10 Songs That Are Meant To Confuse You
Putting Your Mind Through a Blender.
For any good song, the melody is the one thing that catches you the first time around. In pretty much any genre, all you need is a nice enough hook to reel the audiences in before putting in the clever bits after the fact. When it comes to these songs though, they have a bit of a different flair going on with them.
As far as the typical song structure is concerned, you can throw that idea out the window for these songs, as most of them are playing by their own rules regardless of whether they would get famous or not. From the worlds of hip hop, rock, pop, and everything in between, these songs are designed to make you question what the hell they're doing from the minute they start. Even though this kind of stuff sounds like it should be reserved for the avant garde side of music, it actually goes over pretty well if you're willing to go along for the ride.
As much of a rollercoaster these songs may feel like at times, they never stop being interesting throughout their duration, having just as much confidence in their delivery as they do dramatic left turns. Forget the idea of a bait and switch, these songs are practically a maze when you try to break them down.
10. Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles
As the rock landscape was slowly starting to shift at the turn of the '60s, the Beatles were clearly the musical freak of nature leading the charge. Even with new and interesting genres and subgenres popping up left and right, the Fabs always maintained an ability to be ahead of the curve, if records like Sgt. Pepper's and the White Album were any indication. Before any of that though, Tomorrow Never Knows shows the moment where the Beatles past the point of no return.
To put it bluntly, this is not the first Beatles song anyone should learn on guitar, considering it's nothing but just one chord for the duration of the tune. While the backing track of horns does switch the chords every now and again, this entire composition comes back to just one droning sound from an Indian tambura, with John Lennon's voice being compressed to all hell on a speaker that was primarily used for church organs.
Even beyond the musical bits, there's everything from backwards guitar bits sprinkled in to tape loops brought in by Paul McCartney that add even more of a hypnotic flavor to the whole thing. By the time they were finally finished, George Martin insisted that this track could never be performed live considering how much production would have to go into recreating it. For as much you might like to experiment, you've reached a different level of weird when you can't even play what you wrote.