Can’t think of one myself right now, I’m sure there are dozens written by Elvis Costello and the guys from Squeeze that would fit.
Not technically a couplet (I don’t think), but I’ve always admired this rhyme from Steve Taylor in Bannerman:
Prime time football in the Buffalo snow / Freezing his little epidermis
Lifts that banner at the first field goal / Drinks clam chowder from a thermos
I’m pretty sure it’s the only time I’ve heard a song rhyme “epidermis.”
Not even close.
Consider:
"When tearing off a round of golf
I might make a play for the caddie
But if I do I don’t follow through
“Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.”
“You’re the Nile! You’re the Tow’r of Pisa,
You’re the smile, of the Mona Lisa!”
"Or bring a jeroboam on
And write a drunken poem on "
“In dear Milano, where are you, Momo,
Still selling those pictures of the Scriptures in the Duomo?
And, Carolina, where are you, Lina,
Still peddling your pizza in the streets o’ Taormina?
And in Firenze, where are you, Alice,
Still there in your pretty, itty-bitty, Pitti Palace?
And sweet Lucretia, so young and gay-ee?
What scandalous doin’s in the ruins of Pompeii!” (Pick any two).
“If she says your behavior is heinous
Kick her right in the “Coriolanus.””
And that’s just Cole Porter.
I’m impressed with some of Tom Lehrer’s
I’d rather marry a duck-billed platypus
Than end up like old Oedipus
Rex!
…
Down by the Old Maelstrom,
There’ll be a Calm before the Storm
…
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
…
“If you say you watch the movie you’re a couple of liars,
and remember only you can prevent forest fires!”
:rolleyes:
Back to back
Sacroiliac
Blondie Rapture
Short, to the point, and it uses the word “sacroiliac”. Seriously, how does that end up in a pop song?
I’ve always been fond of the rhymes in “We’ll All Go Together When We Go” by Tom Leher seen in their entirety Here: http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/t/tomlehrer3903/wewillallgotogetherwhenwego185492.html
Favorites:
We’ll sing out a Te Deum
when we see the ICBM
Universal bereavement
An Inspiring achievement
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
When the air becomes uranious,
And we will all go simultaneous.
Some of the best.
Cole Porter is the alltime godfather of brilliant rhymes; there is no close second.
But disqualifying him so there’s SOME kind of competition, let’s not forget:
Big black nemesis
Parthenogenesis
And, a four-part rhyme that’s always impressed me; each rhyme close enough to work, but progressively different. Obviously the shift from line to line is intentional; it’s not misrhymed, it’s getting from point A to point D brilliantly. In “The Night of the Swallow,” Kate Bush literally gets from Dover to Malta hopping from rhyme to rhyme:
Meet them over at Dover
I’ll just pilot the motor
Take them over the water
Like a swallow flying to Malta
The greatest post-Porter Broadway lyricist is Stephen Sondheim. From Sweeney Todd:
It’s fop.
Finest in the shop.
Or we have some shepherd’s pie peppered
With actual shepherd
On top.
And I’ve just begun.
Here’s the politician — so oily
It’s served with a doily —
Have one.
Put it on a bun.
Well, you never know if it’s going to run.
Try the friar.
Fried, it’s drier.
No, the clergy is really
Too coarse and too mealy.
Then actor —
That’s compacter.
Yes, and always arrives overdone.
Catch that? That was: AABBACDDCCCEEFFGGC.
And his West Side Story lyrics are perhaps even more impressive. Nothing to exerpt there; every line is exceptional. Well OK here’s one:
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough,
With all the marijuana,
They won’t give me a puff.
They didn’t wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin’ lizards, that’s why I’m so bad!
Andrew Ratchin is not quite in the same league as Cole Porter and Tom Lehrer, but he’s close:
Penis Envy
I’d stick in vacuums
On vacant verandahs
Gas guzzling Volvos
And poodles and pandas
Lois Lane
She wouldn’t know love
If it only went one way
Taking off with her desk as a runway
If he told her the truth
And the rules of the order
As he dressed in the phone booth
And he asked her for quarters
Another Fat Song
*See the kid who’s been so totally insipid
He’s been saving up the lipids for a rainy day
Thinks it kind of funny that some hypodermic honey
For a little bit a money drains the past away
Everyone who’s phobic about being anaerobic
Can endure the mock heroics of the surgeons’ grind
Every tofu hater can revert to steak and taters
If he knows that sometime later he’ll be redesigned
Slip the tube
Into the sack of suet
As you pass the fluid with some tenderness
Greet the future
With a single suture
As you roto-root your way to slenderness*
In the song “It’s Not Safe…” by Amy Rigby:
“Now I’m runnin’ for my life, like Dustin Hoffman,
I guess that I’ve been lucky once too often.”
A lot of her writing is good, but that’s my favorite rhyme, ever.
I’m all about the Tom Lehrer, too. “Vatican Rag” has some doozies:
There the man who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original
You can do the things you want, if
You have cleared 'em with the Pontiff
Ave Maria
Gee it’s good ta see ya!
Gettin’ ecstatic, an’
Sorta dramatic, an’
Doin’ the Vatican
Rag!
Not sure what a couplet is either, but I love this opening
Is a couplet two lines rhyming one after the other (pleading musical ignorance here) ?
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand / Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s / Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein
Werewolves of London, Warren Zevon
Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
(I think this is the rhyme scheme: a,a,b,c,c,b ?)
From “That’s Entertainment”
It might be a fight like you see on the screen
A swain getting slain for the love of a queen
Some great Shakespearean scene
Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everyone ends in mincemeat.
From “That’s Entertainment”
It might be a fight like you see on the screen
A swain getting slain for the love of a queen
Some great Shakespearean scene
Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everyone ends in mincemeat.
From “Cry Me a River”:
Said that love was too plebian,
Said that you were through with me, an’
Not a couplet, but good - From “Misalliance”, lyrics by Michael Flanders:
Said the right-handed honeysuckle to the left-handed bindweed,
“Oh, let us get married, if our parents don’t mind, we’d
Be loving and inseparable, inextricably entwined, we’d
Live happily ever after” said the honeysuckle to the bindweed.
You quote Vatican Rag and leave out “Make a cross on your abdomen/when in Rome do like a Roman!” Fie upon you. Fie I say.
“Generals gather in their masses,
Just like witches at Black Masses.”
… well, nice try, Ozzie.
My favourite, courtesy of Bob Dylan…
“what can I say about Claudette, ain’t seen her since January
she could be respectably married or running whorehouse in Buenos Aires”
mm
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with a little British comedy songwriting duo known as Flanders and Swann?
I give you such masterpieces as:
*I don’t care for sherry, one cannot drink stout
And port is a wine I can well do without
It’s simply a case of chacun a son gout
Unaware of the wiles of the snake-in-the-grass
And the fate of the maiden who topes
She lowered her standards by raising her glass
Her courage, her eyes and his hopes
Now if it were gin, you’d be wrong to say yes
The evil gin does would be hard to assess
Besides it’s inclined to affect me prowess
Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said
With her antepenultimate breath
“Oh my child, should you look on the wine that is red
Be prepared for a fate worse than death”*
And that’s all just from one song, Madeira, m’dear.
But my very favorite single rhyming couplet may be from Pippin:
And if all the ploys we’ve picked to really work to bring to pass occur
We won’t have just a victory, we’ll have ourselves a massacre
Note that not only do “pass occur” and “massacre” rhyme, but so do “picked to re-” and “victory”.