Mind Screw/Music

"John: I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution, but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was antirevolution."
 * Surfin' Bird by The Trashmen
 * Many Primus songs features a number of psychedelic and amusingly disturbing aspects.
 * Don McLean's song "American Pie" is a Mind-Screwy combination of imagery and references to other songs and historical events.
 * Some of McLean's lyrics allegedly reference Bob Dylan (The Jester). Who, incidentally, is famous for his own well-known, mind-screwy song: "Desolation Row". . .to name one of MANY in Dylan's catalog.
 * "Desolation Row" is child's play compared to "Changing of The Guards", "Brownsville Girl" and "Highlands", all written and recorded long after Dylan's most reputedly mind-screwy era.
 * Leonard Cohen's early songs (late 60's early 70's) top Dylan's by far!
 * There have been many analyses of this classic song. One of the best is one of the earliest, by Bob Dearborn. One of my favorites is the very Mind-Screw-friendly site IMISSAMERICANPIE.COM.
 * The music video for Neo-Prog group IQ's Drive On is more than a bit odd...
 * The one for Promises (As The Years Go By) is probably weirder...
 * Many people have put forth their theories on The Eagles' "Hotel California," particularly regarding "the beast" that the residents just can't kill. Others just figure it's about a guy who does a bunch of drugs in a cheap hotel.
 * Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". Especially the part right after the guitar solo.
 * Making a mockery of their boast (on the earlier L Ps) "No Synthesizers", Queen were notorious for employing over-the-top studio trickery. The vocal effects were achieved by using an astonishing number of overdubs, often well over 100. For each little snippet, not the entire "operatic" passage.
 * "39" from the same album is also like this (they set off in '39, travelled for a year, and returned in '39 -- WTF?!?!), unless one realises that . Watching the video on the DVD version of the album makes it suddenly make sense.
 * Nightwish. What a grand old time it is to figure out what half of the lyrics are saying, especially since half of them are of word salad quality. Stargazers, The Poet and the Pendulum, and Ghost Love Score are all huge mind screws, especially the second one with all of its Mood Whiplash.
 * Most of their other songs have quite straightforward lyrics, though.
 * Most of the output of They Might Be Giants falls into this territory. Especially Particle Man and Doctor Worm.
 * The Statue Got Me High is probably the best example, or at least the most literal.
 * House at the Top of the Tree is notable too, particularly since it's on one of the kids' albums (No!). The ending is the epitome of "wait, WHAT?".
 * I always found Doctor Worm to be pretty straightforward. It's about a guy who wants to be a rock and roll drummer and has picked a bizarre stage name. Or an actual worm who wants to be a drummer and likes to call himself a doctor. One of those. But, yeah, a whole lot of their other songs are way beyond my understanding.
 * "Chess Piece Face" was supposedly inspired by René Magritte. It is still unbelievably bizarre.
 * Most of the Anglo-French band Gong's work hit this trope while Daevid Allen was in charge. Prostitute Poem from the album Angel's Egg seems to be a deliberate attempt to induce a bad trip in any listening acid heads. "I break off the corner of your mind and eat it... I am eating your mind..." Brrrrr.
 * "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by the Pet Shop Boys. The song itself is relatively straight-forward, but the music video's a bit of a Mind Screw.
 * For Mind Screw in their songs, look no further than "The sound of the atom splitting".
 * The same goes with the music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart. "Turn around bright eyes...".
 * WTF do you mean, "minus the nightmare fuel"?! o.O
 * The Ayreon Rock Opera "The Human Equation" appears to simply be a look into the mind of a comatose man dealing with a lifetime's worth of angst and misdeeds... until the very end of the final track, where.
 * This will completely fly over the head of anyone who hasn't been keeping up with Ayreon's ongoing Forever of the Stars story line, though. Guide Dang It actually applies to music for once!
 * More like All There in the Manual; there are no less than six albums linking their stories together into the same overarching space opera metaplot as of 2009, and more may be coming.
 * And this makes, you know, money?
 * Enough to keep Mr, Lucassen afloat, at least. It's damn good music.
 * The Dropkick Murphys (!) song "State of Massachusetts" seems like a straightforward song about a single mother, until you pick up on the clues (the title being the most obvious) that the whole thing is to be taken as an allegory, at which point it becomes an incomprehensible meditation on the SJC, the academic élite, the "culture wars," television's influence on society, and Boston's place in history.
 * David Bowie's 1995 concept album 1. Outside is a story told in anachronic order of a 25-year-long investigation into illegal trade in body parts harvested in ritual murders centered in Oxford (NJ) and London (OT), which also seems to be a metaphor for Bowie's own career, including an apparent disco/industrial elegy to Major Tom. The fact that it was planned as part of a scrapped 5-part cycle does not help.
 * Let's not forget "Life on Mars", which has been described as "a cross between a Broadway musical and a Salvador Dali painting." A girl leaves her house as her parents fight, goes to the movies, and then there's something about fighting sailors, corrupt cops, and Mickey Mouse.
 * Heck, a lot of David Bowie is like this, and that's not even counting Labyrinth.
 * The song 1984 was written as part of an aborted rock-opera version of the book 1984.
 * Trying to make a full list of Mind Screwy Bowie songs would be an exercise in insanity, but "Quicksand" deserves a special mention.
 * Special mention to African Night Fight which has an entirely new sound and parts of it are sung in a Kenyan dialect and bizarre lyrics describing some kind of fight and stuff about a baby being born silent and hardships.
 * "Width Of A Circle".
 * The music video for Genesis's "Land of Confusion", which involves puppet-version of the band, as well as the Reagans, a swamp with heads instead of plants, and the keyboardist using his own tongue as a hot dog bun.
 * The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, anyone?
 * A lot of the mind-screwiest stuff was never recorded (or sung). In the early days, the arrangements and effects were quite complicated and the equipment was fairly primitive, so there would often be long breaks between numbers at concerts while the technicians frantically rejigged the equipment for the next song. Peter Gabriel took to filling these gaps with mind-screwy narrative pieces which he usually made up on the spot. Some of them have been transcribed on the sleeves of early live albums and literature. The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is basically an extended one of these, with some of the scenes set to music.
 * "Supper's Ready". A 23-minute song about... well, just try to figure out what, and you'll go mad.
 * It's about the biblical End Times, mixed with a large dose of whatever they thought was cool. The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man, for instance, is the Antichrist.
 * Quite a few of Peter Gabriel's solo work, including the Family and the Fishing Net, which somehow describes both a Voodoo ceremony and regular old fashioned wedding.
 * Mr. Bungle. Look them up.
 * I don't think Bungle's nearly as much of a Mind Screw as Fantomas is. Of course, if you ask Mike Patton, Fantomas is perfectly straightforward...
 * A lot of things involving Mike Patton are like this.
 * The Residents are pretty consistently this, with their album Not Available (intended never to be released until the band forgot they made it in the first place) as a standout example.
 * The Beatles: "Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine..."
 * Which is nothing compared to what John Lennon said about the song later:


 * Also, "I am the Walrus." Reportedly, John Lennon commented, "Let's see the fuckers figure that one out," after recording it.
 * All of these have the disadvantage that they don't really give a sense of expecting to make sense...unlike "Eleanor Rigby," probably their most effective Mind Screw.
 * Tomorrow Never Knows, anyone? Also, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.
 * Anything by Frank Zappa that's supposed to tell some sort of story will eventually turn into this to some degree, but a pretty extreme example is the album Lumpy Gravy. In between music concrete collages of an unfinished ballet and other leftovers, a group of people, who are apparently hiding inside of a giant drum, discuss encounters with boogey-men, pigs, and vicious ponies with claws, and speculate that the entire universe is one musical note.
 * Joe's Garage is a full double-album Mind Screw. The first half sounds like a pretty straightforward story of a guy guy playing music in a totalitarian society where music is illegal (OK so far) who discovers he likes to have sex with appliances (ok, so maybe not so straightforward) but by the end of the second disc, it, uh ... well he ends up working in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, pooting little green rosettas onto muffins. All narrated by The Central Scrutinizer -- a cheap looking flying saucer kinda thing about five feet across covered with stupid looking headers and exhaust hoses and some spoked wheels but who actually gets around by being dangled from a string held by a union guy eating a sandwich.
 * Many of the songs by Lemon Demon have a very mind screwy lyrics, such as "The Saga of You, Confused Destroyer of Planets" or "Your Evil Shadow Has a Cup of Tea".
 * Your Evil Shadow is a deliberate attempt at this. "Ben Bernanke" is another mind screwy song.
 * "Telekinesis" is another good example.
 * "Correctional Facility Food Sucks" possibly wins the award for "Mid Screwiest" song, though.
 * Pick a Tool music video. Any Tool music video. Also frequently overlaps into serious Nightmare Fuel territory.
 * Even their stage on Guitar Hero: World Tour is a Mind Screw!
 * Seeing as it uses the artwork from their music videos and studio albums, that's kind of a given.
 * Their first video, Hush, averts this, as it's relatively easy to figure out the video's meaning. Still, this is way before Tool started getting into Mind Screw territory. However, how could we get this far without mentioning their second scariest video?
 * The band Yes dodged this trope all the time, and did so by explaining that they mostly composed their lyrics based on how the words sound rather than what they mean. However, "Siberian Khatru" (on the album Close to the Edge) is supposed to be about life on the Siberian steppes, but at the same time is about a balmy summer day by a riverbank in England. Figure that one out!
 * All three tracks on Close to the Edge are like this: they seem to make sense, but actually don't. Although "And You And I" could be interpreted as being based on the Foundation trilogy.
 * Jon Anderson, frontman of Yes's collaboration with Vangelis produced The Friends Of Mr. Cairo. 12 minutes of nothing but Minds Screw
 * It's rather Exactly What It Says On the Tin. The song is a homage to the classic 1930's and 1940's movies, and the lyrics are either quotes or references from them. The title directly refers to The Maltese Falcon; the sampled dialogues are, among others, from The Thief Of Baghdad; the song ends with a sound of an old movie projector shutting down; and at one point, Anderson references Clark Gable, (Douglas) Fairbanks and Maureen O'Sullivan by name.
 * Devin Townsend, a Canadian musician, has distilled this into the purest form possible with his album "Ziltoid the Omniscient". Beginning as a somewhat lighthearted tale of the titular Ziltoid invading Earth demanding coffee, it ends with . Not even mentioning that it tends to shift from speedy metal to weirdly dissonant ambient music seemingly at random, and EVERY SINGLE VOICE on the album is the same man singing, up to and including whole choral arrangements of just his voice.
 * According to Word of God, it's supposed to symbolize how the fandom misinterprets the messages of his songs.
 * The video for Goldfrapp's 'Ride a White Horse'. Anyone who has seen it will agree. Totally off, and very strange.
 * Queensrÿche's Rock Opera Operation Mindcrime.  And that's just the surface twist.
 * Arguably, many forms of classical music fall into this category for the non-academic listener (and even the academic, for many of the modern compositions). Embedded within the music of the Romantic era through the twentieth century are such dense layers of symbolism and mathematical placement of notes that we often find pieces that look good on paper, but are not necessarily enjoyed by everyone. Even studying these compositions or attempting to play them can be a nightmare.
 * Twelve-Tone, atonal, and minimalists compositions often elicit mixed reactions from the audience, and generally a negative response from anyone outside the classical circle. It is very difficult for the average person to find coherency in just one listen and not looking at the score.
 * Complex forms of counterpoint such as the Fugue can also be mind screws because there is so much going on at once that it can sometimes be hard to latch onto the theme or subject, etc., without looking at the score first (It also depends on how well it is performed).
 * The Procol Harum song "Whiter Shade of Pale" is a classic example. Much like Hotel California most people have their own idea about what it means. Word of God says the band members came up with the song while sitting around drunk. The song's melody began as a botched attempt to play Bach's Air on a G String.
 * When it comes to trippy concept albums, you'll have a hard time topping Pain of Salvation's "BE". Themes cover practically everything from mankind's relationship to God and vice versa through to the state of industry and consumerism; the myriad plotlines include both a Space Probe  and a greedy misogynistic billionaire   Songwriter and lyricist Daniel Gildenlow cites dozens upon dozens of sources in the accompanying booklet. Musical devices include the recitation of population statistics, two-minute long dramatic monologues, God's answering machine and a track which consists of the sound of a heartbeat, followed by four minutes of silence and then a young girl chirping, "There's room for all God's creatures, right next to the mashed potatoes!"
 * Several songs by the group Renaissance have imagery that tells some kind of story but the listener is stumped as hell trying to figure out what it's really talking about. Take my descriptions with a grain of salt - as I said, I've no idea what these are on about either. Favorites include:
 * "Trip to the Fair" where a lady goes alone to a fair that is completely abandoned, then everything starts moving on its own (and either starts attacking her or she half-faints in terror) and as soon as she can't take it anymore everything becomes normal and the fair is full of people wondering what she's afraid of.
 * From the CD notes of Scheherazade and other stories: "...a delicate story of Roy Wood and Annie Haslam showing up at Hampstead Heath for a fair that had closed down..."
 * "Black Flame", where the only thing that's certain is that the singer has been somehow taken over by a 'black flame' that now has full control of her, feeds off her, and apparently hurts. There's a lot of weird imagery of being mouth sounds "I am words, I am speaking", "I'm just a sigh, just a crying" and in the bridge the singer is talking to someone as though she is inside them, while still telling them to try and escape.
 * "Running Hard", where someone just seems to be slipping through a world of weirdo nightmare images and metaphors, and the more they try to escape or find reality, the freakier it gets.
 * Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory: Metropolis Part 2 Album definitely has some mind screwing going on. It tells the story of Nicholas, who has visions of a girl. He visits a hypnoterapists and under his guidance realises that he is just a reincarnation of Victoria, a girl that was murdered by The Miracle, one of her two lovers, the other one being The Sleeper (and The Miracle and The Sleeper are brothers, too!). However, in the last song on the CD Nicholas is
 * On the topic of DT, there's also the video for "Forsaken." See for yourself.
 * A number of The Birthday Massacre videos fit this trope. For example, "Blue" and "Looking Glass."
 * I don't know if this would count, but perhaps Rammstein's music video for "Mutter". Features Till Lindemann, with hair and fully dressed, going on a seemingly very long journey, on a rowboat through a swamp, in order to bring a bowl of drinking water to another Till Lindemann, bald and naked, living in concrete hole in the ground. The song is anti-cloning/genetic engineering, so it's possible that the bald/naked Till could be a clone, being kept in a hole and perhaps only to be used to harvest its organs in case clothed/hairy Till needs them.
 * Just try to figure out the plot of any Coheed and Cambria song without the comics. Especially anything from Second Stage Turbine Blade or Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Part one. Go on, I'll wait.
 * Some of their songs are fairly comprehensible on their own, but others are just bizarre. Like Ten Speed (Of God's Blood and Burial), which is about a possessed, talking bicycle. For example.
 * The music video for the Madness song (Waiting for the) Ghost Train is a fairly mild example. It features the band dressed in suits that look like newspapers, a random London Underground sign for a station that doesn't exist, a man dressed as a frog appearing out of nowhere and disappearing just as suddenly, lead singer Suggs wearing a succession of funny hats for no good reason, the saxophonist dressed as a Japanese man with angel wings being thrown out of a plane and the drummer's head appearing from a pot of baked beans, among other truly weird things. In spite of this bizareness, the song's meant to be about apartheid in South Africa.
 * The music video for "Disturbia" by Rihanna. It looks like if nightmare fuel manifested itself in music video form, and didn't care about whether it made any sense or not.
 * "Syncronicity II" by The Police. Its predecessor was a straightforward, bouncy song about harmony of mind and understanding. While it is a song about a middle-class man in a rather disastrous home situation, a mundane job, and a generally depressing, repetitive, and horrible life. With a giant sea monster looming somewhere in the distance. Yeah, there was some headscratching.
 * Both songs were influenced by Carl Jung's Synchronicity, which I haven't read in full, but from which I recall the phrase "an acausal connecting principle." Sting took this to be something similar to the Butterfly Effect, but in which one event is followed by another--and the latter couldn't have happened without the first--despite the absence of a cause-and-effect relationship. One song traces a (very) general outline of the theory, while the other gives a concrete example. Yes, it's difficult to understand how an emotional storm in the mind of a businessman could not merely coincide with a far-from-occult appearance of the Loch Ness Monster: but in fact the two things must happen together, though not for a "reason" in the conventional sense. To believe synchronicity occurs, one must step outside of (what are considered) rational explanations.
 * Pink Floyd's The Wall falls here. The movie even more so.
 * Carrie Underwood's song "So Small" is pretty straightforward, but the video...
 * Pick a song by Captain Beefheart. Any song by Captain Beefheart. Founder Don Van Vliet is also very fond of True Art Is Incomprehensible; both in his music and his painting.
 * Oingo Boingo (a.k.a. Danny Elfman's old band) has had its fair share of these (which is kind of unsurprising when you consider their headliner). Most notable include Reptiles and Samuri from the album Nothing to Fear and Long Breakdown from Dark at the End of the Tunnel. You figure out a) Why a reptile AND a samuri would have one's head and 2) Why would someone wander in geometric patterns in the dark?
 * The music video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. Christopher Walken dancing around a Los Angeles hotel is strange enough in its own right. But Christopher Walken flying around a Los Angeles hotel? Woah...
 * Porcupine Tree. It's not just the songs (and entire albums) depicting LSD trips, there are songs which just reach into one's head and scramble things about as one tries to make sense of them.
 * The lyrics to "Dollar and Cent Supplicants" by The Fire Show probably mean something, but good luck figuring out what.
 * The Lamb of God song "Black Label" has lyrics completely impossible to understand, even while attempting to read along with the lyric sheet. Allegedly, the song was supposed to be impossible to hear; the lyrics were printed for the sole purpose of fucking with people.
 * Bounce by System Of A Down, and most of their other songs as well fall into this.
 * That one's about group sex. And it can be taken as read for most of System of a Down's songs that if they're not singing about overtly political, social or environmental themes... they're just being silly.
 * Most of Current 93's career starting with Thunder Perfect Mind is based on arcane Christian mysticism, with allusions to Aleister Crowley and Tibetan Buddhism, and a strange obsession with cats. The general consensus seems to be that it's mostly about the apocalypse, but beyond that it's pretty hard to parse.
 * Their early work is just as difficult to fathom at points, as well as often intentionally invoking Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory... Sometimes literally.
 * In both lyrical and musical terms, any of their collaborations with horror author Thomas Ligotti, especially I Have A Special Plan For This World.
 * On a related note, the particular strain of Post-Industrial Music that Current 93 emerged from is known for its mind-screwiness, with frequent collaborators Nurse With Wound and Coil quite often taking the cake.
 * Phil Ochs was known as a protest singer who dealt with fairly straightforward subjects (anti-Vietnam War, workers' movement, civil rights, etc.) so his eight-and-a-half minute long allegory of ultimate mindfuckery known as "Crucifixion" seems even more crazy in comparision.
 * He named one of his relatively-later albums Rehearsals for Retirement; it had his own gravestone as the cover photo.
 * It must have been the evil sausage!
 * "Blinded By The Light" by Bruce Springsteen/cover by Manfred Mann.
 * The Melvins! How could they not have been mentioned yet? Many, many songs by them are just plain odd. Their whole style is pretty bizarre.
 * The lyrics to "the Riddle" themselves are quite unclear about what they are supposed to mean, but then watch the music video to them and try to understand what's going on.
 * Nik Kershaw himself confirmed it didn't mean anything
 * The infamous Vocaloid PV Tower of Sunz. Just try to explain this load of bull honkey. You can't.
 * Anything by the Vocaloid producer Hachi is almost certain to mess with your head. Not to menton their videos, also made by him.
 * If you start analyzing "Don't Stop Belivin'" instead of singing it (along with everyone else around), you'll notice that the lyrics are a bunch of stories that may not have any connection.
 * The stories are related by a theme running through the stories. The theme is that all humans search for love in any way they can. The song further exhorts us, "Don't Stop Believin'" in our chance at finding love.
 * Dan Deacon's Lion with a Shark's Head.
 * Helen Reddy's song "Angie Baby" is an example of this. In later years, vague and sometimes conflicting explanations were given by Helen and Alan O'Day, but it's still a bit trippy to listen to.
 * Shortly before their first hiatus in March 1980, post-punk band Wire became especially fond of doing this to their audiences when playing live. See True Art Is Incomprehensible for details.
 * The videos to 'The Riddle' and 'Bla Bla Bla', both by Gigi D'Agostino.
 * Lady Gaga increasingly seems to be aiming for this. The best examples being her music videos for Alejandro and Born This Way.
 * Soundtracks for the Blind by Swans. This double-CD behemoth basically codified the Post Rock genre before there was a "Post Rock" genre to codify. It is also probably one of the greatest continuous Mind Screws in the history of rock music, as well as being a nigh-bottomless well of High Octane Nightmare Fuel. It is best explained as being a kind of soundtrack to an imaginary movie. A very long, very weird movie. Directed by David Lynch.
 * Finger Eleven's 'One Thing' music video. That is all.
 * Much of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's work; particularly "My Pink Half of the Drainpipe" and "Rhinocratic Oaths" which feature extended spoken sections which require several listenings to even begin to visualize, let alone understand.
 * Weird Al Yankovic's "Everything You Know Is Wrong", among others.
 * Many of the works of modern classical composer Giacinto Scelsi can be just a tiny bit confusing. Take "Uaxuctum," a piece based on the legend of a Mayan city that ritually destroyed itself. His music has been described as "all transition."
 * The music video (not the song) for Bobby McFerrin´s Don´t Worry, Be Happy.
 * Everything New Kingdom ever recorded.
 * Divine Styler's second album, Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light makes roughly as much sense as the title would imply. Musically it's a mixture of hip-hop, jam band like improv sessions, funk, and spoken word. Lyrically it makes very little sense, Styler's bizarre delivery (on this album, anyway) doesn't help.
 * Some of the music videos for Poets of the Fall are really weird, but the best example has to be "Carnival of Rust", where a woman with a gas mask and a lollipop visits a dilapidated Carnival of Fear.
 * Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, while only debuting in late 2011, is certainly in this section. Her first song is PONPONPON (meaning "clap clap clap") has this video, though the lyrics make slightly more sense.
 * Her second song was called "Tsukema Tsukeru" which is about putting on false eyelashes. Video makes... sense..
 * Zechs Marquise's first video "Everlasting Beacon Of Light" certainly seems like a drug trip, and that's because the video is. The protagonist of the video, played by Rx Bandits frontman Matt Embree, smokes a particularly strong strain of weed known as the Everlasting Beacon. He goes on a trip through El Paso encountering men in suits and animal masks. In the end he and his dealer discuss the mind screwy nature of the Everlasting Beacon.
 * I don't know if Pink Elephants on Parade and Heffalumps and Woozles belong here or not. Even without the video, the songs are pretty damn trippy.
 * Britney Spears has a video where she see's a video of someone complaining abouttsomething she did, which made many people mad then she decided to do it, but at the end of the same video is played, at the same time, but she is no longer there to witness it.
 * Just about every Sound Horizon album. Roman is especially infamous for this, but even the seemingly straightfoward Märchen album starts getting more and more confusing once you start thinking about it. (is Märchen Rewriting Reality, or is he just telling fanciful revenge stories loosely based on depressing happenings? Is he in a Platonic Cave? Magic or Mudane? Does Idolfried Ehrenberg actually have any significance to the story, or did Revo just put him in to mess with the audience? Märchen is Idolfried - and by extension the Well Girl's father - isn't he?...)
 * Boards of Canada thrives on this, but their song Aquarius is particularly egregious. It starts of with samples of sarcastic children, then a woman starts counting, then she starts saying the numbers in a seemingly random order, and finally starts outright inventing numbers (sixty-ten and sixty orange)...and there's a sample of a man saying the word "orange" throughout the song. If there's a meaning behind any of it, no one seems to know what it is