The cognitive process of "rhyming" in pop-art

Factual Questions
1

random shower thoughts:

why is rhyming (in pop/rock/rap-music, poetry, etc…) a thing …

why does it cause us positive feelings ? why is it omnipresent in contemporary art?

is it about “pro-active” pattern recognition (the night was cold / our love turned ____).

again, interested in the mental/cognitve process of decoding (why do we generally speaking like that shit is rhyming), rather than verse-meters or somesuch literary vehicles.

EXAMPLE

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
…

2

[Moderating]
I’ve shortened your example, because quoting the complete lyrics of a song without permission is a copyright violation.

3

[Not moderating]
It’s a pattern. Humans like patterns. Note that, while every culture has poetry with patterns to it, which particular kind of pattern varies from culture to culture. In other times or places, it’s been the meter of a poem that’s more important, or alliteration, or the shapes that the words make on a page, or various other patterns.

4

Rhyme goes back deeply in the British heritage that shaped America, which shaped contemporary popular culture. (Good, readable article about rhyme history here.) English happened to be rich in rhymes. (So did Italian, even more so. Translating Dante, who wrote in terza rima, the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded etc., is difficult because so many more words rhyme in Italian. I prefer the Inferno in prose, to be honest.)

Rhyme appears to be easier to remember than other forms of similarity. Blank verse (rigid scansion without rhymes) and free verse (neither a meter nor rhymes) don’t lend themselves to memory as well. Meter helps, certainly - much easier to remember Robert Frost’s poetry than Ogden Nash’s (couplets don’t count) - but a rhyme gives a cue as to how a line must end. It’s a sort of cheat code. (Yes, Frost really did originate the saying that "free verse is like playing tennis without a net.)

5

There once was a man from Japan,
Whose verses never would scan.
When told this was so,
He said “yes, I know,
But I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can…”

6

nm.
(forgot this was FQ)

7

On the other hand, rhyming wouldn’t work for poetry in Latin, because rhymes are simultaneously too common and too rare. Much of Latin grammar is based on word endings, so basically, two Latin words rhyme if and only if they fit into the grammatical structure in the same way (e.g., two masculine singular subject nouns). (There’s more to it, of course, like different declensions of nouns, but that’s the gist of it). So some things in a poem, you just can’t rhyme, and others you can’t help but to rhyme, for any given message you’re conveying.

8

2 good (macro) points …

  1. rhyming seems to happen in most/all languages to a certain degree (happy to be proven wrong, just as latin might count there or at least be an edge-case) … and hence be universal - (up to debate) … how about “atypical languges” that rely heavily on gargling sounds or click-sounds??? is there rhyming, too?

  2. rhyming as aide memoire yes, i can see how poetry or music wants that - to get more popular, being more easily remembered/recalled, etc… especially in our ever more instant (gratification) world … where you might become popular for 15 min.

9

Being more easily remembered is probably the original reason for the existence of poetry. In the pre-literate era, there was still a lot you wanted to pass down to future generations, which meant that sages, lorekeepers, and/or storytellers (there probably wasn’t initially much distinction between them) had to memorize a lot of information, which meant they needed ways to make it easier to memorize.

10

But meter was the tool used by Classic bards like Homer. Rhyming showed up relatively late.

11

Maybe in the West, but rhyming goes back to at least the 11th century BC with the Chinese Classic of Poetry/Shijing.

12

There was an old man from Dundee
Who was suddenly stung by a bee.
When asked if it hurt
He said "No, not very much -
I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet"

Somehow we expect a rhyme.

13

Rhyming, as a “thing”, goes WAY back. Look at the sets of rhyming characters in the bible:

Huz and Buz (Genesis 22:21)

Gog and Magog (Rev 20:8, although in Ezekiel 38, Magog is the country. It still rhymes)

In the Koran, Cain and Abel become the rhyming pair Habil and Kabil

(and Gog and Magog ar Ya’juj and Ma’juj)

Pharoah’s magicians (the ones who challenged Moses) aren’t given in the Bible, but in Hebrew and Christan folklore are Jannes and Jambres (Yannis and Yambres), which isn’t quite a rhyme, but close enough.

In the Koran, Harut and Marut are angles (or possibly kings) who teach the arts of sorcery in Babylon.

There are plenty of rhyming dual-ary ophrases in English, too

Helter-Skelter
Topsy-Turvy
Higgeldy-Piggeldy
Hocus Pocus
Hoity Toity
Artsy Fartsy
Fuddy Duddy
Razzle Dazzle
Roly Poly

etc. Some of these are surprisingly old, while others are very new.

It seems as if there is a desire to remold such word pairs into rhyming pairs, even if they started out differently. See Cain/Abel to Habil/Qabil above. “Hocus Pocus” is widely thought to be a parody of the formula used in the Ordinary of the Mass when the bread is declared to be Christ’s body – Hoc est Corpus Meam becoming “Hocus Pocus”. And the slang term for Japanese ritual disembowelment (properly seppuku, slang “belly slitting” – hara kiri) became, in American mouths the rhyming “Hari-kari” (helped, I suspect, by the examples of sportscaster Harry Caray and actor Harry Carey)

14

Interesting that Italian swerved so far from Latin in this regard, since it’s a direct descendant.

If meter and rhyme are both useful to memory, then using both in the same verses are even more powerful.

Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man would appall any classics teacher. The rhyme schemes vary from verse to verse and the number of syllables in the last lines are chosen from a dartboard.

But the interior lines are rich in both meter and rhyme, forming triplets of memorable imagery.

has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand

swinging madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone,
it’s just escaping on the run

I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade,
cast your dancin’ spell my way

And, being Dylan, he throws all of it out in the last verse. (The three are not connected by proper assonance either.)

circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves

Yet, just enough formality is left behind to drive the singer - and any listeners - into the last line of each verse, a declarative that caps every segment.

Rhyme, meter, free verse, blank verse, form, structure, Dylan blends all of them into an unforgettable masterpiece.

15

I recall National Lampoon back in the day had little respect for Bob Dylan, and in one comic they had him saying “Poet of our generation? Heck, I just throw in any old words that rhyme…”

I think it was Grade 10 English the teacher mentioned that Shakespeare used a rythmic meter in his plays, which purpose - as discussed above - also made it easier for the actors to remember their lines.

But we tend to remember things sequentially - which is why often when an actor forgets their lines, all you have to do is give then the next word or two to get the needle back in the groove, so to speak.

Are there any particular ryhmes/poems/songs where the lines don’t have the meter to go with them to make recitation easier?

16

I see no reason to think they don’t have rhymes.

The clicks function as consonants, and those languages have vowels too, of course. So, you could have, say, something like -a(click), or -(click)o rhymes.

I’m not saying it exists, but it seems possible to me.

17

Just a data point - most of the Xhosa and Zulu folk and protest songs I know don’t rhyme (other than repetition).

18

Interesting, thanks.

I don’t anything about poetry in click languages but from a purely theoretical point of view, there’s no reason for rhymes to be absent in those languages.

19

Why limit it to art? Lawyers use rhyme because it sounds true, that is how OJ Simpson was once acquitted: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.
People simply like rhymes, and do so from a very young age, at least acording to my experience.

20

or marketing: "it takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’ …

that is the part that I’d (ideally) like to see more elaborated … is it hardwired into our (human) language-brain? … it seems so, as the case was made that it is pretty much non-cultural, as all cultures draw from this communication resource… so it seems to be on a meta-cultural level.

the “we like pattern” approach makes a lot of sense - are there any hints of primate using similar patterns (meters and rhyming) … even if one had to apply a healthy dose of creativity …