And actually, it does recite a list:
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
mmm
I remember hearing a song listing the books of the Bible. Googling gives a bunch of results, but none of the ones I clicked on rhymed.
One of my favourite novelty songs is “If I Had Johnny’s Cash and Charlie’s Pride”:
It’s Grim Up North by KLF:
Life is a Rock (but the Radio Rolled Me).
Fishbone’s “? (Modern Industry)” is mostly if not all radio call letters.
This is one of my favorite list songs, and one of my favorite songs in the world.
Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina - Águas De Março (Waters Of March) in an exquisite 1974 video
Originally in Portuguese, here are the first few verses of the lyrics in English:
A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gunThe oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush
A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush
The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at allIt’s the wind blowing free, it’s the end of the slope
It’s a beam, it’s a void, it’s a hunch, it’s a hope
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain, it’s the joy in your heart.
…
It goes on much longer, hypnotically…
The theme from Are You Being Served lists items for sale in a department store broken down by floor.
“Add it Up” by Violent Femmes
“People Who Died” by Jim Carroll
Histeria! had its share of list songs, including this one summarizing all of Shakespeare’s plays:
“88 Lines about 44 Women,” by The Nails.
Some of the lyrics are NSFW, so I put the YouTube link in spoiler brackets, just to be sure.
Weird Al’s “Hardware Store” has a long list of what the store carries.
This was around in my childhood, and is a sort of list of some US states:
Forever since I heard that.
A sort of hybrid of that and Paul Simon’s ‘50 ways to leave your lover’ [which counts in its own right] would be Flight of the Conchords ‘[Carol Brown].(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cGoDns8wTA)’.
Also the original of ‘I’ve been everywhere man’ by Lucky Starr has lots of Aboriginal placenames which I think are much harder to nail at high speed than the Johnny Cash version.
An oldie but goodie … Danny Kaye listing Russian composers, the stage version showing the lyrics (apparently he didn’t do the movie version), and an interview showing him saying them.
Parts of the brain:
I once saw Beverly D’Angelo doing a cabaret act in which she covered this song in a rewritten version that was all about fashion, renamed “I’ve Worn Everything.” She was brilliant onstage.
Ian Dury is a repeat offender. The obvious one is Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3:
The juice of a carrot, the smile of a parrot
A little drop of claret, anything that rocksElvis and Scotty, the days when I ain’t spotty
Sitting on a potty, curing smallpox
- but the better song is England’s Glory
Billy Bunter, Jane Austen
Reg Hampton, George Formby
Billy Fury, Little Titch…
(Aside: Little Titch was a music hall performer, diminutive in size, from whom we get the word titchy.)
And better yet - though the lists are a minor part - Sweet Gene Vincent.
White face, black shirt
White socks, black shoes
Black hair, white strat
j
The Kings and Queens song from Horrible Histories has a list of English monarcrhs which repeats over time until the list is complete (since William the Conqueror anyway).
The great Emmerich Kálmán’s final operetta, Arizona Lady (that’s the title in both English and German) had an entrance song for the soubrette, who runs a traveling general store, in which she and the chorus list all the things she has on sale. Was ich bringe? Tausend Dinge! Unfortunately, I don’t have an English copy or even a German copy, but it’s really cute.