For those who continue to suck … we salute you!
To produce one bad rhyme in a career may be regarded as misfortune. To produce three or four might be regarded as carelessness, or worse still, the kind of creative bankruptcy that provokes people to lazily rewrite famous Oscar Wilde quotes. Consider the following repeat offenders.
ARTHUR LEE
Arthur Lee of Love took full advantage of the psychedelic era’s creative licence when he wrote the words to their classic album Forever Changes. On ‘The Red Telephone’, for instance, he muses, I believe in Magic. Why? Because it is so quick. Little did he know that David Blaine would one day take three months to do a single stunt. However, it sounds like the only magic that could possibly have been at work in this song were the mushroom variety, considering he then sang … I feel real phoney when my name is Bill … or was that Phil?
Elsewhere on that same album, on ‘Live And Let Live’ he sings, Oh the snot has caked against my pants, it has turned into crystal. There’s a bluebird sitting on a fence, I think I’ll take my pistol. I’ve got it in my hand, because he’s on my land.
Now, you might want to sit down and pour yourself a stiff drink before I break this to you, but Arthur Lee later admitted to being somewhat stoned when he penned those lines. Say it ain’t so!
MARC BOLAN
Clearly affected by a similar variety of ‘magic’, the would-be glam idol was evidently operating on a higher spiritual plane during his time as part of Tyrannosaurus Rex. On the title track of the album She Was Born To Be My Unicorn he wrote, The night-mare’s mauve mashed mind, sights the visions of the blinds. Shoreside stream of steam. Cooking kings in cream of scream.
It’s comforting to know that if Bolan hadn’t made it in the music business, he could have enjoyed a lucrative career writing tongue twisters for joke books.
He’d come back to earth somewhat by 1971, though, when on ‘Cosmic Dancer’ he asked rhetorically, What’s it like to be a loon? I liken it to a balloon. Yet he was. He was still playing fast and loose with conventional meaning when on Woodland Rock he noted, Met a little Momma, she was sweet, she was gone. She’s got legs like a railroad, Face like a song. Luckily, he was already well on the way to inventing glam rock, in which verbal eloquence was not the primary concern, hence him getting away with lines like She’s my woman of gold and she’s not very old (‘Hot Love’), or I drive a Rolls Royce, it’s good for my voice (‘Children Of The Revolution’).
BERNARD SUMNER
This man has been caning couplets for decades now, and he’s not always fussy as to the quality when he’s keen for his next fix. On ‘Slow Jam’, for instance, he noted The sea was very rough, It made me feel sick. But I like that kind of stuff, it beats arithmetic.
A thought that will strike a chord with anyone who has been faced with the daily dilemma of whether to throw up or do some sums.
On ‘Every Second Counts’, he sang, every second counts when I am with you. I think you are a pig, you should be in a zoo. But if that leads you to think our hero lacks a romantic streak, you are so wrong. In fact Sumner is at his most enigmatic on the eternally unfathomable subject of love. Consider ‘Crystal’, on which he notes, here comes love, it’s like honey, you can’t buy it with money. I suppose love is a bit like honey – you know, kind of sweet, can be sticky if you do it without protection, but on the other hand, it’s also like a colour, as Bernard observed on ‘Guilt Is A Useless Emotion’, with the lines real love can’t be sold, it’s another colour than gold. Well that narrows it down on the colour front – could it be dark plum, or burnt russet? Pale cream? Flaccid yellow? All rather confusing, but thankfully, on ‘Sub-Culture’ he offers a more basic appraisal of relationships, with the warning, One of these days when you sit by yourself, you’ll realise you can’t shaft without someone else. Can’t really argue with that.
BRETT ANDERSON
A chronic rhyming habit has been noted in other eminent recording artists, not least this Britpop alumnus. Around the time of Suede’s third album, Coming Up, their lyricist seemed to develop an alarming predilection for winceworthy lines, not least the one on ‘She’ in which he spoke of She, shaking up the karma, She, injecting mari-joo-ana. You had to ask what exactly a self-confessed chemical gourmand like Anderson could possibly be thinking of. We could perhaps forgive the likes of St Winifred’s School Choir for being a touch sketchy on the finer details of recreational cannabis use, but he must know only too well that injecting marijuana is nigh on impossible. And as for its pronunciation, is he trying to play dumb in case the drug squad are listening? There’s no point playing the innocent, Brett, they’ve heard those other songs, and lines like ‘let’s chase the dragon’, ‘I’m aching to see my heroine’ and ‘All I want for christmas is a crack sandwich’. The game’s up, son.
Soon after, on ‘Savoir Faire’, he wrote, She lives in a house, she’s stupid as a mouse. However, despite this modest appraisal, he noted, she’s got savoir faire, yeah yeah. Sounds like one hell of a lady! Her own accommodation, almost completely unintelligent, but nevertheless has some sort of basic ‘know-how’ which presumably means she’ll be quite practical when it comes to cooking, cleaning, that kind of thing. Why, you’ve got yourself quite a catch there, Brett!
She must have been particularly tolerant of his eccentric ways, however, judging by the lines on ‘Head Music’ when he yelps, Give me head, give me head, give me head music instead.
Make your mind up, lover boy! One minute you’re desperate for some intimate oral attention, and then when she’s just reaching for the zipper, you tell her ‘Actually, on second thoughts, I’d rather put some Brian Eno on’. That’s got to be tough for any woman to swallow. Metaphorically speaking.
RICKY WILSON
Most of the above lyrics may seem a little less than contemporary, coming, as they do, from the last century. So it’s good to know there are plenty of artists still out there who are prepared to play fast and loose with poetic convention, and marry words together in the songwriter’s equivalent of a shotgun marriage. This Leeds quintet dragged fingernails down imaginary blackboards in 2003 when their breakout hit ‘I Predict A Riot’ began with the lines Watching The People Get Lairy, It’s Not Very Pretty I Tell Thee. You will also have noticed their coupling of ‘name tag on it’ and ‘plate tectonic’ on ‘Oh My God’, as discussed in more depth in Chapter 2.
But since then they’ve raised the bollocks bar to ambitious new heights, as we witness on their 2007 number ‘Saturday Night’. Consider the passage:
Pneumothorax is a word that is long, They’re just trying to put some punk back into punctured lung.
Panic over, party off, party on,’cos we are birds of a feather and you can be the fat one.
In a recent interview, they admitted that lyric writing is a collaborative process for them. Which surely confirms the ancient wisdom which defines a camel as ‘a horse, designed by committee’.
BONO
You can sometimes excuse the young and naive of their momentary descents into schoolboy doggerel in the early days of their careers. When U2 were first signed, Bono had still yet to perfect his stock in trade of writing vague impressionistic rhetoric about rivers running dry in the desert of the American night. On their early song ‘Trevor’, U2 informed us Trevor seems quite clever, but Trevor lives forever. Trevor is together, Trevor whatever. Innocent enough, really, but if rhyme is, as we suggested, like a drug, U2 were clearly getting dabbling in the hallucinogenic variety by the time they released ‘Some Days Are Better Than Others’ on their Zooropa album in 1993. Some days are dry, some days are leaky, he sings, some days come clean, other days are sneaky. Some days take less but most days take more, they slip through your fingers and onto the floor.
I know what he means. What a week I’ve had. A leaky Monday, a sneaky Tuesday, then I spent all day Thursday cleaning Wednesday off the floor. Mind you, it’s nothing compared to last winter. Next door had a pipe full of 23rd February burst on them, and it flooded the whole of March.
Anyway, Bono dabbled relatively sparingly in such sentence-altering substances until 2000, when he fell off the wagon big time on ‘Elevation’. Got no self-control, he admitted, not before time, been living like a mole now, going down, excavation. High and high in the sky, you make me feel like I can fly, So high, elevation.
I think you’re having another leaky day, Bono. How about a nice lie down?
As we have seen elsewhere in this volume, the spokesman for a generation trod in a few cowpats on the rocky road to greatness, even in his peerless mid-60s prime. It’s hard to forget the line from ‘I Want You’ when he sings, Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit, he spoke to me, I took his flute. No, I wasn’t very cute … to him, was I?
A serious motorcycle accident didn’t really do much to knock any sense into him, and on ‘Lo And Behold’, recorded in 1967 but released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, he sang, What’s the matter Molly dear, what’s the matter with your mound? What’s it to ya Moby Dick, this is chicken town!
That’s right, Bob.
Thankfully, by the mid-1970s he seemed keen that the odd listener should actually understand what he had to say, and the epic protest song ‘Hurricane’ exemplifies this new approach. Yet despite such lucidity, he performed a trick beloved of rhyminals everywhere – shoving a square peg in a round hole, with the line We’re gonna put his ass in stir / We’re going to pin this triple mur … der on him, he ain’t no gentleman Jim!
Here we see a word that straddles two lines as comfortably as an athlete landing crotch-first on a hurdle. It hurts even to watch it. Still, this is the man who later wrote, ‘Wiggle wiggle wiggle, Like a bowl of soup’, so he clearly has a high pain threshold.
RAKIM
Awarded almost regal status within the hip-hop ‘game’, the rapping half of pioneering 80s duo has been praised in rarified literary circles (well, The Source magazine, maybe) for his pioneering use of internal rhyming (writing rhymes within the same lines – there, that’s street knowledge if you care to share), but it’s a dangerous path to tread. Especially when, on ‘Paid In Full’, he mentions some of the things he enjoys in his spare time. He lists a tape of Me and Eric B, and a nice big plate of fish, which is my favorite dish. But without no money it’s still a wish.
Of course, once their debut album went platinum, they were wealthy enough to listen to tapes of themselves and stuff themselves full, of cod, haddock and macker-ull. I dare say they had them stacked on shelves, to suit themselves, or were even served them by elves so they didn’t have to delve, and get their fingers all sticky.
You can’t buy a poetic licence, and Rakim came close to having it revoked on ‘Follow The Leader’, when he exhorted, Dance! Cuts rip your pants! Eric B. on the blades, bleedin’ death, call an ambulance!
Even if we disregard the rhyme of ‘pants’ with ‘ambulance’, it’s a good job such injury-inducing music isn’t being made in the more litigious 21st century, or there would surely be TV adverts, featuring a badly acted reconstruction of a man’s pants being ripped by the sheer force of the DJ’s ‘cuts’, and then the question: ‘Have you been a victim of an accident in a nightclub which wasn’t your fault? Possibly involving cuts which rip your pants? Well call “Hip-hop Injury Lawyers” today. Don’t delay, it’s the only way. Word to the mother, HHIL – there ain’t no other.’ They’d surely have a watertight case, and would leave our deadly duo skint and fish-free once more.
You might regard such flinch-inducing lines as fundamentally harmless. But there were evidently young impressionable rappers out there copying them. Assuming you’re reading this book chronologically, rather than dipping into the odd bit while waiting for the turtle’s head, then you will have seen the entry about Snap’s ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ in Chapter 1. Bearing that in mind does the following passage ring any bells? ‘I got a question, serious as cancer – who can keep the the average dancer, hyper as a heart attack, nobody smilin’?’.
Elsewhere, on ‘Microphone Fiend’, Rakim bragged, back to the problem, I got a habit. You can’t solve it, silly rabbit! The same ridiculous phrase was later used by Public Enemy, who wrote in ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’, I see the tape recorder and I grab it. No you can’t have it back, silly rabbit!
Que? It turns out that the phrase comes from a US advert for breakfast cereal, in which a rabbit tries to steal the cereal and is told, ‘Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!’
It all makes perfect sense now.