Great Songs With Nonsense Or Gibberish Lyrics (2024)

Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah is not actual gibberish; Jet
Screamer provides a translation right in the song.

One of my favorite pop songs ever was Kidney Bingos by Wire (video below). In spite of the fact that it consists entirely of nonsensical lines like “Natural splits sunburn jets, price marks smart bets” and has the refrain “Money spines paper lung, Kidney bingos organ fun”, it somehow manages to express a bittersweet sense of reflection and ambiguous hope. For me, nothing will kill a great pop song faster than bad lyrics, which is probably why I used to be so partial to French rap like MC Solaar and Assassin, or Arabic Hip Hop that I discovered via collections like like Rough Guide to Arabesque or Arabic Groove. Not only do the guttural qualities of the respective languages suit the style better than English, but for all I know, the artists are complaining about the foie gras at the local cafe, and not murder, race, and gender prejudice. My disinterest in the precise meanings of pop songs has served me well; frankly, I think many would agree that 90% of pop song lyrics are moderately incomprehensible on the first listen, and when we finally spend the time and energy to decipher the meaning, we’re likely to regret the effort. I think this principle was well understood through the 60′s and 70′s; I’d argue in fact that nearly the entire Beatles catalogue is comprised of songs with nonsense lyrics. But recently I ran across a tune I’d never heard before that sent me on a little mission, and forced me to rethink the whole meaning of “nonsense” when it comes to pop song lyrics. The song was “Prisencolinensinainciusol” (video below), released in 1972 by Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano. It’s a weird and hooky amalgam of big band and hambone-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, and although you at first get the impression he’s singing in some Slavic dialect or something, it turns out the lyrics are 100% gibberish. In any case, it got me wondering: how many pop songs with nonsense lyrics had become actual hits? And that’s where my search ran into trouble. One of the first tunes to spring to mind in this niche might be Harry Nilsson’s Lime In The Coconut, but you don’t have to look too hard to find people who will vigorously argue that it DOES mean something, and that you’re just too stupid to have bothered to understand it. This is true with lots of artists – Steely Dan, REM, or Nirvana are familiar culprits – often you just have to know a tiny piece of back-story, and all the meaning falls into place. And two other things compound the problem. One is the tendency to Mondegreen, so that we end up wondering what happened to Olive, the Other Reindeer, or wondering why Jimi Hendrix politely asks “excuse me, while I kiss this guy”. The other is that simply adding a bunch of gibberish syllables to an otherwise meaningful lyric does not technically make it a “nonsense lyric”. The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is a fine example of this. Aside from the fact that they used the word “bra” a good thirty years before the first frat boy or beach bum, the nonsense refrain hardly detracts from the obvious fact that life goes on in spite of Molly and Desmond’s frustrations. And in spite of the prevalence of lalas, oh-oo-whoas, and dip dips in Doo Wop, almost all the songs are clearly about broken hearts. And Oo Ee Oo Ah Ah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang? Well, there IS an explanatory verse that makes it clear that it’s a spell provided by a witch doctor, right? So after a fairly exhaustive search, below are the only songs I could find that are truly absolute gibberish, with a few honorable mentions. Because nonsense is easy to come by, but genuine gibberish is an art. Feel free to share any omissions in the comments.

Adriano Celetano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol is only available on the CD Nostalrock:

Ernie Kovacs’ The Nairobi Trio has an interesting history. By the way, the song is actually “Solfeggio” by Robert Maxwel.

Please forgive me, both for the song Chacarron, and the quality of the video.

Again, apologies for the poor video quality; Wire’s Kidney Bingos is a little obscure, and this is the best one I could find.

Honorable Mentions

Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah only gets honorable mention because Jet Screamer actually provides a translation right in the song.

Likewise with Scatman John’s Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop). He provides biographical information in the song, which explains that he’s performing scat, which is not the same as pure gibberish, by our standards.