Bob Dylan structures his songs through rhymes. Given his skills, the results can be comforting, jarring, or rousing. But why do Dylan's rhymes work so well? Why are rhymes in any song often so enchanting?
Rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They are also pleasing to the brain because in a rhyme the second word becomes more familiar to us than if there had been no first word to rhyme with. Our brains like what's easy to think about and don't like what's difficult to think about. (Psychologists call this "cognitive fluency." Songwriters don't.) Beyond the attractions of repetitive sounds, a rhyme offers the mystery of an unexpected affinity between two or more words that are seemingly different.
The coincidence of two or more words that rhyme suggests a linguistic order missing from the chaos of ordinary life. Rhymes hint at an alluring land of English, a place of beauty and design. But there's a danger to rhymes as well. Rhymes are mysterious and inexplicable. We have to confront mirror images and doubles, worlds that complicate the simplicity that the rhyme seemed to bring.
For songwriters, rhymes make it easier for audiences to memorize the material. It's no accident that nearly every popular song is written using rhymes. But rhymes can be traps, forcing songwriters to write words they don't want to all for the sake of having to rhyme.
Rhymes are often associated with simple, childlike feelings. Yet they can be a form of attack, a battering ram of words pounding away at the listener. That's why the rhymes in Dylan's protest songs work so well. They keep hitting us with their power, and the repetition forces us to confront what is being protested. The rhymes all through "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" reinforce Brown's growing despair and retrospectively explain his final, desperate action. Consider the concluding verse of the song:
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.
Anyone can hear obvious rhymes. It's the great lyricist who can hear what the rest of us can't. Dylan can hear that "farm" sounds like "born," and "born is the the perfect word, not only standing in contrast to the people Hollis Brown has killed but also in providing hope (for new people have replaced the dead) and a warning (don't let what happened to the Brown family happen to these newborns).
Similarly, rhyme as a form of attack works well in angry love songs. In "Idiot Wind," Dylan writes:
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.
Or take another pair of lines from the song:
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.
The rhyme is more exact but is still unexpected. Additionally, it magnifies the subject of the song from beyond the angry subject to the singer himself and then to Washington. It's a neat shift of ascribing idiocy from an external partner to the internal self to the political.
The battering ram effect can also be seen in poignant love songs such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and attack songs about so-called friends, such as "Positively 4th Street" with lines like:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd
You're in with.
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don't know to begin with?
Here Dylan uses what is technically known as "feminine rhyme" in which the rhyme comes from the penultimate words (or syllables), in this case "in with" and "begin with." That is, Dylan's rhymes are far from simple. He doesn't just use traditional end rhymes. Additionally, he uses alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and assonance (repeating vowel sounds creating internal rhymes in a line.) Here are some beautiful lines from "Mr. Tambourine Man":
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
The assonance of "fate" and "waves" and "deep" and "beneath" and the many examples of alliteration add to the rhymes and startling images to create the attractive world the tambourine man offers.
And that's why nobody rhymes with Bob Dylan.
For information about my new book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, visit my web page here.
