One person’s view: “His songs never have any actual jokes, just setups that try to double as punchlines. I’m sorry, but the fact that your song is about a guy running around naked is just not funny by itself!” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year
The public’s view: 1.67 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1974
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, one of the biggest fads was mooning. High school field trips weren’t complete without the sight of a classmate’s bare butt cheeks smashed against a rear windshield on the busiest street in town. Occasionally, my friends would talk in hushed tones of an even more daring pastime: streaking. This was what their parents and older siblings had done in the 1970s, before Reagan and the Moral Majority came along and ruined everything. As great as mooning was, I always felt like it was a consolation prize for the kids of my generation who had lost the chronological lottery and were being watched over by a bunch of Puritan freaks.
Mooning never got its own theme song. Sure, Bob Seger made an effort with “Shame on the Moon”, but he didn’t come close to capturing the spirit of the sport. If not for Ray Stevens – the very same man who taught us that “Everything Is Beautiful” – streaking would also have lacked a major hit record to memorialize its impact on the nation. Unfortunately, “The Streak” is regarded by many of today’s critics as one of the worst #1 hits in a year full of bad #1 hits. Let’s see if we can figure out why.
In “The Streak”, Stevens plays a TV news reporter who responds to streaking incidents at a grocery store produce section, a gas station, and a basketball game. Each time, the reporter interviews the same slow-witted yokel – also played by Stevens – who has witnessed the nudity. And each time, the yokel belatedly begs his wife Ethel not to look at the streaker’s thingamadoodle. By the end of the song, Ethel – the shameless hussy that she is – has stripped her clothes off too and is joining in the fun.
When I first contemplated this entry, I was prepared to defend “The Streak” as I did with “My Ding-a-Ling”. It has a catchy chorus, it covers an important topic, and it contains funny rhymes like “streak / show off his physique / give us a peek.” But I had never really studied the lyrics, and hadn’t even understood half of them until I looked them up while writing this post. The slow-witted yokel doesn’t enunciate very clearly, plus there’s a vexatious, poorly timed laugh track drowning out some of the record. And I had always thought the female singers were saying “Look at that, look at that,” but they are actually saying “Boogity, boogity.” I think I can be forgiven for not figuring that phrase out.
After reading all of the words to “The Streak”, I believe Stevens left some potential laughs on the table. Why is he talking about pole beans and shock absorbers and snow cones? No one has ever heard of pole beans, and the other items don’t matter. I can write better lyrics with just a few minutes of effort. This line would work at the grocery: “At least he reminded Ethel that we need bananas and cucumbers.” At the gas station: “Now there’s a couple of nuts that can’t be tightened with a torque wrench!” Or: “I stopped here to check my tailpipe, but I didn’t need to see that guy’s exhaust system too.” Or: “I’ve said that Everything Is Beautiful, but I’ll make an exception for that hairy ass!”
“The Streak” is not as terrible as the critics say, but it also demonstrates why Weird Al is so beloved and Ray Stevens is viewed as a second-rate hack. There’s rarely any wasted space in a Weird Al novelty like there is here. If Stevens had spent another week polishing this song, rather than rushing it to market to beat the dozens of other streaking records that were coming out, he might have had a true classic. And I wish that someone had made a theme song for another 1970s pastime that I always heard stories about but missed my chance to participate in: blowing up school toilets with M-80s.
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