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Miniscule Rocking
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Crash: This is called "I'm So Sad. I Am So Very Very Sad", and it goes a little something like this...
[The song plays and ends... before the feather touches the floor.]
Young Neil: It can't be! That song was...
Knives: 0.4 seconds long?!?
Wallace: IT'S NOT A RACE GUYS!
— Scott Pilgrim

Epic Rocking is the trope for really long songs. This trope is the opposite. Miniscule Rocking is when a song is unusually short, either by normal standards or the band's standards (or, in many cases, both). Yet, much like Epic Rocking, these songs will frequently contain no lyrics — after all, it's hard to fit meaningful lyrics into a piece that only lasts 30 seconds.

Songs like this are frequently found on Concept Albums and Rock Operas, where they usually serve as transitions between different scenes or movements. An Album Intro Track will often be this since its role is mostly to set the tone for the rest of the album. Punk rock is well known for this trope, a result of its origins as a reaction to progressive rock and its excesses (such as notoriously long songs).

Of course, if you have a band that specialises in songs of Epic Rocking length, a normal-length song by everyone else's standards would, for them, be an example of this trope.

Searching for "Microsongs" on Youtube will get loads of trope examples.

For the sake of convenience, a song usually qualifies for this trope if its runtime falls under the 2-minute mark. Also it's imperative for all examples to contain the track's length.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Rock 
  • The Beatles:
  • Big Star:
    • "ST 100/6" (0:58).
    • "Morpha Too" (1:28).
    • "I'm In Love With A Girl" (1:47).
    • "Downs" (1:51).
  • Blood Red Shoes: Je Me Perds (1:28) and Welcome Home (1:51) both qualify, with the latter being instrumental.
  • Blur has several examples:
    • "Bank Holiday" (1:42).
    • "The Debt Collector" (1:41).
    • "Lot 105" (1:17).
    • "Chinese Bombs" (1:24).
    • "We've Got a File On You" (1:03).
    • The band's biggest crossover hit, "Song 2", barely misses the 2-minute threshold, clocking in at a mere 2:02.
  • Bush's "X-Girlfriend" closes out Sixteen Stone with exactly 45 seconds of the line "you only call me when you're down" set to a simple, punk-ish riff.
  • Coldplay:
    • "Parachutes" (0:46).
    • "Postcards from Far Away" (0:48).
  • Elvis Costello:
    • His debut album, My Aim Is True, has two examples, "Welcome To the Working Week" (1:22) and "Mystery Dance" (1:38).
    • His follow-up, This Year's Model, has "No Action (1:58).
  • "The Golden Age of Nicotine" and "Cut Lunch" from Custard's Wisenheimer are around 40 seconds long.
  • Divididos:
    • In 40 Dibujos Ahí en el Piso, all three versions of "Camarón Bombay" last less than two minutes, at 1:07, 0:36 and 1:03 respectively.
    • Acariciando lo Áspero has "Jamelosapoaí" (0:44).
    • La Era de la Boludez has "Pestaña de Camello (Intro)" (1:27) and "Huelga de Amores" (1:53).
    • Otro Le Travaladna has "Bolero Coya/Por el Aire Como un Tiburón" (1:30) and "Andá a Lavártelos" (1:03).
    • Gol de Mujer has "Clavador de Querubín" (1:38), "Niño Hereje" (1:39), "Salgan al Sol" (1:46) and "El Gordo Legüero" (1:47).
    • Narigón del Siglo... closes with "La Firma del Opa" (1:56).
  • The Doors:
    • "Unhappy Girl" (1:57).
    • "Horse Latitudes" (1:35).
    • "Wintertime Love" (1:52).
  • Sun, Sun, Sun by The Elected is book-ended by "Clouds Parting (8:14 A. M.)" and "At Home (Time Unknown)", which respectively clock in at 44 seconds and 41 seconds. However, the latter is really just a reprise of the former but with a different arrangement.
  • The Eraserheads have "Hoinky-Toinks Granny" in Ultraelectromagneticpop!. It's 1 minute and 11 seconds long.
  • Adam Faith's "What Do You Want" is just 1:37 and "Poor Me" a slightly longer 1:46. Both songs were UK number one singles and two of the shortest ever to hit the number one spot.
  • The Frogs's "Who's Sucking On Grandpa's Balls Since Grandma Ain't Home Tonight?" is 11 seconds long. As you might expect, the only lyric the song has is the title itself.
  • Japanese rock band Golden Bomber took the concept to a new level by playing an 8-second concert at a mall on June 29, 2017.
  • Gotye's "Easy Way Out" from the album "Making Mirrors" is 1:57 long. The title track is even shorter, clocking in at 1:01.
  • Led Zeppelin's "L.A. Drone" serves as a live intro to "Immigrant Song", and has a length of 0:15.
  • Linkin Park: has "Foreword" from Meteora (a 13-second intro).
  • Modest Mouse:
    • Sad Sappy Sucker has ten tracks that are under a minute long and two that are under two minutes. Granted, nine of those are bonus demos that Isaac Brock recorded on an answering machine and thus couldn't be all that long.
    • Good News For People Who Love Bad News has "Dig Your Grave" (0:13), "Interlude (Milo)" (0:58)note  and "Horn Intro"note  (0:09).
    • Strangers to Ourselves has "God is an Indian and You're an Asshole" (1:17).
  • Muse:
    • "Intro" (0:19) and "Interlude" (0:38) from Absolution.
    • "[Drill Sergeant]" (0:21) and "[JFK]"(0:54) from Drones.
  • My Bloody Valentine has the 56-second long "Touched", a strange ambient track that sounds like 16-bit video game music.
  • Julia Nunes' Settle Down has a trio of short songs she's referred to as "vignettes": "He Is Mad" (52 seconds), "I Wasn't Worried" (57 seconds), and "Pizza" (23 seconds).
  • Pearl Jam's "Pry, To", "Lukin", and "Red Dot" (that track on Yield that has a little red dot in place of a title) are all just a little longer than a minute. "Pry, To" and "Red Dot" have one line repeated over a few times, but "Lukin" actually fits in two whole verses of lyrics, due to Eddie Vedder using some fairly impressive motormouth skills.
  • Pillar's "Intro" is a whopping 10.3 seconds.
  • Queen:
    • "Lily of the Valley". 1 minute and 43 seconds of pure epicness.
    • There's also the four-second-long "Yeah" from Made in Heaven, an in-between track consisting of the last second of "It's a Beautiful Day (reprise)" and the first three seconds of the 22-minute hidden track, presumably to make the latter track #13.
  • The Radiators (US) have a couple of examples: "Heat Generation" was under two minutes. "Law of the Fish" was less than one! Both were the title tracks on their albums; both were usually used in concert as part of medleys.
  • Relient K has done many of these songs, which usually have the longest titles of any of their tracks:
    • "The Only Thing Worse That Beating A Dead Horse Is Betting On One" is a little over a minute.
    • This trope is lampshaded with the song "Crayons Can Melt On Us For All I Care", in which lead singer Matt Thiessen sings "I just wasted ten seconds of your life." And yes, this track is a little over ten seconds.
  • R.E.M. have "Underneath the Bunker" from Lifes Rich Pageant, at 1:27.
  • La Renga's La Esquina del Infinito closes with "Las Mismas Calles", a reprise of the opener "La Vida, Las Mismas Calles", clocking at 1:44.
  • The Smiths:
    • "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" (1:50).
    • "Death At One's Elbow" (clocks in at exactly 2 minutes).
  • The Soul Coughing B-Side "Theme From Rachel's Sitcom" is just over a minute long, probably in keeping with the whole mock-tv-show-theme thing.
  • Sparklehorse's "Box of Stars" (a 1:20 song split into 2 uneven parts).
  • Sumo's Llegando Los Monos begins and ends with instrumental pieces named after the album: "Llegando Los Monos" (0:35) and "Llegando Los Monos (Reprise)" (0:58).
  • Swans:
    • The early songs "Freak" (1:14) and "You Need Me" (1:23).
    • "The Wolf" (1:35) and "The Daughter Brings the Water" (2:41) both qualify, especially since they're on an album positively stuffed with Epic Rocking.
  • Teenage Fanclub:
    • "Satan" from Bandwagonesque (1:22).
    • "Get Funky" from Thirteen (1:22).
    • "Hardcore/Ballad" from Grand Prix (1:48).
  • They Might Be Giants has this as part of their Signature Style. A large quantity of their songs are under two minutes, and most are under three, though their average has gradually lengthened over their career. Still, over four decades of recording, their longest song (not counting remixes or live tracks) clocks in at a mere 4:39 ("They Got Lost"). Some notable examples of short song include:
    • "Fingertips" on Apollo 18 is a series of 21 short tracks averaging 13 seconds long, totaling 4:35.
    • The album Flood starts out with "Theme From Flood," which is 28 seconds long.
    • "Minimum Wage" off of Flood is 47 seconds, consisting of little more than the shout, "Minimum wage! Hiyaa!" and a bullwhip sound effect.
    • Nanobots had them including some extremely short songs again - the shortest track being the six-second "Hive Mind", and several others being under a minute long. The official music video for "Insect Hospital" is actually a video for tracks 13-18 from the album in full, and is a little under three minutes long.
  • "Anything", the first single and opening track on the Third Eye Blind album "Blue", clocks in at exactly 2 minutes. An extended version exists at 2:48 - but the so-called "extended version" merely loops the first and last 28 seconds of the song, along with the power chord around the middle.
  • The Vaccines' first album contains two: "Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra)" (1:21) and "Norgaard" (1:38).
  • "Old Mother Reagan" by Violent Femmes (0:38).
  • The shortest officially released song by Weezer is "My Evaline", a 44 second cover of a barbershop standard, which was recorded for fun (and because they'd learned such songs to practice harmonies) and used as a B-Side.
  • "Little Room" from The White Stripes. It has lyrics (a single verse) and isn't especially short for a band that mostly produces 2-3 minute songs, but it still weighs in at only 53 seconds long.

    New Wave 
  • Bill Nelson's Red Noise: "Don't Touch Me (I'm Electric)" comes in at 1:50.

    Progressive Rock/Metal 
  • "Vacant" by Dream Theater, which is on an album with five songs clocking over ten minutes, is a variation on the second kind.
    • Also, Dream Theater's "Wait for Sleep" fits in the second category as a song of 2:32 sandwiched between a 7-minute song and an 11-minute song, with only one other song under 5 minutes on the entire album.
    • Scenes From a Memory has "Regression" (2:06) and "Through My Words" (1:02).
  • Occasionally seen on tool albums ("Mantra", "Lipan Conjuring", etc.)
  • King Crimson has the three "Peace" songs from In the Wake of Poseidon, which respectively clock in at 51 seconds, 1:15, and 1:54.
  • Several from Pink Floyd, including "Bring the Boys Back Home" (0:51) and the second part of "A New Machine" (0:39).
    • The first is one of three in The Wall (along with "Goodbye Cruel World" (1:17) and "Stop" (0:30)).
  • Rush has one, the song BU2B2 on the album Clockwork Angels.
    • "Malignant Narcissism" and "Hope" from Snakes & Arrows also qualify, being instrumentals that barely top 2 minutes on an album full of songs longer than 6 minutes.
    • "Madrigal" (from A Farewell to Kings) and "Need Some Love" (from Rush) were the two shortest standalone songs the band had recorded until the release of Snakes & Arrows. Both of them clock in at or just under two and a half minutes.
  • Anthony Phillips' solo album The Geese and the Ghost features a song called "Chinese Mushroom Cloud", which clocks in at 46 seconds long.
  • "A Concise British Alphabet, Part One" and "A Concise British Alphabet, Part Two", by Soft Machine, last about ten seconds each.
  • "Asforteri 25" and "Limits" by Caravan are both under a minute, and both bookend a fourteen-minute epic.
  • The Flower Kings have an extreme example of both types with "Captain Capstan", a 45-second instrumental, and "Ikea By Night", a four-second drum fill that both follow the nearly hour-long "Garden of Dreams" suite.
  • Resurrection Band has a couple:
    • "Elevator Muzik", which is anything but that, with its rocking riff, is 1:58.
    • The bluesy "Rooster Crow" is 0:50.
  • Yes have an example that is both kinds of this trope, Five Per Cent For Nothing, at 0:35 - extremely short for any band, and Yes are known for producing such 20-minute epics as "Close to the Edge". There's also "We Have Heaven" (1:40) and "White Car" (1:21) which are mainly examples of the second kind.

    Grindcore 
  • Grindcore in general is infamous for this.
  • "You Suffer" by Napalm Death, which clocks in at a whole 1.316 seconds. Officially holds the record for "shortest song ever". Its lyrics are "You suffer, but why?", but its short length means that it comes out sounding more like "EEEEUUURAAAGH!" instead.
  • Altered States of America, by Agoraphobic Nosebleed, is an entire Miniscule Album - not one (non-hidden) song reaches the 1-minute mark, unless you count the extra CD included in the re-release. Indeed, there's barely a song in the band's entire discography that doesn't fit this trope.
  • Much of the discography of Anal Cunt falls into this category. They have had songs that have lasted as short as 8 seconds.
  • Brutal Truth currently holds the Guinness World Record for the shortest official music video ever with their two-second "Collateral Damage" video.
  • Quest of Aidance, which is usually less grindcore, has their exception in "Anyx", clocking at 43 seconds. It even has a music video.
  • Anal Trump, a side project of Cattle Decapitation's Travis Ryan and Pinback's Rob Crow have taken this to further extremes with several EP's and a compiled album "The First 100 Songs" which clocks in around 11 minutes...for 100 songs. Most songs are under 10 seconds each.
  • Clown Core have only one song which is longer than 3 minutes. Most of their songs are less than 2 minutes long, and many are shorter than one minute.
  • Daughters have used this extensively throughout their career. Their debut album goes through 10 songs in 10 minutes, the longest being just seven seconds short of two minutes. Hell Songs has only four out of ten songs go over two minutes. Until You Won't Get What You Want, they only had three songs go over 4 minutes, two of which came from their Self-Titled Album.

    Other Metal 
  • Dethklok have the 34-second long hidden track Deththeme. note 
    • They also have a few other songs, such as the "Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle", which is only around a minute and a half long.
  • Sixx:A.M. has "Catacombs" off of Prayers For The Blessed, Vol.2. It's around 1'40" and purely instrumental. In an interview, DJ Ashba even stated that he was just noodling around on the guitar, warming up his fingers before that day's recording session, and wasn't aware that his warm-up noodling was being recorded until the album came out.
  • PSA by Nuclear Assault.
  • "Invocation of Apocalyptic Evil" by DragonForce - 14 seconds of keyboard filler starting off their first album.
  • The Korn album Issues has several songs that are only 1-2 minutes long, including "Dead" (1:12), "4U" (1:42), "It's Gonna Go Away" (1:29), "Am I Going Crazy" (1:00), and "Wish You Could Be Me" (1:07).
    • "Twist" from Life is Peachy is 49 seconds long.
  • The "SGNL" tracks from the Isis album Celestial
  • Most of the tracks from the Fredrik Thorendal's Special Defects album Sol Niger Within are around a minute or two long.
  • The Hidden Track on KMFDM's Nihil.
  • "Death Prank" by Municipal Waste is a mere 11 seconds.
  • Sepultura has a lot of these on their albums with Derrick Green. The album Against has 3 songs under 2 minutes. Nation has 'Revolt' and 'Human Cause', which both clock in at just under 1 minute. 'Activist' on Roorback clocks in at just under 2 minutes as well.
  • Of the ten tracks from the Slayer album Reign in Blood, only three are over 3 minutes in length. The shortest, Necrophobic, clocks in at brief 1:40.
  • GWAR's "Fishfuck" is 30 seconds.
  • Black Sabbath has several short intros to many of their songs, listed as separate songs, the shortest of which are are "Embryo" at 0:28 (intro to "Children of the Grave"), "The Dark" at 0:45 (intro to "Zero the Hero") and "FX" at 1:43 (intro to "Supernaut"). A short non-intro song is "Orchid" at 1:31.
  • Stormtroopers of Death, a side project two members of Anthrax, a former member, and somebody else, has a lot of these. The "Ballad of [dead musician]," for example, is several songs that are a distinctive part of a hit song by a dead musician (the opening chords to Purple Haze, for example) followed by "You're dead." "Diamonds and Rust (Extended Version)" is about 4 seconds long and homages Judas Priest's cover of the Joan Baez song "Diamonds and Rust". And the longest track on "Speak English or Die" is 2'32''.
  • Dirty Rotten Imbeciles generally kept their songs short and to the point in their early years. Their debut Dirty Rotten LP crams 22 songs into 17 minutes, with only four songs lasting over one minute. Dealing With It has slightly longer songs on average, but only four songs longer than two minutes. While they would start releasing longer songs starting with Crossover, they would still have at least one song shorter than two minutes on every subsequent album.
  • Gama Bomb have the sub 20 seconds Nuke the skeets.
  • Christian rock band Stryper perform a short but awesome version of Battle Hymn Of The Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory...") which lasts barely 2 minutes. But it's a magnificent chunk of rock all the same.
  • Knocked Loose:
    • Small Victories (1:52) from Pop Culture (2014)
    • Counting Worms (1:11) from Laugh Tracks (2016)
    • Return to Passion (1:13) from A Tear in the Fabric of Life (2021)
    • Thirst (1:46) and Moss Covers All (0:46) from You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To (2024)
  • Given their reputation for Epic Rocking, Nile actually does quite a bit of this too:
    • From ''Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka comes "Kudurru Maqlu" at 1:05 and "Pestilence and Iniquity" at 1:54.
    • From Black Seeds of Vengeance comes "Invocation of the Gate of Aat-Ankh-Es-En-Amenti" at 43 seconds and "Libation Unto the Shades Who Lurk in the Shadows of the Temple of Anhur" at 1:32.
    • From Annihilation of the Wicked comes "Dusk Falls Upon the Temple of the Serpent on the Mount of Sunrise" at 51 seconds and "Spawn of Uamenti" at 1:14.
    • From Ithyphallic comes "The Infinity of Stone" at 2:04.
    • From Those Whom The Gods Detest comes "Yezd Desert Ghul Ritual in the Abandoned Towers of Silence" at 2:33.
    • From At The Gate Of Sethu comes "Slaves of Xul" at 1:24 and "Ethno-Musicological Cannibalisms" at 1:40.
  • A lot of Dismember songs clock in around the two-minute mark, including "Never Forget, Never Forgive" (1:43), "Soon to be Dead" (1:55), "Skin Her Alive" (2:15), "Eviscerated (Bitch)" (2:20), and "Wardead" (2:28).
  • "Rumpelkombo" by Alestorm is seven seconds long, and five of those seconds are silence.
  • "Venite 2.0" from Unisonic's Light of Dawn lasts 1:30.

    Comedy and Fake Bands 
  • "This Song" by Barry and the Bookbinders.
  • "The Ex-Boyfriend Song" by Garfunkel and Oates lasts six seconds, which is evidently enough to express the singer’s opinion of the ex-boyfriend in question.
    One, two, three
    I fuckin' hate you
    You fuckin' liar.
  • "Harvey the Wonder Hamster" by "Weird Al" Yankovic is 26 seconds long.
    • Also, "Bite Me", the 15-second hidden track from Off the Deep End, which is an homage to "Endless, Nameless" from Nirvana's Nevermind.
    • And from UHF, there's "Let Me Be Your Hog", which is 17 seconds long. (It was only created to plug a gap when the producers couldn't get the rights to "Kung Fu Fighting".)
  • "The Tony Award Song" from [title of show], due to Musicalis Interruptus.
  • Presumably most songs by Crash and the Boys, most egregiously I'm So Sad, So Very, Very, Sad.
  • "Power Of The Power Of The Power (Of The Great Sword)" by Nanowar of Steel, which is eight seconds long and consists solely of the band yelling the title.
  • Possibly the king of this trope, Psychostick, with their World's Shortest Song
  • Liam Lynch's "United States of Whatever" was, until 2007, the shortest song to appear inside the top 10 of the UK Singles chart. It is 1:26 minutes long.
  • The Smothers Brothers had a track titled "Soap" that had 10 seconds of music (not counting 20 seconds of banter and audience laughter).
  • Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album has several sub-1:00 songs, with "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio" (:55) even getting released as a single in the US by Arista Records.
  • Weird Paul Petroskey's song "Pay for Your Tacos Quickly and Securely" clocks in at 10 seconds long, with the lyrics being as follows:
    Thank you for choosing Taco Bell
    Thank you for using PayPal
  • CHAINRAW is an Italian metal band created for a Youtube project, their album "As Grind As Possible" was made with the intent of making the shortest metal album of all time, it contains a cover of Napalm Death's "You Suffer", among other original tracks, the longest of which has a runtime of 9 seconds.

    Pop 
  • Cults:
    • Static has two: "I Know" (1:42) and "TV Dream" (1:02).
    • To the Ghosts has "Cells" (1:44).
  • "Der Bus ist schon weg" (Missed the bus) by German NDW singer Nena.
  • "Magic Melody" by Les Paul and Mary Ford from 1955note  ends with the Shave and a Haircut riff, but not the "two bits" part. People complained to Capitol Records about it, so Capitol jokingly released a promo single of "Magic Melody, Part II", which is just the two missing notes. The official run time is (0:01).

    Punk 
  • Punk rock was intended to embody this trope, as opposed to its progressive contemporaries.
  • Being the band that invented and codified Punk Rock, the Ramones' debut album packs 14 songs into barely 29 minutes. They didn't even write a three-minute song until "Questioningly" on their fourth album, Road to Ruin.
  • "Am I Punk Yet?" by the Electro Hippies.
  • Green Day sometimes dip into this, with "Take Back" and "Song of the Century," as well as The Eleven O'Clock Number trio on Dookie, "Coming Clean," "Emenius Sleepus," and "In the End."
    • American Idiot came to be after they decided to turn Miniscule Rocking into Epic Rocking by stitching a few fragmental songs into a suite, "Homecoming". They also did this with "Jesus of Suburbia" on the same album.
  • Five Iron Frenzy has a lot of these. The straightest examples were "Shut Up", "I Still Like Larry"note , and their cover version of Vengeance Rising's "Receive Him". There was also the eight-part "These Are Not My Pants", where all but one part were less than a minute long. Then there are songs that are ridiculously short on the studio albums but longer at live shows (like "When I Go Out" or "Pootermobile"), or vice versa (like "Kingdom of the Dinosaurs").
  • Dead Kennedys have done this at least three times, with "A Child and His Lawnmower" (0:54), "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" (0:51), and the Lampshade Hanging "Short Songs" (0:20, prefaced with "Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out!").
  • Descendents have quite a few songs that are under a minute, but the shortest include "I Like Food" (0:16) and "Weinerschnitzel" (0:10). And then there's "All!" and "No, All!", both of which are five-second tracks with one second of music, and have only their title phrases for lyrics. Their album 9th and Walnut, consisting of rerecordings of their earliest material, is 18 tracks long and only spans 25 minutes.
  • Hüsker Dü have several examples, particularly on their first two albums Land Speed Record and Everything Falls Apart (the former of which consists of multiple, short songs combined into one track and played simultaneously). Their next three albums (from Zen Arcade to Flip Your Wig) also contain multiple examples, including "Never Talking To You Again" (1:40), "Beyond the Threshold" (1:36), "Folk Lore" (1:34), "What'cha Drinkin'" (1:30), "Every Everything" (1:56), and "Hate Paper Doll" (1:52), among others.
  • The punk compilation Short Music For Short People is themed around this, and the tracks average out to be around 30 seconds each: It manages to fit 101 songs by 101 different bands on one 48 minute album. Yes, CDs have a maximum of 99 tracks, but they got around this by putting the last three songs all on the same track.
    • Most of the songs on this album were recorded specifically for the album, but a few were already released by the artists on previous albums. These include "No Fgnuikc" by Nomeansno, the above-mentioned Descendents song "I Like Food", and "Deny Everything" by The Circle Jerks.
  • Possibly inspired by the Descendents examples above, Darkbuster have "Jerk", "You Jerk", and "You Fucking Jerk": All are under 10 seconds long and have only their respective titles for lyrics. Other incredibly short songs of theirs are "Lenny's A Drunk" (0:07) and "FMGMS" (0:12).
  • "I Say Fuck" by the Supersuckers is a succinct 46 seconds long.
  • Short Attention Span by the Fizzy Bangers.
    Why can't people understand? I got a short attention span. A short attention span.note 
  • Wire's first album: Pink Flag, contains a number of very short, very fast songs, the briefest being the 0:28 "Field Day for the Sundays." What makes this particularly notable is that Hardcore Punk, as a genre, did not exist when any of these songs were written. Their second album: Chairs Missing, also had a few songs under two minutes. Amusingly, the record label thought one of these tracks, "Outdoor Miner," had a decent shot at being a crossover hit on pop radio — and the edited-for-radio version of the track was longer than the album version.
  • The EP Downsided by the Powerviolence band No Comment. It has over 11 songs in 7 minutes, and fits 10 of those under 5 minutes.
  • Minor Threat launched the Straight Edge subgenre with the song of the same name and it's less than 50 seconds long.
  • The Minutemen did this frequently; their band name referenced their tendency of writing songs roughly a minute in length. Their first album is 15 minutes in length and features 18 songs. Their average song length increased to around a minute and a half to two minutes when they added things like guitar solos and choruses to their music, but they rarely surpassed the three-minute mark.
  • The Gerogerigege are notorious for their music's intense brevity and abrasiveness and have gone so far as to release a 30-minute long album consisting of 75 tracks and condensing what may or may not be a cover of The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry" into 20 seconds.
  • The majority of songs by Cerebral Ballzy are under two minutes, with some just below or barely above the one-minute mark.
  • Sum 41 lampshaded this by titling their first album "Half Hour of Power".
  • German Punk band Die Ärzte (The Doctors) have a song called "Yoko Ono" lasting exactly 30 seconds. It was even in the Guinness Book of World Records for shortest single with a music video.
  • Fall Out Boy's experimental punk-influenced EP Pax Am Days has eight songs, but a total of just 13 minutes, each song being only about a minute and a half long. The whole thing was recorded in two days.
  • Quite a lot of Crass's early songs fall under this trope, with several being shorter than a minute. On the other hand, later in their career they would tend to avert this, and they even recorded the longest punk song ever with Yes Sir, I Will.
  • blink-182 has the song "Brohemian Rhapsody," clocking in at 0:26 minutes. They also have "Family Reunion" (0:36 minutes), "Built this Pool" (0:16 minutes), "Happy Holidays, You Bastard!" (0:42 seconds), and "Generational Divide" (0:49).
  • Finnish band Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät's 2015 Eurovision entry "Aina mun pitää" clocks in at only 1:27, beating the UK's 1957 entry as the shortest Eurovision song.

    Avant Garde 
  • The Magnetic Fields:
    • The 1999 album 69 Love Songs dabbles with a huge range of styles and tropes, and has several songs hovering around the 1-minute mark; "Roses" clocks in at just 28 seconds.
    • The band's 2020 album Quickies is, as the title implies, entirely dedicated to short songs; only two are longer than 2.5 minutes and a whole bunch are shorter than a minute.
  • The Residents' The Commercial Album consists of 40 one-minute songs.
  • Tendon Levey seems to be all about cramming five minutes worth of content into one-minute songs.
  • One Second: A Compilation Album consists of over a hundred 1 second songs, with a total running time of about 2 minutes.
  • Nero's Day at Disneyland had a lot of really short tracks in their catalogue, including (but not limited to) "Godzilla Take Your Mask Off" (1:09), "A Theme for a Molting Russian Gentleman" (0:54) and "Family Lying Face Down in Living Room" (1:02).
    • The shortest track in the project's history is undoubtedly "Enter Text, Find Words" originally from a compilation CD called Triskaidekaphobia, entirely consisting of 13 second long music tracks.

    Folk / Folk-Rock 
  • Sufjan Stevens' Illinois! has a number of brief tracks (with overly-long titles like "A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons" or "One Last 'Whoo-hoo!' For The Pullman") ranging from 8 to 48 seconds long, which basically just serve as a coda for the preceding track. For some of these, you'd have to pay attention to your music player to even notice that they're a separate track.
  • Danielson: The first and last tracks of the double-album Tri-Danielson!!! are 2shooting long, and just consist of a crowd cheering and shouting the album title.
  • Matt Nathanson's song "Angel" is about 1 1/2 minutes long, while most of his songs are more "standard" length. It also has lyrics.
  • Bob Dylan, the Trope Maker for Epic Rocking, went way in the opposite direction on Nashville Skyline in 1969. It has 10 songs, with the longest being 3:41 and the shortest 1:32, with the entire album clocking in at 27:14. In comparison, his next album, the widely panned Self Portrait, is 73:15.
    • The followup to Self Portrait, New Morning, closes with "Father of Night", which at 1:27 is the shortest song he's released on a studio album.
  • A 1964 version of "Little Boxes" by a group called The Womenfolk runs just 1:03 and held the record for the shortest song to ever make the Billboard Hot 100 for over half a century, until it was broken by Pikotaro's "Pen Pineapple Apple Pen" (:45), then Kid Cudi's "Beautiful Trip" (:37),note then Jack Black's "Steve's Lava Chicken" from A Minecraft Movie (:34).
  • "Cast Me Away" by Over The Rhine clocks in at 45 seconds,

    Soundtracks 
  • The Title Theme Tune of The Babaloos is just over 20 seconds long- this lack of length was required as the episodes themselves are only five minutes.
  • Halo:
    • The Halo 3 soundtrack has "Legend" (0:43, for a small hidden scene after the credits) and the 0:29 "Movement" (which doesn't seem to have any reason for being there).
    • The first game's soundtrack had "Shadows", a 59-second "Psycho" Strings track that was even shorter in the actual game.
  • A huge number of songs from the Homeworld soundtrack, mostly for the small between-level cutscenes. They actually help hold the soundtrack together as an album rather well.
  • "Vitamin A", "Vitamin B", and "Vitamin C" from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack were used for eyecatches in the anime and are less than 10 seconds long.
  • Magicka: Vietnam soundtrack has "Welcome to the 'nam", a song that is less than two minutes long and inspired by Chuck Berry's Johhny B. Goode.
  • I Am So Sad, So Very Very Sad, from the Scott Pilgrim movie, takes longer to name than it does to play. The Cut Song We Hate You, Please Die is of similar brevity. ("Last Song Kills Audience" was renamed We Hate You, Please Die for pacing reasons.)
  • By most people's definition of "short", the vast majority of playable tracks in the BEMANI series, as well as other arcade rhythm games, fall under this, lasting typically around 90 seconds to two minutes, up to 2:30 in rare cases, in order to accommodate arcade games where the player is typically permitted three to five songs per credit. However, "Thank You For Playing" from the console version of GuitarFreaks & Drummania V3 is a shining example of this trope; it is a playable track that lasts only five seconds.
  • Tenacious D's "Destiny" and "The Divide" are both transition pieces from the movie and last around half a minute.
  • The Homestar Runner album Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits has several songs that are less than a minute, and only three songs pass the three-minute mark.
  • The main theme of Sonic Rivals 2, Race to Win, is only about a minute long. The entire Sonic Rivals series could count as well, with every song being 45 to 60 seconds long whereas modern Sonic songs are typically 2 to 3 minutes while theme music is 4 to 7 minutes.
  • Billy Corrigan's theme from The Chicago Code is 34 seconds long.
  • Cave Story: "Charge", which plays while fighting the second-to-final boss. One loop is about six seconds.
  • Deltarune: Most of the songs in the game are under 2 minutes. Some particularly short ones include "Your Power" (0:13), "A Real Boy!" (0:15), "Powers Combined" (0:16), "KEYGEN" (0:15), and "When I Get Mad I Dance Like This" (0:10).
  • Shrek 1: "March of Farquaad", the theme that plays in the titular antagonist's introduction scene, is only 38 seconds long (20 if you only count the organ part). The comically low length is a joke on Farquaad's small size.

    Other 
  • "They Got The Mustard Out" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Musical Episode, "Once More With Feeling".
  • Skinny Puppy did many minute or less length pieces, such as "Brap" on Remission, "Christianity" on Bites, and "Rain" on Rabies.
  • Short tracks on rap albums are more likely to be skits or interludes, but Ice-T's O.G. Original Gangster includes a few songs with actual rapping on them that are under two minutes: "Ziplock" is a minute and 20 seconds, "The House" is 57 seconds, and "Prepared To Die" is 39 seconds of rapid-fire a capella rapping.
  • George Strait's "Heartland", "The Big One", "We Really Shouldn't Be Doing This" and "Don't Make Me Come Over There and Love You" are just over 2 minutes each. They were released in 1993, 1994, 1998, and 2001, respectively, and are both unusually short for any era.
  • Tracy Byrd's "Drinkin' Bone" in 2003…
  • Clint Black's "One More Payment" in 1991
  • Garth Brooks' "Longneck Bottle" in 1997
  • Joe Nichols' "What's a Guy Gotta Do" in 2005
  • Diamond Rio's "Unbelievable" in 1998
  • Beck does this every now and then.
    • On his earliest releases (Golden Feelings, A Western Harvest Field by Moonlight, Stereopathetic Soulmanure, and his home demos), most of his songs were two minutes or shorter.
    • One Foot in the Grave, the longest song is three and a half minutes, with a majority of tracks around the two-minute mark.
  • Relient K has "Crayons Can Melt On Us For All I Care" on Five Score and Seven Years Ago, a ten-second song that appropriately only consists of the words "I just wasted ten seconds of your life."
  • Songs to Wear Pants To used to have a rule that all songs produced for the site would be a maximum of one minute and eleven seconds in length. Songs that are incredibly short even for those standards include "Don't Feel Bad" and "A Bug Fell In Love With A Cat".
  • The shortest song to hit #1 on the Billboard charts is "Stay" by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs from 1960 (1:37). The shortest Top 40 hit was Duane Eddy's 1959 instrumental "Some Kind-A Earthquake" (1:17).
  • One of the shortest classical music pieces, if not the shortest, is the 2nd movement of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, which is one bar long and consists only of a Phrygian half cadence. Most performances of the movement last 15 seconds or less.
  • You wouldn't think Medleys could fall on this page at all. You'd be wrong - some Nico Nico Douga medleys have been known to last less than one second! If you're looking for something longer, try this 50-second one.
  • David Byrne's album Feelings has Track 13, which is just 21 seconds long. It doesn't even officially have a name, because it's not listed on the back cover or the liner notes. It's more of a prelude to "They Are In Love" than a proper song.
  • "Gratitude" by India.Arie is only about a minute long.
  • The Tom Waits album The Black Rider has three pieces that clock in at about a minute. "Interlude" is eighteen seconds of gloomy trumpet.
  • Daniel Amos's:
    • ¡Alarma! has three. "C & D Reprise" (0:43), "Shedding the Mortal Coil" (1:20), and "Props" (1:58).
    • Doppelganger has "Hollow Man (Reprise)" (0:43) and "Autographs for the Sick" (1:40).
  • Thundercat's Drunk has 9 tracks under 2 minutes long, 3 of which are under one minute.
  • One famous alternative to Happy Birthday to You!.
    "This! Is! Your! Birthday song!
    It isn't very long!"
    ...
  • Sly and the Family Stone may have been the only ones to beat Grindcore at its own game, twenty years before Grindcore existed. The title track of There's A Riot Goin' On clocks in at 0:00!, which Sly Stone later explained was a symbolic gesture to express his opinion that "there should be no riots."
  • Tierra Whack's Whack World consists of fifteen songs in fifteen minutes, with each track being exactly one minute long.
  • Stephan Sulkes "Uschi" manages to squeeze three verses and three choruses into under two minutes.
  • The German country band Truck Stop has "Country-Kurz", their self-proclaimed "shortest country song in the world". It clocks in at 0:20, and it has got one line of lyrics.
  • The Avalanches have many short interludes;
    • Since I Left You: Avalanche Rock (0:20) and Pablo's Cruise (0:52)
    • Wildflower: The Leaves Were Falling (0:15), Park Music (0:54), and Over The Turnstiles (0:41)
    • We Will Always Love You: Carrier Waves (0:57), Star Song.IMG (0:10), Pink Champagne (0:12), and Dial D for Devotion (0:31)
  • The appropriately named The Shortest Song In The World comes in at 0.765 seconds long, although the title's a bit of a misnomer if one considers a song music with lyrics, it appears to be entirely instrumental.
  • Aesop Rock's "Flies", off of Spirit World Field Guide, is about him failing to rid his house of flies, and is only 46 seconds long. In an interview with FLOOD Magazine, he remarked that "some stuff doesn't need to be exhausted for two to three verses, but still deserves a song."
  • Another Country Music example, and another example called "The Shortest Song in the World", this one clocking in at :18, released by Hee Haw regular Kenny Price in 1970.
  • Jack Stauber's music as a whole is usually an example of this, with songs that are over a minute long being uncommon.
    • Taken to an extreme with his Micropop album under his Jack Stauber's Micropop alias, where almost every song is around 30-90 seconds long.
    • Under his normal name, several songs off of the "Viator" album only last around a minute, the shortest being "Gnocchi" at only 9 seconds long. Examples from other albums include "Mindsight" at 1:54 and "Lynn" at 1:39.
  • Limmy's Show has "Wrong Way Down a One Way Street", which is loved by everyone who hears it and becomes a huge hit, despite consisting of just the title and a single chord.

  • Bull of Heaven, whose releases normally fall on the other end of the scale, have released a few songs that qualify as miniscule by their standards:
    • 288: Four Years Ago? Opium. runs for just 3:13. This is notable because the release immediately before, 287: n, runs for over 10 billion years.
    • In 2010, a series of "anti-music" albums starting with 137: The Meaning of Hysterical Symptoms were posted onto Bull of Heaven's website. These albums have covers and titles, but no music file associated with said album. Despite the lack of any music, "durations" running into the negatives were still listed. 137 runs for 00:00, and the next album (211: With Muffled Sound Obliterating Everything) runs for -47:22.
    • A rather odd example is 289: CALCULOR, for which the length varies depending on what number or equation the viewer puts into it. Due to technical limitationsnote , even massive numbers won't last longer than a few seconds.
    • The first few parts of their lcm() series of Flash loops are short due to containing a small number of samples. These entries are 238 - 2 (0:02), 239 - lcm(2,3) (0:06), 240 - lcm(2,3,5) (0:30), and 241 - lcm(2,3,5,7) (3:30). The next release, 242 - lcm(2,3,5,7,11), runs for 30 minutes, and it only skyrockets from there.
  • Emily Montes' albums have various songs that are often very short, ranging from a few seconds to less than a minute. The shortest in her discography is "Intro" from Emily Rose, which clocks in at 5 seconds.
  • As part of his Let's Play of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Luke Westaway decided to write an original song for the most prominent boss of each episode. In one episode, the only boss of note that he hadn't written a song for already was resident Zero-Effort Boss the Mist Noblenote . The song, in its entirety, lasts less than ten seconds:
    I am! The Mist Noble! Do you wanna know why I play this flute?! It's because- ahh!

 
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Video Example(s):

So Sad - Crash and the Boys

Crash and the Boys' (first) entry at the battle of bands only lasts about 5 seconds (about 4.6 seconds longer than the comics' version, at that). As Wallace puts it, "It's not a race, guys!".

Alternative Title(s): Minuscule Rocking

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So Sad - Crash and the Boys

Crash and the Boys' (first) entry at the battle of bands only lasts about 5 seconds (about 4.6 seconds longer than the comics' version, at that). As Wallace puts it, "It's not a race, guys!".

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