It’s been ages since my freshman year of high school when Fr. Jost taught how to scan for iambic pentameter. And for some reason, a friend of mine was discussing this with me, declaring that Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” is written/sung primarily in iambic pentameter.
Can anyone (a) tell me what iambic pentameter and/or (b) if “Lose Yourself” is indeed in iambic pentameter?
An “iamb” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. “Pentameter” is a line of verse containing five metrical feet. Put 'em both together and you’ve got iambic pentameter: verse where each line contains five iambs. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter.
da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA
It should be noted that a lyric or verse can be considered to be in iambic pentameter even though not every single “foot” conforms strictly.
Much of Shakespeare’s work was written in i.p., for example.
I remember that the perennial theory on the popularity of the i.p. throughout college was that it approximated the human heartbeat.
I’m not familiar enough with M&M to tell you if that song is or isn’t i.p. though
-j
I wish I knew the answer to your post.
Iambic pentameter is stylized, but one reason it was popular among poets (Shakespeare obviously the best known among them) is that it’s not that far away from normal speech. If this was a verbal conversation and I said that last sentence to you, the stresses would have gone like this:
It’s NOT that FAR aWAY from NORmal SPEECH. And I didn’t even plan the line to be that way. Iambic pentameter is broken up into lines of five iambs (or ‘feet’), and Lose Yourself really isn’t. So by a strict answer, no, it wouldn’t be. But who wants to be strict?
In reality, parts of it do fall into the unstress-stress rhythm, as all speech will from time to time.
“You better lose yourself in the music, the moment.”
That sounds pretty natural (except for ‘the music’), and it’s pretty much how Eminem says it. By the way, not all of the stresses are equal, so it’d be acceptable that, say, “lose” would be emphasized more than “the.”
However, it crashes and burns in other places.
“To seize everything you ever wanted
One moment”
If it was an attempt at iambic, it’d be pretty awful. You normally stress the first syllable of “every,” not the second. Ditto for “ever” and “wanted.” There’s no reason to stress “you” in this context either, really. (See, that’s the other trick. Iambic pentameter has to be written so that the pattern of stresses doesn’t just mirror speech - it has to make sense, and convey the emotions of the characters and the meaning of the scene. Fitting into an off/on pattern isn’t hard, it’s the latter part that’s the real trick.)
So I’m gonna say no, “Lose Yourself” is not in iambic pentameter, and I doubt it was Eminem’s intention to make it so - again, the bits that fit the rhythm are there because that’s how people talk. If it’s gonna be in iambic, it’s got to be ALL that way, and it isn’t.
Not a bump, but a thank you for all that responded. Very much appreciated.
One solution to that is to drop a syllable somewhere–metric feet are not always perfect–but another is to augment “everybody” so that it’s four syllables, a not uncommon phrasing in songs. Then, you’d have:
“To seize everrything you ever wanted One moment”
and that works. I’ll have to go and play it to see, I can’t hear it right now for sure.
It’s bound to be close, the sing-song beat is going to end up iambs or trochees, depending on when you start. And pentameter is just a count too.
Nitpick: Actually, the lyrics you cite are only the narrative opening to the actual song. The song really starts with “His palms are sweaty…”
That’s not quite how I’d scan the line. “The” is definitely unstressed, and “Mu” in “music” is stressed, with the second syllable weak.
Iambic pentameter is almost never regular, anyway. Anapests, trochees, extra syllables at the end and the such are regularly thrown in. One should never read a line of iambic pentameter in such a way as to twist around the natural accents of speech in order to fit a set rhythmic blueprint.
That said, ain’t no way this is iambic pentameter. I can’t think of any pop song that could be analyzed as pentameter. The reason is straightforward. Metrical divisions in pop music are based usually on four or three. Fitting four or three accents in a bar of four-four pop music is natural. Five is odd, unless you stick the fifth accented beat on the first beat of the second measure of a song.
Check out the classic songs:
ROW, ROW, ROW your BOAT
GENTly DOWN the STREAM
MERRily MERRily MERRily MERRily
LIFE is BUT a DREAM
Tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, trimeter. And, as you’ll notice, this is not accentual-syllabic meter, but just accentual meter. It makes little sense to analyze this in terms of iambic or trochaic. Most music works this way. The feet are variable, but the accentual pattern stays the same. But if you do make the feet iambic, then this 4-3-4-3 pattern is what’s known as “common meter” or “hymnal meter” which also lends itself well to song. Check out Burn’s “My love is like a red, red rose” or any of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
Off to Cafe Society.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
Ezactly. If you just scan it, I think it’d go the way I proposed. But I know that’s now how Eminem says it, and it wouldn’t sound right if it was done as I scanned it. That’s why I said it’s not iambic pentameter.
For the Tolkienites reading this thread: I read an article once that claimed that all of Tom Bombadil’s dialog in the LOTR is written in Iambic Pentameter. Perhaps that was why the weird character is in the story - to give dear Prof. T. the chance to do this. (well, also so Merry could get a special sword from the Barrow-wight).
I just went over several lines of that song with the Hightly Technical Method of Meter Analysis (i.e. counting the beats on my fingers) and much of it loosely fits into iambic pent. Loosely. For example:
His PALMS are SWEATy, KNEES weak, ARMS are HEAVy
There’s VOmit ON his SWEATer alREADy, mom’s spaGHETTi
He’s NERVous, but ON the SURFace he LOOKS calm and READy
To DROP BOMBS, but HE keeps ON forGETtin
What HE wrote DOWN, the WHOLE crowd GOES so LOUD
He OPens his MOUTH, BUT the WORDS won’t com OUT
He’s CHOKin, how EVeryBODy’s JOKin NOW
The CLOCK’S run OUT, TIME’S up OVer, BLOah!
I could have arranged the stressed to fit a more strict iambic pent, but I’m keeping in mind what I remember of the song’s flow (it’s been a while since I listened to it). Shakespeare would, in his plays at least, drop or add a foot here and there, or arrange it so two words slurred together or an unusual word got the stress to emphasize certain words. So “classic” iambic pentameter wasn’t always terribly strict. Many lines of “Lose Yourself” can be read as iambic pent (there are some shorter lines), but as others have pointed out a lot of natural English speech comes out as iambic.
Checking syllables instead of stress (I was curious if maybe there were some Alexandrines in there 
), it seems most of the lines have between 10 and 15 syllables – strict iambic pent would have 10. But in English what really counts is the stresses, not the syllables.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. If you scan it, it doesn’t go the way you propose. Although different people will have slightly different scansions for the same line of verse, even if this were in iambic pentameter, you would not put the stresses where you put them. I may be misunderstanding your post, but even in a perfectly iambic pentameter poem, you don’t always stress every other syllable.
And iambic pentameter need not have ten syllables in each line. That is usually the case, and a base rhythm should be established to identify the poem as following this meter, but poets often subtract or add one syllable as need be
That’s from Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. Notice the first foot in the first line is not an iamb, but a trochee. It would sound godawful if you tried to pronounce it as “some-THING.”
Whether stresses are more important than syllables is another issue. Classic anglo-saxon poetry was certainly accentual and not syllabic. But the history of English poetry shows a great dependence on both the accentual and syllabic aspects of prosody.
For music, all that really matters in lyrics is the placement of accents, so you won’t really see such strict attention to a constant foot size as you might in poetry.
I wouldn’t accuse Eminem of paying strict attention anyway (unless he wnts to), but rap is closer to the original lyrical poetry idea–a beat that drives the narrative forward. And as the examples of “real” poetry show, constant feet are rare anyway.
:dubious:
um, no.
Bwaha!–we’re giving Eminem Poetry 101 treatment! I love it!
Don’t tell anyone–it would shoot his street cred all to hell.
A professor gave me a real insight into the use of iambic pentameter in Shakespeare when he compared it to 12 bar blues. The fundamental root of it - de DU de DU de DU de DU de DU - is just the underlying framework.
You could play blues entirely based on the framework, and it’ll still be blues, but the real blues masters play with the rhythm around the framework, thus eliciting all sorts of effects and emotions from the disparity between what is expected and what is played.
Thus:
Now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT
sounds silly. It’s effective because Shakespeare wrote it so that the natural scansion of the words creates a tension between the expected rhythm and the actual rhythm:
NOW is the WINter of OUR DISconTENT
If you’re acting Shakespeare, the fact that you have to hit five emphases per line can also change which words you emphasise - thus:
Made GLORious SUMmer by this SON of YORK
would seem to be the natural way to say that line. But there are only four beats. The fifth has to be found somewhere else in the line. I’d guess the line’s meant to be:
Made GLORious SUMmer BY this SON of YORK
By stressing the word “by”, the nuance of the line is subtly altered (this is also perfectly iambic, compared to the previous line).
I’m guilty of oversimpifying it, but I was trying to say that Eminem doesn’t not even come close to iambic pentameter in some places, ergo he was probably not trying to write in that style.
Yes, I know, see above. Although a long line in iambic will be eleven syllables (and sometimes there’s some monkeying to avoid twelve). Some of the lines in Lose Yourself are fifteen syllables or more.
So since I saw this thread start, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of popular music which is in fact in iambic pentameter, or at least a pretty close approximation. So far all I’ve come up with are the first line of “The Battle Of New Orleans” (“In 1814 we took a little trip…”) and “Danny Boy”. There surely must be more… I’ve just been thinking of songs, and singing the first line of a Shakespearean sonnet to the tune to see if it scans…
Obviously the style doesn’t lend well to music lyrics, but anyone else able to come up with some?