There has long been a sort of subterranean feud between the Beatles and the Velvet Underground–and a largely lopsided one at that. For the super-majority of Beatles fans, the existence of the Velvets barely registers, and even when it does, they naturally consider the Beatles biggest rivals to either be the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan in America, or the Rolling Stones back in England. Velvet Undergound fans by contrast have largely followed Lou Reed’s lead in lambasting the Beatles as overrated and overplayed–with not even a fraction of the influence that the Velvets would have upon the development of Punk, Indie, and ’90s Alternative–all while eliding the fact that Reed despised the Beatles precisely because they were popular, and he wanted to be. Reed in fact had forced out his co-founder, avant-garde musician John Cale, after only their second album so that he could start cranking out more conventional pop-songs for popular consumption.

The irony however is that their first post-Cale album (confusingly self-titled The Velvet Underground, and not to be confused with their and Nico debut) penultimately finishes with perhaps their greatest experimental-song of all, “The Murder Mystery” (the track, incidentally, that finally made me fall in love with them).

The song starts with a simple guitar riff that’s at once menacing and euphoric, soothing and anxious, understated and expansive; on the “verses” (if you can call them that), both Doug Yule and Sterling Morrison speak-sing their competing verses rapidly and simultaneously. Each recites densely-written sound-poems—with Lou Reed and Maureen Tucker singing their own competing lines on the choruses—in a dazzling cacophony that mirrors the cacophony of postmodern life, with our myriad and incomprehensible distractions that tear apart our attention in every which direction.

Try and look up the overlapping texts if you must (that is what the internet is for, after all), but I doubt there is anything to decipher: the “Mystery” perhaps refers less to a crime than something like the mysteries of the Catholic Church, i.e. the incomprehensible miracles that you simply must accept to be a true believer. It is not the words themselves that matter, but what the words invoke, and point towards.

And that, ironically, is where The Velvet Underground and The Beatles almost-accidentally overlap: because the latter’s most celebrated experimental-song, “I Am The Walrus” (double A-side with their #1 hit “Hello Goodbye“), is also one that completely undercuts the intelligibility of all language in its cacophonous sound collage.

John Lennon even openly mocked the attempts of Beatles fans to decipher the lyrics the following year, facetiously telling everyone that “The Walrus was Paul” on The White Album’s tongue-in-cheek track “Glass Onion“. The lyrics really are intentional nonsense; the Beatles had all but openly declared their use of LSD on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” earlier that same year–and “Glass Onion” explicitly mentions making “a dove-tailed joint, yeah.” (This of course was the exact same year that the Velvets debuted “Heroin“). Much like “The Murder Mystery,” the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” is more about affect than message, mood than meaning–the words intentionally self-destruct, so as to ensure that we find meaning somewhere else entirely. (It is also the track that finally made me fall in love with the Beatles as a teenager.)

And at the risk of once again hammering on a well-trodden theme: so too does the Book of Mormon.

Repeatedly throughout the Book (the keystone of our religion), the various narrators complain about their inability to communicate through words the things that they feel (2 Nephi 33:1; Ether 12:25). Mastery and eloquence of language is perpetually portrayed as the province of the various Anti-Christs (Sherem, Nehor, Korihor, even the lawyer Zeezom pre-conversion), while the prophets by contrast rely exclusively on the Holy Ghost–what Paul in the New Testament called “the groanings beyond utterance” and “the peace of God which surpasseth all understanding”.

Nephi himself explicitly tells the reader that “if ye believe not in these words [then] believe in Christ,” because the words were always the least relevant part; and of course our own missionaries seek to prove the veracity of the Book to investigators not by resorting to complex textual exegesis, but to “ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.” The words were always the least important part of the Book. The Book of Mormon participates in its own textual self-decontruction, in order to ensure that conversion comes of only place it can come from–the thing beyond discourse.

Ironically, instinctively, intuitively, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground drew closest to each other–and to the Book of Mormon–when they were also undermining all textual reliability, in order to ensure the primacy of the affective experience (“the peace of God which surpasseth all understanding”) above all other considerations. “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary, use words,” said Elder Holland, who in turn was quoting St. Francis. No one knows how little words matter than those who use them most.

(And here we promise to let this theme take a breather).