Survival concerns? Maybe be more gymnure. Small, elusive and nocturnal, it's not a rat, nor a shrew, but a furry hedgehog, a Galericinae from the Erinaceidae family, with acute senses, especially of smell, and likely resembles the earliest form of mammal. Being small, furtive, with very sharp awareness of surroundings would have been essential to survive in the predator-filled dangers of the early days of the late-Triassic to mid-Jurassic period (200-150 million years ago) and while this species, also call the moonrat, may also be the ancestor of the shrew, in a sense, as a true mammalian survivor, it is also, indirectly, an ancestor of us. And it may well survive the human species too. It generally inhabits moist jungle terrain in various locales of southeast Asia, mainly Vietnam, Sumatra, China and the Malay Peninsula. But are there any in song?
The word gymnure, like the creature, is hard to find indeed, but hedgehogs very occasionally appear in the lyrical undergrowth, so let's get right in there with particular song by those psych folk artists, The Incredible String Band, from the 1967 album The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion:
Sitting one day by myself,
And I'm thinking, "What could be wrong?"
When this funny little Hedgehog comes running up to me,
And it starts up to sing me this song.
Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes,
But you never quite learned the song, she sang.
I can tell by the sadness in your eyes,
That you never quite learned the song.
The hedgehog is also set in the countryside context, and of course it is vulnerable to human invasion. Originally written in 1970, Elton John subsequently recorded a version of Country Comfort with Earl Scruggs on banjo.
Now the old fat goose is flying cross the sticks
The hedgehog's done in clay between the bricks
And the rocking chair's creaking on the porch
Across the valley moves the herdsman with his torch
And in a very different style, here's one of many versions of the extraordinary Fall song, Hard Life In The Country, originally from Hip Priests and Kamerads (1985):
It's good to live in the country
You can get down to real thinking
Walk around look at geometric tracery
Hedgehogs skirt around your leathered soles
Fall down drunk on the road
It's good to live in the country
Shoegaze singer-songwriter Ben Kweller meanwhile brings the hedgehog inside to illustrate a slacker lifestyle from 2005's Sha Sha album.
I got a pet hedgehog
Drinkin' Jaeger all day
You got me crate combo and a baby on the way
But it's OK
Talking of losing control and Going Nowhere, hedgehogs can hurt as well as be hurt. Frank Turner uses them for relationship metaphor, from the Be More Kind album of 2018:
When you feel like you're letting down your friends and you failed your family
When you're a hedgehog who can't help pricking all the people that you meet
Meanwhile, the vulnerability of the declining species is used as a metaphor by Hailey's Comet on I'd Give A Kidney For You, from 2018's album Table For One:
I'm attracted to you like sound is, like sound is to a hearing aid
You lead me astray like a hedgehog, like a hedgehog on a motorway
But the spiny hedgehogs also have their day on the road. Perhaps best of all musically too, is this this surreal, extraordinary jazz-crossover song by Robert Wyatt, filled with reverses, Little Red Riding Hit the Road, from the album MW Pour Robert Wyatt from 1974's Rock Bottom:
I lie in the road try to trip up the passing cars
Yes me and the hedgehog
We bursting the tyres all day
As we roll down the highway towards the setting sun
So then, do any further hedgehog or gymnure examples prick the memory? Please feel free to share any further examples in songs, instrumentals, on albums, film, art or other contexts in comments below.
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