Rhymes against humanity – Part One
You could probably fill this entire book with rhymes that flow as smoothly as a dead crocodile through a U-bend, as they are by far the most common and most immediately noticeable form of lyrical clanger. But we have a whole world of wrongs to cover in these pages, so we’ve dedicated a mere two chapters to them.
In this the first of those chapters you will find everything from relatively forgivable ‘rhymes of passion’ (committed on the spur of the moment, with a certain ‘will this do?’ quality) to cold, calculated rhyme rampages in which the culprits could hardly have insulted our great language any further if they had dug up Shakespeare’s corpse and dirty danced with it, then called his mum a slag. We might as well throw you in at the deep end, then …
DES’REE
In times of crisis, songwriters will instinctively invoke primal urges, such as hunger, thirst, or a big fat KitKat wrapper full of ‘brown’. How else can we explain the sentiments of this 1998 hit, wherein Des admits, I don’t want to see a ghost, it’s the sight that I fear most. I’d rather eat a piece of toast, and watch the evening news.
It is customary, when describing something you really dislike, to say ‘I’d rather …’ and then include something suitably horrific, such as ‘drown in a vat of Karen Matthews’ hair grease’ or ‘be stuck in a lift with Andrew Castle’. There is a slim possibility that Des’ree has a lifelong phobia of toast, and deliberately avoids walking past Currys in case she sees a Russell Hobbs Retro Four Slice at half price in the window. But my guess is that she went through the rhyme options for ‘ghost’, considered ‘even more than a nuclear bomb in the post’, and then remembered that she didn’t have any breakfast that morning.
Thanks to that rush of blood from stomach to head, everyone now remembers this line more than any of her hits. There’s no justice. But at least she’s got some fairly esteemed company.
THE BEATLES
All the greats have dabbled in the murky waters of rhyminality1. You’ll surely have heard this rollicking romp, in which Ringo foghorns, I’m sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair. You were in a car crash, and you lost your hair.
When it was written in 1968, this line was taken to be further evidence for the conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some months earlier. Thankfully for him, it was merely evidence of what happens when you let the drummer write songs.
THE BEACH BOYS
The Beatles’ esteemed contemporaries dropped a similar stinker here, albeit in 1977, by which time Brian Wilson was ankle deep in his sand–pit barking at the moon and no one was really listening to their new songs. I go and get my skates on and I catch up with her, they sing. We do it holding hands, it’s so cold I go ‘Brrrr!’
Ouch. Still, they should be glad they didn’t end up among the sleazy denizens of Chapter 3, considering they tell of how we’ll make sweet lovin’ when the sun goes down, We’ll even do more when your mama’s not around.
‘Hello, is that Social Services? I’ve just seen a group of bearded musicians loitering by a frozen lake, acting suspiciously …’
SPANDAU BALLET
Until recently, the infamous line She used to be a diplomat, and now she’s down the laundromat was regarded as somewhat laughable. We chuckled not only at the iffy rhyme but the faintly farcical scenario presented therein. Yet in this era of global recession, their words could prove prophetic – could we see a queue of well-travelled executives lining up for a service wash after they are forced to lay off their domestic servants and flog the tumble dryer? They also say of the former diplomat in question, ‘They washed her mind’. Does that cost extra?
SNAP
Turbo B, the rapper who fronted this Europop outfit, was probably unaware that he was uttering the words that will one day later be inscribed on his gravestone when he boomed, I’m serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer!
He may not have written them himself, but we still have to ask the question:
JUST HOW SERIOUS CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE WHEN YOU’RE SAYING ‘RHYTHM IS A DANCER’?
You can perhaps be as serious as you like when you’re saying ‘My house is on fire and I am currently trapped inside it’, but rhythm’s status as a dancer is surely unlikely to be a life-endangering situation, even if, as Inner Circle suggest later in Chapter 2, the dancer might be sweating until they can sweat no more. The only possibility that could redeem this line is that Turbo hasn’t told us the full story. If, of course, he’d announced, ‘I’m serious as cancer when I say Rhythm is a dancer who has just been kidnapped by radical Islamic jihad militia and is being held without food and water while chained to a radiator in a dark Islamabad cellar’ then we would have fully understood the gravity of the situation.
DURAN DURAN
Simon Le Bon and co should know the danger of overstatement better than anyone after the unforgettable observation that fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door, don’t say you’re easy on me, you’re about as easy as a nuclear war.
I think you’ll agree, they’ve overcooked the comparison. A nuclear war would, there’s no doubt, be far from easy. All that death and destruction, eating clumps of your own hair in an underground shelter and slowly dying from radiation sickness – what a chore. But a mildly difficult romantic partner wouldn’t quite be in the same league. Whereas if he’d said, ‘You’re about as easy as finding an unrestricted parking spot in the centre of Colchester on market day’, we couldn’t really have argued.
AEROSMITH
If Steven Tyler’s creaky old knees ever give up on him, there’s a gap in the market for a man who can describe colours accurately and succinctly. He was the man, after all, who sang Pink when I turn out the light. Pink – it’s like red but not quite.
Yeah, tell it like it is, Stevie! I for one would be only too happy to go into my local DIY shop and, instead of finding colour shadings that sound like euphemisms for drugs, like ‘intense apple’ or ‘Moroccan velvet’, you’d get straight-talking descriptions like ‘Nearly black but got scared’, ‘Would have been mauve but the magenta ink cartridge was running low’ or indeed ‘Well on the way to yellow but stumbled at the last hurdle and got splashed with a pot of cream’.
ABC
Martin Fry of ABC professed his joy at being voted into the top ten of worst ever lyrics in a BBC poll a few years back. And I think we can confirm he was worthy of the accolade thanks to this passage: More sacrifices than an Aztec priest, Standing here straining at that leash. All fall down, can’t complain, mustn’t grumble – help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.
He might try to argue that once he’d used the word ‘grumble’ his rhyming options were limited. But what was wrong with rumble, fumble, humble, mumble, stumble, tumble or even possibly womble? Or dumbbell?
I actually rang Martin Fry, asking for an explanation. I only got his answering machine. He said he couldn’t come to the phone, as he was being kept on a leash today, making one of his regular sacrifices to the gods. He said not to worry though – he’s being well fed with popular British puddings.
FEEDER
We all dream of escape from time to time, to a land of sunshine and good times, where we can leave all our cares behind and duck out of the rat race. Somewhere like … Exeter, perhaps?
That’s what was presumably on Grant Nicholas of Feeder’s mind when he wrote ‘Buck Rogers’, a radio-friendly pop song in which he sings, We’ll start over again, grow ourselves new skin. Get a house in Devon, drink cider from a lemon.
Now, I know they’re into New Age practices down there in the South-west, but this sounds more like some bizarre religious cult. I’m imagining allotments full of human skin, and people drinking cider from lemons, quietly muttering to each other, ‘They’re a bit small, as drinking receptacles go, aren’t they? Why can’t we just drink lemon from a lemon?’
The more smart-arsed among you might point out that human beings grow new skin all the time, so maybe we can’t argue with that part of the equation. But drinking cider from a lemon? You might as well drink wine from a fax machine.
But anything goes in this brave new society, especially when Brother Grant announces he is the son of God, and he has put something special in those lemons to transport his disciples to the next world.
COLDPLAY
It is traditional when considering an artist’s ‘work’ to divide it into ‘periods’. To give you some examples, Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon is the most famous piece of his ‘African’ period, Bob Dylan’s Saved and Slow Train Coming are said to come from his ‘Christian’ period, and Neil Young’s synth rock adventure Trans is part of his ‘titting about with a vocoder like Uncle Jeff at Christmas hitting the bossa nova button on his new Bontempi organ’ period.
Likewise, this song can be seen as part of Coldplay’s ‘rhyming’ era, wherein lyricist Chris Martin began to use couplets in much the same way an OCD sufferer uses soap. He was soon displaying a wholehearted passion for activities like wanting to be just you and me in a boat on the sea, drinking cups of tea with no great need to have a pee.
All harmless fun, for the most part. But when he promised on this hit single that Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, the collective intake of breath from radio listeners must have been sufficient to divert global weather currents.
I’m guessing that most people’s initial thought would have been, ‘Thanks for the thought, Chris, but I’m not sure setting light to my bones will actually do me much good in the long term.’
It’s understandable that you might want to warm someone’s bones with the glow of the light of your enduring love, but igniting them would surely be going way too far. Besides, last time I checked, bones didn’t readily lend themselves to being set alight, unlike, say, paper or matches.
It would surely require several years’ supply of Ready Brek2 consumed in a single sitting to actually induce spontaneous combustion, combined with large amounts of a highly flammable liquid, like, say, alcohol. By which time, if he tried it, Chris Martin would probably sound more like Tom Waits singing the hits of Impaled Nazarene. Which, come to think of it, may not be such a bad idea.
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1 I will occasionally refer to lyrical wrongdoers as ‘rhyminals’. I realise this is wordplay worthy of Richard Stilgoe after one too many Bristol Creams, but like many of the artists featured in this chapter, I don’t care. It’ll do, I’ve got a book to write, and you try looking for alternative words for ‘rhyme’, let alone puns involving it. Never apologise, never explain. Although I think I just did.
2 For those readers born outside the UK or after 1985, Ready Brek is a popular oat-based British breakfast cereal which was advertised for many years using the highly suspect suggestion that consuming it would make your child glow with warmth, as if they’d swallowed liquid plutonium. And no one even reported them to That’s Life3.
3 For those readers BOTUKOA1985, That’s Life was a popular consumer programme in which toothy harridan Esther Rantzen and a harem of turtle-necked man-slaves stuck up for the nation’s consumer rights. Then Doc Cox4 sang a ‘zany’ song about it.
4 Oh, look him up on the bloody internet.