Most Random Song Lyrics Ever

It's not easy to write deep, meaningful lyrics, which is why many artists just don't bother. If you actually sit and listen to what the following songs have to say, you'll find a whole lot of nothing. That is, unless you enjoy garbled gobbledygook and random non-sequiturs that only mean anything if you and your mind-altering chemical of the day work really, really hard to overanalyze them.

The lyrics to "Summer Girls" might be the most pointlessly random set of words ever written. It's very possible they never were written, just vomited out with the least stinky chunks committed to tape. Virtually every couplet is just the Lyte Funkie Ones (ugh) rhyming, only sometimes connecting it to whatever girl they're warbling about. "New Kids On The Block had a bunch of hits / Chinese food makes me sick," "Your the best girl that I ever did see / The great Larry Bird jersey 33," "When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet / Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets," "Fell deep in love, but now we ain't speakin' / Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton," and it just goes on and on for what feels like an epoch. The only way any of this makes sense is if his crush looks like Larry Bird and, as transcendent a basketball talent as he is, a hot piece of hubba-hubba he was not, especially when he tried to grow a mustache. Even the LFO bros could do better than that.

Beck's iconic stoner/slacker anthem boasts some of the most deliciously surreal lyrics since mid-1960s Dylan—at least, that's what we tell ourselves. Truthfully, every single one of the words from "Loser" mean absolutely nothing. This is evident from the very first line: "in a time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey" is more redundant than a dozen Duran Durans. And while "he hung himself with a guitar string" sounds like a tragically poetic way for tortured artists to kill themselves, any meaning the line might have had melted away with the pointless follow-up: "slab of turkey neck, and it's hangin' from a pigeon wing."

Beck intended "Loser" to be a throwaway, and so he put absolutely no thought into the words, which is why they make no sense at all. Even the "I'm a loser, baby" chorus meant little aside from how stupid he felt after playing the song back and realizing how terrible a rapper he actually was. But to his shock and embarrassment, the song caught fire, and now it's his most famous tune. This despite the words being the musical equivalent of a root canal patient's ramblings after too much goofy gas.

Thanks to Eminem, everybody thinks they know the story behind "In the Air Tonight": a guy witnesses a drowning, doesn't help, and Collins calls him out at a show. But if that seems like a bizarre topic to write a song about, Collins would agree with you, mainly because he didn't write that song with that story in mind. In fact, he had no story in mind at all, other than "I'm getting divorced, I'm angry, and need to vent." And so he just made up words based on how he felt at the time (and what went well with the melody). Over 35 years later, even he can't remember exactly what he had in mind. As he told Rolling Stone, "I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I'm not quite sure what the song is about, but there's a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration." It's musical scream therapy, basically, though that doesn't make lines like "Well I remember, I remember, don't worry, how could I ever forget / It's the first time, the last time we ever met" any less gibberish.

Elton John's "Your Song" is a classic, but likely only because nobody listens to the words. If they did, they'd find not-thoughts more slapped-together than anything on Radio Disney. Elton sings about how he'd like money to buy him and his lover a house (a sentiment that, $450 million later, is awful weird to hear from him), and starts talking about how to earn it. This includes the most rock-and-roll line ever written: "If I was a sculptor / but then again, no." It's like Bernie Taupin (Elton's lyricist) mumbled first-draft lyrics into a tape recorder at 4 a.m., and sleepily chided himself for including garbage about sculpting. Then he woke up, played the tape back, and felt so bad about yelling at himself, he kept everything, including "then again, no."

That theory also applies to the second verse, where Elton rambles out of nowhere: "Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean / Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen." Unless Taupin wrote "Your Song" from the POV of an awkward sixth-grader mumble-asking a girl to the dinner dance, then whatever endgame he did have in mind didn't even approach fruition.

From the start, many people overanalyzed Beatles songs, assuming they were deeper and more poetic than they actually were. In actuality, the band actually found it quite amusing when people took what they said so seriously. So, when John Lennon learned that schools were actually lecturing children on Beatles lyrics like they were Shakespearean sonnets, he decided enough was enough. He wrote "I Am the Walrus," a mish-mashed hodgepodge of random lyrical references, acid-trip visions, nonsense schoolboy rhymes, and pure word-salad, meant entirely to screw with people's heads if they dared try to nitpick it. Additionally, the song is also a rib on Bob Dylan, who regularly wrote lyrics with no meaning but kept them because they sounded good. As John put it, he "could write that crap too," and used "Walrus" as his proof.

So no, there is no Walrus, Eggman, yellow mellow custard, dead dog, pigs running from guns, or anything else. Just John being his typical trolling genius self.

Not satisfied with having one or two songs comprised entirely of random ramblings, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain constructed an entire catalogue that way. According to Cobain, lyrics meant very little to him when compared to the actual music, and so he actually put very little thought into them. Typically, he would grab lines from his poetry and insert them into songs, but had little rhyme or reason behind what lines went into what songs aside from "they sound good together." So that's why "Heart-Shaped Box" can contain both witty and clever lines like "hey, wait, I got a new complaint" and pure head-scratching filler like "Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet."

This also goes for Nirvana's most famous song "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The song isn't a revolutionary anthem, but rather just a collection of words that sound neat. Teen Spirit is a deodorant, and apparently Kurt was unaware of this when writing the song. He just thought "teen spirit" sounded like a cool phrase to base a song around. And he was right, not that being so made him the next Yeats. Luckily, he didn't want to be.