Had an R&B gig last night - we played Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”. There’s a line in the bridge that I had realized in the past was a double entendre, but then it dawned on me that it’s intentional, and a bit out of place in the tune:
“<So> C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon baby, stop beating around the bush”
:dubious:
Anything similar come to mind?
Well, one of the tenderest classic love ballads of the Sixties is probably based around a naughty reference to the vagina.
The Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane.”
Seriously, in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Lady and her lover Mellors refer to their private parts as John Thomas and Lady Jane.
When Mick pledges his troth to Lady Jane, he may just be declaring his lifelong devotion to pussy.
There is the persistent rumor that the “I’ll take it like a man” line from “Hey, Mickey” is a reference to anal sex.
“Please Please Me” was supposed to be John’s plea to his S.O. for reciprocity with regard to, um, well, oral favors.
“Last night I said these words to my girl
I know you never even try, girl
Come on, come on, come on, come on
Please, please me, woah yeah, like I please you.”
Not a pun, but an inside joke of sorts.
Beethoven’s eighth symphony is quite funny. It’s my favorite of his symphonies because he was obviously having some fun in the midst of being a tortured artist.
“The second movement is famous for its tick-tock accompaniment in the woodwinds, an imitation of a metronome. The Allegretto scherzando’s chirpy tune and ticking figure are from a silly little canon (“To Mälzel,” WoO 162) Beethoven wrote to honor, or lampoon, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (the inventor of the metronome), rather in the spirit of a Friars Club roast. The movement is Beethoven at his cutest, full of sudden explosions and silences, peekaboo figures and double takes.
. . .
The finale’s jittery, rustling principal theme diminishes into near silence, only to be rudely interrupted by a loud unison C-sharp which, in a respectable piece in F, is utterly beyond propriety, the musical equivalent of a joy buzzer or pie-in-the-face. Its immediate effect is to turn the quiet opening of the movement into a romp. Beethoven reprises the “wrong-key” second subject: this time it appears in the strings in the not-even-close key of A-flat before the woodwinds take it up in the “correct” key of C. He also brings back, at the end of a powerful and highly contrapuntal development section, the by-now-familiar “everybody stops for the bassoon solo” effect, with a new twist: the bassoon is in unison with the timpani.”
You can’t beat it!
I just remembered another one that I probably mentioned in another thread…
The parenthetical part of the title of Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” refers to the lines at the end of the tune:
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine…”
Al Stewart, having the typical dry English sense of humor, once said that he wanted to write a song about growing old. He also wanted to write a song about Katherine of Aragon. With the British love for puns, he came up with Katherine of Oregon.
“You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant
Excepting Alice”
For the more classical types, there’s Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, in which a sudden chord in the middle of a quiet part wakes up all the guys who have fallen asleep.
I also think John Cage is laughing his freaking ASS OFF over 4’ 33.
Hmm, that says more about the person making that statement than the actual song itself.
I am assuming you mean the Toni Basil version, which as any nerd knows, is a cover of a song by a UK group from the Chinn/Chapman stable.This lyric inconsistancy is an artifact of a gender change in the artist
I think most of the rumours of <song x> being about <sexual practice y> are nothing more than that, rumours. A couple of other examples that spring to mind are “I Can’t Go for That” and “More than Words” (another supposed plea for oral gratification). In both cases the songwriters expressed bemusement upon learning of people’s bizarre interpretations of the lyrics.