Why exclude “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? It’s not actually all that hard to understand.
And I never even listened to it that much. I’ve never been able to understand why that song, in particular, got such a reputation for being incomprehensible, when there are so many less comprehensible songs out there.
What about Bad Brains?
Ina kwest, ina test, ana owin a-seen
en evaboda debegoda gada geb yoseb
en eba …(okay, I honestly forgot this line…)
hep yoteb e yelp
so teme why
deja hatalie
an tritamayme aconfus aba dayouesay
whenda fat uda mada
isa jesdo ka
taundasta ocompahe asinga wudisay
That’s just the first ten seconds. I can sing along with the whole album but damn if I know what 50% of it is.
chronos, with all due respect, I think you have it wrong
With the lights out
It’s less dangerous
Here we are now
Entertain us
I feel stupid
and contagious
Here we are now
Entertain us
A mulatto
Alibino
A mosquito
My libido
Going off of memory here… Agreed though, not that hard to understand, just nonsensical. See Pixies.
A local classic rock station had a daily phone in contest called “What’d He Say?”, where they would get listeners to try to decipher the lyric of the day.
Steven Stills Love the One You’re With…first line, last verse. The caller thought it was “Why are you always/walkin into walls”.
It’s actually “Turn your heartache/right into joy”/
The only DMR song I know is “Come On Eileen” and when that came on the radio the other die, I realized that pretty much the only words I could figure out were the ones in the title of the song.
Well, you can hear a bit on iTunes if you search the music store. And, there’s a short .au clip on the LSC’s website, though it doesn’t really do justice to the full composition.
A friend of mine is a big fan of some Celtic folk singer whose name escapes me. The singer was known to have a wee bit of a problem with the bottle, and it showed in his singing. My friend could never make out the lyrics. Then one night he was out, and had a few bourbons before driving home. He popped in that CD, and lo and behold, he could understand everything!
I think I had heard **A Hard Day’s Night ** for 40 years, and countless times, when suddenly the light dawned and the line “But why on earth should I moan” became clear. The first 10,000 times I’d heard it – unintelligible.
90% of the Mazzy Star catalog. I think a few songs off of “She Hangs Brightly” actually sound as if Hope Sandoval isn’t singing with a mouthful of wet tissue.
I was singing along in the car the other day to some Def Leppard when it occured to me that i’d be hard pressed to actually make out words of any sort for most of the song Rocket (Rocket…yeah…say the lange a laa!). Then I thought about it some more and realized that a great deal of Def Leppard is total gibberish.
That’s probably apocryphal; I saw R.E.M. on their Document and Green tours, and have heard numeorus bootlegs from the time, and he never had any trouble remembering the words live (although I do remember on the Green tour he brought out a music stand that held sheets of paper supposedly with lyrics written down for him for some song or other, but I always figured it was an affectation).
I just thought of another one (it was playing on my mp3 player): Husker Du’s version of “Eight Miles High”. If I hadn’t already known the Byrds’ original, I’d probably never have been able to make out a single word.