Non Sequitur Scene/Music

If the lyrics themselves don't make you scratch your head, these parts of your favorite songs just might.


 * Nicki Minaj - Stupid Hoe is one massive Non Sequitur Scene.
 * Lady Gaga's song "Government Hooker" is full of them.
 * The song opens with Gaga singing in an operatic voice "Gaga.... Aaaaaaaah.... Gaga... Aaaaaaaaah... Government Hoo-kar-eh". Her awful Italian accent should say something.
 * The random "Mojito!" in the middle of the song
 * Similarily enough, her song "Christmas Tree", which really isn't about a Christmas tree has four bars of orchestral Christmas music near the end which come out of nowhere and hae nothing to do with the rest of the tune.
 * Amongst the many metaphors for life, aging and death in the Talking Heads's "Road to Nowhere" video, there is a single sequence where two businessmen in luchadore masks grapple with each other. This has no thematic resonance whatsoever.
 * Not necessary a lyrical example, but the ending of Angel in Disguise by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. Why did Ronnie Winter do that really loud cough?
 * Maybe it was accidental
 * Jethro Tull's album Thick As A Brick (and even more so, the stage show during that time), was full of these, and intentionally so, as the album was supposed to be a parody of "concept albums", which their previous album Aqualung had been labelled as.
 * The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles, from A Passion Play, is widely considered by many fans and critics to be this.
 * "The Man Who Would Be King" by Iron Maiden, an otherwise downbeat and depressing tune, has a random upbeat and happy instrumental section in the middle of the tune.
 * "Wasn't Born to Follow" by The Byrds is a sunny, rustic, sweet-sounding song...until the strange, discordant bridge that begins about a minute in and lasts around twenty seconds, only to give way again to the pleasant sound that dominates the song. The bridge also qualifies as a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * From the very same album (The Notorious Byrd Brothers), "Old John Robertson" also has a musically disconnected bridge. After the line "then she died" the band drops out and a string quartet plays an entirely different melody, then disappears and we're back into the song. Oddly enough, the inclusion of the baroque section might have been the result of a real-life Non Sequitur Scene; according to guitarist Roger McGuinn, while the bad was rehearsing the song, some classical musicians walked in, played some music, then left. The band eventually decided to put something like it in the version that made it in the album.
 * Yuri the only One by L33T STR33T Boys has the hilarious "Sephy's Mom Has Got It Going On" Non Sequitur Scene from 2:19 to 2:45.
 * You had to be there: Consider who Sephiroth's mom is.
 * Alice in Chains "Love Song", from their EP Sap, basically just a series of Madness Mantras, set to music that alternates between goofy and nightmarish.
 * "So Fine" by Electric Light Orchestra. It's a generic (but catchy) pop song, until the weird, jungle beat section in the middle. No transition, nothing to indicate that the section actually belongs there.
 * Hot Chip's music video for "I Feel Better" contains two Non Sequitur SceneS for the price of one. It starts out like a generic Boy Band video and then...
 * The fact that it starts off with a Boy Band lip synching the song is itself a Non Sequitur Scene compared to the Hot Chip's other videos, which are far heavier on featuring the band's members. The actual members of Hot Chip are those nerdy looking guys in the audience that the camera keeps going to at weird intervals.
 * Late 1960s pop songs often contained Non Sequitur Scenes of jarring psychedelic effects in order to keep up with the prevailing trends of the time. Two that come to mind are "It's Wonderful" by the Rascals and "Susan" by the Buckinghams.
 * Another good one in this genre is the frantic, five-second long harpsichord solo from Pink Floyd's "See Emily Play".
 * The most extreme example is probably "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius, which has a middle section made up of an ambient sound collage (including a baby crying, a horse race and a marching band) that actually predated "Revolution 9" by about 18 months or so. Between this and the two Byrds songs mentioned above, producer Gary Usher sure loved musical Non Sequitur Scenes.
 * Two Blood, Sweat & Tears songs could be considered to have Non Sequitur Scenes. The Western section ("Yee-haw!") in "And When I Die" and the Latin section in "God Bless The Child" don't have much to do with the rest of their respective songs, although they do provide an excuse to feature the horn section.
 * "Lady Godiva's Operation" by The Velvet Underground. For the first half of the song, John Cale softly and smoothly sings the lyrics. Then, during the second half, he stops singing the last part of some lines, only to have Lou Reed shout or say the last word or so (Reed also gets a few complete lines to himself) and after Reed's "interruptions," Cale casually continues as if nothing happened. Another sort of Non Sequitur Scene in the song is an odd noise that comes in toward the end (in fact, it's the only audible noise for a brief period) that sounds remarkably like Chewbacca, though the song predates the Star Wars films.
 * Also, the lion's roar and breaking glass in "European Son."
 * The They Might Be Giants album Apollo 18 contains one of their most infamous tracks - Fingertips. Fingertips is actually a collection of many mini-songs, each barely more than a few seconds in length, and each counting as a separate track. This was done so that listening to the album on any player in shuffle mode would result in random moments of "I found a new friend underneath my pillow" and "What's that blue thing doing here?".
 * In the middle of John Lennon's song "Hold On," he growls "Cookie!" for some reason that only he, and maybe Yoko, knew.
 * A year earlier, Kevin Ayers had a similar Non Sequitur Scene with "Town Feeling", where he lazily sings "banana".
 * German band Die Ärzte's "Leichenhalle" is a song about being a corpse in a mortuary, admittedly rather tongue in cheek, but with an appropriately deep atmosphere. Halfway through the final verse, the corpses announce that they are all Smurfs, and the last thirty seconds are of cheery la-la-la-ing.
 * In the Squarepusher song, "Male Pill Part 13," there is a period where the music comes to a complete halt followed by a voice simply grunting "Hhuuuhh... hhhmmm... uhhhuumm" then the music continues right where it left off. This is especially surreal when you take into account the fact that aside from that line, the song, like most of Squarepusher's other work, is an instrumental.
 * Queen's song "One Vision"—how many people who didn't already know to look for it were surprised when singing the track on Rock Band 2, and seeing that the last words were "fried chicken" instead of the repeated title? The story as to why they included it is well documented, but the line still comes out of nowhere.
 * Similarly, in their song "I'm Going Slightly Mad", the line "I think I'm a banana tree!"
 * "Get Down, Make Love", a raunchy hard rock tune that breaks into a fit of electronic weirdness about 2/3s of the way.
 * Along similar lines, the Barenaked Ladies song "One Week" ends with repetition of the last line of the chorus: "it'll still be two days till we say we're sorry". But the very last repetition changes it to "Birchmount Stadium, home of the Robbie".
 * Venetian Snares is fond of putting the odd Non Sequitur Scene into his songs. In "Pussy Skull", the instrumental completely drops out and a voice comes in, growling "Hours and hours of footage of two giraffes fucking," before the song resumes as normal as though nothing had happened. He pulls off a similar trick in "Horsey Noisers", except with the even more inexplicable phrase "I've drawn you a picture of a giraffe fucking an elephant. Notice how his moustache looks just like mine." Then there's Welfare Wednesday, which is basically one long Non Sequitur Scene.
 * The (now broken up) band Winter Solstice has one on their only album, "The Fall of Rome." Every song is djenty with a pig-squealing type 3 metal scream, except the title track. It's all harmonized acoustic guitar and piano. A very good standalone track, but very out of place. probablyone of the best examples in music. YMMV
 * The Doors' song "The End," specifically the spoken bit toward the end. "father yes son i want to kill you... mother i wanna f..... all night long!"
 * Another one occurs in "We Could Be So Good Together". At the end of the instrumental bridge, someone - most likely Jim Morrison - can faintly be heard singing "Do dapa de do, de doopa dapa de day" alongside an organ lick.
 * Black Sabbath's "Supernaut" starts off as a typical heavy number before going off, without warning, into a Caribbean flavored acoustic shuffle, then going back to the main riff as if nothing had happened.
 * Pete Seeger often sings his popular fairy-tale folk song to kids at concerts, but it's a crapshoot whether or not he'll remember to replace the single "damn" in the song with "darn." When he doesn't, it's pretty Non Sequitur-y for a kiddie song.
 * The Melvins' "Dry Drunk" contains a Non Sequitur Scene that is actually performed by an entirely different band: one an half minutes into the track, it suddenly jumps from a punky collaboration with The Jesus Lizard's David Yow to a slow discordant drum, guitar, and saxophone jam by Godzik Pink that's otherwise completely unrelated to the song. Then the David Yow section kicks back in as though nothing happened. The album it's on, The Crybaby, is themed around collaborations, but this particular example was clearly done just for the sake of screwing with the listener.
 * At the end of the Sum 41 video for "Fat Lip" there is a random sequence of the band dressed up as heavy metal rockers and they play a short bit of music completely separate from the "Fat Lip" song. This added bit isn't on the single.
 * At the end of her video for "Sk8er Boi" Avril Lavigne decides to smash her guitar through a car winshield and a SWAT Team and Police helicopters surround her for no reason at all.
 * The otherwise excellent "Sound Chaser" by Yes features an incredibly annoying "cha-cha-cha, cha-cha!" vocal harmony part that completely breaks the flow of the song and arguably ruins the song itself.
 * The album Axis: Bold As Love by the Jimi Hendrix Experience starts with a Non Sequitur Scene in the form of "EXP", a brief spoof radio show with Mitch Mitchell as a talk show host and Hendrix as UFO enthusiast/alien Paul Caruso, complete with sped up and slowed down voices and screeching guitar.
 * The "Piltdown Man" sequence from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, where Oldfield howls and growls in what seems to be like a cross between werewolf speak and Klingon.
 * The song "Altered States" from Tubular Bells II.
 * When performing live, Misty's Big Adventure start playing their first song... And then this guy just runs onto the stage and dances frenetically to the music. And no one in the band acknowledges his presence.
 * Also, his name is Erotic Volvo.
 * A similar incident occurred during a Bob Dylan performance at the Grammys, featuring the interpretive dancer known as Soy Bomb.
 * Steely Dan's cover of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo", both in terms of its parent album (1974's Pretzel Logic) and the Dan's career as a whole.
 * The Beatles, well...
 * "Revolution 9" and "Wild Honey Pie" are basically the Non Sequitur Scenes of the White Album.
 * "A Day In The Life" ends with a piano chord, but if you leave the CD (or record if you had one that wasn't automatic) on rather than turning it off when the album ends, you'd hear—after a moment of silence—the Beatles chanting, "never could speak any of the words (badump bum bum)" over and over again.
 * It is repeated because originally, on vinyl, the sound was an endless loop, recorded in the lock groove. Word of God maintains they were saying 'It really couldn't be any other' but it was overall meant to be just random noise. Much backmasking 'secret message' conspiracy theory/fun resulted, naturally.
 * And for good reason. Paul McCartney admitted in the book Many Years from Now that backwards the loop does sound a lot like, "I'll fuck you like a Superman!" Although he maintains that it's completely unintentional.
 * It's actually two phrases looping: "been so high" and "never could be any other way".
 * Let's not forget the "freak out" sections of "A Day In The Life" itself.
 * The infamous "panther dance" in Michael Jackson's "Black Or White" video is something of a Non Sequitur Scene.
 * This troper always thought of "Chopsticks" being played towards the end of Manfred Mann's cover of "Blinded by the Light" was a Non Sequitur Scene.
 * Halfway through the album Colors by Between the Buried and Me comes the track "Ants of the Sky", an Epic Rocking 13-minute track which twists, turns, and eventually builds up to... an utterly inexplicable bluegrass section. The very next track of the album features an accordion breakdown, complete with vocalist Tommy Rogers growling in a French accent.
 * Hell, the whole album is full of those. Informal Gluttony and Decade of Statues come to mind.
 * The title track to Van der Graaf Generator's 1969 debut, The Aerosol Grey Machine. While the rest of the album is folk-based prog, this one is a forty second jingle parody advertising fume huffing.
 * They never stopped being bonkers if "The Sleepwalkers" from Godbluff is anything to go by. A 10-and-a-half minute song about a zombie outbreak still manages to squeeze in a little break to play... elevator music?
 * George Harrison's All Things Must Pass has "It's Johnny's Birthday", a weird carnival styled piece congratulating someone for their birthday, with no connection with either the spiritual songs from the first two LPs or the jams from the 3rd.
 * The eponymous album by pre-King Crimson group Giles, Giles & Fripp has "Just George"; between the songs on the second side of the album, one of the members says, in a funny voice, "I know a man and his name is George" with variations of said phrase. We never find out who George is or what connections he has to the group or the songs.
 * Speaking of King Crimson, a rather disturbing Non Sequitur Moment occurs in the studio version of "Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Pt. 2", where it sounds like a Disney character is murdering his friend, all while the music continues to play as if nobody notices or cares.
 * Quack Quack Quack, in The Only One by Evanescence.
 * Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come was very fond of this trope. For example, the song "Whirlpool", from their self titled second album, randomly jumps to the ticking of an alarm clock.
 * MTV Brazil's show Piores Clipes do Mundo (The Worst Music Videos in the World) once showcased a video which featured a sudden appearance of a dancing Indian, which even cuts the song and puts some tribal drums in the BGM instead, only for it to never appear again (the presenter was baffled and even asked to replay that part to see if he could understand). One of the comments on the link above even points out it is a Non Sequitur Scene...
 * "Rhamadan" by Syd Barrett is a 20 plus minute jam that, for some reason, has a motorcycle driving by about a third of way into the piece.
 * In the Opeth song "The Lotus Eater," the song for the most part is a straightforward metal song, or at least as straightforward as most Opeth songs go, but during the bridge, a long, dissonant chord is played on a keyboard, with a drum fill that you would normally expect to lead into a big guitar solo, but instead, it's jazz-boogie time! And it is awesome.
 * In "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes, there is an instrumental solo following the main melody that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the song. It goes on for a few minutes till it ends. "Layla" (written by Eric Clapton) and the instrumental (written by Jim Gordon) were originally two separate songs, but they decided to combine them into one piece.
 * Directly from being a non-melodic and heavy song by their standards, the instrumental section of "Lost In The Future" by Gamma Ray bursts immediately into "Oh! Susanna," complete with background whoops and eventual humming along, then dives right back into the solo as if nothing had happened.
 * Nightwish has done something similar in recent live shows: during the instrumental section in the middle of "Sacrament Of Wilderness," Tuomas now plays an Homage to "Moskau" on the keyboards.
 * The scat-singing part of Van Halen's "I'm The One".
 * Tori Amos has many songs where the musical tone abruptly changes for a minute and then goes back to normal. Examples are "Pretty Good Year", a calm song with a random dramatic section including lyrics that seem irrelevant to the rest of the song, and "Professional Widow", which goes from messy and dramatic to clean piano and crisp high register vocals for a few bars in the middle. Lyrically Amos is known for being inpenetrable, so trying to point out all the lyrical BLA Ms would be a waste of time.
 * The second movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 94 has a soft intro with a single fortissimo chord stuck in the middle (hence the nickname, 'Surprise Symphony').
 * Dream Theater's "The Dark Eternal Night" is, for the vast majority of its duration, a horror themed heavy rock piece. However during the band's trademark overly long bridge the music suddenly stops so Jordan Rudess can play a ragtime piano solo for no apparent reason.
 * It wasn't the first time they'd done it; the same thing happens in their (similarly heavy) instrumental The Dance Of Eternity from Scenes From A Memory. In that case though, it's marginally less Non Sequitur-y, as the plot of the album takes place in 1928.
 * More recently, in the Korean artist Hyun A's song "Bubble Pop", there is an inexplicable dubstep part in the middle. The whole song is sort of cutesy and then you get hit upside the head with bass.
 * Metallica and Lou Reed's collaboration album Lulu in its entirety.
 * "I am the table!"
 * Post-Grunge band Presence's song In My Room. On an album filled with straightforward (yet good) post grunge, including all of its usual theme. This song however, is a somewhat disturbing song about A Date with Rosie Palms (to Mary Kate And Ashley no less!) that ends abruptly for about a minute of silence, then the band just start goofing off on the microphone.... its out of left field to be sure.
 * Blue Swede's cover of "Hooked on a Feeling" opens with an incredibly obnoxious chant of "Ooka Chuka! Ooka! Ooka!" (which reappears during the last verse). YMMV as to whether or not this falls into So Bad It's Good territory, but it reached #1 on the US charts.
 * Showbread's discography is spattered with a few of these, most notably on their first studio album No Sir, Nihlism Is Not Practical. Moments such as the totally-unexpected Doo-Wop-inspired bridge on So Selfish It's Funny and the odd sound bite of air raid alarms and people shouting followed by vocalist Josh Dies saying, "Fire!" and what sounds like a muffled nuclear explosion at the end of And The Smokers And Children Shall Be Cast Down are certainly BLA Ms. However, the biggest Non Sequitur Moment on the album is probably track 5, Sampsa Meets Kafka. It starts with some echoey electronic warbling, then a throbbing bass starts up, followed a few seconds later by screeching techno and Josh Dies screaming the line, "Gregor starved to death, no one dies of loneliness'' twice, and the song ends with a bit more drippy techno and a couple seconds of static. Weird.
 * The early Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra released two albums containing quirky, innovative electronic music--and then their third release, x∞Multiplies, was practically a Non Sequitur album. It contained significantly more bizarre music (including a cover of Archie Bell and the Drells' "Tighten Up" with a high pitched voice repeating "Japanese gentleman, stand up please!" throughout the entire song) and was filled with arbitrary comedy acts, predominantly in Japanese (which made it especially confusing for English-speaking listeners). After this, they returned to a more conventional style.
 * The Wiz Khalifa section of the Maroon 5 song "Payphone". It doesn't have any backing music and seems kind of forced into the song. The music picks back up after it's over.
 * Postmodern Jukebox will occasionally have bizarre events happen in their videos that go way beyond just being a Funny Background Event and fall into this trope.
 * Their video for their 1920's themed cover of 'Love Yourself' has, just before the instrumental break, clarinet player Jacob Scesney suddenly jump out of a window that opens at that moment conveniently. His fellow musicians look stunned and concerned (Lemar Guillary, who had been playing trombone up to that point, especially plays it up with his facial expressions) until Jacob climbs back through the window, pulling a sousaphone in with him. Lemar takes the sousaphone, and joins in with Jacob and trumpet player Mike Cottone in the instrumental section. They, vocalist Sara Niemietz, and the rest of the band go on as if the whole bizarre incident never happened.
 * The video for the 1940's jazz cover of 'Misery Business' featuring Therese Curatolo has this starting around the 2 minute mark, when smoke suddenly appears in the corner of the room, followed by the arrival of Tosin Abasi from the instrumental metal band Animals As Leaders. He brings a bright yellow metal guitar and does a metal style guitar shredding completely out of place with the 1940's jazz aesthetic. Once this interlude is over, Tosin Abasi leaves as suddenly as he arrived, and Therese continues with the rest of the song as the instrumentation and the arrangement resumes the 1940's jazz theme.