Songs that rhyme a word with itself

In Randy Newman's "It's A Jungle Out There" (aka the theme from Monk), he sings

"People say I'm crazy cos I worry all the time
If you paid attention you'd be worried too
You better pay attention or this world we love so much
Might just kill you"

Not a rhyme, but it always pestered me how he sings "paid attention" and "pay attention" so close together.

 

" Little Joe never once gave it away.
Everybody had to pay and pay.
But he never lost his head
even when he was giving............

Well, you know the rest.

 

A lot of people are listing feminine rhymes here, which is where the second-to-last syllable is stressed and rhymed, and the last syllable is unstressed and identical. As an example, "see you" and "be you" is a perfectly valid rhyme because of the stress pattern.

 

Doorstep
More Step.

That is two-syllable feminine rhyme. The rhyming words are "door" and "more. It is not rhyming the same word.

 

Guys with shot hearing who spend too much on stereo equipment probably can't be bothered with hundreds of years of poetic tradition.

 

None other than Bob Dylan in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll:

"And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table"

 

Hmmm... I take your point, but it’s always sounded clumsy to me even though I’m otherwise a big fan of Don’s lyrics.

 

Feminine rhyme. He is rhyming life with wife.

 

It's been done for hundreds of years. Maybe you should write to the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and suggest that they not anthologize Lord Byron because of his clumsy rhyming.

It is the blight man was born for
It is Margaret you mourn for. - Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 

Rubbish lyrics... that Byron guy should just give up on songwriting!
In all seriousness, as I say, I do understand your point but I guess it just comes down to the individual song and whether we personally hear rhymes such as these as “good poetry” or “clumsy”.
I actually think the Beach Boys “Life on it”/“wife on it” is ok and amusing.
For whatever reason, Don’s line just feels lazy to me.
He should worry... I wish I’d written a song that had sold half as well!

 

I agree with you that we can argue whether we think a rhyme is clumsy or not, but some people in this thread seem to be making the claim that feminine rhyming in and of itself is somehow faulty.

 

"Feminine rhymes", I had no idea that's what they were called, that's great.

 

Nor me. I’m surprised no-one’s so far complained that calling these rather dubious ‘secondary’ rhymes “feminine’, isn’t sexist!

 

Technically they are different words but in Caroline Says I Lou Reed rhymes

Just like poison in a vial
She was often very vile

 

Why Don't We Do It In The Road

 

Not necessarily rhyming a word with itself, but I've always found the lyric in Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" that says "you gotta start from the start" to be incredibly bad. Every time that stupid song has come on the radio (almost always on a Friday afternoon, too) over the last 30+ years and I hear that, I cringe.

 

Ray Davies has a few I just need to think of them, but I in no way consider them to be lazy rhymes, rather he uses the word that he needs to move the story along.
Only example I can think of at the moment is Animal Farm:
In the first two verses he rhymes
Insane & playing and pillow & window, but in the third verse he rhymes:

I'll take you where real animals are playing
And the people are real people not just playing

 

I cringe whenever I hear Loverboy, period, which thankfully is almost never.

 

Ok same album, Picture Book.

Picture book, of people with each other, to prove they love each other, a long time ago.

 

A few of Beach Boys lyrics rhyme "now" with "now". Tony and Mike were well at it. For example...

"It starts with just a little glance now,
Right away you're thinking 'bout romance now..."

"Well she got her daddy's car and she cruised to the hamburger stand now,
Seems she forgot all about the lib-rary like she told her old man now..."

 

This is actually an example of epistrophe--repeating a word for effect at the end of a phrase or line. That is, rhyming a word with itself on purpose, not because you're too lazy to find another word. A couple of the Lou Reed lyrics that people have mentioned (like head/head) also qualify as epistrophe. The Kanye one too (money/money/money).

The term "feminine rhyme" really is as sexist as it sounds--the idea is that rhyming one syllable sounds assertive and strong, but rhyming two sounds soft and gentle. If that bothers you, you can say "double rhyme." "Life on it / wife on it" is a triple rhyme. The English poet Thomas Hood wrote a poem where most of the the rhymes are triple rhymes:

Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly;
Not of the stains of her,
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.

 

Ah, as we’ve now established, they’re feminine’ rhymes, you see? Not the same thing at all!

 

"Feminine rhymes" are not mentioned by the OP. Are the goalposts being changed by someone else here?

 

This is actually a pretty elegant example of repetition as a poetic device. He is repeating the words “make it better” to emphasize the intended message of the song. It’s not really meant to be a rhyme. The ear-pleasing rhyme is supplied by the “heart” and “start” pairing. Unfortunately, Paul abandons this stylish approach in the next (and far clumsier) verse, where he rhymes “get her” and “better.” That’s where I cringe a bit. Still a pretty good song, though.

 

Not at all, it's just that participants are unable to determine which words are being rhymed. in the example of "glance now" "romance now," the word being rhymed is not "now." Some of us have tried to point this out.