I have commented before about how dumb most pop song lyrics are. This is not a new discovery. Steve Allen had a regular comedy bit on his TV show back in the 1950s, in which he read rock song lyrics aloud in a clear, unemotional intonation. (That was back when self-identified intellectuals thought pop culture was something to be mocked, rather than something to be co-opted.)

And yet it is a curious fact that a great many people believe that rock song lyrics are important. They quote them on signs at political demonstrations, or in online arguments, as if they mean something. I’ve never seen anyone quoting Shakespeare’s sonnets in a political context, or the limericks of Edward Lear, despite the fact that both writers likely put more care into what they were writing than most lyricists.

In high school and college I had friends who spent far too much time trying to figure out the significance of rock song lyrics. That was before the Internet, so we had to come up with our own naive and wrongheaded interpretations of songs instead of being able to read thousands of other people’s naive and wrongheaded interpretations. What’s interesting is that we would argue about what the significance of certain song lyrics was, but we never questioned the idea that they were significant. That was taken as axiomatic. But why?

Now a digression about dreams. 

The best explanation I’ve ever heard for dreams is that the images and events are a response by your brain to the emotions and associations it is experiencing as a result of whatever neurological housekeeping it’s doing while you sleep. This explains the phenomenon I’ve noticed in many dreams, where the actual thing you’re dreaming about doesn’t quite match the feelings associated with it. “I dreamed about a chair — but it was a scary chair!” 

In my own case I once had a series of nightmares in which light switches didn’t work, and this led me to struggling to wake up or cry out, mute and paralyzed in terror as I struggled (because my brain was engaged while my body was still shut down in sleep). All this because the lights didn’t work! These were decades ago but I remember them vividly because of the emotional intensity.

Whatever the neurological cause, I think the odd mismatch between what we dream itself and the emotions we experience while dreaming is what makes dreams seem so significant to us. We remember the intense emotion, we remember the imagery, and our conscious minds try to figure out the connection. There isn’t any connection — other than random neural connections — but we try to find it anyway.

This is how you get prophetic dreams, Freud’s dream analysis, and cheap pamphlets telling you how to turn dreams into winning lottery numbers. I expect it may play a role in certain kinds of mystical experiences but I don’t feel qualified to comment about that, having never had one.

You can probably see where this is going. I think the reason people look for significance in rock song lyrics is the mismatch between the (let’s be candid, here) inanity of the words and the over-the-top extravagance of the singer’s performance. Just like dreams. The song lyrics are just a bit of doggerel some stoner scribbled on a napkin ten minutes before the studio session started, but the band is playing with incredible intensity, the vocalist is delivering them like they’re having the most intense emotional experience of their entire life, and the producer is layering in sound effects and throat singers and a full symphony orchestra and whale songs and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir behind it all. 

If Brad Delp is so excited to be singing “I closed my eyes and she slipped away” and the rest of Boston are doing their damnedest to make that moment absolutely galvanizing, then the listener’s brain decides “I closed my eyes and she slipped away” must be really really important. It must mean something, something worthy of such strong emotions.

Nope. 

Still, it might be worth putting on a sign next time you attend a political demonstration.