Lyrics that mean...well, you know

If you’re looking for laughs, ask a music-savvy friend to take a stab at some contemporary hip-hop karaoke.

Besides a good dose of bad singing -- riotous impressions of falsetto-fixated rappers such as Pharrell Williams and Andre 3000 -- you’ll get an entertaining earful of what sounds strangely like aural spam. There’s R. Kelly’s ode to a mysterious but evidently alluring object called a “Thoia Thang.” And there’s the chorus to Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” which takes the line “I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” and, well, flips and reverses it (via synthesizers) until it sounds like gobbledygook.

You’ll also enjoy amusing attempts at foreign phrases: the Punjabi and Hindi, for instance, in Jay-Z’s bhangra hit “Beware of the Boys,” “or Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” -- a sea of Jamaican patois whose lyrical lifeboats are limited to “don’t stop,” “let the beat drop” and the ever-reliable “shake that booty.”

Call it hip-hop’s hottest subgenre: Songs you can’t quite sing along to. Not unless you embrace the unknown, that is.

Difficult to decipher, altogether meaningless or in want of translation, these hits transform hip-hop from an exercise in listening to an adventure in guesswork, explication or simply making things up as you go along.

“The essence of hip-hop is lyrical -- wordplay, battling -- but we’ve moved away from that,” says Wyclef Jean, a rapper old-school enough to wax nostalgic about hip-hop’s verbal wunderkinder, such as KRS-1 and Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

He’s also a rapper inventive enough to milk the creative possibilities of this trend. Though Jean’s latest album, “The Preacher’s Son,” has its lyrical moments, its prime tracks are those less intelligible to average Americans: the reggae song “I Am Your Doctor,” with patois interludes by Elephant Man and Wayne Wonder, and “Party by the Sea,” an English-tinged French Creole song featuring Jamaican artist Buju Banton and Haitian group T-Vice.

Haitian-born Jean is also releasing French Creole versions of his new singles, starting with the ballad “Take Me as I Am,” and is currently recording an entire album in that tongue. Though it was plotted with the French-speaking Caribbean market in mind, its possibilities in the U.S. might be boosted by hip-hop’s move toward un-lyricism -- its mounting openness not just to foreign sounds, but to music whose precise meaning is beside the point.

“The mood and the spirit of music is understandable,” says Jean. “I think about someone like Cab Calloway, who performed around the world and left people a vibe and an energy.”

It’s an apt comparison. Calloway’s jazz scatting made music of mumbo jumbo and was one of the first American art forms to favor music’s connotation over and above its literal denotation.

An outgrowth of Jamaican DJs who chatted over records in hard-to-decipher slang, early hip-hop featured gibberish galore: Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s “La-Di-Da-Di,” or the oft-cited “hippity hop” chatter in the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

Postmodern party songs

Since then, however, narrative-oriented tracks have been hip-hop’s meat and potatoes, making its current forays into unintelligibility something of a throwback.

Lumidee’s one-hit wonder “Uh-Oh (Never Leave Me)” still has partygoers saying “uh-oh” for no apparent reason, while Kelis and Chingy give us catchy choruses that make only a smattering of sense. Why is Kelis talking about a “milkshake,” and where’s that “right thurrr” to which Chingy keeps referring?

These are, in a sense, postmodern party songs that hint at the inadequacy of words themselves. Climaxing in a chorus that isn’t easily comprehended -- or not comprehensible at all -- they somehow transcend language altogether.

They also prove that lyrics aren’t the only path to comprehension. Not one word in its chorus can be found in the dictionary, yet somehow we know what Missy Elliott is talking about in “Gossip Folks.” We sense what R. Kelly’s beloved “thoia thang” is, and we have more than a clue about why Kelis’ milkshake “brings all the boys to the yard.”

So just as fluency in Spanish wasn’t a prerequisite to grasping the essence of Enrique Iglesias’ “Bailamos” or Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” knowing French isn’t the only way to get a handle on the French Creole version of a new Jean single. A powerful beat, an intense mood and the overall vibe of a song can sometimes do more than any translator.

“As an artist, I’m unpredictable -- you never know what I’m gonna do next,” says Jean, unwittingly suggesting another reason why we’re grooving to music we don’t understand: After a quarter-century of hip-hop wordplay, perhaps the only thing we haven’t heard before is something we actually haven’t heard before -- a lyrical stream that’s surprisingly absurd, meaningless or foreign, and that still, somehow, says it all.