Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

Old and nasty

Listening to a track from Chuck Berry's The Great Twenty-Eight, I was momentarily stunned by:

I want to be your driver
I want to be your driver,
I would love to ride you,
I would love to ride you around.
( Berry, I Want To Be Your Driver (The Great Twenty-Eight) )

It's not like I didn't know that rock and roll, especially old-time rock and roll, was about sex. And it's not like I've never heard the driving-as-sex metaphor before (the blues classic "Built for Comfort" springs to mind). And it's certainly not like I haven't heard far more explicitly sexual lyrics in my life (Liz Phair's "I want to fuck you like a dog / I'll take you home and make you like it" springs to mind). But something about Berry's delivery of that old chestnut retained some of its shock value even for this jaded Gen-Xer. The terror that white, middle-class parents had of rock music in the 1950s suddenly makes a little more sense.