There are other threads in the Great Debates about rhyming and poetry. This thread is about famous songs with extended stretches of non-rhyming verses. It could be spoken word poetry (no william Shatner, please), narrative-type pieces, or stream-of-counciousness pieces. Two famous ones that comes to mind are “Peter and the Wolf” by Prokofiev and “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow. My favorite is “Funk That”, by Sadat X. Do you have any favorites?
Most of Soft Machine’s lyrics were unrhymed. About the only rhyme in “Moon in June” (19 minutes of it) is it’s title. One particular lyric from Soft Machine Vol. 2 (don’t recall the song name) goes:
There’s also “Frank Mills” from HAIR
Well, there’s Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, but I prefer Peter Schikele’s Bach Portrait, which is a great take-off on it.
Jethro Tull’s Passion Play has a prose story read in the middle of it. “The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles”
Many Pearl Jam songs do not rhyme – far too many of them to list here, in fact.
From Monty Python:
“Many times, we’re given rhymes,
that are quite un-sing-able”