Duran Duran’s “New Moon on Monday” contains the following line:
Shake up the picture
The lizard mixture
With your dance on the eventide
WTF?
“I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire, I got a cobra snake for a necktie
A brand new house on the road side, and it’s a-made out of rattlesnake hide
…
Who do you love?”
"Making believe this is what you’ve conceived
From your worst day, I’m takin a dive
Oh moving in line when you look back in time
To the first day, I’m taken I’m taken
And you and your sweet desire, don’t you do it, don’t you do it
you took me ohh, higher and higher baby
It’s a living thing,
It’s a terrible thing to lose,
It’s a given thing
What a terrible thing to lose"
"Keep a-wearing your bracelets and your new rara
Cross your heart with your living bra
Chimney sweep sparrow with guise
Judy in disguise, with glasses
Come to me tonight, come to me tonight
Taking everything in sight
Except for the strings on my kite"
I am the Walrus
Itchycoo Park
Have you ever been stoned? That describes the sensation perfectly. I can tell you, as there was a lot of weed in my freshman/sophomore college dorm, I spent a lot of time walking down long halls while stoned. And it seems to take forever, yet at the same time, it feels like you’re moving fast. Also, it’s “Slowly walking down the hall.”
He is stoned in a park where there are a lot of mosquitoes (or gnats more likely, as i tis England - real mosquitoes aren’t common in England, but gnats that leave an itchy bite are). Presumably you have to cross over a bridge to get into the park (the gnats suggest theer is water, anyway), and presumably there is a spired church or churches (or some other tall buildings, or maybe just trees - he is stoned, after all) nearby.
What did we do there?
We got high, high!
I already discussed I Am the Walrus upthread. (And of course, it is supposed to be nonsense.)
Pretty much every song from Yes in the 1970’s.
And although I know what the song “Blue Monday” is about overall, most of the verses make me go, “WTF?” I’ll just post a couple of what I think are the worse offenders in this song.
Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They will turn away no more
and
I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn’t for your misfortunes
I’d be a heavenly person today
I can’t say I ever have been stoned, so I guess that’s why I didn’t get that. I’m learning so much today. And I have to admit, you are right about me misquoting the song. :smack: I am out of it tonight.
Then you have nothing in common with the authors of the songs quoted in this thread.
My son listens to a genre of music I call "We were totally wasted when we wrote this song; we’re counting on you being equally wasted when you listen to it".
He agrees with me on the categorization.
For those too young to remember, the Living Bra was a real product (as was/is the Cross-Your-Heart bra), much advertised on TV in those days. This inspired the oft-used stand-up comic’s line from the '60s: “My wife* bought a Living Bra and it starved to death!”
*Or Twiggy, if they wanted to sound hip.
Considering that BEP pretty much say dumb shit that rhymes, I think they probably own this thread.
You’re on the right track.
“It’s a place we used to go to in Ilford years ago. Some bloke we know suggested it to us because it’s full of nettles and you keep scratching.”
Ronnie Lane (bass player of Small Faces)
“Itchycoo Park wasn’t really a park, it was an area in Ilford which was a bombsite, an area of wasteland all wild and overgrown that ran down the railway lines, which was full of stinging nettles.”
Kenney Jones (drummer of Small Faces)
What’s so hard about this one? The guy’s bragging about what a bad-ass he is (I’m so not scared of poisonous snakes, I’ve killed enough of them to cover the walls of a house; heck I wear one around my neck just for fun), then asking the woman if she’s impressed enough yet to sleep with him.
[I mean, come on, this is the bottom line interpretation of 99% of pop music…]
It makes enough nonsense that many people think its
“I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shallow bay”
which only make slightly less sense.
Well, ok, but what does the ice wagon flying down the alley have to do with it? (And how come the sky was blue when the night was dark?)
If you want the weirdest and most hilarious lyrics, then check out Bad Lip Reading on YouTube. They create random lyrics to songs that match up with the lip movements of the original lyrics. This allows them to come up with lyrics such as:
Quote:
Originally Posted by PlainJain
Keep a-wearing your bracelets and your new rara
Cross your heart with your living bra
To expand on what Biffy says, when I was in high schoool in 1968, “rah rahs” was a term for the black and white saddle shoes many of the girls wore. Just about every high school cheerleader in those days wore saddle shoes as part of her uniform. Hence the use of the term.
I always heard that as “new rah-rahs” instead of “new rara,” so that line has always made sense to me.
I’m probably completely mistaken. 
Pete Sinfield, the lyricist for the early King Crimson, deserves to be ranked highly in this thread. He was responsible for such deathless lines as:
“Go Polonius or kneel
The reapers name their harvest dawn
All your tarnished devil’s spoons
Will rust beneath our corn”
and
“‘Worship!’ cried the clown, ‘I am a T.V.
Making bandsmen go clockwork;
See the slinky seal Cirkus policeman
Bareback ladies have fish’”.
Dr. Dre
Uh. Ok.
Pretty much all of “Stairway to Heaven,” but these lines give me the most pause;
“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.”
Um, okay.
“And your father still perfected ways of making sealing wax.
Here it comes,
Here comes you nineteenth nervous breakdown.”