Rhyme Time

Writing lyrics for Diet! The Musical, I came face-to-face with that greatest of English-language challenges: Rhyming while still making sense.

It's harder than you think. Hip-hop, which supposedly thrives on rhyme, fudges rhymes left and right. You'll hear "water" rhyming with "harder," "change" with "same," and words or syllables "rhyming" with themselves. This is largely true as well in contemporary pop and alternative rock. Old pop demanded exact rhymes (see the lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Oscsr Hammerstein II, etc.), and the one place where that's still the case is the musical theater.

I remember attending one of the ASCAP/Disney musical comedy workshops in Burbank a few years back, where portions of new musicals were performed a panel of professionals. Among the panelists was Alan Bergman, co-lyricist (with his wife, Marilyn Bergman) of such standards as "Windmills of My Mind" and "The Summer Knows." When a song in one of the new musicals tried to rhyme "time" with "nine," Bergman stopped them cold: "'Time' doesn't rhyme with 'nine,' no matter how many times you've heard it on the radio." Exposed for decades to fudged rhymes and non-rhymes, most people wouldn't understand that. But in point of fact, to rhyme, two words must end in the same sound, and "m" and "n" are different sounds.

I've written a column about this for The Desert Advocate. Below is an excerpt. For the whole thing, go to www.thedesertadvocate.com/080807/arts/foothills.htm.

"I’ve been thinking of rhyme lately, and how in popular song it has largely disappeared, or has been so altered as to be unrecognizable. My teenage son shares with me songs by Radiohead and Incubus and other contemporary groups, and for the most part, rhyme is absent. There are exceptions (White Stripes relies heavily on rhyme), but most recent rock lyrics treat rhyme as strictly optional. As for the admittedly small amount of hip‑hop I am exposed to, either the rhymes come quick and easy, rhyming for their own sake and without relationship to the story being told; or they aren’t real rhymes at all, but fudged approximations.

"Rhyming in English is tough because the language isn’t well suited to it. Think of 'love,' certainly one of the more important words for a songwriter. It has exactly five possible rhymes: 'of,' 'shove,' 'glove,' 'dove' and 'above.' (With the current use of 'gov' as short for governor, I suppose there’s now a sixth.) That’s why you’ve heard so many songs that include, 'You’re the one I’m thinking of' or 'You were sent from heaven above.' They are there to set up the rhyme.

"But 'glove' and 'shove?' I’m sure there are lyrics using these, but the words don’t exactly lend themselves to high romance. Envy lyric writers in Spanish, Italian or French, languages where appropriate rhymes flow like wine. As the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner observed, 'The Romance languages are romantic because love rhymes with heart rhymes with flower. The English language is English because love rhymes with shove and heart rhymes with fart and flower rhymes with power.'”

- KLF