Lyrical Dissonance/Music/Christian
< Lyrical Dissonance | Music
Christian Metal
- Christian Metal in general. Of course, this is a religion whose most prominent symbol is the image of its God's mutilated corpse nailed to a cross, and some of whose followers ritually eat the flesh and drink the blood of said God in commemoration of His bursting forth from the grave, and a few groups see the metallic potential in that, but hearing super-positive lyrics (or 19th century hymns [dead link]) beneath the brutal riffs and growled vocals is always a bit jarring.
- One example of a different nature is Emery's song "Don't Bore Us Get to the Chorus." Its tone is much more upbeat than their other songs and has minimal amounts of screaming. It's about a serial rapist. That's arguably the point, though; the song is basically a deconstruction of pop culture's tendency to ignore disturbing lyrical content and go instead for a happy beat. The result is . . . memorable.
Christian Pop
- Christian rock band Newsboys has a song titled "Breakfast" a very cheery song with quirky lyrics...describing the death of a beloved member of a literal breakfast club. "Ah, rise up, Fruit Loop lovers, sing out Sweet and Low/With spoons held high we bid our brother Cheerio/When the toast is burned/And all the milk has turned/And Cap'n Crunch is waving farewell/When the big one finds you/May the song remind you/That they don't serve breakfast in Hell." The over-all message of the song isn't completely depressing - the Christian view that those who trust in God will be reunited in Heaven - but it's still a pretty cheery song for a song about death.
Christian Rock
- Relient K's song "Deathbed." The chorus, describing a man dying of cancer, is very somber ("I can feel the death on my sheets, covering me / I can't believe this is the end"), but the verses, reflecting on his life, are very upbeat, despite being about teenage alcoholism, parental abandonment, a shotgun wedding, divorce, more alcholism....
- Many popular Christian Rock groups or groups that take inspiration from their beliefs; ie: Red, Skillet, Flyleaf, Dead By April. They're often so similar to typical rock and have such Alternate Character Interpretation that a lot of people would have never learned if someone didn't point it out.
Christian Ska
- Five Iron Frenzy's "Blue Comb '78" puts humorous lyrics (eulogizing a comb that singer Reese Roper lost when he was five years old) to dramatically overwrought music (dramatically overwrought for a ska-punk band, at least). Subverted in that the song is actually a metaphor for his parent's divorce and his own lost innocence: Reese has stated that the lost comb incident was the last memory he has of his parents prior to the divorce. He chose to write indirectly to avoid falling into Wangst.
- Five Iron Frenzy seems to be fond of this trope; consider the songs "Ugly Day" and "Where 0 Meets 15", both of which have relatively depressing lyrics set to upbeat, cheerful music.
Contemporary Christian
- The group Go Fish has "What Mary Didn't Know", an amazingly peppy song about a girl whom the narrator had the opportunity to lead to Christ but didn't before she died, and his angst over whether she's in Hell because of him.
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"I knew the things to say, I knew the things to do |
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Hymns
- Far too many hymns to list will have cheerful lyrics but slow, mournful melodies.
- One egregious example is "Christ Jesus Lay in Death's Strong Bands" — the lyrics are joyful and celebratory about the resurrection of Jesus (it even has "therefore, let us joyful be" in the first verse!), but set to a dark, somber, minor-key melody more fit for a funeral dirge.
- Conversely, the Values Dissonance between Christians and non-Christians means that a lot of non-Christians are disturbed by cheerful hymns about Armageddon like "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
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