Perfect Rhymes vs. Imperfect Rhymes — Page 2

Miller's Son also falls in line stylistically with the rest of the evening - Petra has a deep understanding of life, and she expresses it in the language of the musical she's in.

On the other hand, "trip the light fandango" and "pitch the quick fantastic" are kind of inexcusable, and the idea that perfect rhyme suggests intelligence and education is absurd. If you write a musical about idiots using perfect rhyme, the characters are still idiots.

Mentioning these lyrics from Beetlejuice again because I hate them:

'Cause we're all on a hitlist
Might not live 'till Christmas
Choke to death on Triscuits
Hey, that just statistics

It's almost impressive because it's four pairs of syllables that almost rhyme, but none of them rhyme with any of the others. You have it-ist, ist-mas, isc-its, and ist-ics. "Ist" appears three times, but only twice in the same place in the word (ChrISTmas/statISTics), and even then they really don't sound the same. In the very next four lines, he rhymes perfectly:

So take a little break here
Kinda like a wake here
The scenery is fake here
But there's a giant snake here

Which, again, if it was established that he did one or the other, it wouldn't really matter as much. In fact, it would even make sense for Beetlejuice to be bad at rhyming (his first lyric rhymes "pardon" with "barge in" ), but he's not. He's sometimes bad at rhyming, and that just makes it seem like Eddie Perfect is sometimes bad at rhyming.

Updated On: 7/15/20 at 11:04 PM

Charley Kringas Inc said: "Mentioning these lyrics from Beetlejuice again because I hate them:

'Cause we're all on a hitlist
Might not live 'till Christmas
Choke to death on Triscuits
Hey, that just statistics

It's almost impressive because it's four pairs of syllablesthat almost rhyme, but none of them rhyme with any of the others. You have it-ist, ist-mas, isc-its, and ist-ics. "Ist" appears three times, but only twice in the same place in the word (ChrISTmas/statISTics), and even then they really don't sound the same. In the very next four lines, he rhymes perfectly:

So take a little break here
Kinda like a wake here
The scenery is fake here
But there's a giant snake here

Which, again, if it was established that he did one or the other, it wouldn't really matter as much. In fact, it would even make sense for Beetlejuice to be bad at rhyming (his first lyric rhymes "pardon" with "barge in" ), but he's not. He's sometimes bad at rhyming, and that just makes it seem like Eddie Perfect is sometimes bad at rhyming."

To be fair, his first lyric is changed to "Welcome to the Winter Garden" on Broadway.

One thing I've mentioned before on this board is that Eddie Perfect is Australian, so he uses rhymes that work in an Australian accent that don't work in an American accent (you see the same thing with Tim Minchin). One that sticks out to me is in "No Reason", when Lydia rhymes "wars" with "cause". That works in an Australian accent (similar to how a Brooklynite would rhyme "picture" with "hit ya", but it doesn't in an American accent.

Many of the near rhymes in the show aren't saved by this, but I'm interested in how the two Australian musical comedy writers who've broken into the American mainstream (Perfect and Minchin) both use near rhyme and accent rhymes.

They both have their value.

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