A friend who had a radio show back in college used to start it off with “Vista” by Guadalcanal Diary.
America?
Really?
It seems very straight-forward to me. Nothing nonsensical at all about it.
Some explanation here:
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/32487/
Camp songs count? Ever so often I would try to find a song, but the words are so nonsensical, I have yet to find it. I sing parts of it in the shower rather often.
Flee Fly Flo is the runner up. The second video from this page is quite similar to how we sung it in scouts.
Several Beatles songs have been mentioned, but so far I haven’t seen “Sun King.”
(And, while they’re not songs, there’s a lot of nonsense in Lennon’s books Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write.)
I don’t know of any good nonsense lyrics that Lennon wrote after the Beatles. But Paul (and Linda) McCartney’s “Monkberry Moon Delight” would qualify.
The “Blinded By the Light” lyric that really picks me is maybe also the most horrid one, capped off by the most painfully-delayed verb:
But mommaaaaaaaa, that’s where the fun iiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssss
oh, and then into chopsticks, and then “AAAAAAA - AAAAAA - AAAAAA - AAAAAA”.
Another pick-any-song band: Pere Ubu
If anyone can make sense of what David Thomas is going on about, here, you have an IQ of roughly 250.
Loituma: Ievan Polka
It isn’t actually nonsense other than the parts that are ‘scat’ but indistinguishable from Finnish anyway.
I love Bob, Weird Al’s parody of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Bonus: every line is a palindrome.
Joshua Rifkin adapted a passage from In His Own Write as a baroque-style recitative:
@markn_1 I love that one too. Ever seen it played backwards?
Warning - I have weird/eclectic tastes in music.
Caramba - Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot
Sigur Rós - Sæglópur
Part of the song is in Icelandic, part of it is intentional gibberish that is meant to sound somewhat like Icelandic (it has been referred to as “Hopelandic”)
From Wikipedia:
Number 9 Dream
does surrender by cheap trick count?
Okay, good one! That one (like “Sun King”) is an example of a song that includes nonsense words, as opposed to a song where all the words are real English words and the nonsense comes from how they’re put together. We’ve gotten examples of both kind of nonsense in this thread.
Why that one? The imagery may be in snippets, but it makes sense (at least to me.) Basically, you think your parents are a bunch of squares, but actually, they’re quite hip with a lot of experiences they went through in life.
Only the part that implies Rick Nielsen may have once been a KISS fan.
I don’t see that being odd as all. I didn’t listen to Kiss, but a lot of my musical heroes liked them.
Just my personal take as a teen of the ‘70s when Cheap Trick was at the top of my list of favorite bands and KISS was at the very bottom.
Little nightmare fuel for you:
Speaking of, I used to be absolutely terrified of the covers of my cousin’s KISS records as a child.
Yikes! Keep your pix of Jello Biafra at Club 54 to yourself, please.
This is feckin’ brilliant. Plus my mom’s name, Naomi, is in the lyrics.