Songs that rhyme a word with itself

"Don't Pass Me By" is a classic?

 

And like with like?

 

Four pages in and it’s clear SH.TV doesn’t understand rhyming.

 

I had always read the lyrics were: "She's got to be herself so she can give us help". However, listening to it, it's hard to tell WHAT he sings!

I now hear "She's got to be herself so she can do her job" which doesn't rhyme at all.

 

From The Fountain of Salmacis:
The two are now made one
Demi-god and nymph are now made one

 

Oh, I'm quite sure it was deliberate. There are internal rhymes in all three stanzas.

 

Having a tin ear can express itself in different ways - not being able to carry a tune, or not being able to tell which syllables are being stressed and, in turn, being rhymed.

 

The term stems from French, in which feminine adjectives have a short additional syllable compared to their masculine counterparts.

The same term is used in classical poetics to discuss certain metrical patterns.

Bottom line: the term relates to grammatical gender, not human sex.

 

That's your poetry right there.

 

Van Hagar-Why Can't This be Love?

"Only time will tell if we stand the test of time." Ok, maybe it's not rhyming a word with itself but it's still lazy and awful

 

There does seem to be a lack of clarity here about what rhyme is and what it does. I'm going to try and spell things out. I should warn you that this is going to get pretty pedantic.

First of all, the kind of rhyme people are mostly concerned with here is end rhyme. There are of course other kinds; McCartney’s use of internal rhyme in "Hey Jude" has been noted, and in the larger sense any repetition of similar sounds, as in alliteration and assonance, is a kind of rhyme. (These are all figures of repetition, to use the language of rhetoric.) In some traditions of songwriting, end rhymes are supposed to be exact (pain rhymes with rain, but not with fame), but in most current traditions, if you can hear that it's supposed to rhyme, that's good enough.

People have repeatedly explained here that something like "shake it / break it" isn’t rhyming a word with itself. It's a feminine rhyme, and the unstressed part ("it") is supposed to be the same; what’s important is that the stressed part (shake/break) is different. Part of the confusion, I think, is that idea of stressed vs. unstressed, i.e., accented vs. unaccented, syllables and how they work in the structuring of English verse has become arcane knowledge. But while poems aren't commonly written in meter anymore, songs are—not consciously, but intuitively, because when you fit the words to the beat, what you get is meter. A stressed syllable, roughly speaking, is one that comes on the beat, and an unstressed syllable is one that comes between the beats.

Rhyme is a conventional way of linking lines of a poem or song to convey the idea of a larger pattern. But it's not the only way, and there have been many poetic traditions that used other means than rhyme to accomplish the same objective. Vowel quantity in Greek and Latin, for instance, or various figures of repetition, (in addition to those mentioned above), such as anaphora or epistrophe (repeating the same word or phrase at the beginning of different clauses, or at the end), repeating the rhythm and syntax of a phrase, but not necessarily the words or sounds (put out the cat / bring in the dog), or repeating a phrase with minor changes. Etc. Using rhyme doesn't rule out using those other means, of course, and in fact rhyme can interact with them in sometimes very intricate ways, as in "By day I make the cars / By night I make the bars." That sounds simple and natural, but there's actually a lot going on there, not that it needs to be analyzed.

The subject of this thread, songs that rhyme a word with itself, encompasses some very different uses of language. Often, of course, the songwriter is just being lazy. He didn't notice, or care, that he just used that word. But other times it's not lazy at all. Same-word rhymes stand out more than other rhymes. They call attention to themselves. And a good songwriter can take advantage of that, such as by using the word in a very different sense. For example (I just made this up; you're all welcome to use it): "And like the falling leaves / She leaves." (Syscrusher's vial/vile example is similar; same sound, different meaning.) Or by repeating it in the same sense, for emphasis: "And never sat once at the head of the table / And didn't even talk to the people at the table / Who just cleaned up all the food from the table." As I said in an earlier post, Dylan is using the rhetorical device of epistrophe. The effect is like a hammer coming down, or a finger jabbing at your chest. A lot of the other examples in this thread are also epistrophe. In a sense it's not really a rhyme at all, since the point is the repetition of the word or phrase, not of the sound of it.

 

Nice!

 

...AND 'step' is being used in two different senses here, a 'door step' is a thing/place and 'one more step' is an action... Similarly for the Sabbath quoted at the beginning - IIRC, one 'masses' is a group of people and the other is a religious ceremony, not really the same words at all just spelled and pronounced the same.

 

Man ! That Kanye is something else innit he? What a wordsmith.

 

Actually, they're related, as the step is something that is also a call for action. The door step is a place where you are invited to take one.

 

Yes, they are certainly related but not the same.

 

Ray Davies - The Big Guy
Another one, when I listen to it I just think it’s a good rhyme.


Tony came out of South London
He was a cockney boy
He saved my ass back in '82
When I acted such a silly boy

 

I don’t think I’ve seen this one posted but my brother mentioned it when I brought up the conversation.

Otis Redding - Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay

Looks like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can't do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I'll remain the same

 

I just have to guess that they didn't want or intend a rhyme there. It's something poetic ending in strophy or something.

 

THis is where i draw the line! (no i'm ok really) But the same word is the same word. Even with diffferent senses or cases. Isn't it?

 

Similar to:
“Only time will tell if we stand the rest of time.”
Why Can’t This Be Love - Van Halen

Edit - blastfurniss beat me to it - but much like this lyric, I’m too lazy to delete the post.

 

Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go....
Nothing to do, nowhere to go...

 

This is too big a project for individuals. Why don't we all take a band and run the catalog though in our minds. We got some beatles people here, awright, and stones too. I think that will be covered. I'll take blind faith. Let's convene Saturday.

 

Realistically, it's more of a chant rather than lyrics.

 

He’s not rhyming money, but he is oddly trying to rhyme “Michael” with Tyco, Lipo and Geico.