Rhyme and Other Literary Devices in Popular Song:

Some time ago, I drafted up a list of what I thought might be interesting alternative literary devices to be used in song lyrics because I felt that rhyme had been pushed about as far as it could possibly go. I believe the successful songwriters of the future will move past rhyme to new and varied techniques which will carry us forward to a new literary/musical plateau.

To my mind, rhyme is one of the most tired and over-used literary devices in English--in fact, in all of European literature. But nowhere has it been so monotonously perpetuated as in the arena of popular song. This doesn't mean that we'll ever be totally through with rhyme, but it does mean that we ought to think of new and more creative ways to use it in poetry and songwriting.

I'm a big fan of Bob Dylan's. I believe his lyrics occupy the top tier of American creative endeavour along with those of other greats like Paul Simon and, of course, some of the early songwriters of this century like Rodgers and Hammerstein/Hart andGeorge and Ira Gershwin. But if there is any weakness in his craft, I believe it is the mundane and ever-present outer rhyme which pervades all his lyrics.

Still, Dylan's rhyming displays a great deal more creativity and humor than a great many other songwriters. Take the chorus of a recent song by Alanis Morisette, for example, where she transforms the beautiful and natural-sounding English expression "head over heels" into the awkward "head over feet" just to get a half-rhyme with the word 'me':

You've already won me over in spite of me
So don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet
Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are
I couldn't help it
It's all your fault

-Alanis Morisette
Why go through such complex acrobatics just to rhyme at the end of the line? What is so sacred about the concept of end-rhyme that the lyrics of virtually every popular style of music are so mired in this rut?

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Take a look at the literature of other cultures or even of our own culture in another age. Many other interesting literary devices appear which could spice up our song lyrics in this day and age. For example, Old English poetry uses a technique called alliteration which stipulates that in each line of verse, three words begin with the same sound, two in the first half and one in the second. The Hebrew Psalms make use of a similar literary device wherein each in a series of poems begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Artistically and musically, we tend to live in the nineteenth century. So much so that we often forget that the poetry of our own day rarely rhymes or, if it does, then internally or in other unique and interesting ways. Interesting rhythmic ideas are also experimented with in modern poetry. Some poets use acrostics and other interesting techniques in order to discover new literary territory. Much of what has been tried has been, to my mind, unsuccessful. But at least they are trying. And songwriters should take their lead in my opinion.

One promising technique I intend to begin experimenting with soon is a concept I have borrowed from the field of linguistics. The term "minimal pair" is used by linguists to determine phonemic boundaries. If two words sound exactly the same except for one sound, then the two differing sounds are deemed to be two separate phonemes. Here are a few examples of this concept in English:

'Thy' vs. 'thigh' (voiced 'th' vs. voiceless 'th')
'fine' vs. 'vine' (/f/ vs. /v/)
'kook' vs. 'cook' (two slightly different vowels which share 'u' quality)
'bat' vs. 'bought' (two slightly different low vowels)

I think some of these pairs could be combined in interesting ways to form interesting lyrics. Just off the top of my head, the following pairs come to mind:

'rifle' vs. 'rival'
'bullet' vs. 'pull it' (or 'bullet, Sir' vs. 'Pulitzer'!)
'sudden' vs. 'sullen'

I don't know exactly how this would work. You might have to come up with a set of rules for which element in the name varies or something, but I think there are a number of interesting possibilities. One idea might be to begin a phrase with one part of the minimal pair and end it on the other. Another might be to place minimal pairs in corresponding places in separate verses.

Here's an idea that's similar to rhyme but different enough that it might yield interesting results. What if you were to create a song or poem based on five-line verses where the last syllable ended in the same consonant for all five lines in a verse but preceded by a differing vowel, eg. the first being 'a', the second 'e', and the third, fourth and fifth 'i', 'o', and 'u', ending up with five verses whose lines all end according to the patterns found in each column (from top to bottom) in the table directly below:

Verse 1: Verse 2: Verse 3:
Line1: mad hand pal
Line 2: bed send sell
Line 3: rid wind kill
Line 4: sod pond mole
Line 5: mud outgunned pull
Line endings for each line in each verse

Another idea which I think has merit would be to collect examples from the speech recognition literature of interesting misunderstandings. A good one I encountered recently was "Two torn labels and an ice cream cone" when "Two turntables and a microphone." was what was meant. Perhaps the first verse could end on the original phrase while a subsequent verse end on the garbled version. In any case, I began using a Dragon Speech speech recognition package recently, so I think I will have to start making note of any interesting typos it generates so that I can use them in crafting song lyrics.

Another interesting idea which I developed in a song I wrote several years ago entails rhyming each line in one verse against each corresponding line in a subsequent verse. In other words, line one of verse one rhymes with line one of verse two, etc. Here are the lyrics to that song which is entitled "Why Don't We Spend Some Time Together?" and was written in 1990:

Why Don't We Spend Some Time Together?

Why don't we spend some time together
far from the cares of life gone sour?
'Cause you've been scheming for a long, long time,
I know.

There may be clouds and stormy weather
and angry moments every hour.
But step by step we'll come a hundred miles
or more.

-David Harris, Copyright 1990
I wrote and posted this originally on December 7th, 1999. I plan to add any additional ideas as they occur to me.If you come up with any interesting ideas of your own or have comments or perhaps even wish to discuss the possibility of collaborating with me, please contact me: dave@languages-of-the-world.us

Meanwhile, I'll be writing a similar article with musical (rather than lyrical -- lyrical as in "about lyrics" if ya know what ah mean, mah main man!) ideas soon.