Subverted Kids Show / Music

• Lily Allen's "Alfie" is set in a brightly-colored house that looks like the set of a children's show, but is offset by a rude little hand puppet smoking joints, masturbating and generally being horrible.
• The video for Will Young's "Who Am I?" digitally inserts him into a number of old children's shows, including Blue Peter. Unlike many of the examples on the list, it doesn't have any specifically NSFW content, but the use of old clips set to a slow and melancholy ballad make it clear the video is aimed at an adult audience.
• Kate Nash's "Pumpkin Soup" is set in a children's TV set, with certain homages to Bewitched visible...
• The set for the music video of Hard 'n Phirm's "Pi" is "Zap", which apes the TV show "Zoom".
• The video for Lostprophets' "A Town Called Hypocrisy" features the band as characters in a parody of kids shows such as Playdays or Playbus called "Town Time", intercut with a debauched cast party.
• Dizzee Rascal's "Dream" is a spoof of British children's shows in the 50's, with a miniature Dizzee interacting with puppets atop a piano, presided over by a grandmotherly looking woman.
• Rather than a kid's show, Muse's "Invincible" featured the band on an amusement park ride obviously modeled after the It's a Small World ride. The ride shows a very abbreviated history of man, with an unsettling focus on wars; after the September 11 recreation, everything goes completely insane.
• Serj Tankian's 'Empty Walls' video takes place at a day care (where he seems to perform) rather than an actual show. And then the little kiddies start acting out America's 'War on Terror' on each other..
• Green Jello/Jelly's "Three Little Pigs" consists of a retelling of the classic fairy tale that features rather child-unfriendly elements, such as one of the pigs being implied to be a stoner and the song ending with the pigs hiring Rambo to gun down the Big Bad Wolf. The music video is even in stop-motion animation and features a brief glimpse of a woman sunbathing topless.
• Inverted on Rob Zombie's I'm Your Boogieman music video for The Crow: City of Angels in which the framing device (a 1950's-esque children's show a la Ghoulardi) is relatively harmless compared with the bits of the movie and Rob Zombie singing...
• Kanye West has pictures of TEDDY BEARS on his first three rap albums.
  • The bear going cartoon didn't help much.
• Primus's video for "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver" has them in kids-show appropriate cowboy costumes and animations of Winona with a pet beaver to lyrics like "Wynona loved her big brown beaver and she stroked it all the time." It was so well-executed that not even the kids caught on.
• While Kunt and the Gang never fit the Depraved Kids' Show Host archetype, much of his music fits into this trope; examples include "Fucksticks" (about a phrase the singer and his late grandfather shouted whenever bad things happened to them), "Gentleman's Wash" (about how it's proper etiquette to wash one's genitals in the sink on the off-chance that the woman you date will want to fellate you), "I Was Pissed Out Of My Head" (where the singer mentions incidents where he injured or killed people while extremely drunk) and "Wank Fantasy" (where the singer talks about women in erotic situations he's fantasized about while masturbating), which sounds like The Wiggles' evil twins broke into their recording studio.
  • Later double-subverted: as part of a campaign to get "Fucksticks" played at the Royal Wedding, he issued a family-friendly version aimed at small children.
  • Taken to Crosses the Line Twice extremes in "Jimmy Savile and the Sexy Kids", in which he is actually singing in the persona of Real Life Depraved Kids' Show Host Jimmy Savile justifying his hundreds of child rapes by blaming it on 'sexy kids'.
• In Germany, The Smurfs song by Vader Abraham (Vader as in Dutch for "father", not the Star Wars one) is a popular target for this.
• The Paul and Storm song "Epithets" is a Schoolhouse Rock!-inspired tune (specifically, a pastiche of "Interjections") about the most common applications of shouting profanity.
  • Similarly, "Pirates and Emperors."
• It's The Bad Ronald Show! (a.k.a. Bad Ronald's video for "Let's Begin")
• The video for El-P's "The Full Retard" stars both El himself, and a Muppet who kills people (including a little girl!) and injects himself with heroin.
• The video for Alice in Chains' "The Devil Puts Dinosaurs Here" revolves around one of these.
• Imagine Dragons' video for "Radioactive" is kind of a live-action Darker and Edgier, Bloodier and Gorier Pokémon pastiche, with adorable fluffy Cartoon Creature monsters duelling in an apocalyptic cockfighting ring, surrounded by grimy criminals betting on them.
• Miley Cyrus' performance at the 2013 VMAs used a lot of this as part of her Former Child Star persona. For instance, she showed up with her hair in two little childish topknots, and was wearing a teddy bear leotard — the teddy's face had bloodshot, unfocused eyes and was sticking its tongue out lasciviously. She also had teddy bear-costumed backup dancers, portrayed by twerking black women with big butts, while singing a song about partying on molly and coke. And that's just the start. In short, despite being a star marketed towards children for most of her career, her performance in that show absolutely should not be viewed by children. Or anyone else.
• AWOLNATION's music video for "Kill Your Heroes" takes the form of three children watching a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood parody entitled Awol's Fun Time.
• The music video for Mastodon's Deathbound is that a solar eclipse has caused everyone in Magicland to go Ax-Crazy while demons rise from the earth and aliens invade, destroying the world.
• Melanie Martinez's work could best be described as Subverted Kid's Music. The songs' scores typically sound like lullaby-esque pop music, and with her cute outfits and song titles like "Dollhouse", "Tag, You're It", and "Milk and Cookies", a parent could plausibly mistake her for a children's entertainer. Except those songs typically have surprisingly crude lyrics, and even when they don't, the themes are often dark or mature. (The aforementioned songs alone are about a Stepford Smiler's dysfunctional family, a woman getting kidnapped, and the same woman killing her kidnapper, respectively.) The fact that her work runs on Ambiguous Innocence doesn't help.
• The music video for Radiohead's "Burn the Witch" features a Camberwick Green pastiche... based on the plot of The Wicker Man.
• The music video for "In This Cold Place" by Moby is built around this trope.
• The first few (English) lyrics in AronChupa's "I'm an Albatraoz" sound like a kid's story. Then "hoe" gets dropped...
• Slick Rick's "Children's Story" is set like a story told by an uncle to a pair of children. This story just happens to be about a young gangster doing robberies and getting killed by police.
• A frequent theme in Eminem's work and music videos during his early-career era of courting as much moral panic as possible.
  • All of The Slim Shady LP is handled as Subverted Kid's Music, featuring a little girl and Slim Shady's crayon handwriting on the cover, cartoony skits, sound effects and voices, Slim rapping in a cheerful squeaky voice, a public service announcement warning that children should not listen to the album "with laces in their shoes", and lyrical content about childish topics like school bullies and getting revenge on teachers. It's also extremely foul-mouthed and violent.
    • His signature "I Am" Song "My Name Is" starts with Slim Shady addressing a group of children. The video shows Eminem playing various characters on midcentury-style children's TV - a science teacher, a ventriloquist's dummy, a 50s suburbia sitcom dad, and a light entertainment host.
    Hi kids!
    Do you like violence? (Yeah, yeah, yeah!!)
    Do you want to see me stick nine-inch-nails through each one of my eyelids? (Uh-huh!)
    Then do you want to copy me and do exactly what I did? (Yeah, yeah!)
    Try 'cid and get fucked up worse than my life is? (...huh?)
    • "Role Model" starts with him cheerfully telling kids that he's going to commit suicide, and that you should try it at home and be "just like me". It gets worse from there.
  • Starting from The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem added elements to his image of a Corruption of a Minor-themed Teen Idol, making numerous parodic Teen Pop songs which encouraged teenagers to shoot up their schools, take drugs and commit suicide.
    • "Marshall Mathers" imitates the Latin Pop-inflected boyband pop of the time, with Eminem's sung vocals delivered in a dreamy, heartthrob style and panned to sound like a group chorus. It then details into outrageous Chaotic Stupid boasts, Artist Disillusionment, and death threats.
    • "I'm Back" features outrageous bloodthirsty lyrics, a light-hearted pop sound, and a chorus of adorable children who cheer "Slim Shady!"
    • "The Kids" is about Slim Shady explaining over a beat of happy children's music why Drugs Are Bad. His stories are clear nonsense and the children heckle him, but he's relatively well-behaved here for Shady standards, at least apart from when he starts asking them if they've seen his penis.
  • Eminem's daughter Hailie, a prepubescent in all of her appearances in his discography, provides vocals on several of his songs, which was highly controversial considering the content of the songs in which she makes an appearance. On "'97 Bonnie and Clyde", she provides burbling while helping her father dispose of the corpse of her murdered mother. On "My Dad's Gone Crazy", she attempts to control her father as he raps obscene verses and snorts coke. On the Protest Song "Mosh", she calls out to the world at the end, as the voice of the new generation.
  • The music video for "Without Me" is done in a bright, comic-book style and involves Slim Shady dressed as Robin from Batman (1966). It also has references to drugs, his role as The Corruptor of children, and a bunch of assault threats to other artists.
  • The Diss Track "Can I Bitch" is a parody of Slick Rick's "Children's Story" (which is already this), has the single silliest and most childish beat of Eminem's entire career, and is just a comedic story along the lines of the 'Em and Dr. Dre as 1960s superheroes' theme with a lot of childish insults. This appears to have been done to soften the offense Canibus could have taken from the track - Eminem wasn't trying to destroy Canibus's reputation, only to wind him up with insults intended to snap him out of his obsession with Em in the hope that Canibus would go and make some proper music. If so, it worked - Canibus was so confused by how seriously he was supposed to take the track that he didn't bother to respond to it, causing the beef to cool for a while.
  • Much of Encore is childish Toilet Humor, and there's even a song on there about a father's love for his little girl which ends in a nursery rhyme. It's still full of swearing and disgusting sexual perversion, with "Just Lose It" in particular being a disco song about paedophilia. The video for "Ass Like That" has Muppet-like puppets smoking weed and showing off their tits.
  • Eminem returned to his kiddish tone on his 2020 project Music To Be Murdered By, which has been categorised as "Children's music" by Google. The music video for "Godzilla" is in a colourful style reminiscent of his old videos. The song "Little Engine" is named after The Little Engine That Could and uses famous lines from the book as hooks. It's also a typically foul Boastful Rap using Eminem's typical Slim Shady themes of drug abuse and murder. There's also a ridiculous Rap Rock song about a child Shady murdering his abusive stepdad.
• The video for Y2K and bbno$'s song "Lalala" takes place on the fictional children's show Y2K's Big Fun Fun Show, on which bbno$ is a special musical guest. The set design is wacky and colorful, complete with puppets in Y2K and bbno$'s likenesses. While nothing explicit actually happens in the video, its childishness is a contrast to the song, whose lyrics mention sex and drugs.
• The music video for Unknown Mortal Orchestra's "That's Life" initially depicts a Muppet-like hand puppet dancing by a pool, but as the song continues, the puppet character grows more sickly until it is last seen stranded in a desert, sallow, stripped down to his underwear, bleeding from cuts and delirious. It matches the song's message about the destructive pursuit of hedonism and partying.

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