8 Incredibly Popular Songs That Make No Sense
No, you're not the walrus, shut up.
You know what's a great way for a songwriter to avoid all that scrutiny and keep the public at arm's length? Don't share anything personal. Write about stuff that doesn't really represent you or your honest feelings. Write about other people and fictitious things. You know what's an even better way to keep all that personal judgment at bay? Write lyrics that are so incomprehensible, so baffling that the song plays out like a sonic Rubik's Cube where each little block is its own Sudoku puzzle. These types of songs aren't as rare as you may think, and an unfathomable number of them manage to become incredibly iconic, despite either making no !*$% sense or, at the very least, sounding like they make no !*$% sense. And it didn't matter. We ate it up anyways.
8. Beck - "Loser"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgSPaXgAdzE Although Beck's breakout tune is still widely considered one of the defining slack anthems of the 90s, the song wasn't written to be taken literally. In fact, the song was barely "written" at all. The first outline of "Loser" was formed during Beck's early show, where he would occasionally get a disinterested vibe from the audience and start making up ridiculous songs on the spot "just to see if they were listening." He used that ad-libbing process to build his rap-rock opus, recording the lyrics on the fly in his producer's kitchen. Beck had a basic idea for the song, and spent six hours fleshing out the rest of it with some improvised rapping about spray-painting vegetables and beefcake pantyhose. Apparently, he was attempting to emulate the style Public Enemy's Chuck D. Anyone who's heard the song knows that Beck is no Chuck D, which Beck also realized as soon as he heard his vocals on playback."When he played it back, I thought, 'Man, I'm the worst rapper in the world. I'm just a loser.'"And that immediately became the chorus, aka, The Only Part of "Loser" That Has Meaning.