As you age, three things are true:
Hair starts to grow in places where it never dared to before.
The Weather Channel takes on an oddly important role in your life.
You think music has gotten soooo much worse since when you were young.
That last one has been going on for generations. It’s not necessarily true, it’s just that no music is ever as meaningful as the stuff you listened to from about ages 12-25.
Having said all that, today’s music does seem to be missing something that made many songs in the past great: impenetrable lyrics. I don’t understand why everything today is so understandable.
Simon says
I’ve been proudly singing songs that I can’t comprehend for my entire life. You probably have too.
A perfect example is Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” When I hear it, I can’t help but belt it out. But do I have the first clue what I’m singing about? Nope.
The mama pajama rolled out of bed and she ran to the police station
When the papa found out he began to shout and they started the investigation
It’s against the law, it was against the law
What the mama saw, it was against the law
The song isn’t exactly gibberish; the words do form sentences. But when you hear those sentences strung together and try to make heads or tails of them, you might as well be Alan Turing trying to break the Enigma code.
This is a bit of an aside, but it’s nice that after all these years a song can still surprise me. Until about 15 minutes ago, I had no idea that the first word of this song was “The.” “Mama pajama” was strange enough. “The mama pajama” raises even more questions.
These are questions Simon didn’t care if you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out. I mean, look at this:
Whoa, in a couple of days, they come and take me away
But the press let the story leak
Now when the radical priest come to get me released
We was all on the cover of Newsweek
I’ve tried in vain to decipher this, complete with a Carrie Mathison wall full of photos, pushpins, and string. Who are “they”? What story? Radical priest? Why are they on the cover of Newsweek? And the biggest mystery of all: who the hell is Julio?
Magnifico!
According to a statistic I made up, the number of people who claim to have read Finnegans Wake is 10,000 times higher than the number of people who’ve actually read it. That’s because reading Finnegans Wake is like trying to find your way out of a fiery corn maze while blindfolded and on Ambien.
But if James Joyce had set some of that stream of consciousness to music, things would have been very different. Maybe Joyce would have written an incredible song that turned him into a heartthrob, with lasses “Dublin” up on his shillelagh, if you know what I mean.
Consider this: Beck’s “Loser” is a catchy song. It also sounds as if he threw dictionary pages into a box fan and taped together whatever scraps he could find around the room.
In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey
Butane in my veins, and I'm out to cut the junkie
With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables
Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose
If a stranger approached you and let loose that torrent of gobbledygook, you’d whip out the pepper spray. But those same words got Beck a Grammy nomination.
That was back when we were bullish on balderdash. Like these familiar songs:
“Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John (lyrics by Bernie Taupin)
Hey kids, shake it loose together
The spotlight’s hitting something
That’s been known to change the weather
We’ll kill the fatted calf tonight so stick around
You’re gonna hear electric music, solid walls of sound
This sounds like the disjointed ramblings of a cult leader. But so what? It reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart.
“I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles
Sitting on a cornflake
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you've been a naughty boy
You let your face grow long
Lennon and McCartney were musical geniuses, but could they also have been heat-stroke victims? Either way, “Walrus” is considered a classic.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me
(Galileo) Galileo, (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro magnifico
Admit it: you’ve sung this a million times and have never bothered to look up Scaramouche. Because it doesn’t matter. Rolling Stone ranked this number 17 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. Magnifico!
“Give It Away” by Red Hot Chili Peppers
I realize I don't want to be a miser
Confide with Sly, you'll be the wiser
Young blood is the lovin' upriser
How come everybody wanna keep it like the Kaiser?
If you’ve ever wondered what Dr. Seuss on meth sounds like, here you go. Nevertheless, this song won the Chili Peppers the Grammy for the Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocals.
Use your words
I’m in no position to call myself an expert on current music. Still, of the stuff I’ve heard over the past several years, there’s definitely weirdness, but I can’t recall any that go off the rails the way artists used to.
As an experiment, I looked up the lyrics of the current top 25 songs on the Billboard Top 100. It was depressing: all of them were entirely coherent.
Check out the chorus of the current #1 song, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey:
Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey
They know me and Jack Daniеl's got a history
There's a party downtown near 5th Street
Evеrybody at the bar gettin' tipsy
That’s not so much a rhyme scheme as a rhyme crime, but that’s beside the point. The most confusing thing here is “Shaboozey,” and that’s not even part of the song.
Here’s a message to today’s songwriters. Forget about things like “story,” “cohesion,” and “narrative arc.” Try it old-school for a change.
It’ll feel a little unnatural at first, so I’ll help get you started.
Get yourself a dictionary, a couple of catalogs—I’m using L.L. Bean and IKEA—and a handful of takeout menus. Then start mixing and matching words. You can pepper in verbs, articles, conjunctions, and all that stuff as needed later.
Here’s a sample verse I just put together:
Semiotic longjohns
Hyperbaric cold prawns
Flannel fennel futons
Have a side of neutrons
Now go on, and in the words of the Talking Heads, stop making sense.
Goo goo g’joob.
Even without words, there's plenty of music that goes off the rails. In jazz, we have Miles Davis pushing boundaries, while in classical, composers like Stravinsky and Charles Ives have created works that defy conventional understanding. Music without words doesn’t always make sense, but perhaps that’s precisely the point.
Can confirm: have belted out scaramouche countless times and have never once wondered about the meaning until now. 🤔