Recently heard another song which was around before I was born. It's from a British comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News, possibly famous for being Rowan Atkinson's first hit (Mr. Bean was his third, while the second being Blackadder).
A video could be found here:
The lyrics and the video at around 1:00 clearly shows how risqué it is – basically it depicts truckers as inconsiderate, rude and sexually predatory beings. But I somehow manage to find two hidden gems in academical aspect.
- The chorus features a to-infinitive ("I like to truck") after three uses of gerunds ("I like trucking"). Usually gerunds are for habits while to-infinitive is one time experience, but for this occasion the gerunds mean the act of trucking in general, while the to-infinitive emphasises the personal experience. This can mean the singers like to be on trucks and they also like being in control themselves.
- Usual songs have simple forms, even other arch-form music would do little more than ABCBA. This song stands out in that it is a long arc of ABCACBDA, with Pamela Stephenson's stand-out presentation of the chrous in the middle, Rowan Atkinson's solo before and after Stephenson's core respectively; Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones' segment yet on the outside of them, and the all-men chorus at the start and end. A bridge segment ("from behind") was inserted before the final chorus to match the melody.
Another piece of gem found among British audience is that the video features a three-lane road, with the middle one open for vehicles of either direction to overtake if necessary. The joke in the second Atkinson solo is based on this. Now that British roads are either definitely dual or having singled down to two plain lanes, younger people (like me) probably have diffiuclties getting this joke. (A related discussion can be found here)
