10 Songs That Are Impossible To Understand
The Best Odes to Nonsense.
Most great songwriters have a unique way of drawing a straight line through their song. Regardless of what kind of window dressing you want to put on everything else, the greatest storytellers manage to at least put you in the mindset of their characters without having to show you all of the intricate details behind their lives. Then again, it sometimes helps when the songwriter gives us at least something to work with.
Across every single generation, there have been songs that came along that make absolutely no sense no matter how hard you try. Despite sounding utterly transcendent whenever they come up on shuffle, the actual meaning behind these songs have been lost to history, with people only guessing what they are actually about. Even that seems to be a fruitless endeavor, with most of these lyric sheets dealing more with word association than some actually coherent thought from one page to the next.
You probably won't find luck asking the writers of these tracks either. Chances are they'll tell you to leave it up to the listener's interpretation, which is just a fancy way of saying that they don't have a clue what it's about either. For as much as someone like Bob Dylan might get lauded for his lyrics, sometimes all you need is a good tune to make people pay attention.
10. Loser - Beck
The entire decade of the '90s didn't really rely on the intellectual side of the spectrum. From the styles of grunge populating the airwaves to the strange ventures into art rock, you would consider yourself lucky to come across any song that made even a shred of sense. If you wanted the king of disconnected phrases though, you'd only need to look to Beck on Loser.
Being the main song that made him a star in the age of irony, Loser is almost a genre car crash as it is, having everything from backwards choruses to a hip hop influenced DIY production centered around an acoustic slide guitar lick. That sentence alone is already a bit of a car crash to take in...just wait until you actually listen to what's coming out of his mouth.
Starting from living in the time of chimpanzees, Beck pretty much uses every psuedo rap verse as an exercise in word association, as he talks about everything from a man being hung with a guitar string and spray painting vegetables to even getting crazy with the cheese wizz. As much as this song isn't really that coherent, it's placed so low because that actually might be the point. It sure as hell isn't all that intellectual, but when you strip away the words and leave the aesthetic, this is the '90s in one song.