If you are one of those who frequent museums and galleries of contemporary art, you are surely familiar with that feeling of bewilderment, exhaustion and irritation caused by the pompous and exaggerated prose with which they often accompany their exhibitions. As if a ruthless soul is giving us a key so that we can open the door, knowing that the lock is broken. But paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities are not exclusive to the world of art. Often what appears to be the most accessible is also the most confusing and incomprehensible. Social networks are loaded with messages that pose real riddles and, forever, be it John Lennon or Rosalía, fans have loved playing detective when the lyrics of their favorite musicians' songs are too mysterious. At some point the FBI even had to intervene.
Louie Louie, one of the rock anthems of all time, was composed in 1957 by Richard Berry. The lyrics are the lament of a sailor who, at a bar, cries for the woman who is waiting for him in Jamaica and can't wait to go after her. The story would not have happened from here if it weren't for the fact that six years later the Kingsmen locked themselves in a garage to record their own version in disastrous conditions. Singer Jack Ely had only a microphone suspended above his head and wore braces that forced him to slur his words while the band's musicians drowned out his voice by playing around him at full throttle. The result was so incomprehensible that it triggered all kinds of paranoid theories.
The father of a teenager wrote an outraged letter to Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, asking him to investigate the obscenity of the letter. The FBI spent two years scrutinizing that subversive message that was going to corrupt the American youth; playing the single over and over again at different speeds, calling witnesses and using experts to find out what the hell that guy was singing. No one could determine it, so there was no case, although in the desperate process of finding things that did not exist, delusional interpretations were recorded in the report.
It doesn't matter if the obscenities some thought they heard were imagined. Louie Louie promised strong things and his bad reputation gave him a touch of danger that dragged hundreds of musicians to make their own versions: Kinks, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Tina Turner, Patti Smith... The songs, like Works of art are not always what they seem, although they all implore to be heard. It depends on who does it, things like Ronald Reagan seeing patriotic fervor in Born in the U.S.A . which Springsteen conceived as a bitter song about the shameful treatment of Vietnam veterans. The president's misunderstanding, or bad faith, would have warranted a file, but the FBI sat back.
