Crapsack World / Music

• "21st Century Schizoid Man" and "Epitaph" from In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson describe a miserable pastiche of the modern world, ruled by corrupt politicans and presumably wartorn, if the line 'innocents raped by napalm fire' is worth going off.
• Macabre likes to play that our world is full of killer and tragedy, this is especially noticeable in their album "Gloom".
• The world around the kitchen set used for the video of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" appears rather devastated, indicating the state of the world that existed from 1989 (the ending point of Billy's list of historical names and events) onward.
• The subject of Black Sabbath's "Wicked World".
• Many Bruce Springsteen songs, such as Youngstown or Born in the U.S.A. deal with this theme.
  • This trope is the overlying theme of his 1982 album Nebraska.
  • As on his 1995 album The Ghost Of Tom Joad.
• Battery City and The Zones, the setting of My Chemical Romance's post-apocalyptic concept record Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. "The Zones" are basically the dry, scorching hot, desert wasteland California becomes after the tragic events of 2012
• "Hunger City", the setting of the David Bowie Concept Album Diamond Dogs (a work that rose from the ashes of an unrealized musical version of 1984) — after an undescribed catastrophe, what's left of humanity here splits up into decadent, scavenging tribes, bringing on The Apunkalypse.
• Downplayed in Los Lobos- "Hearts Of Stone". The chorus is about how there's too many people with hearts of stone, ice etc, but hearts of gold (i.e, good people) are hard to come by. Also, the first stanza talks about him looking to pick a rose but only finding a bunch of thorns, the implication being even things that are supposed to be good are shitty these days.
• The entire setting of the concept album Deltron 3030 but specifically Turbulence, a song describing the setting in detail.
• Fireaxe’s Food for the Gods depicts life - all life - as a never-ending, brutal struggle. The fate of humanity is to careen from one brutal god or ideology to the next, murdering each other en masse. Ultimately, humanity destroys itself to put an end to it all. After a life in this world, your reward is likely to be eternal torment in hell. The best outcome is for God to destroy the universe and fail to make another one.
• The Evillous Chronicles, while occasionally normal, has quite a lot of these at times.
• The Underworld in Hadestown
• The lyrics to Linkin Park's Forgotten seem to describe this.
• Ludwig Von 88 made several songs on this theme. L.S.D. for Ethiopie is sarcasm about humanitarian aid (Don't feed monkeys with peanuts, send these to Ethiopia). In Oh Lord it is mentioned that starved children in Latin America are being eaten by rats.
• The Mega Man (Classic)-inspired songs of The Protomen.
  • Act II tells us exactly how the world managed to turn into this.
• Nightwish's "Planet Hell" definitely describes one of these. The chorus even suggests that the only way to escape the suffering of the living world is to cross over to the world of the dead.
• In the song Roses, not by Outkast, but by Nik Kershaw, tells what of happens later after a wasteful society turns the world into this trope later on.
• "Here's To The State Of Mississippi" was a brutal take down by Phil Ochs of the state of Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement: Phil depicted Mississippi as a state where murder was prevalent, the citizens apathetic to the killings, the schools taught hatred, the police was brutal and corrupt, the churches were tolerating injustice, the judiciary was morally compromised and so was the government who had left the U.S. Constitution "drowning in an ocean of decay."
  Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
  Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of
• The opening lines of Shania Twain’s “Up!” strongly hint at such a world.
• In a humorously ironic subversion of this trope, Scatman John's Scatman's World partially takes place in a Utopian society called... Scatland. You know, like crap.
• "Mad World", by Tears for Fears.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Happy Birthday" is a song about how you should enjoy the crappy party for the fleeting moments it offers as a distraction to the fact that the world is going straight to hell.

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