The older I get, the misuse of simple rhyming (at least to my ear) by established artists is ticking me off more and more.
Two recent violations:
1) The (attempted) self-rhyme - you should never take a simple word in lyrics and then just randomly cop-out and try and rhyme it with itself. That is jarring and it doesn’t work well.
From: Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side
Candy came from out on the Island
In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
What the hell? Head is an easy word to rhyme. You can’t just throw it on two lines in a row like you are trying to beat the deadline down to the second and a raging case of writer’s block just kicked in?
How about:
But she remembered what they said
Even when she was giving head
It isn’t that hard to come up with clever rhymes to common, one-syllable words. I can spout better ones off one after another. What was the problem the first time?
2) The forced circumstantial rhyme - Casually throwing in something whose key traits that just happen to rhyme.
From: Billy Joel’s Piano Man
And he’s talking with Davy who’s still in the Navy
I see this type of thing way to often. You can bet your ass that the guy either:
A) Goes by David
OR
B) Is in the Army instead and gets his whole history of service misrepresented just because Billy Joel wants to fill some space cheaply and easily.
I see these types of things way too often.
Any more egregious rhyming violations you want to report?
I am bothered far more by haphazard metre. There is a metre common to the kind of smarmy stuff that appears in the local newspaper’s “Poet’s Corner.” (We apparently have only one poet, but I digress.)
This metre could be described as:
Iamb Iamb Amphilbrac
“My son, he was a soldier”
Iamb Iamb Trochee
“He fought, but then he fell.”
Other than the fact that it seems to be the natural metre of doggerel, there’s not much wrong with it. But then people start forcing it.
Anapest Anapest Double Iamb
“On the way he encountered a bad man”
This kind of poetry frequently includes forces rhymes, too. “Soldier” with “told you,” for example.
“One Thing”, by Finger Eleven… which was getting WAY too much radio play not too long ago. Stupidest lyrics ever.
Even though I know
I don’t want to know
Yeah I guess I know
I just hate how it sounds
The last line sums up the rest of the rhyme scheme.
What guy? Billy Joel made up both the person and his background. Are you of the belief that any name used in song lyrics always refers to an actual person?
“We wanna put his ass in stir,
We wanna pin this triple mur-
der on him,
he ain’t no Gentleman Jim”
Yeah, I get the Gerard Manley Hopkins-esque word fragmentation and playing with the metre. I just think that the “Gentleman Jim” is so unbelievably forced that square pegs in round holes ain’t in it. Even sarcastically, what police officer with faint hopes of appearing intimidating is going to say anything about “Gentleman Jim”, even in the 60’s/70’s? It’s such a contrived rhyme that it always makes me squirm. Dylan’s reach exceeded his grasp on this one, regrettably.
No, of course not. However, the song is describing a scene that should exist as a cohesive whole at least in imagination. The reason that line was singled out was that it seems to be gratuitous filler material.
Navy Davy has to serve a life-time in the military and go by a diminutive nickname way past the normal age to fulfill a one-syllable rhyme in a simple filler-line.
I will make it an even more egregious rhyming violation to illustrate the concept.
“And he’s talking with Gena, who loves her Singer Sewing machine-a”.
Same here (though this is less a problem with song lyrics than with poetry). Lots of aspiring poets will work to rhyme, but idea concept of meter is completely ignored.
The most egregious example was when a local public TV station (who should know better) had a limerick contest and graciously gave the first two lines – in iambs!
I dunno. Deriding Carter by comparing him unfavorably to a legendary white boxer from the past makes sense to me. Maybe if Dylan had really wanted to torture the rhyme, he could have added “He ain’t even Errol Flynn.”
Why doesn’t it exist as a cohesive whole? His name is Davy – and it’s not all that unusual to refer to someone by a diminutive nickname if you’ve know him for years. He’s in the Navy. How is that not cohesive?
But that’s not what happened. He described Davy as being in the Navy. He didn’t make up a word or add a syllable (not that that is automatically bad – see Cole Porter or Tom Lehrer) It’s not a stretch at all, but a perfectly normal – and actually quite clever – rhyme.
I have a feeling you would hate this song then. :dubious:
My contribution has to win, though:
“Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail ya
They subjugate the meek
But it’s the rhetoric of failya”
Worst. Rock Rhyme. Ever.
You can tell Sting was so in love with the “rhetoric of failure” phrase that he was willing to contort the English language well beyond its breaking point just to keep it in. Yuck.
There’s another kind of rhyme crime, which any reader of kids’ books knows, and that is the force-of-inevitability rhyme. For instance, if you see “mouse” at the end of a line, the odds are about 95% that the next line will end in “house.” Even Seuss was guilty of this.
And ditto to the complaints about meter. It’s rare to see a kids’ book that acknowledges that such a concept even exists.
Rare among XTC fans, I don’t care for “Season Cycle,” which Andy Partridge rates among his best songs. A big reason for my dislike is the forced rhyme in the chorus:
Like the baby and his um-bi-LIE-cal
He’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle
Todd Rundgren needled Partridge mercilessly for those lines, and I don’t think I blame him. Comically forced rhymes are fine when, say, Tom Lehrer does it; otherwise, you risk sounding precious.
Another Partridge rhyme, from “Scarecrow People”:
No one wants to write a book or try to paint thee
We thought we’d base our civilization upon yours
'Cuz we’re all dead from our necks up, now ain’t we?
I approve the sentiment, but you can’t use “thee” in a pop song.
Another thing: whenever a song writer is talking about a month he remembers, the month is invariably September, November or December. Suppose, say, in “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” Papa had actually died on the 3rd of February?
How can this be
though all these years
I have been true to thee
You had the nerve to say
you’re done with me
and that I should leave
girl, you’re killing me
I don’t mind the head-head “rhyme” in Lou Reed at all. Personally, I think it’s pretty clever and a much better line than the “said/head” rhyme, which is pretty trite, IMHO.
Rhythmic violations bug the crap out of me, though. A limerick whose first line is composed of iambs? Egads!
I don’t mind accentual meter (where only the amount of stresses per line is important–think nursery rhymes or Manley Hopkins’ derivation of it: “sprung” meter") as long as the accents per line are consistent. Otherwise, unless you have proved to me that you know what you’re doing and are doing it for effect, it sounds unbalanced and amateurish.
Obviously accentual-syllabic meter (like the famous iambic pentameter) is almost never ever in perfect meter, where each line consists exactly of a particular type and quantity of foot. (The only exception I could think of is Frost’s “Stopping by Woods…” which holds a perfect iambic tetrameter all the way through.) Unless being done for effect (as in Frost), strict adherence to meter sounds terribly boring, forced, and dangerously close to lulling you to sleep.
The worst rhymes, by far, are the obvious ones. “Love/Glove” would be the classic example. I don’t think “Davy/Navy” would qualify as bad, though.
I mean, holy shit. that’s bad rhyming in multiple ways; the completely irrelevant insertion of “Chicken,” interrupting a sentence to finish a rhyme, and bad metre. Yowza.
