10 iconic lyrics that don’t actually make any sense
When John Lennon went down the route of nonsense poetry with strange assortments like ‘I Am the Walrus’ he begot a weird revolution that has impacted popular music forevermore. He opened the door for a new form of lyrical ambiguity and a swathe of lines like “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave” have followed his liberty-taking ways. At least with the Eagles example above, there is a sense that the lyrics denote a sentiment of spiritual inescapability, but for others offering up meaning is nearly impossible.
In fact, by the 1980s, songs came under scrutiny for allegedly sharing hidden messages with the impressionable youth. Bands like Judas Priest came under fire from the Christian right for apparently slipping in subliminal satanic messages urging young fans to commit suicide. Their frontman, Rob Halford, sensibly pointed out the rational argument of why the hell would we want to kill off our fanbase, if anything, the subliminal messages would be urging fans to spread the word and buy more records.
Naturally, this was purely a symptom of the overstimulated minds of heretics, but it would not have been possible in the simple same days of the pre pop culture past. If Bob Dylan brought a new sense of irony to lyric writing, a lot of other acts took his double meanings and obfuscated them in weird ways. And by weird ways, I mean that often the intent doesn’t shine through, and the words failed to make sense. With Lennon, nonsense was the aim anyway, but others have provided poetry that fails to translate from their minds.
Below we’ve curated a few golden examples of these that have largely gone unnoticed. From the closing line of The Beatles’ back catalogue to a truly baffling yet ubiquitous line that surely left Elton John looking at his lyric-writer Bernie Taupin inquiring, ‘Is this a first draft?’ these words could certainly do with some work.
10 iconic lyrics that don’t actually make any sense:
‘Your Song’ – Elton John
“If I was a sculptor, but then again, no, or a man who makes potions in a travelling show…”
Woh Elton, before you get onto your transient alchemy work, I believe you were going to say something about sculpting? Alas, you seem to have simply trailed off as though you’ve never even heard of the Bust of Nefertiti, and proceeded to tackle an even more hogwash vocation when there were so many other rhymes staring you down (‘if I was a writer, I’d pen you a poem’, no?).
Perhaps it’s a sign of the ultimate declaration of love that even the song written as a gift for his other half is unconsidered in a delirious whirlwind of emotion, but ultimately, that kind explanation doesn’t excuse it. This line remains one of the most baffling to ever pass under the nose of the public without much comment. It just goes to show how a great melody can mask just about anything.
‘The End’ – The Beatles
“In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make…”
This lyric has almost become a meta tagline for The Beatles, and it secretly doesn’t really make that much sense. I suppose it’s trying to convey the moral that you reap what you sow, but given that lovemaking denotes either the momentary act of coitus or ‘making’ in the sense that you craft something into existence, neither involves putting something out into the world and having it come back to you in an equal share.
Perhaps that’s pedantic, but as far as closing lines go, it’s far from the neatest on record. While the intention might shine through, something like “In the end, the love you pocket is equal to the love you put forth,” would’ve done the job with a bit more grammatical coherence. And as one final insult to the most praised band around, take and make seem to be the wrong way around; focus on what you put out before you start grabbing handfuls of harmony.
‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ – Bob Dylan
“The handmade blade, the child’s balloon, eclipses both the sun and moon…”
Kurt Vonnegut once told Hustler, “The Beatles have made a substantial contribution. Bob Dylan, however, is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.” It is lines like this one that the late, great Vonnegut must have been referring to. Oddly enough, Dylan opines it to be one of his best, and while to him it might have some sort of mystic meaning, to the rest of us, it’s nonsense amid a masterpiece that otherwise has a lot to say about the world.
Vonnegut might be a master in his own right, but Dylan’s gibberish-to-good-line ratio tips the scales towards the greatest songwriter of all time direction. And this line later in the same track is testimony to that: “While one who sings with his tongue on fire, Gargles in the rat race choir, Bent out of shape by society’s pliers, Cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.”
‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – Procol Harum
“One of sixteen vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast, and although my eyes were open wide, they might have just as well been closed…”
Your eyes were open, but they may as well have been closed? You and me both, Keith Reid, you and me both. The lyricist told Uncut that he “was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story.” That much is obvious from the strange words that continually mention boats and seafaring without really much explanation as to why. It would seem that the operative word in his explanation is trying.
As Reid continued: “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it.”
‘Time’ – Pink Floyd
“Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain…”
I’m guessing that sunshine on this occasion means indoor lighting or some other electronic illumination that allows you to shelter from the outside world but actually results in wallowing. If that is the case then it’s far from clear, and while not everything in music has to be patently obvious, the so-called art of ambiguity has let a lot of musicians off the hook for overly loose liberties.
The rest of the song might deliver a lyrical wallop about wasting time, but this bewildering line is as unintentionally ironic as the solid minute that the band waste on a god-awful intro comprised purely of a ticking clock.
‘Life on Mars’ – David Bowie
“It’s a God-awful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair, but her mummy is yelling ‘No’, and her daddy has told her to go…”
Is this line about the bewildering blind navigation of adolescence or just Bowie being Bowie? There’s an argument to be made for both with this opening sequence in ‘Life on Mars’. It’s certainly interesting, but when push comes to shove if you’re confidently offering up an explanation then you’re doing a lot of the legwork for the ‘Starman’.
Bowie himself said that the song was about “a sensitive young girl’s reaction to the media”, he also added, “I think she finds herself disappointed with reality.” The pertinent phrase there is I think. On the surface, this opening line might be about a girl arguing with her parents, but there is no doubt that it’s a very murky surface to try and decipher, after all, even Bowie seems slightly befuddled.
‘Each Small Candle’ – Roger Waters
“Not the torturers will scare me, Nor the body’s final fall, Nor the barrels of death’s rifles, […] but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world…”
While this one may be clear, what Waters essentially does is list a slew of cruel indifferences and then claims that none of them scare him, only the cruel indifference of the world in general can do that. In essence, he’s saying that he can grin and bear specific truths, but unspecific overarching ones are too much for him to face.
Waters is not fazed by death, just everything that leads to it. However, this first verse fades out to a specific tale of kindness before the true moral of the song is poetically brought to the surface: “Each small candle lights the dark side of every human mind.” In short, as the Dylan-detracting Vonnegut once said: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
‘Black Skinhead’ – Kanye West
“They say I’m possessed, it’s an omen, I keep it 300 like the Romans…”
West was a never a man likely to let a wild historical inaccuracy get in the way of a good rhyme. King Leonidas of Sparta was by no means associated with the Romans so this lyric is as sensical as saying “They say I’m possessed, it’s an omen, I keep it 300 like Gary Oldman”.
Nevertheless, he has been more inaccurate in the past. He did, after all, tweet the following accusation about Elon Musk: “Am I the only one who thinks Elon could be half-Chinese? Have you ever seen his pics as a child? Take a Chinese genius and mate them with a South African supermodel and we have an Elon.” But at least he also admitted: “You should only believe about 90% of what I say.” Maybe that itself was something we shouldn’t believe and the actual figure is closer to 10%.
‘It’s Hot’ – Jay-Z
“Thirty-eight revolve like the sun round the Earth…”
I’d love to say that contextually this comes out as a clever allegory. Sadly, it is merely a medieval scientific faux pas. Jay-Z has never publicly commented on this first-grade error so it’s unclear whether there is some sort of double meaning, but he’d do very well to justify it.
In his defence, he does get through a good thousand words in the lyrics to this track so it’s maybe more understandable, but that really is offering a very kind get-out-of-jail card to the rapper. If Carl Sagan was alive today, he’d have died of despair having heard this and he’d be orbiting around in his grave.
‘The Great Beyond’ – R.E.M.
“I’ve watched the stars fall silent from your eyes, All the sights that I have seen…”
In a fashion that was brought to the fore in nonsensical style by Yes, Michael Stipe has a tendency to write words based on feeling and melodic fit more so than fine-tuned meaning. If anyone anywhere can explain what this opening gambit means, then they are owed a pint. The bewilderment is only compounded by the fact that they don’t seem intentionally absurdist—they read more like a reconstructed verse of pop song platitudes.
Stipe once told Salon: “Lyric writing is not easy, and I don’t need a pat on the back for it, but it’s just a really different thing to work with words and ideas and narratives, than putting chords together and creating and arranging music. The music speaks to a very different part of our brain and our heart than other mediums.”
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