This is something I’m pretty sure only Stephen Colbert would do: In an interview with “Rolling Stone”, he connected Chance the Rapper and Childish Gambino to Gilbert & Sullivan and “Lord of the Rings”.
There’s a line in Chance and Gambino’s track “Favorite Song” that he couldn’t get out of his head. It’s apparently a pretty rare rhyme and rhythm scheme. And he realized the reason it stuck was because the rhythm is the same as the one in the “Major-General’s Song“ from the Gilbert & Sullivan musical, “The Pirates of Penzance”.
And because he’s such a J.R.R. Tolkien FREAK, he also figured out that the Song of Earendil form “Lord of the Rings” fits that same scheme. (Check out someone singing it to music here.)
So there you go, Chance the Rapper and Childish Gambino linked to Gilbert & Sullivan and J.R.R. Tolkien. Something I doubt you’d ever see in a world without a Stephen Colbert.
(Here’s video of him breaking it down. Warning! The “Favorite Song” lyric he quotes has some questionable language. You do know what “skeet” means, right?)
