Ironic Echo / Music

• The Who song "The Kids Are Alright" from Quadrophenia — the two sentences in the bridge completely change the meaning of the (otherwise identical) first and second verses.
• There's a Barenaked Ladies song called "The Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel". The line "you're the last thing on my mind" goes from meaning "I'm not thinking about you" at the beginning of the song to meaning "I die thinking about you" when it's repeated at the end.
• In the Tim McGraw song "Don't Take The Girl", the line "Please, don't take the girl" that ends each verse changes meaning over the course of the song.
• "Major Tom (Coming Home.)" The part you know from that car commercial: "4, 3, 2, 1, Earth below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless, calling, coming home..." Well, it means one thing on the way up when everything's fine. It means something a little different on the way down when the thrusters aren't working.
• "According to You" by Orianthi. The first few stanzas begin with "according to you", before changing to "according to him" in the chorus. And nearing the end of the story, it changes to "according to me".
• Eminem:
  • In Eminem's Breakout Hit "My Name Is", a goofy novelty song full of shock punchlines, Slim raps, "I just drank a fifth of Vodka. Dare me to drive?" In "Stan", Stan, a Loony Fan driving his car with his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk, screams on the tape he's sending his idol, "Hey Slim, I just drank a fifth of Vodka - dare me to drive?" Apparently, he hadn't got the joke.
  • In "Lose Yourself", Eminem raps, "you only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow" (meaning to get huge). In 2012's "Richard", Slim uses the same line (amusingly, shifting into his 2002 voice and flow) to tell a woman that she needs to suck his penis.
  • Eminem makes another "Lose Yourself" joke in "Asshole" - turning "my soul's escaping through this hole that is gaping" into "my soul's escaping through this asshole that is gaping", a reference to how Eminem came up with his Slim Shady alter-ego character while on the toilet at work.
• Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle". The chorus includes "When ya comin' home, Dad / I don't know when, but we'll get together then," but the son nevertheless desires to be like his father. At the end, while reflecting that his now-grown son is too busy to spend time with him, the narrator muses "he'd grown up just like me" — the last two repetitions replace "dad" with "son".
• Still healing by Uprise uses this. The first half of the song is lamenting the fact that the singer is "still healing" from some childhood trauma. The second half uses the same line — with the context changed to highlight that he is, in fact, healing, while the offender will always be miserable.
• The chorus of the Mark Wills song "Wish You Were Here" describes a postcard which has the word "Heaven" on the front. The postcard's message has a completely different tone when sung after the first verse (where the postcard's writer is boarding a plane) and after the second (where he dies when the plane crashes):
  Wish you were here, wish you could see this place
  Wish you were near, I wish I could touch your face
  The weather's nice, it's paradise
  It's summertime all year and there's some folks we know
  They say, "Hello." I miss you so, wish you were here.
• Act 1 of Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown opens with "Know Your Enemy," in which the protagonist rails against the establishment and encourages others to do likewise; Act 2 ends with Gloria realizing that her life's been ruined:
  You're a victim of your symptom
  You are your own worst enemy
  Know your enemy.
• The chorus of Material Issue's "Trouble" is built around the plea "I ain't lookin' for trouble" and the reply "Trouble's come lookin' for you". After the first verse, the exchange of words is between a shopkeeper and the young thug who robs and/or murders him. After the second, it's between the thug and the vigilante who hunts him down and murders him (and who's also the song's narrator). After the final verse, it's between the vigilante/narrator and the executioner.
• Ghosts and Spirits, a CD of songs based on C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, has a song ("Bleeding Charity") that's an ironic echo. First, a ghost protests, "Can't you see that I'm only human?" and can't be expected to be perfect (as he thinks is necessary to enter Heaven), and refuses to accept any "bleeding charity"; in the second verse, a spirit explains he is not perfect either — "Can't you see that I'm only human?" and begs him to accept the Bleeding Charity.
• At the beginning of "A Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody From Tetris" by Pig With The Face Of A Boy, the "man who arranges the blocks" enviously muses that "The Tsar puts gold on his bread" when noting the unfairness of the old regime. At the end, having gone through revolution, Josef Stalin, World War II, the Space Race and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the same worker bitterly notes that while he has more than enough gold, he's reduced to standing in line for the chance to get a loaf of bread.
• tool's song "Prison Sex" changes "I'm breathing so I guess I'm still alive" to "You're breathing so I guess you're still alive" when the song's subject, a rape victim himself, commits rape.
• Sublime's Date Rape is a story about a woman being bought a couple of drinks, before being offered a ride and raped in a car. She then proceeds to take him to court, he gets a 25 year sentence and raped by an inmate.
• In the song "Rocky" (most famously recorded by Dickey Lee), the subject's wife expresses uncertainty on her ability to do certain things (fall in love, have a child, then die). "Rocky, I've never ____ before, don't know if I can do it..." In the final verse, now that she's dead, he swears that he sometimes he can hear her saying "Rocky, you know you've been alone before / You know that you can do it..."
• Imagine Dragons' "Pantomime" makes four usages of the phrase, "It's just a matter of, 'Oh, don't touch me. Don't you, don't you touch me no more.'", the last of which replaces the second "don't you" with, "dare". The singer uses it twice during the first verse, when hesitating to take an ex-girlfriend back in, especially as her friends try to help him rebound. It appears two more times in the second verse, which details how the singer and the ex broke up (she left him for a rich and handsome man), and why she started pursuing him again (the rich and handsome man keeps brushing her aside in favor of making more money).
• The Blue Öyster Cult and Patti Smith's Revenge of Vera Gemini is built around the ironic echo; Patti Smith's lines, coming in slightly behind Eric Bloom's, are sardonic echos that subtly twist the meaning.
• In The Smashing Pumpkins' 1979, from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness the chorus changes to imply that the narrator realizes they aren't alone, not wanting to grow up.
  And I don't even care, to shake these zipper blues.
  ...
  And we don't even care, to shake these zipper blues.
• French singer Jacques Brel's song Les Bourgeois. The first two verses is about how he and his friends used to mock the establishment when they were young, singing a song about how they were chochons (pigs) and cons (idiots), the last verse is about how they now when they are old and wealthy themselves are trying to get the police to arrest some young people who has been singing the exact same song about them.
• Early in the Danish rap epic Østkyst Hustlers — Verdens Længste Rap the protagonists, Jazzy and Bossy, are talking about their schooldays together. Bossy grumbles about a time where he got beaten up by five angry guys and Jazzy didn't help him, but Jazzy points out that "...it was better it was only your balls that got busted." Much later, when Jazzy is getting monkey-stomped after insulting a local crime boss, Bossy wonders if he should help him, but decides that Jazzy would probably say that "..it was better it was only his balls that got busted."
• Billy Joel's song "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" tells the story of Brenda and Eddie, a popular teenage couple who the narrator went to high school with. At first, he mentions how everyone looked up to them, saying "Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive". He goes on to tell how they graduated, got married, ran out of money, started fighting, and eventually divorced, not having any plans in place for the rest of their lives. He ends this by saying "We always knew they would both find a way to get by", which is similar to the previous line, but seems much less believable now.
• Hero of War by Rise Against tells a story of a man, who joins the military in hopes of gaining glory, but also out of a sense of patriotism. The song repeats a phrase "It's a flag that I love" thrice. Two times it presumably refers to a flag of his country, but the third instance refers to a white flag, belonging to a woman he killed during his service.
  And I brought home that flag
  Now it gathers dust
  But it's a flag that I love
  The only flag I had trust
• The Megas use this several times.
  • Mega Man's song about wanting to be a hero on the album Get Equipped is "I Want To Be The One", about his desire to fight for justice. Dr Light gets a similarly named song on the album History Repeating...except that it's called "I Want To Be The One...To Watch You Die".
  • "I Want To Be The One" gets another reference in the song "History Repeating":
    Now I can say when you want to be the One / What you start to realize is / You’re the only one
  • Air Man's song, "The Annihilation of Monsteropolis", has the line "Up in the sky, ten miles high, a man stands above the city he will destroy". In "The Haystack Principle", Needle Man, who's fighting the same apocalyptic rage that Air Man has succumbed to, uses the line "Deep underground, ten miles down, a man stands below the city he will destroy...STOP!"
  • In "I'm Not the Breakman", Proto Man uses the phrase "we walk the program" as part of his belief that he and Mega Man are both Just a Machine. In "I Refuse (To Believe)", Mega Man works the same phrase into his rebuttal and statement of personhood:
    Brother, if we walk the program, then what system do you serve?
    Is your song just lines of code, or something that you heard?
  • "Make Your Choice" has this happen within the song. In the first chorus, Proto Man calls Mega Man "a machine who calls himself a man". In the second, Mega Man throws the same phrase right back at him, pointing out his brother's hypocrisy in also calling himself a man.
  • In "Stalker", which is about an unnamed Hunter of Monsters (presumably a Belmont) fighting Queen Medusa, the first verse is about how screwed they are...and the second is about how screwed Medusa is, because now she's up against someone she doesn't massively outclass. The ends of each verse make use of this:
  Verse one: You made the choice to fight; that door closed long ago, you cannot run away. You feel the stalker's eyes...
  Verse two: So certain she will win, but she's never seen the way you move. She can't run away. You have the stalker's eyes...
• "Crusade" by Voltaire:
  • The last line of each verse repeats the same thing differently. In the first verse, the narrator is eager about setting out on the crusade and is apparently encouraged by his father's words. "Son, know your enemy, as I know my son." In the second one, he has a Heel Realization after having killed a dragon "who only fought to protect his young." Now, he recalls those words again, and they have a different meaning for him. (Just what the sentence is literally taken to mean in each case is far from clear, but it's clear it gets a different tone.) In the third verse, it's the narrator's son who's going on a crusade, and the narrator wants him to hear a different version of the same words: "Son, know your enemy, as I would have them know... my son."
  • The entire first and third verses are the same thing, with much of the same wording, from different perspectives — from the eager crusader's, and the disillusioned veteran's who sees that this crusade is probably not a good thing. Besides context, this is signified by a change of tone of voice and the changing of numerous small details, such as "my blessed sword" being replaced with "his brazen sword."
• The chorus of "no body, no crime," a Murder Ballad by Taylor Swift.
  • First, Este, narrator's friend, voices her suspicions: she thinks her husband is cheating on her, but she can't prove it — "No body, no crime / But I ain't letting up until the day I die".
  • Next verse says Este disappeared, and her husband's mistress took her place. Apparently, she let up because she did die, but "No body, no crime." The narrator figures this out but can't prove it, so she wows, "But I ain't letting up until the day I die."
  • Next verse has the narrator killing Este's husband and disposing of the body, and the chorus goes, "No body, no crime" again: his mistress thinks the narrator did it, but she just can't prove it. The narrator gloats, "I wasn't letting up until the day he / Died."
• During the song "My Ordinary Life" by The Living Tombstone has a repeated line "I feel fear for the very last time". At the beginning it's an expression of defiance by an artist who refuses to be held back from their goals. Over the course of the song, the artist falls into a life of excess and disconnection, until at the end they throw themselves off a ledge, half expecting to fly instead of fall, and "I feel fear for the very last time" becomes an expression of doubt and depression.
• Johnny Cash's song "One Piece at a Time", a song about someone sneaking parts out of a Cadillac factory to build their own at home, has a comedic example. The chorus says "You'll know it's me when I come through your town" and "I'll have the only one there is around". By the time the chorus repeats, they've realised that they spent so long sneaking pieces out that the parts are all from mismatched models spanning thirty years, resulting in a "psychobilly Cadillac". Everyone knows when he's driving around town in it, and it's definitely the only one around because nobody else created such a car.
• "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman.
  You got a fast car
  Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
  We gotta make a decision
  Leave tonight or live and die this way
  • At the end of the song, "we" is replaced with "you" to show that the narrator has broken off the relationship.
• Jhariah: On "ENTER: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FAKING YOUR DEATH", it's said that "he found the man before him had died", referring to the protagonist faking his death and abandoning his old life, becoming a new person. This line comes up again in the Album Closure track, "Flight of the Crows", which is about him killing himself out of guilt and shame.

---