REASON FOR RHYME

The Guardian has lately been running a long correspondence in which readers cite admired examples of rhyme in song – usually pop song – lyrics. I fired off my inevitable letter, conscious that it was a mite long for the letters page’s purposes, a view confirmed by the letters editor who kindly suggested that I send it to the “comment” editor. He in turn rejected it for “lack of space” (by which he means that he would rather run error-strewn pieces by Mark Lawson) and suggested I submit it to the on-line comment editor. This I did and have heard nothing. Today the paper includes my short letter correcting recent misattributions but it’s hardly the same.

In case my reader is at all interested, I reproduce the article below. It draws heavily on the chapter about theatre in my book Common Sense (still available as a free download from the link in the right hand column) and it still of course may surface in Guardian On-Line.

“On this newspaper’s letters page, an extended correspondence has been vying for the accolade of most deft rhyming couplet. The generality of the suggestions makes it clear, however, that the nature and rules of rhyme are poorly understood. Many of the examples offered are, rather, false rhymes, near rhymes and non-rhymes (spouses/trousers, rainbow/lumbago, language/sandwich, Sweden/read them, tour/before).

Ben Elton, lyricist to Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Beautiful Game, told a radio interviewer that he was “very proud” that he had managed to rhyme ‘vegetables’ with ‘testicles’. He might as well claim to rhyme ‘idiot’ with ‘garbage’. There is no rhyme for the word ‘vegetables’. Nor is there a true one for ‘testicles’. You could reasonably pair the singular ‘testicle’ with these three adjectives (which you can hardly pluralize): ‘majestical’, ‘anapaestical’ and ‘catachrestical’.

As it happens, the second and third of these are peculiarly appropriate to the matter in hand. ‘Anapaestical’ means having “a metrical foot of three syllables, the first two short, the last long” (which means of course that the noun ‘anapaest’ is itself nicely anapaestical). ‘Catachrestical’ pertains to “the incorrect use of words”. To write successful lyrics or verse, you need to use words correctly. You need a finely tuned ear for sounds as well as an awareness of nuance and a willingness to hone the line until it flows naturally. Deftness is a basic. Cleverness is a bonus. And the syllables that the metre determines must rhyme should do so exactly, and no others.

If you seek cleverness in rhyming, try this as a cause for pride. It’s by Lee Adams to the music of Charles Strouse for the song ‘Put On a Happy Face’ from the musical Bye Bye Birdie: “Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy,/It’s not your style./You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad you de-/cided to smile”. The rhyme is delicious and the stress is in just the right place.

Or how about this by Stephen Sondheim to the music of Richard Rodgers in the title song of Do I Hear a Waltz?: “Do you hear a waltz?/Oh my dear, don’t you hear a waltz?/Such lovely Blue Danube-y/Music, how can you be/Still?” That rhyme puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer’s own mischievous contribution to the 3/4 time genre: “I remember the night I held you so tight,/As we danced to the Wiener Schnitzel Waltz./Your lips were like wine (if you’ll pardon the simile),/The music was lovely and quite Rudolf Friml-y”. Rudolf Friml, I dare say, is not much remembered now but he did write the score for Rose Marie, the movie of which draws fans of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald to the telly whenever there’s an afternoon screening.

Here’s another breath-taking piece of wordplay from the Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along in a song about planning a soirée at the Kennedy White House: “Evenings of the Budapest playing Vivaldi/And Munch doing bits of Ravel./I’ll get Leontyne Price to sing her/Medley from Meistersinger/And Margot Fonteyn to dance Giselle” . The joke of the Pryce-to-sing-her/Meistersinger rhyme is nicely enhanced by knowing that Ms Price has almost certainly never sung a note of Wagner in earnest in her entire career. This is grown-up rhyming, correct and yet so free-flowing that you hardly notice that a rhyme has slipped past. I suggest that Ben Elton take a few lessons before he blows his own trumpet again.

One of your correspondents reckoned that “only Ella Fitzgerald could get away with” the pairing of ‘spoil’ and ‘goil’. But everyone who has ever sung ‘Manhattan’ has “got away with” that rhyme because it was of course created by the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who was guying the accent of Manhattan’s neighbour Brooklyn (goil = girl). Singers generally enhance a lyric if they find the jewels within it rather than bringing their own supposed pearls to it.

Fitzgerald was a great exponent of lyrics because she understood them and delivered them as written. Her version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ is rapturous. Porter loved internal rhyming and that number contains a world-beating rhyme scheme: “Flying too high/With some guy in the sky?/Is my idea of/Nothing to do”. Frank Sinatra ruined it by substituting ‘gal’ for ‘guy’.

The great Broadway lyricists also understood feminine rhymes, wherein the stressed syllable (the one that rhymes) is not the last and the subsequent syllables do not change. The first three lyrics I quoted above are feminine rhymes. Lorenz Hart provided some of the finest examples throughout the song ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. Dorothy Parker’s front of me/lobotomy rhyme, quoted in the correspondence, is not a proper feminine rhyme but the elegance of the wordplay helps to excuse her.

In ‘On the Street Where You Live’, Alan Jay Lerner (Broadway’s most overrated lyricist) paired ‘bother me’ with ‘rather be’, an attempt at a feminine rhyme that simultaneously breaks the rule and tortures the vowels. Bear in mind that the argument of My Fair Lady is the opening line of the refrain of the first song we hear: “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Professor Higgins’ irascible entry sets the bar pretty high for the pin-accuracy of Lerner’s lyrics and of his ear for idiomatic English (rather than American) expression.

Consider the song whose rhyme I deplored above. The very title is a solecism: in Britain, if you’re “on the street” you are homeless, with perhaps the suggestion that you are a prostitute. The singer should be ‘In the Street Where You Live’. Anyone interested may apply to me for my rewrite of this entire lyric in proper rather than mid-Atlantic English [see pp 189-190 of Common Sense, the book].

You don’t get Lerner’s sort of looseness in lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Noel Coward, Porter, Hart or Sondheim. But it has become standard in pop songs, which is perhaps why so many listeners think they’ve heard a brilliant rhyme when what they’ve heard is an approximation.”