Use Your Allusion: 10 Great Literary References in Rock

10. The Walrus Mocks the Penguin

Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan PoeLike most of "I Am the Walrus," this sounds like word salad until you learn the story behind it:

"I saw Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus, going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to. The words ‘Elementary penguin’ meant that it’s naive to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol. –John Lennon, All We Are Saying by David SheffNot a bad dig at Ginsberg, right? Once you've imagined him as a Hare Krishna-chanting penguin, you can never quite unimagine him as a Hare Krishna-chanting penguin.

For good measure, "the walrus" is a nod to Lewis Carroll's character of the same name, and "Goo goo ga joob" is lifted from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's interesting to notice how many "psychedelic" '60s lyrics--seemingly the product of drug-fueled free association--call back to the tradition of English nonsense poetry and the Modernist language experiments they helped inspire. (Think about it: the Carroll-Joyce connection is pretty strong too.)

Speaking of which…

9. Grace Slick Jumps Down the Original Rabbit Hole

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your headWhen Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane in 1966, she came armed with a masterpiece: "White Rabbit." Her two-and-a-half minute riff on Lewis Carroll's Alice books doesn't so much graft '60s trippiness onto a children's classic as bring out the trippiness that was already there. (Carroll isn't known to have been a drug user, but he was a logician fascinated by the illogic of dreams, and he suffered from hallucinatory migraines and unexplained seizures.) And while Slick takes some creative liberties with the Alice story, her lyrics reveal an impressively detailed familiarity with Carroll's fiction, which she loved as a child. "Remember what the Dormouse said" is an allusion to an obscure passage from the trial scene in the first Alice book:

'But what did the Dormouse say?' one of the jury asked.
'That I can't remember', said the Hatter.
'You MUST remember,' remarked the King, 'or I'll have you executed.'8. Jeff Mangum Revives the Ghost of Anne Frank

"The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone"
One of the weirdest concept albums in rock history, Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea makes repeated but never explicit reference to Anne Frank and her diary. The above lyrics are from "Holland 1945," Holland being Anne's main country of residence and 1945 the date of her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Immersion in the album and in Frank's diary may have taken a toll on songwriter/frontman Jeff Mangum--or they may have been symptomatic of something taking a toll on him already. Following the success of Aeroplane, he retreated into seclusion for the better part of a decade, prompting one critic to call him "the Salinger of indie rock."

7. The Byrds Turn It Up With the Good Book

Plucking lyrics almost verbatim from Ecclesiastes 3, American folk-rock band The Byrds famously covered Pete Seeger's 1950s song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and landed their third single in 1965 to wide acclaim and a happy afterlife of pop culture references. (Remember that Simpsons episode where they parody The Wonder Years?) While Seeger and folk group The Limliters released their own versions of the song, The Byrds' version is by far the most popular.

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracingTurns out all you have to do to reach that coveted #1 Billboard spot is plagiarize the Bible. Why start from scratch, right? A time to plant, a time to reap what someone else planted…

6. Prince and Dorothy Parker [Glyph] Till Dawn

Dorothy was a waitress on the promenade
She worked the night shift
Dishwater blonde, tall and fine
She got a lot of tips
Well, earlier I'd been talkin' stuff
In a violent room
Fighting with lovers past
I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine
Dorothy was fast"The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," a lesser-known cut off Prince's classic Sign O' the Times, is pretty odd even for TAFKA TAFKA. His version of poet and quote-master Dorothy Parker still has the quick wit, but instead of cracking jokes at the Algonquin Round Table she's working tables for wealthy diners, and instead of a petite brunette she's a tall, fine blonde. That last detail is probably a nod to her most famous short story, "The Big Blonde." As for the rest of the ballad, it seems to emerge purely from Prince's fevered imagination. The line that says it all: "I took another bubble bath with my pants on."

5. Kate Bush Goes Full-On Brontë

Out on the wily, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.Kate Bush's 1978 breakthrough hit may be the most immersive literary homage in all of rock. It certainly boasts one of the most eccentric music videos ever recorded: a kind of cartwheeling musical Ren Faire skit that's equal parts hypnotic and hilarious. And Bush sings the lyrics--without a trace of irony--as Catherine Earnshaw, doomed heroine of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Cathy's restless spirit has returned to the window to call out for her Heathcliff, echoing a famous scene from the novel.

Snicker at "Wuthering Heights" if you want--but that hook! Like a spectral voice from the moors, it'll float around your skull for days on end. "I'm so cooooooold…"

4. The Arctic Monkeys Channel John Cooper Clarke

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rustAfter so many bouts of lost love, what does Alex Turner have but the punk whimsy of John Cooper Clarke to keep him smiling? Carefully placed at the end of the Arctic Monkeys' smash 2013 LP AM, "I Wanna Be Yours"--titled after the Clark poem--is an homage to one of the greatest contemporary performance poets in the UK. Clarke toured on bills with the likes of the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Elvis Costello: not exactly a conventional resume for a poet. Like Clarke, frontman Turner wants to be what's likely the ONLY Ford Cortina that never did rust…a golden boy to the apple of his eye. He'll take the bad with the good, without hesitation--just like a vacuum cleaner.

3. Blue Öyster Cult Swoons Over the World's Most Famous Power Couple

Valentine is done
Here but now they're gone
Romeo and Juliet
Are together in eternityWell, yeah...they'd better be! After the most intense five-day love affair the world has ever known, we can only hope R & J are holding hands and smooching in some groovy 70's sky. In "Don't Fear the Reaper," singer Daniel Roeser waxes poetic about the survival of love after death. Unfortunately "Reaper" isn't remembered so much for the literary reference as for being "that cowbell song": rather than lovers cooing in heaven, it'll always evoke the memory of SNL's Will Ferrell beating away at the iron.

2. The Mountain Goats Rewrite Dostoevsky

Raskolnikov felt sick
But he couldn't say why
When he saw his face reflected
In his victim's twinkling eye
Some things you'll do for money
And some you'll do for fun
But the things you do for love
Are going to come back to you one by oneIn "Love Love Love," The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle provides one of the best pocket summaries of Crime and Punishment we've come across. Raskolnikov's reasons for murdering his landlord have fueled thousands of pages of commentary--starting with the novel itself--but his surface motive is money, while his main ulterior motive is the desire to prove himself a "great man" exempt from ordinary moral codes. ("Am I a trembling man, or do I have the right?") But there's more! This being Dostoevsky, he's also exiled from the grace of God, which he eventually seeks with the help of a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who…anyhow, The Mountain Goats. Whether Darnielle's referring to earthly or divine love, his suggestion that young Rodion killed for lack of it cuts straight to the heart of the novel.

1. Bob Dylan Alludes to…Well, Most of Western Literature

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While Calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About desolation rowBob Dylan's 1965 opus "Desolation Row" is a feast of quotes, allusions, and characters from literary history: everyone from Cain and Abel to Shakespeare and the Phantom of the Opera gets name-checked. But while the hallucinatory pageant occasionally drifts out of focus, this passage near the end stands out for the sharpness and coherency of its satire. The opening reference to Emperor Nero, who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned, sets the theme of ridiculous self-indulgence. We then get Pound and Eliot, the captains of High Modernism, bickering atop the doomed Titanic of modern culture while mermaids (in whose dreamy company Eliot's Prufrock liked to hide from reality) frolic in the ocean below. The fishermen courting the mermaids aren't going to have any more luck than Prufrock did. Stand back from it all and you've got a portrait of an era sailing off into irrelevance and failure: the times, they are a-changing.

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BONUS: Paul Simon's 1965 "A Simple Desultory Philippic" is still a great parody of Dylan's relentless reference-spitting. "I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded / Communist, cause I'm left-handed. / That's the hand I use…well, never mind."