History Main / KayfabeMusic

* Canadian band Cybertronic Spree preforms as characters from ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformersTheMovie'', with Hot Rod and Arcee as primary vocalists.

* Music/UnknownP the [[PissTakeRap posh]] [[DrillMusic drill rapper]] is a character created by British comedian Munya Chawawa for a series of comedy sketches, who happened to become popular enough for Munya to launch a comedy music career as Unknown P.

* Swedish rock band '{Music/Ghost}} consists of a rotating masked band and frontman Tobias Forge in costume as one of several characters, currently the Cardinal Copia. The band has a fairly elaborate backstory which they continue to build upon to explain the progression from the various Papa Emeritus characters to Coppia.

* In'' Music/{{Blutengel}}'' the singers are vampires.
* In ''Music/{{Versailles}}'', the band members were vampiric immortal aristocrats from the Romantic era. A FunnyAneurysmMoment (and the ultimate breaking of the kayfabe) ensued when Jasmine You died in RealLife.
* The band ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k9UveuX1Po Rolandz]]'' has developed a quite solid discography and even been on tour. Its singer, Roland, is a character from a comedy movie. The real singer is the same actor who played Roland in that movie.
* ''Music/{{ManoWar}}'' consists of really manly men, fantasy heroes who are always ready to kill anyone. With STEEL, of course.
* ''Music/{{Lordi}}'' are [[PeopleInRubberSuits monsters]]... who have sued to bury images of them out of costume.

* ''Markoolio'' play this on [[MultilayerFacade two levels]]. His first persona is this cool playboy, gangster, warrior, expert soccer strategist, and so on. However, this facade breaks all the time, especially since his own chorus are disloyal to him and frequently rat him out to the audience - exposing him as the total failure and SmallNameBigEgo that he really is. Of course, this "real person, under the mask" is just as fabricated as the first level.

* ''Music/TheWhiteStripes''' Jack and Meg maintained that they were brother and sister long after it was public knowledge that they were actually AmicableExes. Jack said it originally started so that people wouldn't constantly focus on their relationship over the music, and presumably they just maintained it as part of the band's identity.
* ''Music/DaftPunk's'' persona is of a couple of robots. They say that the reason why they do this is because takes focus off of them as artists, and puts more focus on the music, so their live performances are more like raves where the DJ isn't all that important.
* ''Music/LadyGaga'' went to her little sister's graduation in [[ImpossiblyCoolClothes full Gaga regalia]]. She later said that she considers her entire life to be part of her 'character'.
* Members of the German band ''Coppelius'' usually play their XIX-century aristocratic personas in public.
* ''Music/{{Kraftwerk}}'' are robots, who became less human as time progressed. They even give interviews as their mechanical robot selves.
* ''Music/{{GWAR}}'' has a long backstory about them being aliens banished to Earth, and like Lordi are never seen out of costume.
* ''Music/{{Devo}}'' has gone through a few permutations of this; it's essentially them, except with sci-fi bases, an idiot manager that doesn't understand them, a giant baby (Booji), and their...uh...leader, General Boy. They always did claim to be a corporation, which got a lot funnier in the mid-90's when they reformed as a soundtrack company. And then there's bass player Jerry Casale's side-album as Jihad Jerry, essentially Stephen Colbert as a Muslim blues musician.
* ''Music/TheResidents'' are never seen in public without their trademark eyeball masks. There's a general assumption that the four "managers" that appear with them and speak on their behalf are at least partially composed of the actual members of the band.
* ''Music/{{Gorillaz}}'' are a BandToon in the real world, which means that their members are a group of four cartoon characters.
* ''Music/{{Buckethead}}'' is the persona of Brian Patrick Carroll, who is so socially awkward that he invented the character to hide his face and distance himself from his audience. People who know him, however, say that his behavior "in character" is basically just him being himself.
** ''Cornbugs'' was a Buckethead side project that also featured actor Bill Moseley, who performed in-character as Chop Top, the deranged murderer he played in ''Film/TheTexasChainsawMassacre2''. Possibly for copyright reasons, Bill is officially credited as Bill "Choptop" Moseley on all their recordings.

* IndustrialMetal artist ''Music/{{Mortiis}}'', for a long time, was never seen without his troll mask on, with its pointed nose and big ears. In 2005 for his album ''The Grudge'' his mask took on a more artificial appearance, looking like it had been stitched and stapled to his face. After that, however, he finally removed the mask. And then brought it back a few years later due to popular demand.
* Singer ''Music/EmilieAutumn'' seems to always be in character as Emily-with-a-Y from her book to some extent.
* ''Stovokor'' is a death metal band consisting entirely of [[Franchise/StarTrek Klingons]].
* ''Faxed Head'' supposedly met as teenagers in Coalinga, California, had a BungledSuicide pact that left them [[BodyHorror deformed in various bizarre ways]], then decided to form a death metal band together. Thus they'd typically perform wearing strange masks and costumes, under stage names like Neck Head and Jigsaw Puzzle Head. In reality, their lineup included Music/MrBungle guitarist Trey Spruance and [[Creator/NeilHamburger Gregg Turkington]]. They would also sometimes open for themselves as their supposed "rival" group The Bon Larvis Band, removing the masks, dressing more like a typical bar band, and playing an OverlyLongGag-laden parody of blues-rock.
* ''The Space Balloons'' claim to be lost travelers from the planet Balloonia. The concept is mainly adhered to in performances and the songs themselves, though, not interviews.
* In a 2012 interview with Creator/OprahWinfrey, ''Music/FiftyCent'' says that his onstage "thug" persona is this. His real self, Curtis Jackson, is a family man.
* {{Death|Metal}}{{grind|Core}} band ''Brujeria'' is ostensibly made up of Mexican drug lords who always perform in masks to hide their identities from the FBI. However, most of their members past and present are already well-known from other acts.
* The electro-industrial project ''Zombie Girl'' has singer Renee Cooper as the eponymous zombie, always appearing in corpse make-up and claiming to be undead in her lyrics.
* {{Horrorcore}} rapper/singer ''The Jokerr'' raps from the perspective of a medieval court jester imprisoned in a dungeon for twenty years with a red costume patterned after a joker playing card to match, he has recorded a large amount of songs unrelated to his persona though.
* ''Music/TheAquabats'' are a ska band made up of super heroes. Their mythos is expanded upon in [[Series/TheAquabatsSuperShow their TV show]].
* ''The County Medical Examiners'' are two Music/{{Carcass}}-loving physicians joined by a much older, avant-garde physician who play DeathMetal based on what they see in their field. After years of mystery, it was implied in 2012 that the whole band was simply a side-project of musician Matt Widener (ex-Exhumed/Cretin).
* ''Har Mar Superstar'' is Harold Martin Tillmann, the [[IntercourseWithYou frequently sex-obsessed]] soul-singer twin brother of indie pop singer-songwriter Sean Tillmann (aka Sean Na Na). Of course, Har Mar ''is'' Sean Tillmann, the stage name really stems from a shopping center in Minnesota called the Har Mar Mall, and he really only kept up the twin charade for a short period of his career. Tillmann continues to put out solo albums as both Sean Na Na and Har Mar Superstar, and he still takes on a somewhat more flamboyant persona when performing as the latter.
* ''Masked Intruder'' are four ski-mask-clad criminals who formed a pop-punk band while in jail together, only differentiated from each other by the colors of their masks and shoes [[note]]in an in-character interview it was once pointed out that if the masks were really meant to help them evade authorities, they'd stand out less if just all wore black masks - they claimed they needed the colored masks to tell ''each other'' apart[[/note]] . Lead vocalist Intruder Blue apparently got in trouble with the law due to his StalkerWithACrush tendencies, so a lot of their material consists of {{obsession song}}s being played for humor.
* Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, ''Music/DavidBowie'' and his backing band's alien personas during the 1972 tour for the ''Ziggy Stardust'' album.
* ''Music/AbneyPark'' is a group of SteamPunk {{Sky Pirate}}s.
* ''Music/UnknownHinson'' is just the onstage persona of Stuart D. Baker, but is presented as if he's a real individual.
* The members of ''Music/SteamPoweredGiraffe'' perform as a group of automatons built in the Victorian era, complete with elaborate metallic stage makeup. Even their merch sellers have their own personas in the form of "Blue Matter Engineers," which they dress up as for shows.
* The Japanese metal band ''Music/SeikimaII'' performs as a group of Akuma (demons) from the futuristic hyper-evolved dimension Makai that preach a demonic religion and aim to take over the world through their music. They were destined to disband at the end of the century (''seikimatsu'', another way to say the band's name, means "century's end", as any ''Manga/FistOfTheNorthStar'' fan knows), but they've reunited several times since, once in response to the Touhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster.
* ''Music/AliceCooper'' was originally the name of the band as a whole, but frontman Vincent Damon Furnier eventually turned it into a fictional, psychopathic character. Behind the scenes, Furnier is, at least in modern times, mild, straight-laced and conservative.

* The thrash metal band ''Music/{{Ghoul}}'' perform as a group of mutant, cannibalistic ghouls from an over-the-top {{Uberwald}} land called Creepsylvania. They keep their identities a secret and always wear bags on their heads when performing live.
* Japanese rock band ''Kishidan'', who model themselves after the 80s-era "yankee" punk look complete with pompadours, is fronted by vocalist Show Ayanocozey. Meanwhile, a similar looking man in a blonde afro is the flamboyant J-pop rapper DJ OZMA, who later "retired" to produce the Japanese-American trio Yazima Beauty Salon, one of whom is the "16-year-old" Naomi Yazima. The open secret that all three are the same person was a big joke when all three were technically recording music. During a television program, Naomi asked for another musician's autograph and to have it made out to "Naomi Show Ozma". The Show Ayanocozey and DJ OZMA personas were even made to have a faux-rivalry between them, and they had a shared concert where they even performed on stage together (with DJ OZMA played by a member of the OZMA entourage who was to "inherit" the band in another publicity stunt), and at a later time DJ OZMA performed with the other two members of Yazima Beauty Salon as OZMA rather than Naomi. He kept the ruse up until he appeared on a talk show in 2013 and admitted (as Show) that he and OZMA were "the same character".

* ''Creator/TomGreen's'' album ''Not The Green Tom Show'' was recorded under an alter-ego, the ill-tempered rapper MC Face. Tom Green himself is supposedly just MC Face's producer, and it's a running gag throughout the album that MC Face will include lyrical jabs towards Tom Green and his friends in songs, insult him in between-song skits, or antagonize him in staged StudioChatter. By the end of the album, Tom Green finally has enough and walks out, leaving MC Face to do the last song completely acapella.
* The DeathMetal band ''Music/{{Portal}}'' (no relation to the video game) have never performed in public without their costumes, and three of the band members' real names [[AnonymousBand aren't even known to the public]] (two of them are known to be Brad Loong and Kevin Kevinson from Impetuous Ritual and Grave Upheaval though).
* Swedish rock band ''{{Music/Ghost}}'' consists of a rotating masked band and frontman Tobias Forge in costume as one of several characters, currently the Cardinal Copia. The band has a fairly elaborate backstory which they continue to build upon to explain the progression from the various Papa Emeritus characters to Coppia.

* Japanese VisualKei band ''Music/PsychoLeCemu'' is basically a {{Cosplay}} band that plays as if they were an anime/video game/tokusatsu FiveManBand ripped directly from the source into live-action version, as seen in their many music videos and in some of their concerts, where even they make live-action {{RPG}}.

Compare "{{Kayfabe}}" from ProfessionalWrestling. One subtrope is RobotOrSpacemanAlterEgo. Contrast AnonymousBand, where the musicians simply hide their identities, and FakeBand, where the band itself is fictional.

* ''Faxed Head'' supposedly met as teenagers in Coalinga, California, had a BungledSuicide pact that left them [[BodyHorror deformed in various bizarre ways]], then decided to form a death metal band together. Thus they'd typically perform wearing strange masks and costumes. In reality, their lineup included Music/MrBungle guitarist Trey Spruance and [[Creator/NeilHamburger Gregg Turkington]]. They would also sometimes open for themselves as their supposed "rival" group The Bon Larvis Band, removing the masks, dressing more like a typical bar band, and playing an OverlyLongGag-laden parody of blues-rock.

* ''Masked Intruder'' are four ski-mask-clad criminals who formed a pop-punk band while in jail together, only differentiated from each other by the color of their masks. Lead vocalist Intruder Blue apparently got in trouble with the law due to his StalkerWithACrush tendencies, so a lot of their material consists of {{obsession song}}s being played for humor.

** Cornbugs was a Buckethead side project that also featured actor Bill Moseley, who performed in-character as Chop Top, the deranged murderer he played in ''Film/TheTexasChainsawMassacre2''. Possibly for copyright reasons, Bill is officially credited as Bill "Choptop" Moseley on all their recordings.

* Country singer ''Music/{{Orville Peck}}'' is another example of this, as he always appears in public wearing a mask.

** One is a black "gangster" rapper suspected of the rape/murder of a white woman. However, he he is actually quite naive and has no experience in real crime, his gangster persona being nothing more than a keyfabe persona. [[spoiler:The woman was one of his friends, and he ends up getting killed by a ''real'' gangster (who just happens to be white) as he's trying to help the detectives catch the real villain.]]

* In ''Film/TropicThunder'', Alpa Chino is a rapper [[spoiler:who is overly heterosexual in his music and videos, but is secretly gay.]]

* Discussed in ''ComicStrip/{{CalvinAndHobbes}}''. Calvin's mom explains the kayfabe by stating that heavy metal death bands are just creating characters to sell records.

* ''Film/KISSMeetsThePhantomOfThePark'': What if Gene, Paul, Ace and Peter's stage personas of the Demon, the Starchild, the Space-Ace and the Cat-Man were real superheroes? Well, that's the premise. (The idea was taken even further in the Marvel comics starring the boys; they aren's a band at all there, just pure superheroes!)

* ''Film/KISSMeetsThePhantomOfThePark'': What if Gene, Paul, Ace and Peter's stage personas of the Demon, the Starchild, the Space-Ace and the Cat-Man were real superheroes? Well, one would have hoped they would have gotten a better movie than this. Still, that's the premise. (The idea was taken even further in the Marvel comics starring the boys; they aren's a band at all there, just pure superheroes!)

->''Pink isn't well, he's stayed back at the hotel''//
''And they sent us along as a surrogate band''//
''We're gonna find out where you fans ''really'' stand!''

* In Music/{{Versailles}}, the band members were vampiric immortal aristocrats from the Romantic era. A FunnyAneurysmMoment (and the ultimate breaking of the kayfabe) ensued when Jasmine You died in RealLife.

* At the live Music/{{Vocaloid}} concerts, the band is real enough, but the lead "singer" is a projected image (and not really a singer at all).
* Music/TheWhiteStripes' Jack and Meg maintained that they were brother and sister long after it was public knowledge that they were actually AmicableExes. Jack said it originally started so that people wouldn't constantly focus on their relationship over the music, and presumably they just maintained it as part of the band's identity.
* Music/DaftPunk's persona is of a couple of robots. They say that the reason why they do this is because takes focus off of them as artists, and puts more focus on the music, so their live performances are more like raves where the DJ isn't all that important.
* Music/LadyGaga went to her little sister's graduation in [[ImpossiblyCoolClothes full Gaga regalia]]. She later said that she considers her entire life to be part of her 'character'.
* Members of the German band Coppelius usually play their XIX-century aristocratic personas in public.
* Music/{{Kraftwerk}} are robots, who became less human as time progressed. They even give interviews as their mechanical robot selves.
* Music/{{GWAR}} has a long backstory about them being aliens banished to Earth, and like Lordi are never seen out of costume.
* Music/{{Devo}} has gone through a few permutations of this; it's essentially them, except with sci-fi bases, an idiot manager that doesn't understand them, a giant baby (Booji), and their...uh...leader, General Boy. They always did claim to be a corporation, which got a lot funnier in the mid-90's when they reformed as a soundtrack company. And then there's bass player Jerry Casale's side-album as Jihad Jerry, essentially Stephen Colbert as a Muslim blues musician.
* Music/TheResidents are never seen in public without their trademark eyeball masks. There's a general assumption that the four "managers" that appear with them and speak on their behalf are at least partially composed of the actual members of the band.
* Music/{{Gorillaz}} are a BandToon in the real world, which means that their members are a group of four cartoon characters.
* Music/{{Buckethead}} is the persona of Brian Patrick Carroll, who is so socially awkward that he invented the character to hide his face and distance himself from his audience. People who know him, however, say that his behavior "in character" is basically just him being himself.
* IndustrialMetal artist Music/{{Mortiis}}, for a long time, was never seen without his troll mask on, with its pointed nose and big ears. In 2005 for his album ''The Grudge'' his mask took on a more artificial appearance, looking like it had been stitched and stapled to his face. After that, however, he finally removed the mask. And then brought it back a few years later due to popular demand.
* Singer Music/EmilieAutumn seems to always be in character as Emily-with-a-Y from her book to some extent.
* Stovokor is a death metal band consisting entirely of [[Franchise/StarTrek Klingons]].
* Faxed Head supposedly met as teenagers in Coalinga, California, had a BungledSuicide pact that left them [[BodyHorror deformed in various bizarre ways]], then decided to form a death metal band together. Thus they'd typically perform wearing strange masks and costumes. In reality, their lineup included Music/MrBungle guitarist Trey Spruance and [[Creator/NeilHamburger Gregg Turkington]]. They would also sometimes open for themselves as their supposed "rival" group The Bon Larvis Band, removing the masks, dressing more like a typical bar band, and playing an OverlyLongGag-laden parody of blues-rock.
* The Space Balloons claim to be lost travelers from the planet Balloonia. The concept is mainly adhered to in performances and the songs themselves, though, not interviews.
* In a 2012 interview with Creator/OprahWinfrey, Music/FiftyCent says that his onstage "thug" persona is this. His real self, Curtis Jackson, is a family man.
* {{Death|Metal}}{{grind|Core}} band Brujeria is ostensibly made up of Mexican drug lords who always perform in masks to hide their identities from the FBI. However, most of their members past and present are already well-known from other acts.
* The electro-industrial project Zombie Girl has singer Renee Cooper as the eponymous zombie, always appearing in corpse make-up and claiming to be undead in her lyrics.
* {{Horrorcore}} rapper/singer The Jokerr raps from the perspective of a medieval court jester imprisoned in a dungeon for twenty years with a red costume patterned after a joker playing card to match, he has recorded a large amount of songs unrelated to his persona though.

* The County Medical Examiners are two Music/{{Carcass}}-loving physicians joined by a much older, avant-garde physician who play DeathMetal based on what they see in their field. After years of mystery, it was implied in 2012 that the whole band was simply a side-project of musician Matt Widener (ex-Exhumed/Cretin).
* Har Mar Superstar is Harold Martin Tillmann, the [[IntercourseWithYou frequently sex-obsessed]] soul-singer twin brother of indie pop singer-songwriter Sean Tillmann (aka Sean Na Na). Of course, Har Mar ''is'' Sean Tillmann, the stage name really stems from a shopping center in Minnesota called the Har Mar Mall, and he really only kept up the twin charade for a short period of his career. Tillmann continues to put out solo albums as both Sean Na Na and Har Mar Superstar, and he still takes on a somewhat more flamboyant persona when performing as the latter.
* Masked Intruder are four ski-mask-clad criminals who formed a pop-punk band while in jail together, only differentiated from each other by the color of their masks. Lead vocalist Intruder Blue apparently got in trouble with the law due to his StalkerWithACrush tendencies, so a lot of their material consists of {{obsession song}}s being played for humor.
* Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Music/DavidBowie and his backing band's alien personas during the 1972 tour for the ''Ziggy Stardust'' album.
* Music/AbneyPark is a group of SteamPunk {{Sky Pirate}}s.
* Music/UnknownHinson is just the onstage persona of Stuart D. Baker, but is presented as if he's a real individual.
* The members Music/SteamPoweredGiraffe perform as a group of automatons built in the Victorian era, complete with elaborate metallic stage makeup. Even their merch sellers have their own personas in the form of "Blue Matter Engineers," which they dress up as for shows.
* The Japanese metal band Music/SeikimaII performs as a group of Akuma (demons) from the futuristic hyper-evolved dimension Makai that preach a demonic religion and aim to take over the world through their music. They were destined to disband at the end of the century (''seikimatsu'', another way to say the band's name, means "century's end", as any ''Manga/FistOfTheNorthStar'' fan knows), but they've reunited several times since, once in response to the Touhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster.
* Music/AliceCooper was originally the name of the band as a whole, but frontman Vincent Damon Furnier eventually turned it into a fictional, psychopathic character. Behind the scenes, Furnier is, at least in modern times, mild, straight-laced and conservative.

* The thrash metal band Music/{{Ghoul}} perform as a group of mutant, cannibalistic ghouls from an over-the-top {{Uberwald}} land called Creepsylvania. They keep their identities a secret and always wear bags on their heads when performing live.
* Japanese rock band Kishidan, who model themselves after the 80s-era "yankee" punk look complete with pompadours, is fronted by vocalist Show Ayanocozey. Meanwhile, a similar looking man in a blonde afro is the flamboyant J-pop rapper DJ OZMA, who later "retired" to produce the Japanese-American trio Yazima Beauty Salon, one of whom is the "16-year-old" Naomi Yazima. The open secret that all three are the same person was a big joke when all three were technically recording music. During a television program, Naomi asked for another musician's autograph and to have it made out to "Naomi Show Ozma". The Show Ayanocozey and DJ OZMA personas were even made to have a faux-rivalry between them, and they had a shared concert where they even performed on stage together (with DJ OZMA played by a member of the OZMA entourage who was to "inherit" the band in another publicity stunt), and at a later time DJ OZMA performed with the other two members of Yazima Beauty Salon as OZMA rather than Naomi. He kept the ruse up until he appeared on a talk show in 2013 and admitted (as Show) that he and OZMA were "the same character".
* The Youtube channel Music/SiIvaGunner has this to a certain extent. The 'high quality rips' are all submitted under the same person, even though in reality a large amount of people are working behind the scene to make them. In the same sense, the character [=SiIvaGunner=] is also this, with all commentary in videos (provided by a Text to Speech program) being done in-character, including when the channel gets a HostileShowTakeOver in the form of The Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man, Inspector Gadget and President Hartmann (the channel and accompanying Twitter account switched in appearance and character during the takeover). Averted when going to the Bandcamp page however, where all rips are credited to the correct artist.
* Creator/TomGreen's album ''Not The Green Tom Show'' was recorded under an alter-ego, the ill-tempered rapper MC Face. Tom Green himself is supposedly just MC Face's producer, and it's a running gag throughout the album that MC Face will include lyrical jabs towards Tom Green and his friends in songs, insult him in between-song skits, or antagonize him in staged StudioChatter. By the end of the album, Tom Green finally has enough and walks out, leaving MC Face to do the last song completely acapella.
* The DeathMetal band Music/{{Portal}} (no relation to the video game) have never performed in public without their costumes, and three of the band members' real names [[AnonymousBand aren't even known to the public]] (two of them are known to be Brad Loong and Kevin Kevinson from Impetuous Ritual and Grave Upheaval though).

[[caption-width-right:340:Today is a good day to ROCK!]]

* The Youtube channel Music/SiIvaGunner has this to a certain extent. The 'high quality rips' are all submitted under the same person, even though in reality a large amount of people are working behind the scene to make them. In the same sense, the character SiIvaGunner is also this, with all commentary in videos (provided by a Text to Speech program) being done in-character, including when the channel gets a HostileShowTakeOver in the form of The Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man, Inspector Gadget and President Hartmann (the channel and accompanying Twitter account switched in appearance and character during the takeover). Averted when going to the Bandcamp page however, where all rips are credited to the correct artist.

* IndustrialMetal artist Music/{{Mortiis}}, for a long time, was never seen without his troll mask on, with its pointed nose and big ears. In 2005 for his album ''The Grudge'' his mask took on a more artificial appearance, looking like it had been stitched and stapled to his face. After that, however, he finally removed the mask.