John Darnielle has been called, in a much-quoted honorific from New York magazine, America’s “best non-hip-hop lyricist.” A fair point, but I think such praise indicates a misapprehension of both rock lyrics and hip-hop lyrics. They have different goals, different conventions, and ultimately they’re entirely different art forms.

(I’m using the term “rock” loosely here to indicate “guitar-driven melodic pop music,” not “rock” as in “your dad’s ripped jeans and men with blonde highlights”)

To wit: rock lyrics don’t have to rhyme. They often do, but it’s not actually a requirement. I’ve seen JD mention on Twitter and at shows how much he hates a lazy rhyme, and I agree. A lazy rhyme is worse than a non-rhyme, to me. Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you’ve never heard before, and you know what the next lyric will be because they’ve telegraphed the rhyme? That’s not only annoying, it also weakens the emotional impact, because it gives the impression that they words were chosen for the easy rhyme, not because they were the best word for that line.

Most rhymes in the aforementioned non-hip-hop music are masculine rhymes, as opposed to feminine rhymes. (These terms come to us from the linguistic idea of gender, not human gender.) Masculine rhyme is when the lines end on stressed syllables that rhyme, like: Poetry is for nerds/Who cares about words. Both lines end in stresses, and they rhyme.

Feminine rhyme, also known as double rhyme, is when the words rhyme by their stressed penultimate syllable and unstressed final syllable. Examples include: Keeping/weeping or power/tower. It can spread over multiple words, too: see me/free me, or nowhere/go there.

Presented herewith are some of my favorite uses of feminine rhyme in Mountain Goats songs, and what I think they accomplish in the music. To me, feminine rhyme always sounds like something inevitable happening. The long-stacked dominoes finally falling into place, the lens snapping into focus and everything coming clear. It’s so satisfying, even when the words are bleak, and it thematically links to the doom in a lot of Mountain Goats songs: our undoing has already been set in motion, by our prior actions or by a vengeful god, and nothing we can do will prevent it. There’s a pattern to the universe that we often can’t see, but when we can, it brings a terrible clarity.

A while back, my dear friend Tony Breed challenged me to a Facebook thing where you write about five of your favorite songs. He said, teasing me, “they can be five Mountain Goats songs,” and I took that bait. My years of analyzing poetry for school have prepared me for few things in this life, but this is certainly one of them. 

Presented here are all five songs I wrote about, edited slightly, with links to YouTube videos containing the songs. Of course, if you like the songs, please buy the albums. You won’t regret it. 

Note that my use of hetero relationship pronouns reflects only my lived experience and thus personal interpretations; the songs almost never indicate a gender of the speaker or the second person. 

The Church of the SubGenius