What do “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Pump It Up”, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine)”, and (that horrible song by Billy Joel) “We Didn’t Start the Fire” all have in common? They are all sprouts off the tree of the original rock ‘n’ rap, rhyming complaint song from 1956: “Too Much Monkey Business”, by Chuck Berry.

Think about it: the singer has a grievance, or in the case of all these songs, a litany of upset. He is up to his eyeballs with trouble on the mind, so much that he can’t wait to report about it, and then rushes to tell his story. As he vents and sputters, the words become a percussive tool, acting like a drum tapping out the beat. And that forward thrust, combined with the frantic message of overload, is in complete harmony with the song’s jittery melody. It’s a timeless formula for an angry, but essentially upbeat rock ‘n’ roll hit.

“‘Too Much Monkey Business’ was made to describe most of the kinds of hassles a person encounters in everyday life,” wrote Berry in his eponymous autobiography. It was all about the little annoyances, like:

Salesman talkin’ to me trying to run me up a creek
Says you can buy it, Go on try it
You can pay me next week—Ah!

“When I got into writing on this theory, I realized I needed over a hundred verses to portray the major areas that bug people the most. I was even making up words then, like ‘botheration,’ to emphasize the nuisances that bothered people.” Berry, rock’s original poet laureate would become famous for, among other things, his use of the portmanteau, though you might not necessarily find his word combos—like “motorvating”—in the dictionary.

Expressing complaint in a song was certainly nothing new; after all, there was the entire blues canon devoted to hard-heartedness, poor work conditions, and racial hardship, among other things. But Berry’s new rhyming, running commentary resonated with the modern workingman and musician; and the Yardbirds, the Beatles, and Elvis all had a go at recreating “Too Much Monkey Business”, demonstrating the aural equivalent of life in the food chain.

Now I realize I’ll risk boring everyone senseless with another reference to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, but for anyone who doesn’t remember, ’50s rock music was inextricably tied to teenage rebellion; it was tailor-made to accompany school-hating, parent-defying, and job-slacking behavior. The songs back then sang the praises of non-stop dancing, interracial dating, street racing, and anti-segregating; in other words, they were about freedom and your average teenage kicks. You could hear the chaos and abandon described by the action echoed in the music, whether it was “Rock Around the Clock” or “The Girl Can’t Help It.” “Too Much Monkey Business” took it up a notch when it essentially took on authority in the form of the boss (though not quite the Man), and yet when we talk of social protest and rebellion, people don’t always think of Berry and his co-creators of rock ‘n’ roll. Of course, there is a name that eventually became synonymous with protest, and it is he who took “Too Much Monkey Business” to the next phase.

In “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, Bob Dylan reached beyond the workaday world for his subject matter by taking on society at large, though he delivered his rhyme at the same poetic breakneck pace Berry did nine years before him. Dylan’s version of life in the pressure-cooker became the touchstone of the tumbling complaint genre. How did he do it?

“He widens the context and the predicament of the man under pressure,” notes Dylan scholar Michael Gray in his book Song and Dance Man III. “The Berry song technique is to pile up, like a list, the pressures that are on the story’s narrator, and to suggest their unreasonableness by their phrased sharpness and multiplicity,” he writes. “This is done fairly straightforwardly but the simplicity adds to the effect.” As Dylan takes Berry’s complaints out of the general category and focuses them on broader societal and generational confusion, “Chuck Berry might have a nasty job but Dylan has to fight off the whole society.” Leave it to Dylan to perfect the rhyming societal protest song and score his first-ever Top 40 hit.