Jul 122009
My number one pet peeve regarding lyrics is when the songwriter “rhymes” a word with the same exact word.
Last night, I was listening to some Junior Brown and I heard the following couplet:
“One of us will have to give, or there’ll be nothing left to say,
So Darlin’ I’ll do anything you say”
Now, I really like Junior Brown but I have to call him out on this. Junior: It’s not a rhyme if it’s the same frigging word. Get a rhyming dictionary if you have to for chrissake, but rhyming “say” with “say” doesn’t count.
I’m looking for more examples of this egregiously lazy technique (or lack thereof).
Please ignore the artistic merits of lyrics and just focus on the “rhyme.”
Shoot, Costello does this more than once, but I keep blanking on which songs do it. One of us will get this going soon, I’m sure.
From one of my favorite songs of all time: “You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things. And it’s worth just to hear you say you’re going to give me everything.”
Better than: “My love don’t give me presents. I know that she’s no peasant” ??! Couldn’t think of a rhyme for serf or indentured servant?
Opening couplet of “War Pigs”
“Generals gathered in their masses,
just like witches at black masses.”
“When the lights go down in the city
And the sun shines down on the bay
Oh I want to be there in my city
Ohhhh ooooooohhhh ooooo-ooooohhh”
Not only does Steve Perry rhyme city with city – although he does sing it as “ci-tay” in an attempt to hide it – he can’t even be bothered to come up with a fourth line where he could rhyme bay with bay.
Does the opening of The Warlords of War’s “Warlords of War” count, or does it skirt the issue by rhyming night with a homonym?
“Soldiers riding in the night
Very similar to black knights”
meh…i’m gonna have to add the contrary point of view, because i don’t think this is a major problem in songwriting unless you stop and think about it.
how many times did you have to listen to the offending song before you even noticed he was using the same word to rhyme?
i think it’s more important to get a point across than it is to worry about whether or not one is using the same word. “no rhyming a word with itself” is an arbitrary rule.
there are probably more rhymes of words with themselves in pop music than you think. and there are also probably more “lazy rhymes” that don’t rhyme a word with itself than you realize, too (“don’t you love her madly, wanna be her daddy?”).
if the melody and the rhythm and the pattern of the phrase in question get a point across effectively, then it doesn’t matter to me if the lyricist has decided to rhyme “say” with “say.”
i’d also rather hear a natural sounding lyric than a lyric that is clearly the product of the songwriter sitting there going “hmmmm….let’s see….a rhyme with happy….hmmmm….bappy…cappy…dappy…fappy…”
It’s funny you point out that “Love Her Madly” rhyme, Sat. I heard that song on the radio earlier this evening, that lousy rhyme, and then thought about this thread and just what you’re saying here. All songs with “change/rearrange” rhymes also are worse than rhyming the same word or a word that doesn’t really rhyme. (Our friend Dave Ragsdale actually wrote a song called “Change/Rearrange” as a teen and revived it for our offshoot folk-rock band. For a months we thought he’d written a great parody of a certain type of bad song until he admitted that he wrote this thing in earnest 15 years earlier). Although this is not the point of this LMS contest, it is healthy that this side point was raised.
I’m still trying to figure out which Costello song(s) do this. One in particular definitely strikes me as lazy lyric writing.
thanks for the support, mod!
my pet peeve rhyme: hazy, crazy, lazy.
my favorite ill fitting rhyme; pete townshend’s rhyme of the word “circles” with “whirlpool.”
now back to our regularly scheduled programming….
BeastieBoys(MikeD):
“Well, everybody rappin like it’s a commercial
Actin’ like life is a big commercial”
-Pass the Mic
Iggy is a good one for stupid rhymes. I always thought he was doin it on purpose. Ya know just to make fun of pop music and how stupid everything is?
Here are a few examples:
“I love Girls
They’re all over this world
Some have beautiful shapes
I wanna live to be 98″
-Girls
“Night clubbin we’re night clubbin
we’re what’s happinin
Night clubbin we’re night clubbin
We’re an ice machine”
-Night Clubbin
or the great Iggy non-rhymes:
“Fun-baby baby we like your lips
Fun-baby baby we like your pants
All aboard for funtime”
-Funtime
It all works, It’s all good and fun and Rock and Roll. I also don’t think this shit needs to be solid and neat and tidy and/or intelligent. But even I know better than to prove a point in this joint using The Doors as an example.
Duh Sat
Oh, that Pass The Mic one is one of the worst offenders!
Kilroy, great Iggy examples. I also like in 1969; “Now I’m gonna be 22, I say “Oh My and-a Boo Hoo'”
I’ll defer to Saturn if this is good or lazy from Neil Young’s Southern Man:
“I heard screaming
and bullwhips cracking
How long, how long?
Ahh ahh ahh ahh”
Neil seems to just bail on the last line. Was he too lazy to finish it, or is it supposed to be a not very convincing primal sounding scream/groan?
Couldn’t Young have ended that verse with “Can’t we get along?”
I wish Rod Stewart had lazy rhymed this clunker:
“I laughed at all of your jokes/My love you didn’t need to coax”
It’s so bad I wish he had just said:
“I laughed at all of your jokes/Really laughed at all of them jokes”
I always hate it when people throw in an “oh yeah” or “baby baby” to fill up space in a lyric. Sometimes those things have their place, but not when repeated ad nauseum for no purpose (as in the worst-ever offender of that type, Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles.” I can’t believe how much of that lyric is filler) or because they obviously couldn’t figure out how to finish a line. For example, Cockney Rebel’s Sebastian:
“Work out a rhyme, toss me the time, lay me —
you’re mine
And we all know, oh yeah!”
It doesn’t even rhyme or make any sense, for heaven’s sake!
I do like Alice Cooper singing “we can’t even think of a word that rhymes,” though.
kilroy: that’s WHY i used the Doors lyric. duh yourself.
duh
I share this pet peeve… I was meaning to introduce this to the townspeople for a while
The biggest offender is
“It’s All For You” by Sister Hazel (a band that is adored by my dad and my wife)
It’s hard to say what it is I see in you
Wonder if I’ll always be with you
Words can’t say it, I can’t do
Enough to prove, it’s all for you
I can’t get past rhyming You with You and You in the chorus!
They even do the “breakdown” singalong chorus at the end
I think it’s funny that we’ve probably all noticed non-rhymes like this and been troubled by them (or in saturn’s case, not), but they’re so unmemorable that most of us can’t think of examples.
Townshend is the king of weird rhyme schemes for me. One of his biggest influences to me as a writer is the way he seems “shoehorn” phrases into the bar. My own bandmate tends to opt for an odd time signature when he runs into this problem.
TB
i agree, BigSteve!
here’s a partial one, by the Who, from “it’s not true,” which rhymes the phoneme “dad” with itself.
I haven’t got eleven kids
I weren’t born in Bagdhad
i’m not half chinese either
and I didn’t kill my dad.
latelydavid…you mean like this one from “slit skirt”?
“I don’t know why I thought I should have…somekindofdeeevinerighttotheblues.”
Weller also shoehorns words into the bar.
…and this Townshend gem:
Your love is so incredible
Your body so edible
“Your love is like heroin
This addict is mellowin’…”
I adore Towser. I’ll openly admit that he has had more influence on my own writing more than anyone else. I can’t even hate his “bad” lyrics.
TB
That Maggie May inversion is a classic. Just a few weeks ago I heard this and thought about how godawful it is. The worst part is that the song is so nearly perfect and then that line just clunks out there. I have a much harder time with that ugly grab for a rhyme than an imperfect rhyme, same word rhyme or non-rhyme.
beatles:
what can i do what can i be when i’m with you i wanna stay THERE…
if i am true i’ll never leave and if i do i know the way THERE
ooh.
Sadly, Pete has done the same – from Christmas off Tommy
“-Surrounded by his friends he sits so silently and unaware of everything.
-Playing poxy pin ball,picks his nose and smiles and pokes his tongue at everything.”
But also in that song, he rhymes excited with ignited, so that evens things out.
I think stay there/way there is a legitimate rhyme.
yeah, i was just thinking the same thing: stay and way are different words, right?
but on the other hand, the example that started the thread, deemed an ‘illegitimate’ (?) rhyme by our thread starter has the same mechanics: “you say” rhymed with “to say.”
and in the beatles song, the phrasing emphasizes the fact that he’s rhyming “there” with “there” even more than the junior brown song does.
A quick scroll through this thread, & I didn’t notice anyone bring up Macca’s immortal line from Live & Let Die, “In this ever changing world in which we live in” – not lazy rhyming, per se, but certainly grammatically retarded.
Foreigner, “Hot Blooded”:
You don’t have to read my mind
To know what’s on my mind
I AM LAST MAN STANDING!
I’d Pince Nez you on that Foreigner lyric but I don’t want to cop to knowing what the words actually are.
In any event, you are the LAST MAN STANDING!
An early indication of Paulie’s laziness in P.S. I Love You:
As I write this letter
Send my love to you
Remember that I’ll always
Be in love with you
At least it’s not rhyming me with me, but I suspect he has to have one of those out there.
Waiting for the appropriate thread to bust on Steve Miller (“taxes” and “facts is”). His mammoth efforts to hard to smash, pound and otherwise force a round word into a square hole makes one appreciate the “lazy” breed of lyricist.
Yeah, but Steve Miller gets an extra gold star for rhyming “abracadabra” with “reach out and grab ya.”
Welcome aboard, Linusrox!
Great to have you aboard, linusrox! It’s always good to see a newcomer to the Halls of Rock comb through the archives. I hope you’ve seen the posts covering Steve Miller’s induction in the RTH Foyer of Fame. It was an emotional day around here.
By the way, I’m sorry you joined us about a day after our Rookie of the Year poll was posted. Sorry, too, to a few more rookies who’ve kindly written me offlist to ask why they weren’t included in the poll. The oversight was not intentional.