I grew up a fan of Elton John, and while most people just love to blather on about what a brilliant lyricist Bernie Taupin is, I’ve always found his work to be rather inconsistent. Just have a gander at his work on Alice Cooper’s From The Inside album. It’s no Rocket Man. Gawd, absolute bullshit. For every Your Song, there’s a Dirty Little Girl. For every Someone Saved My Life Tonight, a Jamaica Jerk-Off.
Truthfully, I don’t really care an awful lot about lyricists in general — and lots of bands have them. Elton, Rush, Grateful Dead, King Crimson. I mean, I appreciate great lyrics. Perhaps more importantly — bad lyrics will put me off a song immediately and entirely. Even so, it’s the music which is central to me. When I write and record my own stuff — the words and vocals are always the very last thing I do. Maybe if I was a decent singer that would be different, but I digress.
When it comes to Taupin lyrics, one stands above all others as his weirdest: Solar Prestige A Gammon from 1974’s Caribou:
“Oh ma cameo molesting
Kee pa a poorer for tea
Solar prestige a gammon
Lantern or turbert paw kwee.
“Solar prestige a gammon
cool kar kyrie kay salmon
Hair ring molasses abounding
Common lap kitch sardin a poor floundin.
“Cod ee say oo pay a loto
My zeta prestige toupee a floored
Ray indee pako a gammon
Solar prestige a pako can nord.”
OK, Bernie. Now we’re talking.
So I thought I’d examine some other popular lyrics which make no damn sense. Often those ones are the best. Like a guitar solo of words. For instance, there’s no question it’s the words which made Beck’s breakthrough hit Loser so popular. They mean nothing, but sound fantastic:
“Don’t believe everything that you breathe
You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve
So shave your face with some mace in the dark
Savin’ all your food stamps and burnin’ down the trailer park
Yo, cut it.”
You also can’t deny the lyrical brilliance of Little Richard — all the way back in 1957. There’s no question that the title and nonsense chorus was a major part of his signature song’s appeal.
“Tutti frutti, oh rootie
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom.”
Sometimes, the nonsensical lyrics have the opposite effect. Now, I’m not one of those music purist arseholes who refuses to recognize Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe as a great song — but… it does pique me a little when I hear the line: “Before you came into my life I missed you so bad.”
Other times, nonsense lyrics at least make you think or wonder if maybe you’re just missing the message. Maybe you’re taking things too literally, or not literally enough. There are reams of Bob Dylan lyrics like that. I’d be afraid to point at any of them and say “that doesn’t make sense!” because the moment I do, someone points out the clever thing he’s done which went over my head. Best to just keep quiet about it.
But I will venture a guess about some others. For example, I’d wager Robert Plant is trying to convey some sort of metaphor about himself and his semen in the lyrics of Dancing Days from Led Zeppelin’s 1975 double album Physical Graffiti. What else could “a lion standing alone with a tadpole in a jar” possibly mean? Plant has a mane of hair, so he’s the lion. Tadpoles kind of look like sperm. I dunno. It’s better than the stupid “we are your overlords” Immigrant Song.
One of those songs you can group in with Loser, perhaps, is Queen’s epic Bohemian Rhapsody. For the most part, the song does have a narrative lyric — it’s just the operatic middle section which has my stymied. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. Back then, all I cared about was that it sounded cool and — to my ear — like legitimate opera.As I got older and more well-read, I began to wonder about the actual words and their meaning. I have since come around to my original position, that they just sound cool. Let’s examine the section:
“I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?…
Scaramouche was an Italian comedy character from the 16th century, while a Fandango is that Spanish dance you’ve seen with castanets (or a ZZ Top album).
“(Galileo) Galileo, (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro, magnifico…”
Galileo Gaililei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, while Figaro was a fictional French barber in Pierre Beaumarchais’ 1775 play The Barber of Seville.
“Bismillah, no! We will not let you go!”
Bismillah is Arabic for “in the name of God” and can be found at the start of the Qur’an.
“Oh, mamma mia, mamma mia…
“My mother” in Italian.
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me .”
In Christianity, Beelzebub is used both as an alternate name for Satan as well as the name of a lesser devil. I believe this is traced back to both the New and Old Testament, where Beelzebub or Beelzul is referred to as the “prince of demons.”
Basically, Freddie Mercury has tossed a lovely word salad of historic, biblical and fictional names.
A few years earlier, Italian superstar Adriano Celentano tossed one entirely of made-up words. Celentano was under pressure to write a song in English, his management hoping for a breakthrough international hit. Celentano not only refused, but managed to write a hit in doing so. Prisencolinensinainciusol (1972) has a ridiculous title, chorus and is made up entirely of gibberish words which were crafted and sung in a way to make them sound like English-language pop lyrics. It’s genius.
“Uis de seim cius nau op de seim
Ol uait men in de colobos dai
Trrr ciak is e maind beghin de col
Bebi stei ye push yo oh.”
Meanwhile, John Lennon wrote I Am The Walrus with a similar intent to that of Celentano. Lennon, however, wasn’t pushing back at pressures to write an international hit — he was pushing back at music journalists who were forever examining and re-examining his lyrics looking for hidden meanings. For example, suggesting Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was about and took its title from LSD when, in fact, it was based on a drawing Lennon’s son Julian did of his classmate Lucy — literally in the sky, with diamonds. So Lennon wrote “I am the eggman, I am the walrus — goo go g’joob” as a deliberate red herring. Both Celentano and Lennon have awesome nonsense songs — but they’re quite deliberate. The nonsense is the whole point.
The Mars Volta are weird. You can almost pick any song at random. I grabbed one from 2005’s Frances The Mute: Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus. You just know from the title that it’s going to be bonkers, and it is:
“My, my, my nails peel back
When the taxidermist ruined
Goose stepped the freckling impatience
All the brittle tombs
Five hundred little q’s
I’m splitting hairs to match the faces.”
OK, guys.
Here’s another band who put a lot of thought into their wack — Dream Theatre. The title track from 2005’s Octavarium has a few verses of lyrics which are clever run-on sentences of mashed-together song titles, albums and band names:
“Flying off the handle be careful with
That axe Eugene gene the dance machine
Messiah light my fire gabba gabba
Hey hey my my generation’s home again.”
We’ll wrap this up by mentioning two songs which probably owe something to the aforementioned Tutti Fruitti. The first is Chuck Berry’s My Ding-A-Ling, which is basically a song about having your hands down your pants — thinly disguised as a song about a toy. But an actual excellent lyric — crafted by Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes — is Ministry’s 1992 banger, Jesus Built My Hot Rod:
“All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world
So there was only one thing that I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Ding dang a dong bong bing bong
Ticky ticky thought of a gun
Every time I try to do it all now baby
Am I on the run?”
It goes on for quite a while. But I’ll wait until your acid kicks in first.
• • •
Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
