Scary Musician, Harmless Music

"There's nothing safer than someone who tells you he's dangerous."

— Patton Oswalt

In music (especially in Rock and Roll music) the image artists put forth is almost as important as their songs. Almost.

Musicians are expected to be larger than life, so it's no surprise at all that hardcore rockers might want to look... well... hardcore, if only to meet the expectations of their fans. Every once in a while, though, you come across a musician who looks as hardcore as they come. His music? Not so much. This trope is all about when the tattoo-encrusted badass-wannabe puts out songs about love and puppies. Someone who's only familiar with the image might find all of their songs to be Surprisingly Gentle Songs.

Note that there's absolutely nothing wrong with having a hardcore appearance and doing soft music. Different strokes for different folks. This trope is about the dichotomy of the image, not whether or not the music fits any individual's tastes. Also, note that the extremes change over time: what was shockingly hardcore back in the day is tame now, and what's hardcore at present might be on par with Frank Sinatra once your great-grandchildren start forming their own garage rock bands.

Oddly, the inverse is equally or even more common — many of the bands that play the heaviest and blackest of metal are laid-back, fun loving guys.

Related to Stereotype Flip, Rated G for Gangsta, Mean Character, Nice Actor and Dark Is Not Evil. See also Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind, Rule-Abiding Rebel, and Hidden Depths. Contrast Rotten Rock & Roll, where the musician (or the character with rock Leitmotif) is scary-looking and evil.

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Examples:

Played Straight

• Ozzy Osbourne has been calling himself the "Prince of Darkness" for decades, and his stage show is full of scary Halloween imagery. His music is vanilla heavy metal. Well-done vanilla, but vanilla nonetheless, because he's the Trope Maker, naturally (with Black Sabbath, which used to describe their work as "horror films turned into music").
• Alice Cooper's act has always been built on horror-show elements and special effects. Like Ozzy, though, his music is pretty mainstream. He even had several hits in his 1970s heydey with rather soft ballads like "You and Me" and "I Never Cry". Sure, one could argue this to be an aversion, he did write "I Love the Dead" and "Cold Ethyl", both about making love to corpses, or maybe an inversion, as he is now a golf-loving, born-again Christian, appeared regularly on a Phoenix kids show, has been a guest on the Soupy Sales show (he's friends with the host), and was pals with Groucho Marx, but we're talking musical content, not lyrical content.
• AC/DC is an act made up of hirsute (and very loud) Australians not afraid to use satanic imagery on occasion. Their songs are straight rock and roll mainly about life on the road, the awesomeness of rock, and getting lucky with the ladies, with an earnest and endearing blue-collar approach.
• Lady Gaga is known for her outrageous fashion sense and intimidating public image, but her music is relatively harmless pop (albeit very well done and clearly the work of someone with a lot more upstairs than it might seem at first glance), and more than one music critic has remarked that, without the image, she'd be just another B-list girl pop singer. Similarly, in interviews, she comes across as more "eccentric but polite" than "Ax-Crazy".
• When Cyndi Lauper debuted in the 1980s, she looked like a punk straight out of the East Village, with strange makeup and a checkerboard shaved into her pink hair. But her power ballads and pop anthems were accessible to music fans from all walks of life.
• 1990s One-Hit Wonder Jane Child had spiky hair and a chain that cut across her face, connecting her nose ring to one of her earrings. But her hit "Don't Wanna Fall in Love" was an uptempo dance song in the Janet Jackson mold.
• Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba has teen idol good looks and tattoos up and down his arms. His music seems to fit more with his big Disney eyes than with his "badass" ink.
• Charles Manson is an iconic psychopath responsible for one of the most famous murder sprees in 20th-century history, yet he played straightforward folk.
• In his time, Elvis Presley scared the daylights out of the United States' more conservative elements. Today, his music is found quaint, and even in his day, his songs included old gospel and soul numbers.
• Despite the makeup and the pyrotechnics, KISS's music is just as vanilla as Ozzy's. The page image even is Lead Bassist Gene Simmons, whose alter-ego is "The Demon". Their main lyrical themes are the joys of rocking out and having a good time.
• The Ramones were leather-clad punk rockers, but their songs tended to be light, goofy and absurdist.
• Twisted Sister. A makeup encrusted Dee Snider might well be one of the scariest things on the planet, but he's still singing standard hair-metal tunes. (Although some of their songs, such as Captain Howdy sound just as terrifying as Dee Snider looks.)
  • Dimmu Borgir, full-blown Satanist wannabes whose most extreme song was about torturing and humiliating Christians, actually covered "Burn in Hell" (albeit in TS's traditional campy style).
• Most fictional musicians from TV and the movies fit this trope to some extent.
  • Jem and the Holograms looked like they were supposed to be glam rockers who sang songs that sounded like (and in essence were) toy jingles, but their supposedly punk rivals the Misfits looked tougher and didn't sound it.
  • The Bones episode "Mayhem on a Cross" featured a so-called "black metal" group. The musicians in question mimed slitting their own throats onstage, hired people to shoot at them, and so on to show how tr00 they were to the music. The music itself, aside from the screaming, sounded like Devil Driver-esque groove metal, rather than actual black metal.
  • In Danny Phantom, Ember McLain looks pretty "hardcore". Her music is very, very smooth.
  • Parodied in Mad TV with a skit about a pianist who looks like he came straight out of a noir movie who plays cheery (and vaguely gay) show tunes.
• For Electronic Music, Yoji Biomehanika may look like some industrial/hardcore techno producer, but in reality, his "Tech Dance" style is actually quite club-friendly.
• Eclectic and ridiculously prolific breakcore artist Venetian Snares normally makes music just as aggressive and unfriendly as he looks, but a few of his tracks (looking at you, I'm Sorry I Failed You) are soft and melodic, often the ones built out of orchestra samples.
• Culture Club, thanks to the androgynous Gender Bender image of lead singer Boy George, came off looking like a band of sexual deviants. Their music was the type of (rather excellent) smooth pop/soul that was a perfect fit for Adult Contemporary radio.
• Actual goth music sounds nothing like most people assume. The best example is The Cure, whose songs, though sometimes are sad or gloomy, are just as often poppy, bouncy or dreamy love-songs.
  • Even darker bands like The Sisters of Mercy are often really catchy and danceable.
  • And Bauhaus, while downright creepy and sometimes impossible to listen to, isn't the screaming, satanic heavy metal that "goth" is assumed to be (that would be Black Metal). In fact, they sometimes recorded dub reggae songs.
  • Despite Morrissey's abrasive and aggravatingly melodramatic persona, much of the catalog of The Smiths includes fluffy, jangly pop songs, as though the band was rolling their eyes and continuing despite their frontman.
• My Chemical Romance, known for their dramatic stagewear and make-up, once described their music as "violent dangerous pop", and this is pretty accurate considering their post-hardcore edge meets pop punk melodies sound.
• Aurelio Voltaire is one of the faces of goth music—dark hair and eyes, black nail polish, and even surgically-pointed ears to give him a sort of vampiric look. While a lot of his songs ("In the Land of the Dead","Dia de Los Muertos", etc) have Gothic themes to them, the tunes are actually quite catchy and bouncy. He's even written a couple songs for The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.
• Kimya Dawson looks like she should be drumming for an all-female metal group, but most of her music sounds, well, cute.
• Billy Idol, who looked like a leather clad teeth-kicking punk in his younger days, became famous as an only-slightly-edgy pop singer.
• The Misfits. The music's tuned-up pop and the lyrics are horror-movie cheese. Their album "Project 1950" is very slightly punked-up covers of 1950s pop songs. If it's been a while since you've heard "This Magic Moment", their version is more likely to have you thinking "That's funny, I don't remember the power chords" than "Sacrilege!"
• Demon Hunter has a very hardcore image (their logo is a gnarly horned demon skull with a bullet-hole in the forehead), and a very hardcore metal sound, but the band is Christian metalcore, and the lyrics are quite the opposite of anything satanic.
• Taylor Momsen once dressed like this◊ while performing with her band The Pretty Reckless. Black metal image for some pretty straightforward radio rock.
• Big Kenny◊ of Big & Rich. He's really a gentle, friendly guy who loves doing charity work and often writes happy upbeat songs.
• The Finnish band Lordi dress in monstrous costumes, but the music is very straightforward and accessible Hard Rock. And despite their Satanic look, much of their music actually says that Being Evil Sucks and The Devil Is a Loser, including a song by that very name.
• This Miles Davis album◊ contains covers of "Human Nature" and "Time After Time" that are perfect fits for smooth jazz radio stations.
• Most Glam Rappers are accused of this.
• The Break Up, despite their intimidating fashions, produce mostly upbeat nu-wave electro music.
• Helalyn Flowers.
• Ghost has built their fame on being anonymous Satan worshipers who sing about death and destruction. There are probably Jimi Hendrix songs that sound heavier than them. Granted, it's well-made rock, no doubt. However, it's the kind you can safely play at a family Halloween party. One famous post on 4chan's /mu/ board even describes Ghost as "goofy Scooby Doo chase music".
• Hollywood Undead wears creepy masks and look like thugs, but their music is nowhere near as threatening as their appearances would have you believe. Some have described them as "the Boy Band version of Slipknot". One website even referred to one of their songs as a combination of "Andrew W.K., Kottonmouth Kings, Sum 41, and Kesha".
• Abney Park is named after one of London, England's historic cemeteries. The band takes on the personas of airship pirates◊. Their album "Wasteland" features a skull and a circular saw blade on the cover and has songs themed around the world after the Apocalypse. This is their frontman's introspection into the creative process of a song from a previous album.
• During his concerts, Rob Zombie put on an even bigger Halloween horror-show than either Ozzy or Alice, but you could neatly fit his music between the two in terms of it being "extreme."
• Twin Temple are an interesting example of an intentional invocation of this trope. They dress in dark outfits riddled with occultic imagery and engage in Satanic rituals at their live shows...yet their music is reminiscent of 50s doo-wop.
• While Doja Cat's album Scarlet was acclaimed, she caught flack on social media for combining gory, occult visuals, a drastically changed image with huge horror-themed tattoos and shaved eyebrows and hair, and the unveiling of a Kayfabe Music blood-covered alter-ego ready to take on her critics, with the safe and radio friendly nature of her production and lyrics.

Inversions (Harmless-Looking or Pretty Musician)

• One review of The Dillinger Escape Plan's first album noted that, while they looked like they bought all their clothes from the Gap, their image was MASSIVELY deceptive.
• Noisia are pretty normal looking, which contrasts with their very harsh and intense style.
• Akira Yamaoka, the pretty normal and harmless looking Japanese dude that frightened us in Silent Hill.
• Swans. These guys made THIS kind of music.
  • This trope was actually referenced in a 1986 review of one of their concerts.
    They took the stage looking a little like Grand Funk Railroad, but the Swans present a torture of sound as radical as Einsturzende Neubauten's.
• Merzbow. The music this guy makes is a grinding heap of mindfuck, to say at least. Also falls under mild-mannered/nice musician, as he's a polite vegan who raises his own farm animals and generally tends to be One of Us.
• The Incapacitants. Two 40-something white collar workers (one bank employee, the other a government employee) make some of the harshest music ever.
• The County Medical Examiners. They play gore-themed deathgrind In the Style of Carcass.
• Spanish blues band Plonk Moist. This is what they look like.◊ This is what they sound like.
• Burzum's Varg Vikernes does a better job averting (later inverting, depending on his look) this trope.
• Bring Me the Horizon. Well, at least their earlier deathcore/metalcore stuff...That's The Spirit brings them straight.
• Moths To Flames. They're your pretty average Metalcore band, it's pretty disconcerting it is to hear such big screams coming from their positively tiny lead singer.
• Visual Kei. Riffs that sound like Slayer or Pantera played by people who look like gothic Barbie dolls.
• iwrestledabearonce look like [1]◊ with a girl singer. They sound like this.
• The Gerogerigegege. Juntaro Yamanouchi's youthful, effeminate looks◊ and Gero 30's (known for masturbating onstage during performances) resemblance to an ordinary middle-aged man contrast with the confrontational and grotesque nature of their performances.
• John Zorn. Look at this.◊ Let it soak in. Alright, now keep in mind that he's arranged and played music along the lines of this. (Mind, his last name does mean "wrath", so...)
• "Terrifying" was an adjective frequently applied to early King Crimson music. The band was led by a bespectacled intellectual who played while sitting on a stool onstage.
• This is pretty much the rule for any grindcore or power violence band. Here's one example. They look like some guys you'd expect to find skateboarding around a mall or something but musically... well, just listen.
• This is Kristy Greene◊ of Drunkdriver. This is what her band sounds like.
• Laura Nichol◊ may be as cute as a box of baby rabbits but she served as the vocalist of the death metal band Light This City. In a bit of a subversion to this, she now plays in a melodic pop-punk band.
• Screamo bands tend to have very bland images and rarely even look like they're part of the punk subculture, but the music is often very brutal and chaotic. Note this video of Ampere who look like a bunch of coffee shop intellectuals. Then they start playing.
• Rob Dougan. Sports impossibly handsome Mr. Fanservice looks with music mixing electronics and live orchestra with cinematic flair. Those who are only aware of the instrumentals so frequently used as a Standard Snippet for trailers and television are usually surprised that he sings like a grizzled old bluesman, and the lyrics of his songs revolve around death, abuse, loss, and obsession.
• Anaal Nathrakh. You'd hardly expect your average co-workers Dave and Mick◊ to make music sounding like the shredder with your co-workers halfway in them.
• Flagitious Idiosyncrasy In The Dilapidation look like this and sound like this.
• Meshuggah looks like it's made up of some pretty nice guys◊. Well, wait until you hear their music.
• Welcome the Plague Year.
• Excision looks like a fairly run-of-the-mill DJ, but he plays what is regarded as the most extreme dubstep around, with heavy influences from brutal and slam death metal, Industrial and Harsh Noise. Just listen to "Deviance (with Datsik)".
• The guys from Carcass look about as far from scary as it gets◊. This is what they originally sounded like.
• Reversal of Man looked like a fairly preppy looking bunch of guys, but they were known for playing a style of Hardcore Punk that was far more chaotic, screamy and abrasive than anything the genre had contributed before then.
• Tommy Rogers of Between the Buried and Me looks like this◊ and sounds like this.
• On the reverse of Ozzy, his bandmates plus replacement at Black Sabbath formed Heaven & Hell. They don't give much importance to looking scary as Ozzy does, but the music is intimidating. Even when Sabbath itself reformed with Ozzy and they recorded 13, the songs sound much spookier than what most metal bands in 2013 were making.
• Josh Middleton, singer and lead guitarist of Sylosis looks looks like this. This is what Sylosis sounds like.
• Big Black. Look at Steve Albini in the 80s. Now, listen to something like, for example, "Jordan, Minnesota."
• "Quorthon", the man behind Bathory and who was arguably the Trope Maker for Black Metal was downright pretty◊. This is what his music sounds like.
• The Pixies: four normal-looking people from Boston, some pretty weird and occasionally nightmarish music.
• The Hives are five fairly clean-cut and normal looking guys who dress in various matching black and white outfits that have included full tuxedos with top hats and tails, but they play almost exclusively loud, raw Garage Rock with album titles that include Veni Vidi Vicious and Tyranosaurus Hives.
• Project Pitchfork look like this◊, but their music is aggressive gravel-voiced darkwave/EBM.
• Marmozets all look like normal people, with a cute frontwoman. Their music, more often then not, sounds like this.
• Band-Maid, upon first glance, most would assume they're a Japanese pop idol group due to being an all girl band who dress as cute maids. Then they hear the dual-shredding guitars and fast paced metal music, and wonder what goes on in Japan.
• Kayo Dot has been through a lot of members, but their lineups generally look something like this or this. Their music varies widely in sound, but at its heaviest, it sounds like this.
• Linkin Park are six normal-looking guys, but Chester Bennington could scream like this and their songs often touched on alienation, depression, and emotional turmoil.
• When Code Orange started as Code Orange Kids, they looked like a typical bunch of nerdy high schoolers◊. Their music on the other hand...
• If Metal Archives is correct, this unassuming-looking Frenchman is Hasjarl, guitarist of Deathspell Omega. A typical song by his band sounds something like this, this, or this, and their lyrical subject matter tends to be some of the most transgressive and blasphemous in Black Metal, a genre that thrives on Refuge in Audacity. The band themselves are about as anonymous as possible in the Information Age, never listing credits in their albums and having given their last interview in 2004. As a result, no one is entirely sure who they are, which makes them one of the finest examples of Creepy Awesome in music.
• Akercocke is a British band whose members wear suits and look very pleasant. Their music, on the other hand, is blackened death metal with satanic lyrics.
• Knocked Loose. They sure don't look a dangerous group of guys.◊ Then you hear their music and see their infamously violent mosh pits, OH MY GOD.
• Iron Maiden are a bunch of dudes who just seem like fun guys to drink with. Their music is ominous and their concerts have a zombie walking on stage.
• The Buoys look like a bunch of laid-back hippies with long hair. Their biggest hit is "Timothy", a song about miners trapped by a cave-in who eat their fellow miner.
• PJ Harvey is a nice, soft-spoken lady from the southern coast of England who writes songs about giving a bloody hand-job, chopping off an ex-lover's legs so they don't leave her, drowning her infant daughter in a river, and committing suicide in a hotel room.
• Dinosaur Jr. When they started out they looked like incredibly harmless nerdy guys◊. Now they look like a bunch of middle aged dads. Their live shows meanwhile have been described as some of the loudest music ever made.
• Ningen Isu guitarist/vocalist Shinji Wajima looks more like a traditionalist university professor giving lectures on Buddhist philosophy than a heavy metal musician whose work explores some very dark themes.
• Disco Inferno are a zigzagged case of this - they look completely normal◊, and occasionally did more accessible stuff (e.g The Last Dance and Technicolour), but their most-acclaimed work (D.I. Go Pop and their EPs from Summer's Last Sound to It's A Kid's World) is politically-charged and full of dark, surreal, sometimes-abrasive soundscapes and freaky electronic paranoia.
• Spiritbox are a bunch of very non-threatening looking individuals with a pretty and feminine frontwoman who make some very screamy and often quite unsettling sounding music.
• Closet Witch are a bunch of very normal looking people◊ with a cute and small frontwoman...who make music like this.

Inversions (Mild-Mannered/Nice Musician)

• One that doesn't directly involve music, but look at any picture of Keith Moon and you wouldn't really think of him as someone who could put Keith Richards under the table twice without breaking a sweat. Not to mention a Trope Codifier of All Drummers Are Animals.
• My Bloody Valentine are some bizarre cross between this and a subversion — they're all mild people, and their music is mostly Silly Love Songs. But they're legally obligated to give out earplugs at their concerts due to how loud they are, and their set finisher "You Made Me Realise" contains an incredibly long brutal noise-making middle that can last up to 30 minutes.
• Several Extreme Metal musicians as mentioned above. George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher and Alex Webster of Cannibal Corpse, Fenriz of Darkthrone, and Attila Csihar of Mayhem are a few examples.
  • Karl Sanders of Nile write what is recognized as some of the heaviest death metal out there right now, with lyrics relating to people being ripped apart by being essentially raped to death by statues (which actually happened in antiquity), but in his interviews, he's fairly soft spoken, polite, and during concert tours, offers guitar lessons.
  • The Black Dahlia Murder plays what is regarded in some circles the most brutalizing Melodic Death Metal around, but the band members are polite and fun-lovers. This is even seen in their music videos.
  • Dying Fetus is easily one of the heaviest big names in death metal (even in spite of their name), but they're all notoriously friendly and personable, though there is a bit of a difference between Trey's energetic and engaging personality and John's notoriously laid-back, soft-spoken demeanor.
  • Sunn O)))'s music is the aural equivalent of a Brown Note, but the musicians themselves are shy, reserved, and actually afraid of their fans.
• Nine Inch Nails. Both his music and his stage persona differ markedly from Trent Reznor's actual personality. This is subverted considering that he helped compose the Oscar-winning score for the movie The Social Network. And the score is in itself a subversion, consisting mainly of dark ambient electronica that Reznor had worked on with his co-composer for an earlier Nine Inch Nails album — not usually the sort of music that wins Oscars. (although a bigger subversion is his second Oscar, for Pixar's Soul...)
• Nivek Ogre from Skinny Puppy is one of the nicest, most gregarious people you could imagine meeting. Skinny Puppy's music is mostly dark and hard-edged industrial, and Ogre sings with his distinctive harsh purring cleans, which sometimes get downright creepy.
• J.G. Thirlwell. Foetus albums, in their variety, include screaming and rhythmic white noise — all made almost single-handedly by a soft-spoken, shy intellectual. He's good mates with Swans and Trent Reznor.
• William Bennett. He fronts a band who sounds something like this. In his blog and in interviews, he comes off as much more polite and has even given lectures at the German Institute for Music and Media.
• The members of Avenged Sevenfold appear to be this, based off of their two live documentaries. They might be wild and little crazy, but they're actually pretty nice (although the polite tends to swing back and forth).
• Kimberly Freeman, the lead singer for the metal band One Eyed Doll qualifies. While her on-stage persona is that of an Ax-Crazy psychopath who sings about mass murder and cannibalism, she is soft spoken and friendly in interviews. She also speaks Mandarin fluently, making this an example of Hidden Depths. See also Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind.
• Angelspit perform songs about cannibalism, anarchy, and overall destruction, whilst resembling musical nightmares. They're some of the nicest people on the planet.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform long, drawn-out, often atonal, minimalistic, and terrifying music. Based on their title, you'd expect them to be a bunch of angsty, long-haired, long-bearded, possibly quite muscular men wearing guitars strapped around their necks, sitting around looking depressed, reading Ayn Rand and speculating about the meaning of human existence, but, no, they're actually a bunch of rather polite Canadians that seem to rather enjoy making orchestral post-rock music and mucking about with how music as we know it works. Here's◊ some◊ pictures◊ of◊ them◊. Not exactly threatening, are they?
• Scott Walker (not the politician) composed some of the most terrifying pieces of avant-garde music out there, a lot of which is apparently derived from his nightmares, full of atonal strings, rattling percussion and discordant guitars, amongst other... unusual instruments; one song, "Clara", has the percussionist punching a side of pork to get the right sound effect for someone being beaten with a stick. In person, he was a polite, soft-spoken man who avoided the limelight and had a kind word to say about virtually everyone.
• Look at the back cover of◊ Reign in Blood by Slayer — they look like just a bunch of guys who have fun drinking beer while singing songs about Satan, Hell and other scary stuff. And their scary frontman Tom Araya, who looks like a demonic goat-man in his old age, is a Catholic, a family man, and sings country songs to keep his terrifying voice in shape.
• It has been noted that JR Hayes of Pig Destroyer is rather mild-mannered. Being a grindcore vocalist, his lyrics and vocals are not; several times while performing live, the power to his microphone has gone out and the audience could still hear him clearly.
• Industrial Techno project Phosgore presents itself as "dark, uncompromising and severely fucked up". The music is harsh, loud and fast and promotional images usually contain the creator, Flo, looking bloodied and furious. Yet, those who met him in person describe him as "friendly" and "down to earth". He also gains extra Heartwarming points for not only being Happily Married but working together with his wife to create new tracks and set gigs.
• Slint. The cover art to their most popular album◊ makes them look normal enough. However, said album has moments so heavy that their singer actually became physically ill due to all the screaming in the final song.
• Many hellektro/terror-EBM/aggrotech artists, such as Funker Vogt(Jens Kastel) and Suicide Commando(Johan van Roy), are quite good-looking and mild-mannered, in contrast to the genre's extremely harsh, angsty vibe.
• Rammstein is a group of six German men who write songs about every sexual perversion you can imagine, from cannibalism to incest to rape, and they have no qualms about using disturbing real life events as inspiration for their songs. They dress up in nightmarish costumes (the lead singer once had a piercing put in the back of his cheek so he could feed a wire through it for a light in his mouth), their lead singer has a deep, resonating, and intimidating voice, their live shows feature more pyrotechnics than New Year's Eve, and they've constantly had to fight off (false) accusations that they are Nazis, because of the whole "angry-sounding Germans" thing. Offstage? They're mostly pretty soft-spoken and regarded as being overall nice guys to be around.
• Throbbing Gristle came across as friendly people off stage, which clashed mightily with the harshness of their music and their nightmarish lyrical themes. This was actually exploited with 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

  Cosey Fanni Tutti:We did the cover so it was a pastiche of something you would find in a Woolworth's bargain bin. We took the photograph at the most famous suicide spot in England, called Beachy Head. So, the picture is not what it seems, it is not so nicey nicey at all, and neither is the music once you take it home and buy it. We had this idea in mind that someone quite innocently would come along to a record store and see [the record] and think they would be getting 20 really good jazz/funk greats, and then they would put it on at home and they would just get decimated.

• The Geto Boys are one of the most sociopathic gangsta rap outfits around, with songs about rape, murder, paranoia and the fun of gang life; not for nothing are they Trope Namer for Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!. Off the stage, rapper Willie D is highly active as a community worker, protective of his kids' private life and writes an advice column for the Houston Press.
• The Plasmatics: As violent and sexually suggestive as their shows were, their lead singer Wendy O. Williams was actually a very sweet and nice person. Compare her stage shows to her interviews afterwards: it's quite a contrast.
• Tom Lehrer is a Harvard-educated maths professor who performs upbeat piano ballads about Nuclear War, sexually transmitted disease, vivisection and the drugs trade ^note "Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste" — New York Times
• Unlocking the Truth: Three kids not even out of their teens who perform loud Heavy Metal.
• Arthur Brown is particularly well-known for his weird, often nonsensical songs that often has him screaming and laughing throughout the track, and if performing it live, will do so in a white robe with a flaming metal hula hoop on his head. Outside of his stage persona however, Brown is incredibly polite and friendly with those he speaks to.
• Seth Putnam lead bands with names like Anal Cunt, Shit Scum, Impaled Northern Moonforest and Adolf Satan who's songs featured lyrics about death, racism, murder, and other "edgy" topics. But according to several fans and a couple people who knew him, he was a warm, intelligent, sensitive man.
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has an In-Universe example in Ibuki Mioda, the cheerful, Fun Personified, Genki Girl Ultimate Musician... whose genre of choice happens to be Death Metal.

Other

• Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle guitarist James Iha zig-zags this a bit. He's known for his awesome guitar solos and can dress rather gothy and spooky, but most of his songs (especially in his first solo album) are meandering, sweet, sentimental ballads. His cover of The Cure's "A Night Like This" and one of the songs he composed for Sims 4 are more on the spooky side.
• X Japan since dropping their original heavy metal VK appearance is somewhat of a subversion of this. They performed some of their darkest lyrical material and one of their most overtly sexual performances (the BDSM-themed White Poem) while in more "average rockstar dress," and the Murder Ballad Week End (which is actually this very trope played straight since it is an argument for why murder and suicide are hopeless) became one of their biggest hits.
  • Yoshiki Hayashi is, according to those close to him, this trope both subverted and doubly subverted. While feared for his nigh-legendary temper and control-freak tendencies and hated for allegedly being a male Rich Bitch and ditz, most people who have actually gotten close to him say that he is very intelligent, as well as an incredibly kind and loving person. His music, on the other hand, is all over the map from heavy and dark themes of sexuality and violence to deconstructions of violence and suicide to angsty Love Ballads.
• While the bulk of Passenger of Shit's plays around with this trope a lot, mostly via subversion or aversion, but sometimes he plays it for laughs. A bit of warning; the links are all NSFW.
• Dir en grey is an interesting case because their music ranges from tender piano ballads to full on Death Metal (often within the scope of a single song) and while the band is known for their freaky gothic getups, they also appear quite bishie and occasionally fairly normal from time to time. And offstage, they're described as nice, respectful and fun-loving.
• Skyblue 100 is a strange case. They're a Casio and guitar act who play happy, upbeat, sometimes silly tunes, (They even do the music for a small-time kids show) and their stage personas reflect it. However, an upload on their Youtube account implies them to be fans of The Gerogerigegege, which in itself brings up a storm of implications.
• An art example of an inversion: This is Matthew Gray Gubler. He's adorable and is most well-known for playing Dr. Reid on Criminal Minds. He draws stuff like this.
• Andrew W.K. is a strange case of both playing this trope straight and inverting it. It's played straight in the sense that he uses a lot of violent imagery (for example, the cover of I Get Wet is just him staring into emptiness while blood pours from his nose and mouth), yet his songs are mostly about partying and generally enjoying life. It's also inverted in the sense that he does write some violent or relatively shocking songs, and even the happy ones SOUND violent as they are very loud, over-the-top and energetic, yet pretty much anyone who ever met him agrees that he's one of the nicest guys ever. Heck, he's even one of the last musicians left to defend the Emo lifestyle!
  • Oddly, he is fond of playing the piano. One of his albums is solely a calm piano-only album, made in defiance of his record company and touring demands.
  • He's also a brony.
• Revo of Sound Horizon by all accounts appears to be an unfailingly polite pretty boy klutz with a penchant for cosplay and writing pretty or epic songs about such lovely subjects as death, incest, murder, decapitation, death, miscarriage, yanderes, Sanity Slippage, death, rape, war, the apocalypse, revenge, constantly repeating tragedy, and, of course, death.
• Issues is a weird example of both an inversion and subversion. They look like a bunch of scene kids who wear skinny jeans, yet they play heavy metalcore. At the same time, their whole shtick is that they combine metal with Top 40 music. You have one vocalist, who is fairly masculine and does Harsh Vocals and Metal Screams while the other is a poppy R&B singer who seems a bit out of place in a metal band. In real life, they're all Nice Guys.
• Canadian outsider musician Tonetta dresses like a serial killer of the Buffalo Bill variety (usually wearing a skimpy outfit and a creepy mask), but his music is typically upbeat and about homoerotic sexual fantasies that aren't exactly his (the real Tonetta prefers women). One of his songs is about him rooting for (and even flirting with) the Toronto Maple Leafs.
• Emilie Autumn wears dreads, gothic clothing and puts out lots of songs related to things like death, rape, and suicide. However, she has just as many classical violin solos and some genuinely light and happy songs, in amongst the darkness.
  • Well she used to wear gothic clothing, now it's almost all pink and sparkly...which she wears while singing about rape, death, and suicide. It seems like she'll be going back to Elegant Gothic Lolita clothing when she is to start her "Fight Like A Girl" tour, though.
• Granted, in 2012 a punk style doesn't carry the shocking punch it would have in 1982, but singer Michaela Paige wears very unique outfits to put it mildly and has a three-color mohawk.
• You'd probably expect a band named 10,000 Maniacs to be a death metal band (unless you're actually familiar with death metal), but the band played gentle, socially-conscious folk rock instead.
• By looking at Roy Orbison, you'd swear that he performed Murder Ballads. This pale, dark-haired, stoic-looking, sharp-dressed guy with Cool Shades... actually sung Silly Love Songs and Break up songs. He actually fabricated his cool dude looks to deal with his Performance Anxiety.
• Howlin' Wolf was a tall and imposing man, with a low and raspy voice that could scare people out of their wits. Yet in reality, he was a nice and friendly person.
• Barbarion seem to be trying to avert this trope, though this may be the joke; their warlike barbarian personas and over-the-top evolution of quite hard rock make them appear so over-the-top they are no longer scary on any level. They are a comedy act making fun of our new, sanitised, wussy, rockless world, apparently inspired by '80s metal with misspelled band names and too many Low Fantasy movies involving barbarians.
• Eminem has been all over the spectrum at various points of his career.
  • In 1999 he was an adorable, happy young blond-haired lad who made horribly obscene music that caused moral panics. In response to this, he began to incorporate more traditional horror imagery into his image in 2001, like performing on stage in a hockey mask and chainsaw, putting the content of his music and his appearance in (campy) alignment.
  • In the mid-2000s, he toned down the content of his music considerably but without getting rid of his Serial Killer imagery, leading to situations like the video for "You Don't Know", in which Eminem says absolutely nothing controversial but is depicted outside a bloodstained house and dressed as Hannibal Lecter.
  • Eminem drastically changed his appearance for his Relapse era and started rapping Horrorcore lyrics as a gaunt, ludicrously-accented serial killer in a Blood Bath, but the lyrics also note Slim's mundane appearance despite his evil. He ditched his Relapse persona after backlash and changed to a more grownup image, as well as a more socially responsible and radio-friendly sound. In the late 2010s, Eminem moved back towards embracing his more impish and threatening side in his music, but by this point had aged into an unexpectedly cuddly middle-aged appearance that prevents him from appearing scary, so tends to appear in videos as a sort of neutral, hooded Horror Host.
  • Eminem's offstage personality deserves a mention. He's always had a reputation for being sweet, soft-spoken and diplomatic, and as he's shifted to a rap-athlete persona he seems almost like a wholesome alternative to other big rappers like the increasingly erratic Kanye West. However, during his drug addiction he would punch audience members and use his platform to humiliate his mother and wife, and even in sobriety he retains a mean and brooding side to his personality that is congruent with someone who writes the disturbing lyrics he still sometimes does.
• Slipknot could be considered a downplayed example. They wear scary costumes, and due to Public Medium Ignorance are often thought of as the poster boys for extremity outside the heavy metal community. Their music, while relatively heavy and explicit by mainstream standards, is definitely not extreme, being an accessible type of metal that can safely be played on mainstream rock radio; though they do have extreme metal influences, and admit it or not, are one of the ways for listeners to get into extreme metal. This is also probably the reason the band's original drummer, Joey Jordison, is regarded as one of the all-time greatest drummers, even though there are many extreme metal drummers who match or exceed his skill.

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