Bad Moon Rhyming

How do you rhyme 'smile' with 'hour'? Imagine for a moment that you're a song writer and you are trying to think of a word to rhyme with 'smile'. I don't think 'hour' would be among the first few dozen words that spring to mind. But although it's a bad rhyme, Neil Diamond pulls it off in one of my favourite karaoke songs, 'Cracklin' Rose':

Cracklin' Rosie make me smile.
Girl if it lasts for an hour,
Well that's all right,
'cos we've got all night.

Maybe it's his Brooklyn accent, I don't know, but to me it seems to work just fine.

Most bad rhymes grate on my nerves every time I hear them. The Steve Miller Band are probably the worst offenders. These four lines from 'Take The Money And Run' are all supposed to rhyme but none of them do:

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas.
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is.
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice.
He makes his living off of the people's taxes.

"What the facts is??" That's just stupid. But that's not all. They also had a hit with 'Abra-cadabra':

Abra abra-cadabra.
I'm gonna reach out and grab ya.

It grates, I tell you. So does the Vincent Price monologue at the end of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Remember this was spoken, rather than sung:

Creatures crawl in search of blood,
To terrorize your neighbourhood.

It's not Vincent Price's fault. There is no way that anybody could make that work. Then there's Adrian Gurvitz's classic hit 'Gonna Write A Classic':

Gonna write a classic.
Gonna write it in an attic.
Babe I'm an addict.

I never heard the rest of that song because I couldn't make it past the first three lines. It's just so infuriating.

Songwriters take note: Taking words that almost rhyme but don't really and putting them together as if they do, while hoping we won't notice is not clever, and it's not poetic license. It's just annoying, so stop it. Don't ever try to rhyme 'tonight' with 'life' or 'rise' because you can't, although somehow Creedence Clearwater Revival managed to score a hit with this:

Don't go out tonight,
'cos it's bound to take your life.
There's a bad moon on the rhyme (oops, I mean rise).

Annoying!