Stealth Pun/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Stealth Puns in Music include:

  • In the song "Necessity" from Finian's Rainbow, the lines quoted below provoke the shouted question "Do you mean he's a --?", which is answered in the affirmative (the implied statement being that Necessity is a bastard):

Oh, hell is the father of gin,
And Cupid's the father of love.
Old Satan's the father of sin,
But no one knows the father of
Necessity.

    • It also seems to be a stealth pun on the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention."
  • "Girl Anachronism" by The Dresden Dolls: about a girl who blames her constant sickness on having been born too soon by C-section. Including the line "You can tell (...) that I'm not right now at all."
  • During his polka medley "Polka Face", "Weird Al" Yankovic breaks into an accordion solo immediately after the "Break Your Heart" section. The obscure song is actually an instrumental version of the "Tick Tock Polka" originally done by polka-meister Frankie Yankovic (no relation). Appropriately enough, this leads directly into his version of Ke$ha's "TiK ToK".
  • The cover of REM's Life's Rich Pageant is a Visual Pun: It's a collage depicting band member Bill Berry and a pair of bison... as in "Buffalo Bill".
  • The textless cover of The Pixies' "Gigantic" single is a photograph of a crying naked baby, while the back cover has a picture of a driving glove laying on the ground. This may seem like a True Art Is Incomprehensible sort of thing, until you realize it's actually a play on a potential Mondegreen of the song: "A baby glove" instead of "A big, big love".
  • The real name of 2D, lead singer of Gorillaz, is Stuart Pot, a.k.a. Stu-Pot. He spent some time in a coma. At least one fanfic, but nobody in the canon, has pointed out that this would make him a vegetable Stu.
  • "Flowers On The Wall" by The Statler Brothers: "Playin' solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of fifty-one." The narrator's missing one card... he's not playing with a full deck.
  • "Mother Superior jumped the gun..." A nun jumps the gun. Well, it's a stealth rhyme, anyway, a sort of wordplay.
  • The Divine Comedy song, "The Complete Banker", which is about the role of the banks in the current recession. From his point of view, he's a complete banker, but we'd rather call him a complete wanker.
  • The main chord sequence for ACDC's "Long Way To The Top" is A, C, D, C.
  • There's a Linkin Park song called "Cure for the Itch", which is instrumental and performed solely by Joe Hahn, who plays turntables. He's scratching.
  • Mac McAnally's "Back Where I Come From":

We learned in the Sunday school
Who made the sun shine through
I know who made the moonshine, too
Back where I come from

  • "Rollin' (The Ballad of Big & Rich)" by Big & Rich has two. The first is "Charley Pride was the man in black / Rock & roll used to be 'bout Johnny Cash", and the other is "I'm a crazy son of a {{[[[Sound Effect Bleep]] bad word}}] / But I know I'm gonna make it big and rich".
  • The Rush song "Roll the Bones" deals with questions of existence and causation in a funkier style than the band's usual prog-rock fare. In other words, it's existential funk.

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