Once again, Clinton "Never try to sing anything you don't understand, that's a good principle."

If you find it difficult to understand it, then presumably you aren't the only one in your part of the world with the same difficulty, whatever that may be.

Is it something to do with people needing to take things literally, and not recognising figurative language? So that when the song talks about chopping down a dead true, as an image for demolishing old buildings and an old community, people get confused?

Maybe there are parts of the world where that way of using language really isn't done too much, or rather where the expectation is that it needs to be signalled, so that people are alerted to it. There was a discussion here about irony recently which got into that idea.