The recurring clichés of the last half-century of pop music have arguably done more to shape our concepts of love than any other medium, barring Hollywood. From birth, the average Westerner is bombarded with the familiar messages about true love. So much so that the musical debris of our culture is responsible both for how we expect love to be and also how we expect it to be depicted in song.

The weeping chords of country and western, the bombast of the power ballad, the urgency of the rock anthem—these are all familiar cues that the song will be a certain “type” of love story. The flush of infatuation is signalled with disco strings. The pain of a lover done wrong is communicated by slow, reverberating piano chords. If you stop any pop song after the first bar, most people could probably tell you its gist without hearing a word.

So what are we to do with artists and songs that wilfully subvert this time-honoured practice? Most listeners, I imagine, would run a mile.

When a song takes the musical vocabulary of true love and uses it to tell a story of distrust or hatred, the first conclusion we draw is that the songwriter is an unremitting cynic or a twisted prankster. And there’s a sense in which both are true.

Indie super-producer Jon Brion’s solo album Meaningless contains a delightful Lennon-McCartney-esque track called “I Believe She’s Lying.” The chorus refrain “I believe she’s lying / I trust her to undermine my faith in her in time” throws me every time. The first words of each line, “I believe…I trust,” tell my brain to expect the sweet nothings of a lover—the innocent naiveté of a new relationship—not hardness and disillusionment. And the insistent major-chord sweetness of the melody only adds to the cognitive dissonance. An emo-core anthem like Weezer’s “No Other One” mines similar territory, but the discordant angst of that song better suits the subject matter. It’s easy to assume that Brion is just messing with you.

Exhibit #2 would be Scottish eccentrics The Delgados’ “All You Need Is Hate.” A more anthemic, uplifting song would be hard to imagine, were it not for the vitriolic sing-along chorus proclaiming “hate is everywhere.” What the hell is going on here? The song could have been an ode to joy for our generation and yet these Caledonian curmudgeons are telling us that hate is the most important emotion of all. Surely a better vehicle would have been grindcore or goth-rock? Again, we get the sneaking suspicion that we’ve been had.

Perhaps, though, the artists are not doing anything so disingenuous. The inoculating effect of decades of platitudes and nonsensical emotions set to saccharine melodies had deadened our ears to genuine pathos and romance. What we need most of all is a wake-up call—a song that forces us to pay attention.

Sure, as music lovers and connoisseurs, we like to think that we listen to authentic music. Yet it’s possible that even our Sufjan Stevenses have created their own musical cues that no longer mean anything (plaintive banjo = existential crisis).

Brion, Pollock, and Woodward have stuck a big, nasty turd in a Trojan pop horse and wheeled it under our noses. You can’t miss it. But is this just a practical joke or an attempt to shock? Probably not.

“I Believe She’s Lying” at least gives the listener the distinct impression that in this particular case, the dishonesty or the girl in question is almost beside the point. The narrator is still lovestruck, in spite of his reservations about her trustworthiness. The pragmatism of it all can be shocking, but only because pop music has always told us differently. Yet how many relationships are built on a trade off between attraction and respect? Brion actually hits closer to the mark than a thousand other songs.

In a similar way, “Hate” deconstructs the mystique around love and asks which emotion is responsible for the world we see. While it’s a disquieting thought, we don’t exactly see love triumphant over all in the Middle East. We don’t see the hate-filled ejected from political office in favour of the compassionate.

If a cynic is a broken idealist, then surely the best soundtrack for these sad realisations is a pop song that no longer plays the way it used to.

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