![]() ![]() Many of the lyrics played it relatively straight: The sixth sign, or line, was almost always “Burma-Shave”. ![]() ![]() A Burma-Shave advertisement consisted of six roadside signs, each bearing a few words of text, which cumulatively built into a rhyming jingle. Burma-Shave’s unique quality was the way that it was advertised, with a kind of roadside poetry. It was a chemical step between the earliest shaving soaps, which had to be lathered and applied to the face with a brush, and aerosol shaving foam. It is the road or rather, it is the road-side.īefore that, Burma-Shave was a brand of shaving cream for men, manufactured by the Burma-Vita company, and sold in jars and tubs. Burma-Shave is the anonymous, insignificant, American ubiquity, the inland ocean in which a person could lose themselves. ![]() Burma-Shave isn’t a destination, and it isn’t even a journey, which implies some kind of specificity. They are just going, getting away from trouble with the law, and from a town that doesn’t have the distinction of being a dead end it’s just “a wide spot in the road”. But where is he going with his female friend? Somewhere, but nowhere in particular. “I guess you’d say I’m on my way to Burma-Shave,” sings Tom Waits in the 1977 song “Burma-Shave”. ![]()
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