Dumbest Rhyme Guilty Pleasure

Reportedly, producer Todd Rundgren made fun of Andy Partridge for rhyming "umbilical" with "cycle" in the song 'Season Cycle' from XTC's classic album Skylarking. But the lyric was kept.

 

From various things I've written....

(English)
fortunate / coordinates
coincide / [what a] ride
(German)
bund / Mund / rum
Tasche / Asche
(Spanish)
corazon / terragon
(French)
tout suite / romantique

 

The herb.

 

Most of “Blinded by the Light?” The Springsteen version, of course. I’ve always said my favorite thing about that song is all the goofy rhymes.

 

Have I got a Thread for you.
Stereotype The Person Above You - Part 46: Pay To Play

 

Wow, no particular rhyme for me, but this is somewhat related. From one of my favorite books, The Disappearing Dwarf:

The Disappearing Dwarf (Balumnia, #2) by James P. Blaylock

I had just sent this off in an e-mail to a friend a couple of days ago. I was going to try to explain who are the characters and what led up to this emotion packed moment, but it would take too long. I will let you know that everyone except Quimby are from the "normal" world and had to travel through an interdimensional portal to arrive where they are now, the magical land of Balumnia. Quimby is a resident of Balumnia:

“So what inspired you to set in writing poetry again?” Jonathan asked.

“Oh,” Gump replied, “we never gave it up. We can’t. It’s in our blood.”

“Like an infection,” Bufo said.

Gump agreed with him. “That’s right. And some things set it off: changes of seasons, for instance, or weather. Poetry is the sort of thing that just comes sailing in.”

“Kind of like a bat that gets tangled up in your hair,” Bufo put in.

“Or a “possum,” Gump observed, scratching his head, “that sneaks in at night and ravages your shoes.”

Bufo nodded. “That’s it exactly. As you can see, metaphors like that fly out like popping corn. A poet can’t help himself. He’s a slave to it.”

Jonathan said he understood. Quimby declared he knew a fellow once who was a poet: he wrote inspirational pieces for the local newspaper. Very heartfelt. Bufo didn’t look as if he cared much for inspirational pieces.

“What sort of inspirational pieces?” asked Gump, who, like Bufo, had a natural distrust of all other poets. “Do you recall any?”

Quimby thought it over. “Something about pressing on in hard times. You know, the stiff lip and straight back sort of thing. Bearing up. Doing one’s duty. Very stirring, really. Touched home.”

“I should say,” said Bufo. “Sounds like a laugh a minute. But that’s not what we write. Not by a long nose. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you; this poet of yours was likely quite a gem, in his way. I’ll look for his book when I get back home.” He winked at Gump to alert him to how clever this final comment had been.

“So anyway, you’ve run up some good ones, eh?” Jonathan asked.

“Some smashers.”

Bufo agreed. “It was the explosions that did it. We were sure you and the Professor and Miles were – well, you know … That you hadn't made it. Moroseness is what it was that got things going.”

“Morosity,” Gump said.

“Pardon me?”

“Morosity, I believe it is,” Gump repeated. “Not moroseness.”

“You’re thinking of porosity,” Bufo said. “Like your head.”

Gump gave him a look. But by then he was charged up with his poetry, so he let the matter drop. Quimby said that Bufo was probably correct anyway, and that his poet friend had spelled it “morosion” once, which seemed quite suitable under the circumstances since it rhymed, to a degree, with “erosion”, which was what was happening to this fellow’s soul in the poem. Gump and Bufo looked for a moment as if it were happening to their souls too, but then Gump pulled out his sheaf of papers and cleared his throat.

“Poor Squire Lost,” he read in a voice of woe, and he set in on a long poem about the Squire’s tragic wanderings in faraway Balumnia. The whole thing took about half an hour and seemed to confuse poor Quimby no end – he, of course, having no idea that Balumnia was a faraway magical land. He seemed to think, however, that poems were by their very nature obscure, and that it was the inexplicable bits that were the best parts. Jonathan sometimes felt the same way himself. The poem ended up something like this:

And so the Squire trudges past,
In his coat of golden thread
Weaved by Quimby who also knit
The massive cap upon his head.

The towns give way to forests.
Goblins creep through bogs of peat,
And headless men in rowboats
Sail atop the Tweet.

He wanders weeping far and wide;
His rotund form is shrunk away,
And with him travels Hope and Home,
Eastward toward the dawning day! ​

Gump finished and sat very still. It had been a sad poem, even for Quimby – who, by the end of it, had tears in his eyes. He’d never, he insisted, been a part of a poem before. The poems that his friend wrote weren’t the sort that had anyone doing anything – knitting hats or creeping through peat bogs or shrinking away or any of that sort of business. This was, he said, awfully powerful stuff.​

 

Oops, a band of mine ran the draft title of Maybe, Baby. It became Splendid Isolation (which itself sounds like a David Brent song) but kept the "maybe, baby" in the chorus.

I have, from the go and to this day, giggled at Depeche Mode's
Words are very
Unnecessary

but full length terrible rhyming that springs to mind is Steve Miller Band's Abracadabra - not just for I wanna reach out and grab ya - the very first time I heard it on the radio in 1982 I was predicting the predictable rhyming couplets (except for Black panties with an angel's face - that one caught me by surprise)

Around the same time, some bloke called Adrian Gurvitz released a song called Classic with the chorus
Got to write a classic
Got to write it in an attic
Baby, I'm an addict - now

that my older brother used to wail over
Yeah I got a ca-at
It sat on the ma-at
That's where it sha-at - now

which would have ruined it for me, if it wasn't a rubbish song already

 

Huh. I never made a point of rhyming much, but I just looked back at my lyrics and there are predictable self-important rhymes all over the place. And nothing even funny enough to be worth posting. This is great.

 

"...you can take your pound of innocent flesh, in barrels of Iraqi oil.
Then blame it all on terror threats, against American soil."

from the song: "Richard Chaney, Sticky Dick" by The Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Guinea Pigs.

 

A friend of mine is a Nashville guitarist. He's always going on and on about how amazing the songwriters are out there, and how well-written country songs are compared to other genres. In some cases, he's correct. There are some great story tellers out there who can paint pictures with words and music.

However, there are some awful rhymes as well.


I always pull out George Straight's "Rolling ona River of Love". It is CHOC FULL of the worst, most trite, most predictable rhymes ever in the history of music. Neber mind that the whole song is two chords.

My favorite horrible line in the whole song is....

"I got a paddle. I got a boat.
Come on, baby. I know she'll float."


Then there's Luke Bryan's "Fill Your Cup Up". Oy. Most of this song hurts my head. But here's the best gem of them all...

"Kick the dust up
Back it on up
Fill your cup up
Let's tear it up, up
And kick the dust up."

Terrible.... "cup up" and "up up"????

That's just the worst.

 

Just give me give me give me give me give me give me give me fried chicken

 

The Kingston Trio, also Blossom Dearie, The Ballad of the Shape of Things:

Completely round is the perfect pearl the oyster manufactures.
Completely round is the steering wheel that leads to compound fractures.​

 

No, no, no, the absolutely worst Steve Miller rhyme was from “Take The Money And Run”...

“They headed down to, ooh, old El Paso
That's where they ran into a great big hassle
Billy Joe shot a man while robbing his castle
Bobbie Sue took the money and run”

Then it gets topped off with...

“Hoo-hoo-hoo, billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice
He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes”

Adrian Gurvitz was a pretty interesting cat; he and his brother Paul had a succession of hard rock bands in the late 60’s/early 70’s; this tune, while no great shakes in the lyric department, was something of a hit, covered a bit as well...

Adrian Gurvitz - Wikipedia

There’s all sorts of bad rhymes out there, but you have to admire the honesty of someone who has hit a brick wall, and owns it(either that, or the total DGAF attitude)...
“Well we got no class
And we got no principals
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes”

 

I noticed that her hair was longer in the back,
I figured that's cause she's Canadian
That's why I was surprised when
she told me she was fully lesbian

 

I think the Sex Pistols take the cake on this one. The opening lines of Anarchy in the U.K. have always made me cringe.