The useful, musical qualities of rhyme are many – though that’s not the subject of this post.  Suffice to say that almost every single popular song (99%+?) uses rhymes.  A lot.  We’re really used to hearing rhymes in songs.

But what about songs that don’t use rhyme?

Recently I started thinking about Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and about how the lyric flows so beautifully without using rhymes (except for one in the refrain – ‘blind/mind’).

I realized that I’d heard ‘Suzanne’ many times without giving any thought to the ‘lack of rhyme’ – the words flow so naturally that one doesn’t miss the rhymes that are there in most songs.

I felt how ‘correct’ the word choices seemed for this song.  The ends of the couplets don’t rhyme but they do use very similar sounds.  A lot of them end with the sound ‘er’.  Along the same lines, there are related sounds from one line to the next: ‘tell her’/give her’, ‘lover/with her’, ‘broken/open’ (pretty much a rhyme, but incidental overall).

So although Cohen is mostly not using rhymes, he’s never forgetting about the sounds and sound relationships of the words and about creating a sonic world where the word sounds are connected.

I found some other songs that are like this – the standard ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ (Blackburn/Suessdorf), Paul Simon’s ‘America’, Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’, Sting’s ‘Fields Of Gold’, ‘The Blue Nile’s Easter Parade’, CS & N’s ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’. Talking Heads’ ‘And She Was’… but it surprised me how few there actually are.)

Why do they work?  Why don’t we miss the rhymes that we’re so used to expecting?

The first thing I noticed were the melodies.  In all these cases (less so in “Karma Police’, but I’ll come back to that) the melody flows in a way that not only blends naturally with the lyric (something you’d expect in any well-written song) but it also doesn’t lead us to expect a rhyme… the melodies go from the beginning to the end of each section without ‘circling around’.  Each section of melody (verse, chorus, bridge, etc.) is more like one long sentence – which brings much less expectation of rhyme – than a series of connected phrases, which would lead to greater expectation of rhyme.

Rhymes help – a lot – in making songs memorable.  They help imprint an idea on our memory.  Rhymes contain an inherently musical quality.  This can often add a ‘sing-song’ element, which isn’t by any means a bad thing – but sometimes it’s not what the writer is looking for.  In the examples mentioned above, I think not rhyming (lack of sing-song’ quality) helps the ideas and themes seem more mature.  Or maybe it’d be better to say that it brings out a graver, more serious feeling.

The melody of ‘Suzanne’ is almost like a lullaby.  If it rhymed more (which I’ll bet Cohen tried) it would take away from the somber, meditative quality that it attains and the thoughts would be more compartmentalized and fragmented, less fluid.

At the same time, remember that there are very few mature themes that, for example, Bob Dylan hasn’t written about… and he always rhymes.

‘Karma Police’ is a somewhat different case.  It’s a Beatle-esque rock song with phrasing that would traditionally have rhymes in the lyric.  The writers chose, as some writers do, to defy that expectation.  They’re consciously breaking with that tradition.

This makes the song slightly harder to grab onto at first, lyrically, but it creates a more modern and serious tone.  Clearly they know what they’re doing; it’s a choice.  Also note that there are repetitions of the title at the beginnings of the verses and a lot of repetitions of lines within the song – therefore orienting the listener in ways other than rhyme.  Mostly because of the rhyme choices (and maybe the topic) it’s a modern (postmodern?) version of a Beatles song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otJY2HvW3Bw