Porcelain Monkey
*He was an accident waiting to happen
Most accidents happen at home
Maybe he should have gone out more often
Maybe he should have answered the phone
Hip-shakin’ shoutin’ in gold lame
That’s how he earned his regal sobriquet
Then he threw it all away
For a porcelain monkey*
I miss Warren Zevon.
More Cole Porter:
Let’s Misbehave:
Always True to You in My Fashion:
Anything Goes:
*You make wine from sour grapes!
Ya got a flat pancake? Hey! Call it a crepe!
When life gives you eggs, make an omelette!
You get cola from a nut,
A dirty worm makes silk from out of his butt,
When life gives you eggs, make an omelette! Omelette!
The solution to your troubles
Is cheese and ve-ge-ta-bles
And bacon
Make an
Omelette, Yeah!
When it looks like you should quit,
Find another way of lookin’ at it!
When life gives you eggs, make an omelette!*
“Something Rotten/Omelette” from “Something Rotten”
Also from “Something Rotten,” Will Shakespeare laments how “It’s Hard to be the Bard”:
You see,
What people just don’t understand is that
Writing’s demanding,
It’s mentally challenging
And it’s a bore,
It’s such a chore
To sit in the room by yourself
(Oh my God, how I hate it!)
And you’re trying to find
An opening line, or a brilliant idea
And you’re pacing the floor
And you’re hoping for – just a BIT of Divine intervention!
That one little nugget; that one little spark,
Then Eureka! You’ve found it! You’re ready to start!
So now you can write, right?
WRONG! You’re not even close, you remember that dammit, your
Play’s got to be in iambic pentameter!
The Macc Lads managed to somehow rhyme the words “menstrual cycle” in “Gods Gift to Women”:
-She said I was good looking, and I looked a bit like George Michael
-But she didn’t want a f@@ing she was on her menstrual cycle
And of course the rhyme-meister-par-excellence of Toto’s “Africa”:
-The wild dogs cry out in the night
-As they grow restless, longing for some solitary company
-I know that I must do what’s right
-As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I always chuckled at this rhyme in Steve Taylor’s song Bannerman:
Primetime football in the Buffalo snow
Freezing his little epidermis
Lifts that banner at the first field goal
Drinks clam chowder from a Thermos
How many other songs do you know that fit “epidermis” into their rhyme scheme?
ETA: Honorable mention for Old Crow Medicine Show’s Wagon Wheel
Runnin’ from the cold up in New England
I was born to be a fiddler in an old time string band
All of your minions will soon be my witnesses.
They will discover what being scared shitless is.
-from the Something Fierce song “Watergate”
WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE starts off easy enough – “Joe DiMaggio” rhyming with “Marilyn Monroe”, sure – and then he rhymes “H-Bomb” with “Panmunjom” before rhyming “Starkweather homicide” with “children of thalidomide”, which is when you realize the whole point of the song is that it lets him pair stuff like “foreign debts” and “homeless vets” with “AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz”.
Reagan’s our fuehrer
We need someone newer
If I had my way I’d hang him on a skewer!
D.I.
My favorite of his many amazing rhymes
You missed my “favorite”:
You consider me the young apprentice
Caught between the Scylla and Charibdes
sb
How about just plain lazy ‘rhymes’?
Black Sabbath’s War Pigs:
Generals gathered in their masses,
just like witches at black masses.
Does a word rhyme with itself?
“I don’t want a pickle
I just want to ride on my motor-cicle
And I don’t want a tickle
I’d rather ride on my motor-cicle
And I don’t want to die
I just want to ride on my motor-cy…cle”
Arlo Guthrie
And more from the inimitable Tom Lehrer:
Open up the spigot
Pour the beer and swig it
And Guadeamus Igit-
ur.
When you attend a funeral,
It’s sad to think that sooner or l…
ater, the ones you love will do the same for you.
And I often think it tragic
Not to mention other adjec-
tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
Correct!
Yes. Known as an “identity rhyme” in formal prosody. I happen to like that one, as it uses two very different meanings of the word “masses,” from two different roots.
It’s hard to beat Dylan rhyming skull and capital in “Idiot Wind.”
“Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, Peggy Sue
Oh, Peggy, my Peggy Sue
Oh well, I love you, gal
And I need you, Peggy Sue.”
It’s really frustrating to work hard to not do that on your own song and then be listening to an old great song and it happens, and it never mattered at all to you then. I’m too self conscious. Same with film scripts. I would never let them be the way they are. I probably would never finish one if I tried.
By the way, since some people are going back to Cole Porter, you could pretty much pick any song at random from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and it would qualify.