Blog/2025-01-04/Cheerful Is Spooky

A fun thing about how cultures evolve is that as you age, you get to see the changes happen, and sometimes you can tie it to specific artistic choices that your own generation made. It sometimes makes me think about our own stereotypes that are perhaps accidental results of the previous generation attempting subversion.

erm @plumjae

I was in an Uber share today and a song came on that had the most sinister vibes ever and all three of us were sitting in dead silence I wish I could rmbr the song imma try to find it

Jan 3, 2025

❤️❤️❤️skinbytaylr @skinbytaylr

His keys, tones, melodies and his cadence in this song is perfect for a murder scene lol.

Jan 4, 2025

Today's fun one comes from a younger person deciding that the song Uptown Girl has sinister vibes. To us it's a cheerful song with no such connotation. But some time in the 2000s and after, it became the style to play a cheerful song to something scary - sometimes slowed down and sometimes just at normal tempo. To us this was, at first, a clever juxtaposition that enhanced the flavour of the scene and then, later, a bit of a cliché. But to the kids who were just growing up during this period, cheerful songs became associated with spookiness and scary scenes.

I think there was a period before the cheerful-is-spooky time when cheerful-before-spooky was a thing. During this time, there'd be scenes that either showed happy cheerful people with flash cuts to the same scenes with them scared and running (but without cheerful music) and sometimes there'd be happy cheerful music and then silence and then an unleashing of scary chaos. Eventually, cheerful-is-spooky became the norm and now most media that has abandoned malls or abandoned theme parks plays cheerful music to accompany it.

One of the things this reminds me about is 'clowns'. When I first got on the Internet and was exposed to American culture, I realized there were a lot of people who were 'scared of clowns' and by today, many people talk about clowns as spooky or scary. But this sounds very much like the Cheerful Is Spooky that the kids are talking about these days. So one means for this to have happened is perhaps that once upon a time, clowns were cheerful and fun, and then some artist hit upon the subversive idea to make them the bad guys in some scary way, and then it became commonplace, and then everyone growing up at that time saw clowns as being a scary thing. Eventually, clown fear became completely normal seeming and today, clowns in movies are primarily spooky (Fizbo/Fizbeau exempted).

There's all sorts of choices we make today in films that are 'unusual' and intended to be interesting because they are not common. One is the idea that Heroes Arise In Response To Trauma. Perhaps Wonder Woman is the one exception, and she is subject to the other common trope of this generation: Absent Father. I wonder what kids growing up will think is normal.