Many song lyrics will send your grammar check into haywire status. Occasionally, song lyrics in the wild are confusing. Like they need to be returned to the music from which they escaped.
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Green was the first R.E.M. album to feature printed lyrics. Singer Michael Stipe preferred listeners to interpret the words rather than read them. This year, Sabrina Carpenter’s hit “Espresso” featured the beautifully strange line: That’s that me espresso. Also, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” contains seemingly random words but that didn’t stop it from shifting pop culture in the direction of Seattle.
Songwriting often skips clarity for melody. For good reason. Vocal melodies have limited syllables, and often, the tune takes precedence over the grammar. In an exercise of bending language to the will of rock stars, here are three of the weirdest rock lyrics in music. Consider this a celebration of their strangeness.
The three songs below may contain curious lines, but the first one is snarling psychedelia from the greatest band the world’s ever known; the second is a New Order and E Street Band mash-up out of Las Vegas; and finally, the third is the shiniest of Britpop gems from a Manchester legend.
Where were you while we were getting high?
“I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles from Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
John Lennon said the first line arrived following a weekend acid trip. No one is surprised by this information. Biographer Hunter Davies said Lennon wrote down “daft words,” searching for a rhythm. Regarding the song’s meaning, Davies wrote in his 1968 book The Beatles that Lennon said to a friend, “Let the f–kers work that one out, Pete!” Lennon’s psych-jam appeared in The Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour. It also appeared as the B-side to the linguistically simpler “Hello, Goodbye.”
I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’joob
“Human” by The Killers from Day & Age (2008)
Singer Brandon Flowers said the song’s famously dubious line was inspired by a Hunter S. Thompson quote: We’re raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line. “Human” is the first single from The Killers’ third album Day & Age. The band arrived in 2004 with the colossal post-punk and synth-pop renaissance album Hot Fuss. “Human” is the zoomed-out existentialism of Bruce Springsteen’s hope-in-this-run-down-town nostalgia.
Are we human
Or are we dancer?
“Champagne Supernova” by Oasis from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)
Sometimes you don’t need to know a song’s meaning. It’s an obvious anthem, especially when experienced inside a stadium of punters singing the thing at the tops of their lungs. The line in question references Lord Belborough’s butler Brackett from a 1969 British TV series for kids called Chigley. When a critic asked Noel Gallagher about the line’s meaning, Gallagher responded, “I don’t know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.”
Slowly walking down the hall
Faster than a cannonball
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