Hail to the Thief - TV Tropes

In musical theater, especially period pieces, it is common to emphasize the setting by having characters raise their voices in a song of sarcastic praise offered to the most hated political leader or leading figures of their day.

Named after the Radiohead album of the same name.

This can overlap with "The Villain Sucks" Song and "I Hate" Song. Compare Protest Song. A close relative of My Country 'Tis of Thee That I Sting.

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Examples:

• In an example from TV Tropes itself, God Save Us from the Queen! is a play on the British national anthem.
• "We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover" from Annie.
• "Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher" from Billy Elliot.
• During the opening song "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof, a villager asks the rabbi if there is a blessing for the czar. "Of course! 'May God bless and keep the czar... far away from us!'"
• John Denver's "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" pays an 18-second tribute to the Vice President's accomplishments by starting out with "I'll sing you a song about Spiro Agnew and all the things he's done..." followed by silence, conveying the message that Agnew has accomplished very little.
• "Hosianna Rockefeller" from Happy End.
• "Sing Hubbard" from Regina.
• Disney's Robin Hood (1973) has "The Phony King of England," about Prince John.
• TV example: "Shame, Shame, Shame (on you now Dubya)" from Treme.
• Crossed with "The Villain Sucks" Song but "Frieza, Frieza, Frieza" ...
• "Der Fuehrer's Face," as popularised by Spike Jones and Donald Duck, pays mocking respect to Adolf Hitler and Those Wacky Nazis.

  Not to love Der Fuehrer is a great disgrace,
  So ve heil! (raspberry) heil! (raspberry)
  Right in Der Fuehrer's face.

• There's a Josef Stalin-related parody of Gaston's Villain Song from Beauty and the Beast. It's clear that the singers are only singing Stalin's praises because he'll kill them if they don't, and they still get a jab or two in. The song also appears to be mocking Stalin's far-left fanboys on imageboards like 4chan and 8chan, as evidenced by the proliferation of chan memes in the video. The same YouTuber also released a song titled "Albanian Nights" (based, of course, on Aladdin's opening song "Arabian Nights") mocking Enver Hoxha's harsh Stalinist regime in Albania. (Note that the memes in this video revolve around one of Hoxha's less brutal but still bizarrely paranoid policies, namely constructing hundreds of thousands of bunkers all over Albania to prepare for potential military attacks.)
• Self-Insert mockingly rejoices the oppression of the criminal justice system by seducing a female judge with their extensive criminal history in their 2021 single Necrophilia.
• During the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election in The United States, CollegeHumor made a Donald Trump-related parody of "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch" from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
• "Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean" was a Vaudeville-style novelty song by a group called The CREEP (acronym for The Committe to Re-Elect the President) which came out in 1973, soon after the Watergate scandal broke.

  We're Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean,
  The way we were treated was really obscene.
  Who'd think that a bug worth hardly a shrug
  Would end up in getting us tossed in the jug?
  There's no power shortage where we were concerned
  And what little profit resulted we earned,
  Four lovelier fellow you never have seen
  Than Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean.

• Though the "Colonel Bogey March" was instrumental when it was originally composed during World War I, it found new life during World War II as a distinctly crude "The Villain Sucks" Song about Adolf Hitler and Those Wacky Nazis. For propriety's sake, at the behest of the original composer's widow, the tune had to be whistled instead of sung during its iconic appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, making this song an example of both With Lyrics and Forgotten Theme Tune Lyrics at once!

  Hitler has only got one ball
  Göring has two but very small
  Himmler is rather sim'lar
  But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all

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