5 Gibberish Song Titles That Actually Do Mean Something
Song titles don’t need to mean anything. If a song is called “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” it’s just because every second line is “do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.” The title isn’t a reference to P. Diddy or to anything that Diddy do. It was written before he was born, and that repeated line is just a nonsense phrase.
But sometimes, those nonsense filler phrases do mean something. We just never bothered asking what.
Wonderwall
“Because maybe,” sings Oasis. “You’re gonna be the one that saves me. And after all, you’re my wonderwall.” But what is a wonderwall? You don’t know — and the weird part is that it never even occurred to you that this chorus ends in a word that to you means absolutely nothing.
When Noel Gallagher was writing the song, he was going to call it “Wishing Stone.” And when you sub in “wishing stone” into that line, it makes sense. You’re my wishing stone. You make my wishes come true.
Gallagher changed the title and lyric to “Wonderwall” because he found himself listening to a George Harrison album called Wonderwall Music, and he figured that Wonderwall sounded like a nice word. That album got its name because it was the soundtrack to a 1968 movie called Wonderwall, though the album took on a life of its own, which is why Noel Gallagher was listening to it all those years later.
The movie is about a man who punches holes in the wall between his apartment and his neighbor’s, letting him peep on her lounging around naked. We’re fairly certain Gallagher didn’t intend the song to mean, “You’re the wall I look through, because I am a voyeur.” But though he might not have planned it, “You’re my wonderwall” means, “You get me off,” and that’s deeply romantic.
Tubthumping
“Tubthumping,” by Chumbawamba, is seemingly a song with a nonsense title by a band with a nonsense name. But then you might find yourself thumbing through Finnegan’s Wake one day, and you stumble upon the following passage:
If after years upon years of delving in ditches dark one tubthumper more than others, Kinihoun or Kahanan, giardarner or mear measenmanonger, has got up for the darnall same purpose of reassuring us with all the barbar of the Carrageehouse that our great ascendant was properly speaking three syllables less than his own surname (yes, yes, less!), that the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local jargon for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!) then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return, whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays touraloup with us in this Aludin’s Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil?
Ah, you say to yourself. Tubthumper is a word! Then you think a little more and realize that appearing in Finnegan’s Wake isn’t good evidence that it’s a word and instead supports your original theory that it’s gibberish.
But then maybe you find the word in some other old book — say, The Lady and the Law: The Remarkable Life of Fanny Holtzmann. There’s no mistaking it anymore. It’s a word, often hyphenated as “tub-thumper” and going back to the 17th century. It refers to someone who loudly supports a cause. During their protests, they’ll thump on a tub. With the song “Tubthumping,” it’s the protest of the working class, and the band sang it in support of dockworkers who had been striking for years.
As for the name Chumbawamba, the band has offered several explanations for that, most of which are lies. One of the more believable lies is that they based it on a chant they heard from some African drummers, but they changed the sounds to form them into a word, and the result really does mean nothing.
Chop Suey!
They never say the words “chop suey” in the song “Chop Suey!” by System of a Down. So, you might think the title just refers to a bunch of stuff thrown together, much like the song was.
But if you listen a little closer, you discover that they do say, “chop suey” — kind of. The chorus sings, “I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide.” There’s a phrase buried in there. It’s like they’re singing, “Self-righ CHOP SUEY side.”
The band wanted to call the song “Self-Righteous Suicide,” but it turns out that “suicide” is one of a handful of words that your label will not let you stick into a song’s title. So, they made a title by extracting a few syllables from the title they really wanted. You could say they took “suicide” and then chopped it to produce an acceptable name.
We might laugh at kids today using the word “unalive” because they’re afraid algorithms will dock them for speaking more explicitly, but heavy metal bands find themselves doing basically the same thing.
Guantanamera
If you don’t speak a language, everything you hear in it sounds like gibberish, of course, much to the annoyance of whoever does speak it. So, though you’ll have definitely heard the Cuban song “Guantanamera,” you might not know what the title means.
The verses have someone sing about flowers and sing about singing, and the version above by the Sandpipers includes a bridge where someone says much of that in English. But that still leaves the title. The title means “Woman from Guantánamo.” Uh oh!
Okay, “Guantánamo” here refers to the city of Guantánamo, where hundreds of thousands of people live, or to the larger province of which Guantánamo is the capital. It doesn’t refer to Guantánamo Bay, or Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, or the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. But the camp is surely what you think of when you hear the word, so the next time the song plays, you’ll now picture some woman detained indefinitely without having been charged with anything.
Eye of the Tiger
This title seemingly needs no explanation. The eye of the tiger is the fighter’s gaze, which makes this an appropriate theme for Rocky. It’s such an accepted figure of speech now that when Katy Perry put it into the chorus of her song “Roar,” and the band behind “Eye of the Tiger” looked into suing, they learned they had no case.
But you just accepted that meaning of the title because you generously went and met the song halfway. It doesn’t really make sense, to the point that there’s no way the songwriters crafted the song around the image of the eye of a tiger.
Tigers aren’t famous for winning bouts against opponents. Instead, they stalk prey from darkness. The lyrics do mention this, and since that’s not a terribly heroic concept, the song bounces from talking about the singer’s Rocky-like story or your story to talking about some other tiger hunting you both.
That might sound like we’re being needlessly argumentative here, but the truth is, this song really wasn’t originally written around the concept of a tiger’s hungry eyes. It was called “Survival,” and the final line of each chorus was going to be, “And it all comes down to survival.” The second line of the chorus was chosen to rhyme with it, which was how they got, “Rising up to the challenge of our rival.”
But the band was named Survivor. You can’t have a song named “Survival” by an artist named “Survivor.” So, they kept the “rival” line and came up with the new rhyming line: “All with the eye of the tiger.” It doesn’t quite rhyme with rival, but it’s close enough.
Yeah, there’s no way a group called Survivor could have a song called “Survival.” It would be like a group called the Cars having a song called “Drive.” Or a group called Third-Eye Blind having a song called “Blinded.” It’d just be completely impossible.
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