When did incomprehensible lyrics start?

[Donnadogsoth]

My entire life I've been surrounded by songs with lyrics that are either (a) cryptic, (b) drowned by instrumentation, or © both.  Was this the norm throughout history?  Did bards and other singers from earlier times spool out cryptic verbiage obscured by wailing instrumentation?  Or is this a uniquely modern Western phenomenon?

[AccuTron]

I think Marzy Doats started us down the slippery path....

 

More seriously...I wonder if it has to do with modern tech that can send a voice to thousands, get the star worship going, and the worshippers don't much care if they can make out the words.  I have trouble imagining anyone succeeding at all in a pre tech time, if they couldn't be understood.

[ValueOfBrevity]

My entire life I've been surrounded by songs with lyrics that are either (a) cryptic, (b) drowned by instrumentation, or © both.  Was this the norm throughout history?  Did bards and other singers from earlier times spool out cryptic verbiage obscured by wailing instrumentation?  Or is this a uniquely modern Western phenomenon?

Lyrics are often ambiguous in order to appeal to universal themes.

 

In other words, they reach a wider audience if they are cryptic.

[shirgall]

This tradition goes back to Greensleeves.

[KJeeMusic]

Bowie famously used the 'cut up' technique where he'd cut words from text and rearange them to create new text [lyrics]. (Which explains: " Ziggy really sang, screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo Like some cat from Japan, he could lick 'em by smiling He could leave 'em to hang He came on so loaded man, well-hung and snow white tan." and of course: "falls w***ing to the floor"

But this started in the 1920s with Dadaism. According to Wiki:  "the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works."

...So, pretty much the original and irrational SJW movement.

[ofd]

It started right away with philosophy. Right from the start, many had to be face persecution so they wrote in metaphors or in an unintelligible way. Their students and anyone intersted in thinking then got the esoteric meaning.