The next step in using music to learn psychology is to listen to songs whose lyrics are so abstract they don’t fit together on their own. How does the singer’s vocal style and the rest of the music create underlying themes that connect the words?
This is Weird Al’s parody of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Bob used his vocal style and instrumentation to make the pieces of the social movement feel like they fit together, even though no one knew exactly what was happening at the time. Weird Al borrows Bob’s vocal style and accompaniment to make ideas that have no connection at all feel like they fit together. The underlying theme of these lyrics is that each line is a palindrome– it spells the same thing forwards or backwards. But Bob’s musical style even makes these ideas feel like they have a coherent story behind them!
