In another recent thread of mine, I mentioned the closing theme music to Count Duckula. One of the neat things about this song is that in many places it uses sound effects instead of words:
Another song like this is Monty Python’s I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio, which cheerfully lampoons the censor’s bleep:
What other songs use sound effects in place of words?
Pink Floyd, “Comfortably Numb”
Paper Planes by MIA.
Does Phil Harris’s “The Thing” count?
Along similar lines: this satire of the War on Christmas.
I wouldn’t say that’s a sound effect. It’s singing, even if it’s not words. if you count this then you would have to count songs like Great Gig in the Sky, Hocus Pocus, scat songs, etc. I don’t think that’s what the OP I was asking for, but I may be wrong.
Tom Paxton’s 1962 song The Marvelous Toy has been covered by The Irish Rovers an d others. I believe that someone, t least, has replaced the toy’s “Zip” “Bop” and “Whirr” with sound effects.
Tony Orlando’s Knock Three Times.
The chorus is
“Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe means the answer is no”
Once during the song the word knock is replaced by a knocking sound
Funny, I was just watching “A Muppet Family Christmas” last night, which features Sesame Street and Muppet characters together. My friend asked who one of the blue characters from Sesame Street was and I explained that it was Simon Soundman. His main deal is that he replaces words with sounds.
Two of his songs are “Simon’s Song” (about a dog chasing a cat up a tree) and another is “Song of Love” which is about sounds that remind Simon of his date.
I’ve never heard the latter but the former is on one of my favorite albums from when I was a kid.
Oh kids’ songs. How about “Bingo was his Name-o”?
Spike Jones did tons of that. Usually it was just the music using sound effects but sometimes they took the place of lyrics as well.
Not a song, but this started out as a children’s record (written by DR. Seuss!), before becoming a cartoon:
How about a song that uses all sound effects? Pink Floyd’s “Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict”. Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict - YouTube
Jingle Bells by theBarking Dogs.
Does it count if the sound effects were only used to censor words for the radio edit? In a similar manner to “I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio”, The Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn” used a donkey sound effect to censor the explicit language when it was played on the radio, but the language was uncensored on the album version.
It’s not all sound effects. The Pict has some lines at the end.
The first time I heard this song I had never heard the word “Pict” before. My friends and I spent quite some time discussing what it might mean. This was long before the internet, but we did have dictionaries. I’m not sure why we didn’t just look it up.
2nd verse of Lily Allen’s “Friday Night”
It’s quarter to and we get to the front
Girl on the guest list dressed like a (sound of record scratching)
And that’s the version on the CD, not just the radio edit.