Sometimes the catchiest songs are the ones that have the strangest meanings. Here are three weird rock songs from the 80s. They’ll make you wanna dance along, but also leave you scratching your head at the same time.
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“Too Much Blood” by The Rolling Stones
I want to say that this groovy tune is more than what meets the eye, but the song’s meaning is actually pretty on the nose with the title. “Too Much Blood”, which was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, was inspired by the actions of cannibalist Issei Sagawa in the early 80s. Over a series of days in June 1981, Sagawa took apart the body parts of his classmate, Renée Hartevelt, and proceeded to eat them. What followed this incident was Sagawa’s brief incarceration in a mental institution, which ended after a few years in 1985. After that, Sagawa moved to Japan and remained free until his death in 2022. Although his freedom was denounced by many, his story led to the creation of this Rolling Stones track, released in 1983.
“Walk The Dinosaur” by Was (Not Was)
“It was a night like this forty million years ago / I lit a cigarette, picked up a monkey skull to go.” This song was first released in 1987. However, it had a resurrection in the 2000s, when it resurfaced on the internet and became somewhat of a meme. The funk-rock song has also been used in dinosaur media, of course. By that, I mean appearances in The Flintstones in 1994 and 2009’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. There’s not a lot of emotional depth to this tune, and that’s part of what makes it so fun.
“Africa” by Toto
I can’t mention 80s rock without talking about this song. The percussion and synths of “Africa” make it a highly danceable tune. However, if you’ve ever really listened to the lyrics (which I doubt you have), they’re honestly kind of confusing. Songwriter David Paich told Grantland in 2015 what was going on in his head when he helped write “Africa”.
“I went to an all-boys Catholic school, and there were a lot of brothers that were teaching us there, and they were going to Africa and coming back,” he shared. “A lot of them were deciding whether to go into the priesthood or whether to get married or not, and there were a lot of issues – like, celibacy was obviously a big issue. I had all these things rattling about in my brain when I was writing the song.”
I want to say that this explanation makes the lyrics less confusing. There are some, though, like “Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti,” that I still can’t quite make sense of.
Photo by: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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