Nathaly van het Ende, and severely injuring the survivor, Debby St. Marteen. The date of the crash? November 24, 2001 - a little over a month before Christmas. "Do You Remember" is rather chilling in the fact that it sounds just like a song dedicated to Maria and Nathaly's deaths, and even as a farewell to the group as a whole due to the sample - but it was released almost two years before the accident. People have expressed surprise that the song was indeed on their album and not actually written about the crash.
  • J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers charted in 1964 with "Last Kiss," a sad song memorializing an (actual) gruesomely fatal car crash. Around the time that the single made the top ten, J. Frank was involved in an auto accident that left him injured and the band's manager dead.
  • The video for the Johnny Cash cover of "Hurt" has a quick cut to his wife June Carter Cash as he sings "Everyone I know/Goes away in the end". Her death a few months later made the video even more depressing.
  • In 1997, Michael Jackson released the song "Morphine" on the album Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix. The song was a chilling description of drug abuse, with lines like "A heart attack, baby" and "Trust in me / Just in me / Put all your trust in me", the latter line referring to dependence on the titular drug. The bridge is even worse: the angry singing turns into a soft, melancholy melody describing a person's slide into addiction, specifically to the painkiller Demerol, while the sounds of a respirator, an ECG machine, and presumably a doctor talking are heard in the background. Between 2003 and 2005, Jackson allegedly became dependent on Demerol. Then, on June 25, 2009, Jackson died of cardiac arrest, eventually deemed to have been a homicide caused by a lethal combination of drugs, primarily the anesthetic propofol, administered by his personal doctor. As of August 30[when?], the doctor is currently under investigation for manslaughter, although he claims that Jackson specifically asked for propofol, and he also claims that he had administered it every night for six weeks.
    • On top of the obvious points listed above, there is also a chilling pattern present on the album as a whole. The album, primarily a remix album, included five original songs, "Morphine" being the second. The first song, "Blood on the Dance Floor", sang about an attempted murder (albeit with a knife), while the final two original songs ("Ghosts" and "Is It Scary") both dealt with ghostly imagery straight out of a horror movie. Combining "Morphine" with a song about homicide and two songs about ghosts is even more chillingly prophetic than the song alone.
    • "Breaking News", one of the unfinished-in-his-lifetime songs on the posthumously-assembled Michael, starts with a very harsh line. The fact that the dialogue seems to be taken directly from reports talking about him - the overall 'scumbag media' theme of the song. - makes it even scarier.

"The plot begins to destroy Michael Jackson."

  • Ironically, this line takes on a more sinister interpretation when one realizes that "Breaking News" was an extremely controversial song, widely believed - with strong evidence behind it - to be another singer imitating Jackson's voice on a song he recorded no vocals for in his lifetime.
  • Most of Joy Division's lyrics. Especially In A Lonely Place: "Hangman looks round as he waits, cord stretches tight as it breaks, one day we will die in your dreams, how I wish you were here with me now".
  • For Squirrels' single "The Mighty KC" was inspired by Kurt Cobain's suicide, and while the chorus was actually optimistic, the verses were needless to say pretty bleak. A month before the album it was on came out, half of the band (including vocalist Jack Vigliatura III) and their manager died when their touring van overturned. Particularly eerie because all had died younger than Cobain did (Vigliatura was only 21), and because the song included the line "Ship me off to the morgue, I'm ready to be buried".
  • Kurt Cobain's suicide makes some Nirvana material uncomfortable.
    • "Come as You Are" has the chorus, "And I swear that I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun."
    • One of their last singles is called "I Hate Myself And I Want To Die," though the lyrics have nothing to do with it.
      • This song was reportedly named after the phrase Cobain liked to use whenever people asked him "How are you?", because he hated that question.
    • When Kurt Cobain was 15, he made a short film entitled, "Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide".
    • One photo of the band has Kurt holding a shotgun in his mouth.
    • After River Phoenix's sudden death in October 1993, Kurt Cobain dedicated performances of "Jesus Don't Want Me For a Sunbeam" to Phoenix (among other stars who died young), during Nirvana's last shows from November 1993 through February 1994, only months before Cobain himself died.
  • Rakim in 1991, right after the Gulf War: "Even though we won, it doesn't mean its peace. So I wait for terrorists to attack, every time a truck fires, I fire back. I look for shelter when a plane is over me, remember Pearl Harbor? New York could be over, G. Kamikazes, strapped with bombs, no peace in the east, they want revenge for Saddam." Not exactly right in all details, but pretty scary nonetheless.
  • One of the verses in Phil Ochs "There but for Fortune" is about a man whose life was ruined by alcohol. Only one example of Phil's more depressing lyrics describing his own future and eventually suicide.
    • Just listen to Chords of Fame:

I found him by the stage last night
He was breathing his last breath
A bottle of gin and a cigarette
Was all that he had left
"I can see you're making music
'Cause you carry a guitar
But God help the troubadour
Who tries to be a star'"

  • And then there's No More Songs:

Hello, hello, hello
Is there anybody home?
I've only called to say
I'm sorry.
The drums are in the dawn,
and all the voices gone.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

Once I knew a saint
who sang upon the stage
He told about the world,
His lover.
A ghost without a name,
Stands ragged in the rain.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

  • Jordin Kare's Fire in the Sky, has the fourth verse, about the space shuttle Columbia, end with "See her big jets burning. See her fire in the sky." Then we did. (apparently he has since added a verse to recognize this.)
    • The wording of the fifth verse "And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid", which sounds like it refers to two incidents with seven people being lost, but actually is just an accident of wording.
  • Similarly, Billy Joe Royal had a country hit called "Burned Like a Rocket." It reached #10 on the Billboard charts and was still heading up when the Challenger Disaster occurred, and radio stations stopped playing the song.
  • Squad Five-O's album art for Bombs Over Broadway, released in 2000, Has a downright chilling feel to it now. Likewise, the lyrics for the song the album was named for are unnerving at best: New York, New York. Our pride has done you in. Lights out, New York City. You were the first, but you won't be the last.
  • A song from Elton John's Blue Moves album from 1976, "Idol", is a rumination on the rise and fall of a (possibly fictional) washed-up teen idol from The Fifties, one whose "face has changed, he's not the same anymore". This song was inspired by Elton's meeting Elvis Presley for the first time, and being horrified at the distressed state Elvis was in. A year later, Elvis would be dead. This would serve as a wake-up call for Elton to slow down his own career, lest he wind up like Elvis. Unfortunately, Elton's drug and alcohol habits, promiscuity and bulimia were still taking over his life. After seeing himself in a video singing at Ryan White's funeral as sad, bloated, morbidly obese and "look(ing) like a 75-year old man", he finally took himself to rehab in 1990 and saved his life.
    • Another song of Elton's, "All The Nasties", released on 1971's Madman Across The Water, is, according to lyricist Bernie Taupin, both a Take That to Elton's critics, and a rumination on whether the general public would reject Elton over his homosexuality. Elton would come out, albeit as bisexual, in 1976, at the height of his career. The backlash he would receive over his sexuality would severely damage his career until the release of 1983's Too Low For Zero album, and even then, he would not enjoy quite the level of success he had in the 1970s.
  • A verse in Queen's 1989 album, The Miracle, called "Khashoggi's Ship", contains the lines "I'm in pretty good shape" and "No one stops my party". Freddie Mercury secretly (but knowingly) was dying of AIDS at the time.
    • The Miracle was so called as it was "a miracle" it was finished as Freddie was so ill.
    • Also "I'm Going Slightly Mad" is not so funny when you know it was all his fears about dementia brought on by AIDS.
      • YMMV...WordOfGod said himself that it was just a silly joke song he wrote in about 5 minutes.
        • Freddie, Queen, and the few other people who knew about Freddie's illness did and said all that they could to hide the fact that Freddie had the disease, at least until it was too obvious to keep it a secret. It wasn't mentioned in interviews, talked about in private, etc. until the night before his death, when Freddie sent the press release. Freddie wanted to carry on as normally as possible until the end, and did not want the tabloid press to complicate his life or the lives of those he cared for, or for anyone to worry about him or buy his records out of sympathy. So any Word of God you get from Freddie, Queen, etc. up until November 23, 1991 was made while trying to keep the issue a secret and downplay any "clues" about his condition.
    • Unrelated to Freddie, but the song Under Pressure features many scenes of skyscrapers being destroyed. It was supposed to be moving and deep, and still is...but for completely different reasons.
  • ★ (Blackstar), David Bowie's last album and one of his darkest, was released just two days before his death. As a review by a user on Rate Your Music states:

"It's hard to type a review for this because now, I have the burden of knowing that this is Bowie's swan song. It's an awkward position for anyone who is now hearing this. Listening to this album before and after Bowie's death is such a contrast. Things that didn't make sense before now become bleak and depressing as all hell."

  • The video for Eminem's song Like Toy Soldiers featured D12 member Proof being gunned down and then dying from his wounds in the hospital. Proof was shot and killed for real only a year later.
  • "New Life" by Blind Melon was written about vocalist Shannon Hoon hoping the birth of his daughter would give him enough strength to turn his life around - unfortunately he died of a drug overdose the year she was born. Possibly making this eerier is the fact that the Hidden Track on Soup includes vocals from "New Life" being played in reverse.
  • When Charlie Fink, the frontman of British indie folk group Noah and the Whale, split up with his beloved girlfriend, he and his band crafted a rather melancholy and gloomy (and no doubt somewhat autobiographical) concept album The First Days of Spring about the messy break of a relationship as a result. The whole thing makes the small hit "5 Years Time" from the band's previous album Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down rather melancholy to listen, with its happily optimistic daydreaming about having good times with your beloved and hopes that in five years they'll still be together.
    • Its especially harsh because his girlfriend was singer/songwriter Laura Marling who was also a member of the band up until she and Fink broke up and she sung back up on "5 Years Time" (and the rest of the album) and he produced her debut solo album Alas, I Cannot Swim which was more acclaimed and popular than the band's album. Her second album I Speak Because I Can was also a much gloomier affair than her first because of the breakup. Again, Marling's album was much more acclaimed and popular. Happily, he's seemed to have gotten over this, as the band's next album Last Night on Earth, despite its Creator Breakdown-alluding title, was a much happier affair.
  • On The Who's "Tommy," the song "Sally Simpson" tells the story of a girl who sneaks out of her house to see Tommy speak, only to be injured when the audience's passionate reaction to Tommy causes them to riot. It is very chilling to hear after the infamous Who concert riot of 1979.
  • Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice" is a song about the unpredictability of life and death, and the last song John Lennon worked on. He was shot to death the day he finished recording it, and died clutching the completed mix of the song in his hands.
  • After Hurricane Katrina "New Orleans is sinking" by The Tragically Hip was not played on radio stations, at least in Canada for months.
    • Trust me, it wasn't played in the US either.
  • The title song from Alice Cooper's 1977 album "Lace and Whiskey" mentions that he'll "end up a broken old hobo with red and yellow eyes, swearin' and drunk and dyin" but "that's a long, long way from today". Later in the same year he was hospitalized to cure his alcoholism.
  • In August 2009, critically acclaimed indie punk rocker Jay Reatard released his second solo album, Watch Me Fall. A little over five months later in January 2010, he died in his bed of cocaine toxicity, after a tumultuous year that culminated in the firing of his entire live band.
    • The first single from Watch Me Fall" was entitled "It Ain't Gonna Save Me", which for almost the last half focused around a hook based on the line "all is lost, there is no hope for me".
  • In The Beatles, "Come Together," John Lennon says the phrase "shoot me" numerous times. Unfortunately...
  • One of Britney Spears' early singles, "Lucky" talks about an actress who has fame, beauty, awards...and soul-crushing loneliness. Given the singer's later breakdowns, the song takes on a creepy air of foretelling.
  • James "The Rev" Sullivan's backing vocal tracks of Avenged Sevenfold's Afterlife "I'm much too young to fall" and later on "I am unbroken, I'm choking, on this ecstasy/ Unbreak me, unchain me, I need another chance to live". The Rev died of drug overdose at age 28.
  • Billy Joel's "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" straddles the line between this trope and a Funny Aneurysm Moment, as Joel originally intended the described destruction of New York City to be tongue-in-cheek or, in his words, "science fiction". After 9/11 some of the imagery (particularly the falling skyline) became all too real. Billy averted Too Soon by playing the song very soon after 9/11 at a benefit concert, lampshading these tropes, saying "I never thought it would really happen. But unlike the end of that song, we ain't going anywhere."
  • Harry Chapin's "Dreams Go By" has this verse:

You say you should have been a ballerina, babe
There are songs I should have sung
But I guess our dreams have come and gone
You gotta dream when you are young

  • He died at 38.
  • While "Forecast Fascist Future" by of Montreal is filled with one Lyrical Shoehorn after another (or, given Kevin Barnes's Elephant 6-flavored personality, a bizarre universe), the title and chorus was always marked as a harsh criticism towards his audience. Considering how things got worse, it almost seems prophetic now, especially the chorus:

Boredom murders the heart of our age
While sanguinary creeps take the stage (they're on the stage!)
Boredom strangles the life from the printed page!

  • In 2004, Phil Anselmo, a former bandmate of Dimebag Darrell's, had said, "I could kill [Darrell] like a fuckin' piece of vapor. The world should know that. He deserves to be beaten severely". Weeks later, Darrell was shot to death onstage.
  • Scissor Sisters song 'Mary'. "Mary" is about Jake Shears' platonic love for his friend Mary. The song itself sounds a bit mournful, though it was released in 2004. It was two years before she died of an aneurysm.
  • Whitney Houston's sophomore album, Whitney, contained a song called "Love is a Contact Sport". While the lyrics were basic fluff, the title in particular is quite harsher considering the level of physical violence in her marriage to fellow singer Bobby Brown.
  • Aaliyah, early in her career, did the soundtrack for the animated film Anastasia. Think about it: a girl who tragically died too young did music for a movie whose titular character tragically died too young IRL.
  • King Crimson's song "Larks' Tongues in Aspic IV" (specifically, the "Coda: I Have a Dream" section), released in 2000, has lyrics consisting of a list of major events during the 20th century; one line of lyrics is "Tim McVeigh, Saddam Hussein, the bombing of the World Trade". Many live performances of this song used an instrumental version of the coda (although they started doing this at least as early as August 2001).
  • Brian Wilson's old Beach Boys song "In My Room" where he 'locks out all his worries and fears' and where he 'won't be afraid' takes on some real gravity when you know what his family life was like.
  • The end of Dan Fogelberg's "Tucson, Arizona (Gazette)" after the 2011 Tucson shooting. Just look at the similarities between Tony in the song and the suspect in this one article alone:
    • "Now a second high school sweetheart is speaking out. [She] says the same thing -- that Loughner cared about grades, friends, school -- but turned to marijuana, alcohol and hallucinogens like mushrooms after the break up."

The papers simply stated, it must have been the drugs that drove him mad

  • "he was actually a really nice kid when it came to it..."

The neighbors speculated, what could make a good boy go so bad?

  • "She says he came from a dysfunctional family, and never got along with his parents."

It might have been the home he never had.

  • Accidental elegies:
    • Ryan Adams' "New York New York", filmed on September 7, 2001, with the World Trade Center in the background for the chorus shots.

Hell I still love you New York.

  • The Black-eyed Peas' "I Just Can't Get Enough" video (an homage to Lost in Translation) was filmed in Tokyo a week before the 9.0 earthquake.
  • The first Jack's Mannequin album, Everything In Transit's references to being sick was due to Andrew McMahon's recovery from tour burnout. Those lyrics would then turn eerily ironic when he visits his doctor for a case of laryngitis only to discover he had leukemia. Even eerier? He was diagnosed with leukemia the day he was finished with mixing the album and the day he was admitted to the hospital for leukemia was the day the album was released.
  • The Dio track "End of the World" off of the "Master of the Moon" album contains the line "They say you never hear the bullet that kills, and I don't hear a sound...". After Ronnie James Dio died of cancer, it was revealed that the cancer wasn't caught until a very late stage, due to his stubborn reluctance to ever see a doctor (not even once he was having obvious symptoms, so certainly not for routine screenings). In contrast to the image the line originally evoked, it now calls to mind the idea that if he had been listening for the bullet, he might have heard it in time to dodge.
  • Italian rapper Caparezza set up a Viral Marketing fake blog to promote his latest album. The blog is written from the perspective of a Conspiracy Theorist, in reference to one of the songs that mock conspiracy nuts, and its second entry is about natural catastrophes. The album came out March 1, 2011, and on March 11 a massive earthquake hit Japan, triggering a colossal tsunami and a nuclear meltdown.
  • The music video for McFly's 19th single 'That's the Truth' featured bassist Dougie reacting badly to a breakup. Shortly after the video's release, Dougie was admitted to rehab, the reason rumoured to be depression over breaking up with his girlfriend.
  • John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy", written for his son Sean, features the line "I can hardly wait until you come of age but I guess we'll both just have to be patient". He was murdered a few years later, when his son was five (even his older son, Julian, was only a teenager).
  • Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" is eerie enough in a post-Columbine world:

All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks better run, better run, outrun my gun

All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks better run, better run, faster than my bullet
—and is downright scary after the Oslo/Utoya attacks where 69 teenagers were murdered by a lone gunman.
  • In Coheed and Cambria's "Blood Red Summer" video, Claudio Sanchez (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) looks up to see Joshua Eppard (drums) and Mic Todd (bass) sitting in rocking chairs, waving to him, and vanishing. Josh later left the band to further a solo project, while Mic left after being charged for robbery while on drugs. Even worse, in their "A Favor House Atlantic: The Movie" self-parody video, Mic's personality was essentially boiled down to "the stoner".
  • In 2011, Anal Cunt released "Wearing Out Our Welcome", which has become this trope due to the death of lead singer Seth Putnam the same year. The songs "Nothing's Offensive Anymore" and "Wasting Time Writing Anal Cunt Songs", both discussing how the band was declining and running out of steam. In a promotional interview, Putnam even sounds like he's dying.
    • On top of that, the cover art featured a man with a needle in his arm. Putnam's death by heart attack was likely due to his excessive drug usage.
    • Another one: Putnam contributed backing vocals on the Pantera song "Suicide Note Pt. II", featuring the line "Do it, do it, do it, try to die/ yeah like me" A few years later, Putnam suffered a near-fatal drug overdose and entered a coma, something his family and friends suspected was a suicide attempt. (Although it's worth noting that Seth's post-coma behavior, like demanding whiskey as soon as he woke up and getting back onstage before he could even walk, could qualify as a CMOA.
  • From "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young: "Keep me searching for a heart of gold...and I'm getting old." First sung when he was 25. He is now 65.
  • In 1973, keyboardist Richard Wright of Pink Floyd wrote an instrumental piece as part of The Dark Side of the Moon caled "The Great Gig In The Sky", which evokes grief, sorrow and fear of death. Wright was the first member of the band lineup that recorded the album to die, age 65, in 2008 of cancer.
  • In 1994, Weezer released the song "Mykel and Carli," a cute, bittersweet tribute to two girls who ran the Weezer fan club - actually it's something of a Tuckerization as the Mykel and Carli in the song are a pair of friends in high school, who the narrator still misses. The song, which was released as a B-side to "Undone (The Sweater Song)," takes a more poignant tone when you learn that, a few years after the song was released, both Mykel and Carli died in a tragic car accident on their way to a Weezer show. The song can be found on the Deluxe Edition of the Blue Album.
    • Even more poignant, the A-side "Undone" features spoken word segments. One of them was provided by Mykel.
  • The Russian band Kino became extremely famous in their home country in the late 80s, and their lead singer Viktor Tsoi was seen as an icon of Russian youth during perestroika. The last song on their final album (which became known as "The Black Album") was called "Следи за собой," which translates as "Watch Out For Yourself." The lyrics discuss the imminence of death, by discussing several very grim ways in which one can die, including the line, "Someone, coming out of their house, will get hit by a car." Viktor Tsoi died on August 15, 1990 when his car collided with a bus. What's more, even though he had been performing the song for several years beforehand, the recording of the final version that would go on the posthumously released Black Album, along with the other tracks on the album, was the only thing that survived the crash.
  • The single "The One That Got Away" by pop singer Katy Perry, taken from her 2010 album, Teenage Dream. Not long after she released the single in late 2011 came the announcement that she and Russell Brand were divorcing.
  • Perhaps it was deliberate, but the second and final album by Too Good to Last 1990s power-pop band Jellyfish was titled Spilt Milk, a reference to the phrase, "don't cry over spilt milk". The band would break up over Creative Differences a year later, while the album would experience low sales in the wake of Grunge. With the band less and less likely to reunite, and their albums being reappraised as catchy, sunny, well-crafted, Beatlesque masterpieces misunderstood at the time of release, many fans may indeed be "crying over Spilt Milk".
  • REM's "Airportman" was written in 1999, and is most likely just about a weary, disillusioned businessman traveling by plane. After 9\11, it also became easy to read as a man preparing to hijack a plane, especially because the first few lines are "He moves efficiently \ past security \ great opportunity awaits".
  • Paul McCartney and Wings's song "Live and Let Die" can be this when you realize two members of the band are dead.
  • The Wings songs "Medicine Jar" and "Wino Junko" were anti-drugs songs written and sung by the at-the-time lead guitarist Jimmy McCulloch. He would die in a few years from a drug overdose. The drug bust and short incarceration Paul would go through in Japan in 1979, which would lead to Wings' breakup. would only compound the HIH.
  • This lyric is from the remix of N.E.R.D's "Everyone Nose." One has to wonder what was going through Kanye and Pharell's minds when word came that Whitney Houston had cocaine in her system when she died.

Kanye West: "From that Paris, Lindsey, Britney, Mary-Kate and Whitney
People say that they clean: motherfucker, don't bullshit me!"

  • Part of Visual Kei band Versailles's backstory is that the band members are the "Descendants of the Rose," cursed with immortality. Then their bassist, Jasmine You, died suddenly and unexpectedly in August of 2009, just before their second album was scheduled to release. He was promoted to "Eternal Member" after his death.
  • Wind of Change by Scorpions, a famous ballad celebrating perestroika, often seems like an example of this trope to many Russians, since the fall of the Union resulted in many tragic events in Russia (and most other post-Soviet countries too). The line about an "August summer night, soldiers passing by" is perhaps the most jarring, since the most dramatic events of the GKChP coup unfolded exactly at August summer nights just one year later after the song was recorded, and yes, it did involve soldiers.
    • The fact that Germans consider this song a symbol of one of the most joyous events in their history may seem like pure schadenfreude if you think about it.
  • In 1987, Julie Brown's song "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun" was a silly, over-the-top parody of Teenage Death Songs and 1950s films about delinquents. In the 2020s, after decades of highly-publicized and deadly mass shootings at schools, it's not quite so funny any more.
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