Wednesday, April 2, 2025

"Too Much Monkey Business"

Last week, I was thinking about Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and discovered a feature in it that's also included in the cover that the Beatles did on the BBC.

The line "Same thing ev'ry day, gettin' up, goin' to school" is sung to a melody something like this:


(I'm pretty sure the Beatles' version is in A major but Berry's original is in F major.)

The melody here just alternates between two pitches, so there's a musical representation of the repetition and predictability of the narrator's routine.