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Post by Nalkarj on May 14, 2018 17:13:36 GMT
In the ‘30s and early ‘40s, one of the most common new party-games was writing extra lyrics to Cole Porter’s ever-delightful “You’re the Top”; Porter himself got into the act when he wrote ribald and very funny lyrics at one of his ‘40s parties. (I wish I could find the link at the moment—EDIT, found it. From a great National Review piece by John Derbyshire. About halfway through.) I just tried my hand at it:Who wants to have a go at writing some more lyrics? Hm? BREAKING NEWS: I have just been informed that this isn’t the right board for this post. Hm. Curious, that.
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 9, 2018 15:02:39 GMT
A different song, a different songwriter (or writers, in this case. Rodgers and Hart), and some lyrics to fit the board… And, yes, I’m aware that boasts and loathes and facts and hacks aren’t perfect rhymes. Lorenz Hart rhymed mind with wind (as in Gone with the Wind, not winding something up) for this song, so I hope I’ll be forgiven.
But you know we love ya, DC-Fan .
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Post by Hauntedknight87 on Aug 9, 2018 15:05:57 GMT
This is actually a fun idea. Unfortunately I'm not much of a lyricist myself.
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 9, 2018 15:25:44 GMT
This is actually a fun idea. Unfortunately I'm not much of a lyricist myself. Heh, that’s OK. I’d written poetry before, and I’ve always loved rhymes and music, but I never actually started writing lyrics until I read biographies of two favorite composer-lyricists, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim—and then, as Cole might have written, I got writing ‘em under my skin. Just a fun thing with a weird kind of calming effect on me. Some lyricists’ stuff is easy to rewrite—Porter, Hart, even Hammerstein. Whereas it’s often impossible to rewrite Sondheim because he carefully works every word to fit perfectly in the arrangement he comes up with to fit with his music. (I did rewrite “I Feel Pretty” as “I Miss Archie” the other day, as you know, but then again Sondheim only did the words to that one.) Random Salzmank musings…
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Post by Nalkarj on Nov 16, 2018 4:11:03 GMT
Here’s the whole thing if anyone’s interested–not, of course, that I should be writing this when I actually have stuff to do:
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 27, 2018 3:15:19 GMT
The eternal problem with lyric-writing is nitpicking other people's lyrics—Alan Jay Lerner's, for example. In Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim describes Lerner's work as “…pleasant, an adjective which does not connote much enthusiasm,” but even in light of Lerner’s pleasantness and genteelness, how does one explain this? Godalmighty! What makes it even worse is that My Fair Lady is a fantastic musical and that Lerner has some great lines in the very same song—but, then, why lyrics this bad? And Lerner even knew they were terrible and left them that way! Gah. And you know how easily he could have fixed it? Or, if he wanted to keep equally and ever, I mean, I just wrote these off the top of my head, but at least they’re grammatical, in a song sung by a character obsessed with grammar in a play centered on grammar. (You can argue that the split infinitive, “to ever let,” is not ungrammatical, but an educated Englishman in the 19th century definitely would have thought it was.) I don’t like that ever there at all, but even with it, it’s easy to write a better lyric than Lerner’s. As noted at that link above, Noël Coward confronted Lerner about these lines, also from My Fair Lady: Gutters and utters make for a nice rhyme, but, as Coward pointed out, it’s hanged, not hung. (You have hung an object, you have hanged a person.) These are harder to fix because, in any other circumstances, hung and tongue would also make for a really clever rhyme—were it not for the fact that hung is simply the wrong word in these circumstances. Now, if he’d wanted to keep the rhyme (I would have reworked the lines) Lerner could have turned it into a joke, as Gilbert might have done: switch the last two lines and write:It’s not that funny a joke, but it would go to show that even Higgins is not infallible, despite what he’s saying (i.e., singing). In light of these, Lerner’s rhyming “rather be” and “bother me” seems a minor solecism by comparison. Please excuse that strange interlude. Back to our regularly scheduled business.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 27, 2018 14:39:21 GMT
^^^I can’t believe I overlooked another mistake: “willing for.” I don’t know if it’s ungrammatical, but it’s an awkward construction that we don’t often use in English. “Willing to,” of course, works better, but Lerner probably couldn’t find a way to make it work. “Willing for” is not as egregious as that nonsensical than and the split infinitive, but it still should have been improved. Maybe: I actually like that line. That “d” in endure is consonant with dentist and drilling. If we had to keep equally and ever: By Jove, I think we’ve got it!
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 29, 2018 18:48:32 GMT
In my lyric above about DC-Fan (which I’ve now reworked to some degree—only fair in light of my criticisms of Lerner), I somehow neglected to include one of his most amusing, if not appealing, qualities: his propensity for tortured and tortuous analogies. The one right now that somehow fits in illegal online copies of films, Wrigley Field, and a sister’s copy of Microsoft Word has to be one of the best.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 27, 2019 3:09:45 GMT
^^^At the risk of rambling on too much, as unfortunately is my wont, I should point out that the above seems to be a Lerner tradition; indeed, it’s difficult to find a lyric of his without a grammatical or character mistake. It’s doubly unfortunate because most of Lerner and Loewe’s work is so entertaining, making for some of the best-loved musicals ( My Fair Lady, Camelot) in American theatre, in fact. The reprise of “Camelot,” in that show, sorta-kinda gets away with using forgot (“ Don’t let it be forgot/that once there was a spot/for one brief shining moment/that was known as Camelot”) in lieu of forgotten because it’s supposed to be in Arthurian days, of course, and forgot is a valid archaic past-participle. The problem is that Lerner never uses archaic past-participles elsewhere in the show. A far more annoying case comes up in a delightful song called “The Seven Deadly Virtues,” which Roddy McDowall, as Mordred, sings hilariously here. “ It’s not the earth the meek inherit/It’s the dirt” is one of Lerner’s best lines, and even shortening “rigor mortis” to “rigor mort” isn’t too bad. But then, in the final line, we get this: “ Free and happy little me has not been cursed!” “Me has not been cursed.” Unless Mordred has suddenly become Bizarro, there’s no excuse for this. The me is clearly there just to rhyme with free, for a character who does not have terrible grammar. No one would say “me has.” It’s almost as bad as making a professor of phonetics who’s a stickler for the language say that someone should be hung. I have no idea why Lerner’s lyrics are fervently ungrammatical. I just can’t figure that out, but he’s the only major theatre lyricist who consistently does this.
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Post by BATouttaheck on Jan 27, 2019 5:22:04 GMT
RE: “Free and happy little me has not been cursed!” perhaps a comma somewhere or a breath or making it two lines would help here Free and Happy Little Me Has not been cursed
He's not really saying "me has not been cursed" He's saying Free and Happy Little Me (Mordred) has not been cursed.
I suspect that Lerner was not thinking archaic or parts of speech .. he just needed a cool word to rhyme with Camelot and there cannot be all that many … rather like the clever use of gnat I suspect
Roddy was sooooooooooooooooooooooooo good as Mordred. Used to go into the theater and watch the curtain calls and encores so often the doorman used to say "hello howRya "!
How'd I miss this thread … Salzmank … it's such an oldie !
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 27, 2019 5:44:27 GMT
I wish I could agree, BATouttaheck , but I’m not sure about that… The full rhyme is If we flip around the lyrical syntax, we get But even if you add adjectives ( free, happy) to the beginning, in effect he’s still saying, “Me has not been cursed.” Just a “free and happy little me.” I suppose something like might have worked. Maybe. The problem is that it lacks the force of Lerner’s version. Especially when Roddy sings it, it doesn’t sound halfway as bad as it reads on the page—lyrics are meant to be sung, of course. But it just comes up over and over again with Lerner’s lyrics, and he knew it himself (e.g., when Noël Coward told him the word was supposed to be hanged, not hung, in “Why Can’t the English?,” and he’d already realized that but had left the word in anyway). The problem is that it’s not a mistake that Berlin, Porter, Hammerstein, et al. make—i.e., they work harder at it (Hammerstein’s lyrics are of course sometimes grammatically incorrect, but that’s on purpose, because of the characters singing them. Here, Lerner and Mordred have no such excuse). It distracts me, but then I’m interested in (and write) this stuff—I doubt an audience would care, admittedly. You’re right, he probably was just thinking of a rhyme for Camelot, but even when nitpicky Salzmank looks at it, it works because forgot used to be OK in that context. Did you get to see Camelot on Broadway? All silly nitpicks aside, that would have been wonderful!
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Post by BATouttaheck on Jan 27, 2019 6:14:38 GMT
Nalkarj yep saw it a couple of times all the way through and many times saw just the ending. They would open the doors so that people could leave and we would quietly wander in when the play we had been to see finished up and Camelot was still singing away with the audience not noticing the glaring grammatical errors ( ) I am sure that you notice these things more than the average audience member because you do a lot of writing yourself and are VERY into parts of speech etc. Much like as a painter would notice technical glitches in a painting or those in the medical profession notice errors in procedures in a movie or tv show. I just listened to the song and I dunno .. it still doesn't sound wrong to me … but whadda I know ? On the other hand , I do get jumpy when everyone nowadays says "it's so fun !' and I leap up and holler …"It's so MUCH fun you illiterate !" so maybe there is hope for me yet. and yes, I only do this to tv screens and not in the grocery store !
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 27, 2019 18:25:35 GMT
Nalkarj yep saw it a couple of times all the way through and many times saw just the ending. They would open the doors so that people could leave and we would quietly wander in when the play we had been to see finished up and Camelot was still singing away with the audience not noticing the glaring grammatical errors ( ) I am sure that you notice these things more than the average audience member because you do a lot of writing yourself and are VERY into parts of speech etc. Much like as a painter would notice technical glitches in a painting or those in the medical profession notice errors in procedures in a movie or tv show. I just listened to the song and I dunno .. it still doesn't sound wrong to me … but whadda I know ? On the other hand , I do get jumpy when everyone nowadays says "it's so fun !' and I leap up and holler …"It's so MUCH fun you illiterate !" so maybe there is hope for me yet. and yes, I only do this to tv screens and not in the grocery store ! Hah! That sounds so wonderful, Bat. It’s probably the writing, yeah, and also that I’ve always loved wordplay and that sort of thing. Lyrics are like that—in fact, they’re probably closer to wordplay than to poetry—and they’re somehow stressful yet fun for me. Sometimes that stressful part is more pronounced, such as when you spend all this time trying to come up with a good rhyme (just to have to scrap it because the stress is wrong!); I had to rhyme placid once and couldn’t come up with anything but acid and flaccid, both of which didn’t fit. Eventually solved it by “ broken rhyme”— placid there rhyming with pass id-yllic. I guess it’s like solving a puzzle.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 14, 2019 22:17:18 GMT
OK, more comments for no particular reason (except that the Theater board is as dead as a doornail). But I have an excuse this time: they (very obliquely) relate to the MCU! 1. There’s this website called “Am I Right” that has a section of misrhymed song lyrics. There are some decent examples, but on the whole it’s not a particularly good resource. Someone goes into a lengthy complaint there about Don McLean’s rhyming doorstep and “more step” in “American Pie,” claiming he’s rhyming step with step, but the complainer has apparently never heard of feminine rhymes, in which the rhyme is on the first, stressed syllable and everything after that has to be the same. A good example is lover and cover. Or harbor and arbor. Or poet and “know it.” Dorothy Fields, one of the greatest lyricists, rhymed doorstep and “your step” in “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and it’s one of her best lyrics. There are also weird criticisms of lyrics in which the lyricist was not trying to rhyme. If he’s not trying to rhyme, um, yeah, don’t criticize him for rhyming poorly. 2. In Finishing the Hat (again! I know), Sondheim criticizes Ira Gershwin for his [Gershwin’s] “rhyming poison”—near-obsessive need to rhyme everything, to keep making it more and more convoluted in order to make the lyrics sound more impressive. (Sondheim theorizes that it was Gershwin’s desire to compete with George, an undisputed musical genius. I’m not sure about that.) I like Ira Gershwin more than Sondheim does (and I like Lorenz Hart a lot more than Sondheim does), but he’s not totally wrong: “The Man I Love,” one of George’s greatest melodies, is ill-served by Ira’s over-rhymed, convoluted lyrics. But I think I’ve somehow come across the most over-rhymed lyrics I’ve ever seen, to the point that it’s kinda ridiculous—and they’ve got a connection to the MCU!
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 14, 2019 22:53:19 GMT
OK, MCU Connection:
Anyone here know the movie The Swan Princess (1994)? I don’t think I’ve seen the entirety of the movie, but I vaguely remember watching one of the sequels. It was an obvious but entertaining rip-off of Disney’s pictures at the time, in particular Beauty and the Beast (which, in addition to its many other virtues, has some great songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken). So, in trying to rip off BatB, writer-producer-director Richard Rich, a former Disney animator, commissioned an impressive score. I only thought of it because I was watching the “Nostalgia Critic” review last night, and Doug Walker brought up the subject of the songs.
The composer was Lex de Azevedo, who has since apparently only worked on one more film and his only projects for the Mormon Church. It’s too bad, as his music, while to some degree derivative of BotB, is entertaining and surprising. The problem is his lyricist.
Where Mr. de Azevedo just works on religious stuff for the Mormons, apparently, David Zippel is a professional—a Broadway lyricist who worked with Cy Coleman on the Tony-winning City of Angels, with Marvin Hamlisch and Neil Simon on The Goodbye Girl, and with Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Woman in White. If those weren’t enough, he also wrote the lyrics for Disney’s Hercules and Mulan.
Mr. Zippel’s lyrics are probably the most egregious, yet somehow most amusing, example of “rhyming poison” I’ve ever heard. Listen to this:
Wow. It’s so over-rhymed that it’s actually hilarious. (Both music and lyrics come off, oddly enough, as pastiching Sondheim’s “Beautiful Girls”—“oddly enough” because that song was itself a pastiche of Irving Berlin’s “A Beautiful Girl is Like a Melody.”) But, dear God, those lyrics:How is it that Zippel is a professional and de Azevedo pretty much an amateur?
Anyway, Zippel’s also the MCU connection. He wrote the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Man” (with music by Alan Menken, of all people!), the Captain America theme in The First Avenger. (Wikipedia says that it’s an Irving Berlin pastiche, but other than the flag-waving patriotism it doesn’t sound Berliny to me at all, in either words or music.) And Zippel can’t resist over-rhyming there either: why, for example, are we going from “Hoboken to Spokane” (how about Seattle?), other than to rhyme with plan? Why do we need internal rhymes in every single line, except for the lyricist to show off his own cleverness?
Reading Zippel’s work, though, is amusing, and it did teach me better than Gershwin’s lyrics what “rhyming poison” means.
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