My personal favorite bad Kanye line is:
Partly because it’s a half-rhyme, partly because it’s so banal and transitory.
“Upside Down” sung by Diana Ross:
Instinctively you give to me
The love that I need
I cherish the moments with you
Respectfully I say to thee
I’m aware that you’re cheatin’
When no one makes me feel like you do
The use of “thee” in place of “you” just to get the rhyme drives me insane. They could have even turned the sentence around to get “respectfully” at the end if they wanted to: “To you I say, respectfully” which still sucks, but at least it rhymes without needed to be Shakespearian.
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
– “MacArthur Park”
I see your Sabbath and raise you Madonna, from the 1989 masterpiece “Vogue”.
I don’t think that counts. Those rhymes are good–when compared to the rest of the lyrics.
Good one! Even when I was a kid, that made me wince. And as you say, the solution is so simple! Why, Diana? Whyyyyyyyyyyy!
Yeah, rhyming “take it” and “bake it” is fine. It’s the combination of “take it” (and/or “break it”), “make it,” and “fake it” that should be permanently banned from all songwriting under pain of death.
The gem popped up on the radio today:
The Eagles’ “Ol’ 55”. I give you the chorus:
Grelby, now I have to track down that song. Any song with a reference to Zool is a-okay with me.
These aren’t hilarious, but they need to be said.
Stop rhyming “girl” and “world”.
Stop rhyming “dying” and “crying”.
Seriously! You’re just a girl in the world, there are people dying and people crying yada yada blah. Here’s “just a fist in your face”, which doesn’t rhyme but doesn’t need to, and that’ll give you a real reason for the crying!
The funniest of them all is Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.”
“Well, we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”
It works on so many levels. Pure genius!
Can’t believe nobody’s mentioned “Love Will Find a Way” by Yes. I know their lyrics tend to be a bit obtuse, but God only knows what they meant by:
But the most cringeworthy non-rhyme I can think of goes to the Swedish death-metal band Candlemass, “At the Gallow’s End” which rhymes perfectly until this nasty couplet:
Yeesh! A few more seconds and they could have come up with a worth that fits perfectly, AND rhymes!
And then there’s “Illegal Alien” by Genesis, but in this case I think the deliberately bad non-rhyming is part of the song’s charm:
Reminds me of Spandau Ballet’s “True”:
I bought a ticket to the world,
but now I’ve come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
Oh I want the truth to be said
I always thought “lickety-splitly” was quite…uh…witly. Of course, credit that one to Tom Waits, not that pack of doofs in the Eagles.
I quite like Evaporated by Ben Folds Five. I’ve listened to it many times, but it took me quite a while to notice that hardly anything in the second verse rhymes at all. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to work out where the lines begin and end.
No matter where you put the line breaks, the only words that vaguely rhyme are ‘around’ and ‘down’.
From the Beatles’ “Honey Pie”:
Darling Macca, I don’t care how you slice it, but “screen” and “knee” do not rhyme by any stretch of the imagination. Love, LL.
Yeah, but I’m willing to give Ben a pass because his writing seems to have been drawn straight from my emotional states at the times I hear the songs.
I forgot one of my favorites. I’m a big Billy Joel fan (and I won’t even touch on We Didn’t Start the Fire), and one of his songs has a rhyme that just makes you slap yourself in the head:
Two classics from Bob Dylan -
“You speak to me
in sign language
while I’m eating a sandwich”
and my all time favourite ryhme in any song…
“What can I say about Claudette
ain’t seen her since January
She could be respectably married
or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires”
the man’s a genius…
mm
Tom Lehrer does this in just about all of his songs, but it’s done purposely for comic effect. F’rinstance, in The Masochism Tango, he rhymes “agony” with “mahogany”.
You mean like just about *every *couplet in Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City?” ("… but never are the dirty"? Seriously?)