To the stupid Beatle elitists giving evanchester a hard time here is a quote staight from John Lennon in reference to the song: "I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don't."
Every good artist knows that even if something HAS meaning, you don't tell people what it is because it ruins the universal quality of the music. Like all art forms, the beauty of GOOD music is that people can make personal connections with it. Dylan also did the "my song means nothing" bit on a few occasions, but more often than not he was being facetious/cryptic/ironic or deliberately trying to avoid telling his audience what to think. That said, I think it is wise to keep in mind that most songs have meaning - it's just a question of whether...
Every good artist knows that even if something HAS meaning, you don't tell people what it is because it ruins the universal quality of the music. Like all art forms, the beauty of GOOD music is that people can make personal connections with it. Dylan also did the "my song means nothing" bit on a few occasions, but more often than not he was being facetious/cryptic/ironic or deliberately trying to avoid telling his audience what to think. That said, I think it is wise to keep in mind that most songs have meaning - it's just a question of whether it's the artist's meaning or our own personal meaning. And, secondarily, Lennon may have subconsciously meant something when he wrote it that he's not even consciously aware of. In other words, I hear what Lennon's /saying/, and perhaps some songs really are nonsense strings of words meaning nothing, but I think with most of them (and with this song) there's some meaning, even if it's only personal to the listener. You can find several meanings in this particular song, but the overall meaning seems to be that there's no right or wrong meaning, because it's personal to you/subjective. That's the reason the Beatles are huge to this day. Their art is universal.
To the stupid Beatle elitists giving evanchester a hard time here is a quote staight from John Lennon in reference to the song: "I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don't."
Every good artist knows that even if something HAS meaning, you don't tell people what it is because it ruins the universal quality of the music. Like all art forms, the beauty of GOOD music is that people can make personal connections with it. Dylan also did the "my song means nothing" bit on a few occasions, but more often than not he was being facetious/cryptic/ironic or deliberately trying to avoid telling his audience what to think. That said, I think it is wise to keep in mind that most songs have meaning - it's just a question of whether...
Every good artist knows that even if something HAS meaning, you don't tell people what it is because it ruins the universal quality of the music. Like all art forms, the beauty of GOOD music is that people can make personal connections with it. Dylan also did the "my song means nothing" bit on a few occasions, but more often than not he was being facetious/cryptic/ironic or deliberately trying to avoid telling his audience what to think. That said, I think it is wise to keep in mind that most songs have meaning - it's just a question of whether it's the artist's meaning or our own personal meaning. And, secondarily, Lennon may have subconsciously meant something when he wrote it that he's not even consciously aware of. In other words, I hear what Lennon's /saying/, and perhaps some songs really are nonsense strings of words meaning nothing, but I think with most of them (and with this song) there's some meaning, even if it's only personal to the listener. You can find several meanings in this particular song, but the overall meaning seems to be that there's no right or wrong meaning, because it's personal to you/subjective. That's the reason the Beatles are huge to this day. Their art is universal.