Sunday, March 25, 2007

Now That's What I Call Rhyming

I'm not a songwriter, just a regular writer. I've written some jingles so I know how hard it can be to find a decent rhyme. I even bought a rhyming dictionary but it's been moderately useful at best. So it is with this in mind that I decided to give a shout out to two deceased performers from the 80s who sneer at the challenge of rhyming with the attitude of someone confident that they can find a rhyme for "orange" if they had do. Not content with the standard ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme of most songs, they stick with a less-conventional AAAA.

The first shout out goes to Michael Hutchence of INXS and the 1987 song "Mediate" from the "Kick" album. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that Andrew Farriss wrote the words but who ever heard of him? Plus he's alive. What this song does is take the sound "ate" and rhyme it close to 80 times with few repeats. It works a little hard sometimes, like in the lines "sex ornate" and "edge serrate" but still, if I were on "Jeopardy!" and the category was "Sounds Like 8", I'd put all my money on Farriss.

Number two on the charts is Robert Palmer and his 1988 song "Simply Irresistible" from the "Heavy Nova" album. He takes the "ible" sound and rhymes it around 15 times. In retrospect, this isn't as impressive considering Palmer cheats but rhyming "permissible" and "principle" but why quibble (see what I did there?)?

If anyone else out there knows of other songs which rhyme the same sound over and over, please let the staff here at Greetings From Suburbia know. You'll get credit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would look for a song but it seemslike you may have already eaten it.

Anonymous said...

We certainly didn't start the fire, but it's the end of the world as we know it...