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Music - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Apr 20 2014
  • The Beach Boys: The album cover of Surf's Up is based on the statue "End Of The Trail" (1915) by James Earle Fraser, which shows an exhausted Native American horseman, symbolizing how their struggle for their land from the white man's greed was over. This also ties in with the environmental messages on the album.
  • The Beatles' "Yer Blues" from The White Album. John Lennon made it deliberately over-the-top so that no one would take it seriously, but later confessed that he meant it at least halfway in earnest anyway.
  • The title track from Black Sabbath's Paranoid.
  • Bo Burnham: Inside was written and produced while Burnham was in lockdown during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic. His songs and monologues get increasingly desperate and unhinged, and one of the last scenes has him simply break down sobbing. The final song "Goodbye" is also a Dark Reprise Medley, as he finally gives into despair and swears to "never go outside again." However, there's ultimately a "Ray of Hope" Ending, as the final scene shows Bo watching a recording himself, and, for the first time in the entire special, gives a genuine (albeit small) smile.

    Well, well, look who's inside again
    Went out to look for a reason to hide again
    Well, well, buddy, you found it
    Now come out with your hands up
    We've got you surrounded

  • Calne Ca does this in the end of Bacterial Contamination's music video. Given that the song is about bullying, it is very realistic.
  • "The Mercy Seat" by Nick Cave is about a man sentenced to death on the electric chair.
  • Celldweller: "So Long Sentiment" describes someone trapped in his own depression, recalling old memories and begging for release.
  • Many country and western songs, especially Johnny Cash's songs "Folsom Prison Blues," which is about a man sentenced to life imprisonment and "25 Minutes to Go," about a man who is about to be hanged.
  • A common lyrical theme of Cormorant, which have narrators who begin to lose all hope for one reason or another and cross the line, a good chunk of them ending in their suicide.
  • The Cure's "A Forest" from Seventeen Seconds (Album)
  • In Depeche Mode's "Fail", the closing track of Spirit, Martin Gore has crossed the horizon, lamenting the apparently irredeemable condition of contemporary society. "We're hopeless... We're fucked... We've failed."
  • The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails is a Concept Album about this. It ends with the narrator being Driven to Suicide (it's ambiguous whether or not it worked, though).
    • The Fragile has this as well- it IS a Concept Album about depression, after all. Lots of individual songs by NIN are examples, as well.
  • "Exitus" by E Nomine.
  • "I May Not Awaken" by Enya, amid a storm of other Tear Jerker topics. Specifically, it's about a child who's lost in the snow and clinging to threads of innocence to stave off despair, wishing on stars for lack of any better ideas as to how to go on. When she realizes her wishes aren't changing anything, she hits the Despair Event Horizon and reveals that she's suicidal.
  • "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz from Demon Days (Album).
  • The Message by Grand Master Flash And The Furious Five; all the lyrics of "The Message" are full of despair.
  • "21 Guns" by Green Day.
  • "Square One" by Interface:

    When the hope has gone away
    When the night has taken hold
    Emotions are no comfort
    No shelter from the rain
    Denied what has been offered
    An empty hand once more
    Gaining only to lose again
    This has all met its end
    Left here with more broken dreams
    No desire to begin again

  • Many of David Gray's songs are either written from the other side of the horizon or are about trying to keep from crossing it, in particular "Holding On".
  • "Say Something" by A Great Big World. The final lyrics are sang barely above a whisper, with the singer practically begging the subject to just say something as he crosses into despair.
  • "Dance with the Devil", by Immortal Technique. The protagonist rape a random woman in a dark street to be deemed "worthy" to integrate a gang, then is asked to shoot her as witness. It's his own mother... And they suddenly recognize each other.
  • Billie Holiday had a tragic life where she was the victim of rape at age 11, teenage prostitution, abusive partners and severe alcohol, morphine and heroin addiction. All it culminated in her world-weary Lady in Satin, where she sings about break-ups, unrequited love and all hardships of relationships in her drug-ravaged voice. Only a year after recording this album she would die from liver cirrhosis.
  • A few Iron Maiden tracks. Specially "For the Greater Good of God".
    • Their song "Hallowed Be Thy Name" is their most notorious example, telling the story of a prisoner in death row who is just hours away from his execution; he is at first calm and rationalizing about the upcoming ordeal, but as the song progresses he starts to slowly fall apart until he breaks and starts crying, realizing that he is afraid to die after all.

    Tears fall but why am I crying?

    After all I'm not afraid of dying.

    Don't I believe that there never is an end?

  • "Alabama Pines" by Jason Isbell. Oh God, "Alabama Pines." The lyrics describe a dead end in one's pursuit of dreams and happiness, and can hit very close to home.
  • Jethro Tull's song "Locomotive Breath" from Aqualung is about a man who has just crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
  • The ending of Billy Joel's "Allentown" has two popular interpretations: that the narrator simply died of old age, or that he hit this.

    "Well, I'm living here in Allentown."

    "And it's hard to keep a good man down."

    "But I won't be getting up today."

  • Joy Division's Closer, especially the song "Heart and Soul". This is one of the most infamous examples in music because singer Ian Curtis took his own life shortly after the album was recorded. The lyrics almost read like a suicide note.

    Existence, well what does it matter?

  • The song portion of King Crimson's "Starless".
  • According to Nirvana's frontman Kurt Cobain, "Pennyroyal Tea" from In Utero is written from the point of view of someone who's "beyond depressed."
  • In LeAnn Rimes's song "How Do I Live" she implies that ever her lover ever left she would cross the Despair Event Horizon
  • "Breaking the Habit" by Linkin Park.
  • "Fade to Black" by Metallica is about a man who has lost the will to live. At the end of the song, he dies by suicide.
  • Roger Miller's "One Dying and a Burying": One man contemplates suicide to forget the pain of lost love.
  • Melissa Hollick's I Beleive (the credits song for Wolfenstein: The New Order) is about someone who beleives in all the good things in life-love, laughter, family, and answered prayers-and beleives just as strongly that she and hers can't have any of it. Not so much as a beautiful day.

    I believe that the stars keep shining all through the night
    I believe if we just keep trying it'll be all right
    I believe that some day we're gonna find our way
    And I believe, in a beautiful day
    I believe in lovers walking side by side
    I believe that someday we'll be satisfied
    I believe the angels listen, God hears us pray
    And I believe, in a beautiful day
    Yeah I believe, it's gonna work out okay
    But not for me
    And not for you
    I believe I believe I believe I believe
    I believe I believe I believe I believe

  • Although a lot of My Chemical Romance's songs could qualify, their track "Desert Song" might be their most hopeless.

    "From the lights to the pavement. From the van to the floor. From backstage to the doctor. From the Earth to the morgue, morgue, morgue, morgue."

  • Nightwish:
    • "Tenth Man Down":
    • "End of All Hope"

      End of hope
      End of love
      End of time
      The rest is silence

      • Poet and the Pendulum has Tuomas writing from a deep, deep depression after Tarja parted ways with the band.

        I'm afraid, so afraid
        Of being raped again and again and again
        I know I will die alone, but loved
        You live long enough to hear the sound of guns
        Long enough to find yourself screaming every night
        You live long enough to see your friends betray you
        For years, I have been strapped unto this altar
        Now I only have three minutes and counting
        I just wish the tide would catch me first
        And give me a death I always longed for

      • Later in the song, Tuomas writes his own obituary

        Today, in the year of our Lord, 2005
        Tuomas was called from the cares of the world
        He stopped crying at the end of each beautiful day
        The music he wrote had too long been without silence
        He was found naked and dead
        With a smile in his face, a pen and 1,000 pages of erased text

      • Immediately after the last line, there's a sound like a swiping blade, which happens EXACTLY three minutes after the earlier monologue, almost to the second. The timing is even preserved in the live performances, which is a testament to how good the band is.
      • And the 'Home' segment, arguably the most heartbreakingly beautiful music to have ever come from Nightwish, is an almost word-for-word translation of advice Tuomas got from his mother after going to her for comfort.
    • In Nightwish's latest album, Human Nature, How's the Heart has a lyric that says things have gotten much better for Tuomas:

      Come on in, the fire's warm
      Burn the rope and dance some more

  • Virtually all of Nirvana's songs stay at the despair event horizon.
  • "Scarsick" by Pain of Salvation follows a man who grows increasingly frustrated by the various facets of modern society shown to him through television. Eventually, he decides he's had enough and jumps off the roof of a building in an attempt to shock the people around him back to their senses... whether or not this works is left up to the listener.
  • "Cemetery Gates" by Pantera is told from the perspective of a man who is going through a despair event horizon following the death of the woman he loved. For most of the song he is lamenting his loss, and in the final verse he is actually contemplating suicide so he can join her in the afterlife.
  • The Wall by Pink Floyd is just one colossal DEH; the entire album is about a rock star who is constantly hurt within his life, and the mental "Wall" he builds between himself and society. Summed up in the aptly titled 'Goodbye Cruel World', as Pink completes the wall and shuts himself out completely from the outside world:

    Goodbye cruel world,

    I'm leaving you today.

    Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

    Goodbye, all you people,

    There's nothing you can say

    To make me change my mind.

    Goodbye.

  • Dummy by Portishead
    • "Biscuit"

    I'll never fall in love again, it's all over now.

    • "Glory Box"

    I'm so tired of playing

    Playing with this bow and arrow

    Gonna give my heart away

    Leave it to the other girls to play

    For I've been a temptress too long

  • The singer's character in Project Pitchfork's "Lament" has apparently crossed this line after being jilted (or his love interest dying, depending on how it is interpreted), and is preparing to off himself. "I lay down here, forever to sleep".
  • The Protomen: both Protoman and Dr Light cross this when the Robot Masters drag Proto Man down. Mega Man crosses it when he kills Protoman and discovers how pathetic and self-serving the people he was trying to save were. As a general rule, anyone heroic will either die or cross this particular threshold, maybe both. In the time between Act I and Act III, seemingly the only person in the entire city who hasn't crossed it a long time ago (besides Wily, of course) is an as-of-yet unnamed female character who spends "This City Made Us" and "Hold Back The Night" trying to pull Mega Man and Light out of it.
  • Radiohead practically made a career out of this.
  • Rammstein's song "Wo Bist Du" has the narrator crossing the Despair Event Horizon after the death of loved one.
  • Peter Schilling's "I Have No Desire" has the singer so depressed with what he hears going on in the world that he'd rather not want to get up in the morning and would remain retired to his room.
  • Franz Schubert wrote two song cycles based on the poetry of Wilhelm Müller. The first one, Die schöne Müllerin, ends with its protagonist committing suicide. It's considered the happier of the two. The second, Winterreise, depicting a man who, having lost all hope, abandons his life to become a homeless wanderer, trudging endlessly through ice and snow in the middle of winter and having frequent suicidal thoughts but not the initiative to follow through on them, is so utterly bleak that the poetry would probably come across as completely over the top on its own, if it were not for the profoundly and devastatingly sincere music that Schubert wrote for it.
  • Sine City:
  • Bruce Springsteen has plenty of these, but the collapse of the American steel industry in Youngstown still stands out:

    Well, my daddy came on the Ohio works,
    When he came home from World War II.
    Now the yard's just scrap and rubble,
    He said "Them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do.
    Yeah, these mills, they built the tanks and bombs,
    That won this country's wars.
    We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam;
    Now we're wondering what they were dying for."

  • Supertramp enjoys these. "Lord, is it mine?", "Rudy" (arguably), and "If everyone was listening" are about someone who's on the edge of that horizon, and in danger of going over.
  • Swans' "God Damn the Sun" is about a man who copes with the death of a friend by isolating himself and getting drunk.
  • The Lost Christmas Eve by Trans-Siberian Orchestra tells the story of a kind, happy man who has pretty much the perfect life. When his wife goes into childbirth on Christmas she dies due to complications, and he also learns that his newborn son suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen and will probably never learn to walk or talk. This causes the man to go through a major despair event horizon. After raging against the heavens he gives his son over to the care of a state-run hospital, and spends the next forty years as a bitter, broken man who hates Christmas.
  • Tsuyu's "If there was an endpiont" which is about a girl commiting suicide and going to heaven but ending up miserable because there aren't any other people when all she wanted in life was love, making her decide that her suffering will never end and trying to convince people that they should never follow in her footsteps.
  • Van der Graaf Generator's "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" seems to be the self-narration of a man who crosses the horizon, and then commits suicide.
  • Despite its upbeat tune, Tessa Violet's "Bored" is about depression and nihilism, culminating with the realization that life is totally meaningless.

    You look too hard, then you see it's a joke
    And, yeah, you think you're trapped, but it's nothin' but smoke, ohh
    You want it better but you, you only choke
    Is this all there is?
    Is this all there is?

  • "Waffle House" by David Wilcox portrays the titular Real Life restaurant as a haven designed to help its employees cope with whatever depressing event they're dealing with (be it heartbreak, or highway, or some altered state) and stop them from crossing the DEH.

    When it's time that we slow up
    We wrap both our hands around our cup
    And stay until the feeling goes
    As long as there's broken hearts and dreams
    And all of this highway in between
    The Waffle House will never close

  • The Waterboys has Red Army Blues, telling the story of a soldier in the Soviet Army, who was forced over the DEH after the war because his entire unit was sent to Siberia.

    Used to love my country

    Used to be so young.

    Used to believe that life was

    the best song ever sung.

    I would have died for my country

    in 1945

    But now only one thing remains....

    The brute will to survive!

  • The official music video for "Whiskey Lullaby" has a man coming home from war, only to catch his wife cheating on him. He ends up drinking himself to death.
    • Wracked by guilt, his wife ends up doing the same.