"along came a spider... he was freaky like dracula..."
"yeah, nice rhyme keith"
you gotta love rhyming dictionaries...
at least, someone has to otherwise they'd feel all useless and lonely...
i've got one, someone got it for me as a present many many years ago, when i was just getting my head around this whole song-writing tip... and i must have used it uhm... loads of times.
although generally for the exact opposite purpose for which it was intended... choosing words to be avoided...
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| mr meph soars over wittenburg (allegedly) |
i did once start writing a song exclusively using rhymes from the lil' blue book, i chose '-e(a)se' as my starting point, within the first three lines there's reference to both staples of modern song-writing... mephistopheles and journalese... (it had a proper old-skool 8-bit beat behind it - probably best we leave it at that)
although it was probably better than my anti-limp bizkit rap song... that had some cheese-tastic distortion sample through delay... some nice word-play (complete with a tongue in cheek nod to white zombie), but terrible music...
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| my lil' pocket rhyming dictionary |
but the dictionary... what is it about...
i just don't get it, although in this particular case it may be one of those cases of idea vs. execution, the idea itself i am properly down with... its execution, especially in this case, much less so...
but then my rhyming dictionary is pocket-sized, i know they had to filter something out to shrink it in size, and i can't help but wonder if it was the human element that was sacrificed...
it does read like it was written by a computer, quite a gormless one at that... put plainly some of the words don't actually rhyme... yes its partly dialectal variance at fault for this, they probably all rhyme perfectly when 'sung' by a bbc electron...
furthermore the word-choice with-in is at times just plain bizarre...
its a fair bet that even the slowest of songwriter would realise that any word ending with head will rhyme with another word ending in head... although you could just devote several pages to a list of x-head words, some of which were never meant to find their way into song...
here's one...
a rhyme for '-illum'...
try 'chillum' or 'vexillum'...
right... ok, so its not much of a push to get 'chillum' into a song about smoking, but i'm not sure how'd you'd wedge a refernce to a roman military standard into the same track...
and i am sure it makes words up... i'd cite one right now (the most obvious example i've ever found was 'fuckarenee'), but they hide so well within the massive lists of words and i am tired right about now, so they are not forthcoming...
there's some commercial stuff that just sounds like it was lifted from the 'world's first syrupy cheese rhyming dictionary'... proper mushy-bizzle, and personally i think there should be a law against cheese-rhyming 'heart' with 'apart', cos like everybody already been there and uhm,... done that...
there's a particular song on the wireless at the moment with rhymes so bad, they actually cause me excruciating physical pain... i have no idea what its called (maybe i have blotted that out), but i literally cannot listen to it - the songwriting is soooo laboured that even its 'adorable anthemic' pop sheen can make it worth the effort...
matt bellamy is guilty of a few stinkers, "holes in our souls" in 'screenager' is a particular one that springs to mind... but i know that we can let him off, owing to him being a sh!t-hot guitarist and all-round good (properly frazzled) egg...
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| hair-cut... (bad-rhyme) |
i think the problem that i have with rhyming dictionary's is that i don't tend to rhyme the last syllable of a word, it tends to be the penultimate syllable... and apparently they didn't make a book for doing that yet...
rhyming that way fits with some of the faster more staccato (rap) deliveries, and i've noticed a tendency to sometimes slur syllables into the rhyme, or move the position of the rhyme through the line...
with a fast delivery the rhyme can also be created through the phrasing of individual syllables, rather than their content... practician that!
i've also noticed that over time i have moved to longer rhyme schemes... sometimes it'll be the first and last line of a verse, or open with a couplet and then don't rhyme the end of the verse...
its definitely more about the content than the sounds...
and there isn't a dictionary for that...
