It’s a perfect bathroom book. Still, 95% of the songs listed were from a kind of cruddy couple of decades of American MOR music that would come to fill the airwaves of easy-listening stations by the eighties. Skimming through it sends me flashing back to a high school job at a stationery store where the fuddy-duddy owner kept the radio locked on an easy-listening all day. The station had precisely one playlist that never varied in years, and I got burned out for life on Ronnie Milsap, Nana Mouskouri and Lee Greenwood (not to mention a hideous instrumental version of “Light my Fire” that I think had been transposed into a major key).
The New Musical Express used to have a weekly column called “Bismillah! (no, we will not let him go)” that served much the same purpose as the Barry book, but of actual good punk/funk/new wave songs.
Lots of rhyming with “now,” but they mostly took care of the word before it (stand, man, can) as well.
[Verse 1]
Well, she got her daddy’s car
And she cruised through the hamburger stand, now
Seems she forgot all about the library
Like she told her old man, now
And with the radio blasting
Goes cruising just as fast as she can now
From the Humpty Dance, by Digital Underground. Always bugged me.
I get laid by the ladies, you know I’m in charge,
both how I’m livin’ and my nose is large.
I get stupid, I use an arrow like Cupid,
I use a word that don’t mean nothin’, like “loopid”
Conversely, I’ve always gotten a kick out of Alice Cooper’s School’s out
Well, we got no class
And we got no principals
We ain’t got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes
Along these lines, nobody’s ever talking about their brain outside of songs. I actually can’t think of any examples right now but I know they’re out there and they drive me nuts. It’s always a super lazy word choice.
Also:
“If ever a wonderful Wiz there was
The Wizard Of Oz is one because Because because because because because Because of the wonderful things he does!”
I would have gone with the verse from Folk Song Army:
The tune don’t have to be clever, And it don’t matter if you put a couple of extra syllables into a line, It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English, And it don’t even gotta rhyme.
Since I don’t want to start a new thread, and now that Tom Lehrer has been mentioned, I have to drop one of my absolute favorite lyrics ever with a flawless rhyme scheme, from Allan Sherman’s “The Ballad of Harry Lewis.”
Oh Harry Lewis perished In the service of his Lord He was trampling through the warehouse Where the drapes of Roth are stored
“Drapes of Roth.” Utter genius. Then even though that honestly couldn’t be topped, he goes ahead and rounds out the verse:
He had the finest funeral The union could afford And his cloth goes shining on
Of course, it makes little sense out of context because the first verse sets up that he works for Irving Roth and…okay, there’s a “…really?” rhyme in the first verse, when he rhymes “Roth” with “fourth” so I guess this still qualifies for the thread.
Mentioned in post #13 but worth repeating. The worst moment in the worst song in the finest album of the 70’s. In fact, the only bad track on the album.
Same here. Near rhymes are a thing. Perfect rhyming can seem too one the nose. I’ve seen instances where attempting to force a perfect rhyme results in interjecting something that doesn’t really make sense.
To my ear, Dylan is the worst. You can see the rhyme coming from a mile away.
“The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandal stole the handle”.
