Billy Joel- “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”
From his album The Stranger

Almost all pop songs rhyme, but most people treat that rhyme as a necessary evil.

On one hand, critics think they’re above analyzing something that exists so obviously at face value. When there are so many shades of meaning to interpret, the nuts and bolts of rhyme aren’t worth their time. That’s what makes them critics. On the other hand, casual listeners are conscious of rhyme—it’s what helps them to remember lyrics—but they don’t draw deeper meaning from it. That’s what makes them casual listeners.

That doesn’t mean, however, that rhyme is insignificant as a structural device or a literary device. Anyone just starting out uses it as a walk/talk crutch. A beginner feels as if he needs it, but he doesn’t really know how to make it effective. So one of the easiest ways to separate amateur songwriters and poets from the advanced is to look at rhyme. And while I’m partial to imperfect rhyme or double rhyme, a couplet doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective.

For instance, one of my favorite rhymes ever is in the first two lines of Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way.”  After a short intro, Lindsey Buckingham sings: “Lovin’ you / Is it the right thing to do?” Written out, it doesn’t work as well because he spaces the lines out with a long pause on the record. The song’s about a speaker who, despite wanting to  give his world to another person, has to let her go, even if they seem to be perfect for each other. So the completely simple, inevitable rhyme of “you” and “do” reaches at this idea of the way things are supposed to be, and it’s threatened and made tragic by the extended pause leading up to a tortured question. It works.

If you’re a songwriter, you’re much safer picking simple rhymes like that, since the only time average people do notice rhyme is when it doesn’t work. I remember Christmas of 1997, when my uncle asked me to play him whatever I had been listening to recently. For the rest of the day, he ridiculed the way Eminem said “idea” to get it to rhyme with “pier” in “Bonnie and Clyde.” What would be the alternative, Lou? To not try anything more challenging than “school” and “fool”? At least he’s flying close to the sun.

At the same time, I understand what he’s talking about. Sometimes you can be completely invested in a song, and you get ripped out of it because of an illogical rhyme. It’s like hearing a fumbled chord. An artist like Eminem has taught me way more about assonance and consonance and feminine rhyme than any conventional poet, but not everyone—actually only a handful of people on earth—has his gift for matching syllables. In the past year, whenever I’ve had a negative reaction to a song or verse, it’s because there’s a rhyme that seems like the completely obvious fit, and the songwriter trades it for one that is clumsier and inferior.

In her otherwise perfect verse for “Monster,” Nicki Minaj chants, “Let me get this straight, wait, I’m the rookie? / But my features and my shows ten times your pay?” Instead of, you know, not rhyming, why not say that her features and shows are ten times your “booking”? As in, the formal word for scheduling and paying an entertainer. It’s not as if she was holding “pay” over to rhyme with something further down. It just doesn’t rhyme, and she moves on. Maybe she meant for it to sound effortless, or maybe she was just lazy. Either way, it took me out of the song.

Likewise, Chris Brown’s “Deuces” begins with: “All that bullshit’s for the birds / You ain’t nothin’ but a vulture / Always hoping for the worst / Waiting for me to fuck up.” That “fuck up” is a fuck-up of the highest order because it needs to be “falter.” It means the exact same thing in that situation, and it would create a double rhyme with “vulture.” It wouldn’t be needlessly crude, and it would produce much more symmetry with an abab rhyme scheme. And this song had three writers! No one changed it from the rough draft?

The king of terrible rhyme has to be Billy Joel though. “Movin’ Out” is a song bouncy enough for the Diplomats to have sampled, but it gets ruined by a lazy rhyme. In each verse, Mr. Long Island transitions to the refrain with a unique repetition of the last syllable of the last word. For example, the first verse stutters with, “A heart attack -ack -ack -ack -ack -ack.” The third verse goes, “A Cadillac -ack -ack- ack- ack- ack.”

Far be it for me to question a giant like the Piano Man, but I’m guessing the second verse should also do the same thing with the same syllable. But no. Instead, we get, “You should never argue with a crazy mi- mi- mi- mi- mi- mind.” For one thing, “mind” is a one syllable word, so it doesn’t work the same way that “Cadillac” and “attack” do. And, also, WE HAVE A WORD FOR A CRAZY PERSON THAT ENDS IN -AC. Was Billy Joel so coked up in 1977 that he couldn’t remember what a “maniac” was? Did he not know which page to turn to in his thesaurus? “A crazy mind” is so much wordier and more illogical than “maniac.” I could have really liked that song, Billy. And now I hate it almost as much as “I Go to Extremes.”

[Generic conclusion alert] As you can see, while a lot of people view it as incidental, rhyme is anything but. It can be the tiny detail that makes a song magical, and it can also be one syllable that creates a life-long feud with Billy Joel.