10 Rock Songs With Really Disturbing Endings
Rock As a Loser's Game.
When rock was first getting started, it was never a genre that you had to take all that seriously. If you learned anything from the likes of Chuck Berry or even Buddy Holly, it was the fact that simple songs in rock and roll could become pretty timeless if you knew how to write them well. That probably meant that rock was supposed to be pretty lighthearted, right? Wrong.
As much as some rock bands made songs about fighting against the norms of society, these are the stories that don't wrap up nearly as neatly as they started. Though you do hear about these characters going the distance, it doesn't end well for a lot of them, with them either being severely mangled or close to death by the end of the song. Does that mean that all of these songs are downers, though? Not necessarily.
As much as the ending might not be the cheeriest thing to listen to, the rest of these songs are actually pretty entertaining, and even a lot more optimistic than you might expect. If anything, this just speaks to the kind of characters that come and go in rock music in general. We might not like to admit it all the time, but rock is sometimes a loser's game, and these are the people that have to really count their losses at the end of the day.
10. Polly - Nirvana
For most of Nirvana's career, you never really had to think too hard about what they were saying. Kurt Cobain always was of the mindset that lyrics were an afterthought, and would often be writing them at the very end of the songwriting process just to have some words to sing over his melodies. When he did decide to hunker down at write something meaningful though, it wasn't for the faint of heart.
Being an advocate of feminine rights for most of his professional life, Polly comes from a real life story that Kurt had read regarding a girl in Seattle who was kidnapped and tortured after leaving a show. By deciding to see her abuser as a person, the girl managed to escape relatively unscathed the minute that he let his guard down. While that story really hit home for Kurt, he flips it around in the song by taking the point of view of the torturer.
From the opening lines, you can tell that Kurt is trying to take on a character in this song, almost like he's trying to understand the mindset of someone who has no sense of morals. If anything, that just makes the tone of voice that he has in this song all the more terrifying. Not only is this man looking to torture someone else, but it almost sounds like he's going through the motions at this point.