10 Weirdest Rock Songs By Legendary Artists

Even in a genre as big as rock and roll, you can normally confine bands to specific genres. Regardless of what instrument they play or what kind of aesthetic that they're going for, you can normally get a good idea of what style they fit into based on a few songs. For everything that occupies this list though, it may as well not even have a genre.

From one track to the next, these are some of the most off the wall songs that have ever been part of mainstream albums, standing right alongside knockout singles or leading the pack on their own. And these aren't just coming from arthouse weirdos like Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa either. Most of these artists have had many hit records in the past, only to suddenly come up with songs that no one would have even dreamt of at the time or since.

Compared to the usual top 40 songs that populate stations around the world, these are the ones that make you do a double take to your speakers as you wonder just who the hell you are listening to. Weird does not necessarily mean bad though, and every one of these songs has been either influential or at the very least a good time to listen to throughout its run length. If rock is supposed to be about pushing boundaries, this is basically pushing the genre right off a cliff.

In a post Nevermind world, Nirvana could have released anything that they wanted to and it would have sold like gangbusters. Since Kurt Cobain singlehandedly changed the rock community overnight, all eyes were on him to see what new direction that the grunge bandwagon was going to take next. It was time to see what you could get away with, and Nirvana tested that theory many times on In Utero.

As much as song snippets like Very Ape or tourette's could be seen as Nirvana's weirdest song, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is where things really start to go off the rails. From a raw sonic standpoint, never has a song title not matched up to its actual sound, as Kurt makes caustic noise on his guitar before going into a proto metal style riff through most of the verses. Once things mellow out though, Kurt is just getting started, stringing together lyrics that paint a sad picture of just how much he was hurting after the band's rapid success.

Compared to the hints of beauty on the rest of the record, this almost feels like the band are halfway to making a good Nirvana track with elements of torture sprinkled into the mix as well. Kurt could still write hit songs, but this was probably a more accurate depiction of what was going on behind the scenes. Underneath all of those platinum records, things were slowly starting to fall apart.