The words to “Iko Iko” are supposed to mean something, but no one is sure what. The chorus is a mixture of creole, cherokee, and who knows what else, complicated by the fact that it’s been going through over 60 years of what is essentially “telephone.”
“Talk-in’ 'bout, Hey now ! Hey now ! I-KO, I-KO, un-day
Jack-a-mo fee-no ai na-na. - Jock-a-mo fee na-na”
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want,
So tell me what you want, what you really really want,
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna,
I wanna really really really wanna
Zigazig ha.
– “Wannabe,” Spice Girls
Zigazig, of course, being a euphemism for anal sex.
Ha! Too timely. I was playing Blondie’s “Rapture” for my kids tonight, and realized I didn’t know as many of the lyrics as I thought I did. Turned out that was an internal rhyme near the end of the song. 
Oddly enough, at times it sounded to me (when the song was popular) as though they were saying “Soy un ganador” which has the opposite meaning. Always bugged me.
That was one of them. I looked it up and they actually have a list of several songs, none of which were the ones I was thinking of!
[ol]
[li]Roy Milton and His Solid Senders, “The Hucklebuck” (1949)[/li][li]Jerry Lee Lewis, “Lewis Boogie” (1956)[/li][li]Frank Sinatra, “The Man in the Looking Glass” (1965)[/li][li]Ike & Tina Turner, “Tinaroo” (1963)[/li][li]Parliament, “Ride On” (1975)[/li][/ol]
For the record, my songs were:
[ol]
[li]Rapture[/li][li]Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five - The Message[/li][li]Mission of Burma - Nancy Reagan’s Head[/li][/ol]
So 8 songs.
Heh, on the Rapture page, they link to a SDMB thread.
BTW, another WTF lyric is “Gunter gleiben glauchen globen” from Def Leppard’s Rock of Ages and later sampled in the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly for a White Guy.”
I heard a story decades ago that it was left over from a slave song and that it had meant “I go, I go one day.” This is one of those pre-internet rumors, so it was probably something my sister heard on the radio during a brief period when the song was in circulation again in the popular culture.
I’ve also heard it as sac-ro-SI-li-ac, although the spelling you give seems to be the actual medical term. It turns up in songs about dancing, presumably dancing that involves the spine, like the Sacroiliac Swing.
Oh, here’s one that gave me fits for a while:
In the Classics song Cinderella I though I distinctly heard the term “Galeb duhr” which is a creature in Dungeons & Dragons. The song dates well before D&D, but I couldn’t find any evidence that any such name was given to any creature before then. All roads led back to D&D. So, why this reference from the 50’s? Arrrgh!
One day, when the song was playing without me concentrating on it, I heard the line as “gay laughter”. They had shifted the stress to the last syllable to make it scan. GAY-laugh-TER.
If you’re going to count humorous ones like that you also have to count “It’s hard to bargle nawdle zouss” from Smells Like Nirvana.
The Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About A Mover”.
The general consensus is that this is either a “cleaned up” version or misheard interpretation of someone’s comment that “she’s a body mover”.
Would “Pompatus” be a proper ancient Roman name?
Pompatus of Love +1: Gives +1 Attraction to bearer.
I’ve always wondered if the lyrics to The Beatles “Come Together” really mean anything, or if they just sound like they do.
Duran Duran lyrics seem like complete gibberish most of the time to me.
I don’t know what made you bring this old thread up but keep on chooglin’
Only for a zombie.
Don’t see what’s so opaque about this one - a flurry of activity in the hedgerows indicates that the denizens of it - i.e. the fairy folk - are doing a bit of spring cleaning in anticipation of the arrival of their queen.
Lennon’s #9 Dream from the Walls and Bridges album (1974).
He said it came to him in a dream and has no meaning.
[quote=“thelurkinghorror, post:26, topic:745124”]
[li]Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five - The Message[/li][/QUOTE]
While reading this zombie I too was thinking of this and it brought up another line in the song, which apparently is:
Some sources have it as “so so so kitty”, but none of them have it as “She went to the city and got ‘social security’”, which seemed like a euphemism for getting a pimp (i.e. as in you could tell the cops you were on disability which would explain the lack of a job, in addition to whatever physical security a pimp supposedly provides.)
I’ll just go ahead and mention “Yellow Ledbetter” from Pearl Jam…