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Many villains, especially from musicals or Disney animation, have impressive songs in which they boast about how good it feels being evil, or that use to expose their Evil Plan.

But there are also villains that don't have a song. While The Hero and his or her companions have their own musical numbers, the villain doesn't sing a single note. This choice can be made for various reasons: to show that the villain is a Serious Business individual, to highlight his or her scary nature, or maybe because the villain has a bad voice. It could also have happened that the villain was originally meant to have a song, but for various reason it ended up being cut.

Remember: this trope applies when there's the lack of a Villain Song in a work in which such a song would be expected.

Contrast Villain Song. Could overlap with Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor, but not always. Evil Is Cool and Evil Is Hammy have less chance to apply to a villain who follows this trope.

Examples of No Song for the Wicked include:


Film - Animated[]

Film - Live Action[]

  • Singin' in the Rain: Lina Lamont has no singing number, since her voice is really awful. It should be remembered, however, that Jean Hagen (the actress portraying her) was a good singer.
  • In the movie version of Oliver!, Bill Sykes never sings, although other people sing about him. In the stage version, instead, he does.
  • In the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch doesn't get to sing. It's worth noting, however, that her counterpart in The Wiz does have a song.
    • And then there's Wicked, where the Witch gets buckets of songs and her antagonist the Wizard gets to sing as well.
    • Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote some new songs for the stage version of "The Wizard of Oz", including a song for the Witch called "Red Shoes Blues". The song is better than the title suggests and it basically opens the second act.

Live Action TV[]

  • There are many fans of Buffy who see the appeal of both the Musical Episode "Once More With Feeling," and the villainous activities of the Trio of Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan. Such fans would, no doubt, have loved for the episode to have a Villain Song by the Trio. The writers surely could have come up with something good, and of course the actors were all guest stars who were probably completely available for an episode in that season. No doubt, though, it would have been too difficult, and involved sacrificing too much of the screen time used for other stuff, to rewrite the episode in such a way that it included the Trio. But the magical effect that caused everyone to burst into song was operating throughout Sunnydale, so of course there must have been some such song that happened off-screen, which was not recorded by the TV show--but that's exactly the kind of thing Fan Fiction is for...

Western Animation[]

  1. And her voice actor is actually singing both parts