I think that natural languages are primarily supposed to be instruments of communication. In this regard, I assume some languages are better than others; probably, some languages enable their speakers to get ideas across more quickly, clearly, and precisely than others do. However, even if there are languages which are extremely bad at enabling their speakers to communicate, I think that this is still primarily what such a language is supposed to do. The ability to enable us to communicate is, I think, the "essence" of language: it makes any given language what it is, i.e. a language.
Even so, one can use the words of a language to do things other than to communicate. For instance, one can utter a string of words primarily in order to comfort a crying baby, rather than to communicate with it. When one does this, the words retain their meaning, but they could perform their present function just as well (or just as poorly) even if they had no meaning whatsoever. This, I suppose, explains why parents so often speak gibberish to their babies: a parent’s words do not need to mean anything in order to have their intended effect.
Song-writers usually need to meet two requirements: (1) Each word in the song must "mean something"; it must not be gibberish (although this rule is occasionally suspended); (2) Each word must meet the formal requirements of the song (i.e., the last words of each line must rhyme with one another; each line must contain a sequence of words with the correct number of syllables; etc.) (this rule seems very rarely to be suspended, although it is clear that different songs have different structures).
I want to suggest that these requirements at best make communication difficult, and at worst make communication impossible. Let’s consider the song "Sweet Betsy From Pike":
Oh don’t you remember sweet Betsy from Pike,
Who crossed the wide prairie with her lover Ike,
With two yoke of oxen, a big yellow dog,
A tall Shangai rooster, and one spotted hog?
Here, it has to be admitted, a very simple set of ideas are communicated. The song tells us that there was a person named Betsy, her husband was named Ike, they had a lot of animals, and they went on a journey. Betsy might have actually existed, although that would involve a remarkable set of coincidences; it would require, for instance, that Betsy’s husband’s name just happened to rhyme perfectly with the name of her own home town. It’s probably more likely that the details of Betsy’s life, along with possibly even Betsy herself, were mostly made up in order to satisfy demands of the song structure. So the meaning of the song is probably, at least in large part, determined by the song-writer’s effort to conform to the song structure. Nevertheless, the song clearly does mean something.
Incidentally, even this rudimentary level of meaningfulness breaks down in the chorus:
Singing dang fol dee dido,
Singing dang fol dee day.
None of this means, of course, that "Sweet Betsy from Pike" is a bad song; it only means that it does a bad job of getting across the song-writer’s intended meaning (if the song-writer had any intended meaning at all before sitting down to write). We should forgive the song-writer for this; after all, only a finite number of words rhyme with "dog," so if the song-writer wanted to say anything other than "hog" at the end of the fourth line, he was probably simply unable to say it without starting over or abandoning the song structure.
At least in this case, I think it is clear that the song structure impedes the communication of certain ideas. But is it possible that the song structure makes it easier to get other ideas across? Perhaps the song structure can enhance meaningfulness in some ways, even as it diminishes or prevents meaningfulness in other ways. But I see no reason to believe this might be the case. In what way does rhyming or syllable-counting enhance meaning? The number of syllables in a word, line, or sentence have nothing to do with its meaning. So, it seems to me, if your goal is to get something across to your listeners, the song structure will not help you to do this; it is a set of hurdles you will need jump in order to meet your goal. Perhaps you will successfully jump those hurdles, or perhaps not, but in any case, I think that they remain hurdles.
So: If you have a specific set of ideas you want to get across, and this is your primary goal, you’re better off abandoning the song structure. At best, the imposition of the song structure frustrates the aim of communicating quickly, clearly and precisely; at worst, it can prevent you from being able to communicate certain ideas at all. Thus: If, as I have claimed, language "essentially" communicates, then the song structure does a certain kind of violence to language; it makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for language to do the very thing which language essentially does.
All this sounds like a horrible thing to do to language, but I don’t think so. A parent trying to quiet her baby might lapse into gibberish without doing anyone or anything any harm. What is coming out of her mouth cannot properly be said to be language anymore, of course; but she has not claimed that it is, and there is no reason to think that it ought to be. Similarly, the writer of "Sweet Betsy From Pike" has, in adopting the song structure, accepted a set of limitations on his ability to communicate; but this only matters if communication was his primary goal. Probably, his primary goal was to create a catchy, happy tune, or something along those lines. I suppose he succeeded at this.
In general, however, I think all of this means that communication is rarely the primary goal of a song-writer. Song-writing would be an incredibly frustrating experience if communication were the goal; song-writing would be like trying to write an essay in which all the words begin with the letter "N." Such a rule would be utterly arbitrary with respect to your purpose, and you would have no reason to conform to it unless someone forced you. But nobody forces song-writers to adopt the song structure; they generally seem to think that the song structure is not an arbitrary hurdle, but an essential part of whatever it is they are trying to do. So I think we should assume that the song-writer’s primary goal is not to get across any particular meaning; probably, they have other goals in mind.
If song-writers really want to communicate with us, I think, they should write an essay or otherwise speak to us like normal people do.
E.G. 
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