10 Weirdest Rock Songs That Became Hits

As the years of Billboard go on, it's almost like the entire mindset behind a hit song can be turned into a science. Even though not every band has to sound the same, it can get a little bit grating hearing the same type of song over and over again reaching the top of the charts. Then there are those few songs that you never forget from the first moment you hear them.

Though these songs might have been way too weird for radio, they managed to find some time on the charts regardless, baffling the hell out of everyone who heard them on their drive to work every morning. That's not to say that all of these are tuneless or anything. Some of them do have your traditional structures of rock songs, but they are going at it from an extremely weird direction, whether that be with the music that's in the background or the topic they decide to write about in the song.

Then again, it would be generous even saying some of these songs have topics, going from one insane sequence to another with virtually no let up. That's the nature of the music business at work though. We might like to predict it, but this is the Wild West of the entertainment industry, and there are no rules in what exactly makes your song memorable.

The mainstream charts have always had a bit of a rocky relationship with heavy metal. Even when you had Metallica "selling out" with the Black Album in the '90s, something like Sad But True was still a little too evil for the moms of the world to really approve of. So how did we go from the hard rock version of metal to full on screaming being on the charts just a decade later?

When the nu metal boom first started to take over the world, it felt like Slipknot were supposed to be the cartoon version of that, until Iowa came and blew everything wide open. The thought alone of an album like this selling in the mainstream is unthinkable, let alone inching its way to the top of the album charts. That means there had to be some sort of crossover, right? No...if anything, it seemed to get that much heavier with age.

On the now classic Left Behind, there's barely any melodic singing throughout the entire song, with Corey Taylor shrieking his guts out on almost every single chorus. That was premeditated too, since producer Ross Robinson insisted on getting more gutteral so the entire song hit you like a smack in the face. First we started with Black Sabbath's bluesy take on hard rock, and the '00s opened with one of the heaviest records entering the Billboard charts. Fasten your seatbelts, kiddies. The age of heavy was about to take over the world.