Noodle Incident / Music

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(To make it easier to find them, please place songs or groups in alphabetical order)

• The card game that Aborted released as a preorder bonus for The Necrotic Manifesto made reference to Ken Bedene and his run-in with a tow truck. The only other thing that the card confirmed was that he made the mistake of parking the van in a tow zone; the rest of the incident isn't clearly stated, and when Sven encouraged Ken to elaborate in an interview, Ken steadfastly refused on the grounds that he didn't want to "look like a dumbass in a fuckin' interview".
• bill wurtz's song "i just did a bad thing" begins with Wurtz singing about him having done a bad thing and regretting it. The song never explains what was the bad thing he did.
• "Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobbie Gentry - we know Billie Joe and his girlfriend "were throwin' something off the Tallahatchee Bridge," but we never learn what it was (Gentry has said in interviews that she had nothing in particular in mind - that simply isn't the point of the song).
  • Conversed briefly in the film The Guard, when the song comes on during a tense exchange in a diner. Suddenly, everyone takes a pause to debate what the song is about and what she was throwing off the bridge. One character says he always thought it was a baby.
• "Babaganoush" by TV's Kyle describes a man against whom several people commit various acts; the only explanation they give is the title.
• The opening of the video for Blow by Ke$ha gives us this little gem.
  "So, I grabbed the bear by the throat, looked him right in the eyes, and I said 'Bear, you have 'till the count of zero to put some pants on and to apologize to the President.' And, um...that's the story of how I was elected to the Parliament of Uzbekistan.
• Bowling for Soup:
  • The album "The Great Burrito Extortion Case" doesn't actually refer to anything. That they'll admit to.
  • Their song "Somebody Get My Mom" [1]
• Phil Collins, from "In The Air Tonight": "Well, I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes..." What he might have seen has become the subject of both Epileptic Trees and urban legends. As the page from Snopes notes, the entire song seems to be a Noodle Incident.
• Dido's "White Flag": "I know I left too much mess and destruction to come back again." She doesn't say what, but then again, I don't know if I even want to know what it is, if it's so bad an attractive woman like her can't ever go back to him.
• The Flight of the Conchords song "Albi" is apparently "part 6" of a children's TV program, and it starts "...and so all the people of the village chased Albi the Racist Dragon into a very cold, very scary cave". The song also mentions "the badly-burnt Albanian boy from the day before", whom Albi tried to kill.
• Guns N' Roses' album "The Spaghetti Incident?" (the quotes are part of the title) was named for a food fight between Axl Rose and Steven Adler involving spaghetti. During Adler's resolution lawsuit after leaving the band, the food fight was brought up, dubbed "the Spaghetti incident" by Adler's attorney. Eventually, it was explained by band members Matt Sorum and Slash.
• "Hillary Song" by Marlin Spike Werner never says what exactly happened in that Customs warehouse at Kathmandu. The only thing we can be certain of is that knocking the yak was most definitely not a good idea.
• Gail Garnett's 1960s song "We'll Sing In the Sunshine" says she'll live with a guy for one year, then move on. Does not say why, whether it's that she's dying (or he is), she can't be with a guy more than one year because she gets bored, or just likes medium-term relationships.
  • Actually she does say why: because her father warned her against ever loving anyone. Which kind of makes you wonder how he treated her mother, and why Gale was willing to follow his advice when she must have seen the results. Still and all, a bad explanation is still an explanation.
• The British band Invocal, on a partiuclarly reclusive public-transport-user: "Oh, now don't you worry, Madalini's little crossbow / Only launches rods with little orange sucker pads. / She makes a point of never using actual weaponry / (Well, not since The Accident.)", Invocal, "Madalini's Aversion to Smalltalk Had Become Really Rather Extreme."
• Billy Joel "Big Shot", where a real posh dude walks into a party, gets drunk, and...well, probably he played Miles Gloriosus, but the somewhat sadistic singer refuses to tell him what he did exactly.
• The opening to the song of Let's All Get Demented.
  When mum locked me in the coal shed, after the incident, with the chainsaw and the latex rabbit, and the girl guides in the tent.
• The origin of Maroon 5's name, which according to most reports is "a secret known only to the 5 of them and Billy Joel" (though Wikipedia hints it to be a girl the band members had a "collective crush" on).
• In the Ninja Sex Party song "Rhinoceratops vs. Superpuma", Danny refers to somebody named Doug twice, though it's never stated who he is or what he has done.
  Everyone rejoices, stupid Doug shouts "Hooray!"
  Doug you suck, but that's a story for another day.
• Peter, Paul and Mary's I Dig Rock and Roll Music has these lines:
  I dig rock and roll music
  I could really get on that scene
  I think I could I could say somethin'
  If you know what I mean
  But if I really say it
  The radio won't play it
  Unless I lay it between the lines.
  • Might also be a piss-take about many people's interpretation of "Puff the Magic Dragon"...
• In Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," "what the mama saw / it was against the law," but what she saw is never specified. Asked in an interview, Simon replied, "I have no idea what it is. [...] Something sexual is what I imagine, but when I say 'something,' I never bothered to figure out what it was. Didn't make any difference to me."
• When performing the song "My Home Town," Tom Lehrer always omits a line by saying something to the effect of "we're recording tonight, so I'll have to leave this line out." (The published sheet music just calls for whistling, and in the studio version that appears on Songs by Tom Lehrer he says "Shall I? No, maybe better not.") He has subsequently admitted that he never came up with a satisfactory rhyme, and found the implication that he intended to say something so unspeakably racy it had to be censored much funnier.
• Lit's breakout single "My Own Worst Enemy" revolves around a moderate one. There was a fight between the singer and his girlfriend, but a lot of specifics are left to the listener's imagination.
• Tom Waits has done this a few times, mostly in his scarier songs.
  • "Murder in the Red Barn" describes the impact of a murder on a small rural community, including the general air of mistrust and what kind of roadkill is most common in which season, but we never find out who killed whom. There are a few cryptic hints, but not much of a solid narrative.
  • Off the same album, "Black Wings" is about an Ambiguously Human character on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Revenge for what? We'll never know.
  Some say he once killed a man with a guitar string
  He's been seen at the table with kings
  Well, he once saved a baby from drowning
  There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings
  • "Don't Go Into That Barn", which may be a kind of sequel to "Murder In The Red Barn", involves something sinister happening on a Southern Gothic plantation, a barn you shouldn't go into, and a guy named Everett Lee who "broke loose again, it's worse than the time before". Probably not Everett Lee the famous violinist. None of these things are elaborated on in any way.
  • In the love song "Take It With Me", we get glimpses of fond memories shared by a couple, including "way back when we lived in Coney Island" and the time "we fell asleep on Beula's porch."
  • "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" has several Noodle Incidents, beginning perhaps with just how the hooker in question knows Charley (the guy she's writing the card to), but most especially the line "Hey Charley I almost went crazy / After Mario got busted". We never learn who Mario is or why he got busted.
• Rosetta Stoned, from Tool's 10,000 Days album: "This is so real, like the time Dave floated away..."
• The Runaways, a '70s and '80s rock band whose members included Lita Ford, Joan Jett, and Micki Steele of The Bangles, were kicked out of Disneyland in 1977. According to a Disney rep, one of their offenses was "doing weird things with french fries"
• If the note sailor!Craig sends out to the rest of sailor!Driftless Pony Club is anything to go by in "Inspectors of Inspectors", Driftless Pony Club's been stuck in more than one whale.
• There was a band named The String Cheese Incident.
• The Streets' "Such A Twat", from A Grand Don't Come For Free has a reference to "the incident with the ice cream": It comes off as a noodle incident in the context of the album, which is meant to have a continuous narrative, but is actually explained by a song that ended up being a B-Side: "Soaked By The Ale" is about the main character drunkenly attempting to shoplift a tub of ice cream while on vacation in Spain, which annoys his friends since he's running the risk of everyone getting arrested.
• "Square Pegs" by The Waitresses references a few, such as "But they told me it was senior wig day" and "Honest, I don't even know how those worms got there!"
• The song "Such Horrible Things" by Creature Feature explains the evil deeds committed by a person throughout his years. (Ex. "When I was two I poured super glue into my father's hair..." It skips ages by two until it reaches 18) The lyrics refer to a noodle incident at age 14: "When I was fourteen—nothing much happened. Well, heh heh, there was that one time..."
• While not a song in and of itself, X Japan was, in their early days as X, involved in an actual Noodle Incident that split Visual Kei from just being another part of Japanese Heavy Metal. The band performed their song "Orgasm" at a noodle shop Yashiro, inviting along a TV crew to video them performing. Whether the noodleshop owners were complicit in the publicity stunt wasn't known, though the TV crew definitely was, and that led to the split at the time - the Japanese Heavy Metal community as it was at the time saw the Visual Kei upstarts as being the Attention Whore to use such promotion as staging a performance outside of a venue and dragging a TV crew along to film it, and as causing needless trouble for everyone. The split would later be mended to some degree (though some corners of Japanese Heavy Metal still look down on Visual Kei artists as more interested in attention than music).
• Used to surprisingly dark effect in Warren Zevon's "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me", with the abrupt ending of its last verse:
  I met a girl at the rainbow bar
  She asked me if I'd beat her
  She took me back to the Hyatt House
  ...I don't wanna talk about it.
• In the original 1968 album release of The Who's Rock Opera Tommy the incident that traumatized Tommy into not hearing, seeing or speaking is never explained and left purposely ambiguous. Of course, in The Movie and The Musical versions, the event is elaborated on as Mrs. Walker's lover killing Tommy's father (or vice versa, respectively).
• The music video for hardcore band Norma Jean's "If You Got It At Five, You Got It At Fifty" starts mid-conversation with guitarist Chris Day casually telling vocalist Cory Putman about how "apparently restraining orders are a really big deal", and Cory responding with deadpan boredom, "Whatever."
• Bobby Pinson's "Don't Ask Me How I Know" is a series of these, with the narrator imploring the listener not to do a number of activities that the narrator just knows are bad ideas, but "Don't ask me how I know."
• Carole Bayer Sager tells us in her 1976 hit "You're Moving Out Today", "Your nasty habits aren't confined to bed/The grocer told me what you do with bread".
• Modest Mouse's hit "Float On" has the narrator lament that "a fake Jamaican took every last dime with that scam", but doesn't elaborate (he decides that "it was worth it just to learn some sleight of hand").

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