As Lana Del Rey gradually reveals snippets from her forthcoming album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, after already releasing “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “Venice Bitch,” the latest Instagram unveiling of a portion of “How To Disappear” (way to rip off Less Than Zero) finds Del Rey returning once more to a favorite rhyme of hers: “beer” with “here,” as was the case in “Video Games” with, “You open up a beer and you say get over here…”
In “How To Disappear,” she rephrases to, “You just crack another beer and pretend that you’re still here.” Interpretation-wise, this is a far cry from the sentimentality characterized by the rhyme in her first major single, all about the sweetness of “comfort” in a relationship. In the “How To Disappear” context, however, it would seem Lana is addressing the concept of someone who is but a shell, whether for reasons of self-preservation or simply as a result of living in the post-apocalyptic reign of an orange oppressor. As Del Rey evolves musically, the sadness that has always colored her songs becomes more profound, therefore warranting the repackaging of certain lyrical motifs.
Del Rey, of course, is not the only artist to have returned to a convenient rhyme scheme a few times in her career. Everyone’s favorite puppy-turned-fuckboy (sorry, it’s not you Pete Davidson), Justin Bieber, is also a repeat offender of favoring the couplet that can pair “you” with “do” and vice versa, using it as liberally as The Beatles, who have a far greater discography with which to spread the repetitiveness over. However, they’re not alone in their inability to avoid this common “curse” in rhyming. Other music legends, including Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, also show blatant nepotism for “you” and “do.” To boot, according to Slate, “…an analysis of every song on Billboard’s Year End Hot 100 between 1960 and 2013 suggests that the do/you rhyme might be the most popular in pop music history.”
There is also, as is to be expected in terms of the maudlin aspect of pop songs–speaking of love as though it wasn’t a capitalist invention–“love” and “glove (which Eminem once famously mocked on TRL when Britney Spears’ “Oops…I Did It Again” was yet again at number one). Apart from Spears, Madonna, too, has even fallen prey to it in the puerility of her early work that allowed “True Blue” (a quintessentially schmaltzy rhyme as it is) to eke by on the album of the same name, waxing of Sean Penn, “True love, you’re the one I’m dreaming of/Your heart fits me like a glove.” Madonna’s true (blue) favorite pairing, however, has been proven to be “girl” with “world” (as in “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl” and “Do you know what if feels like for a girl in this world?”).
While some pop icons like M prefer to be a little more inventive with their lyrical schemes, others surrender to the fact that “the twenty most popular rhymes contain either me or you.” While pop music cynics will maintain that this is a result of the frivolity inherent in the genre, what it really boils down to is that all pop music speaks of the kind of love we can never have, hence a predilection toward painting this false portrait of “me” and “you.” Ergo, it’s no coincidence that “the most common rhyming pair in Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets is me/thee.” Does that legitimize the “literary” value of pop songs enough for you?
So, at the very least, Del Rey has an off the beaten path “go-to rhyme” in “beer” and “here.” Though one would have loved to see her find a way to rhyme “Bugatti Veyron” with “upper echelon” more than once as solid proof of the residual effects of her hard-earned degree at Fordham.
Thus, in between trolling Kanye West and subsequently invoking the knee-jerk contempt for white feminism from Azealia Banks in so doing, Del Rey has also found time to show us that there are so many ways and so many reasons to rhyme “beer” with “here.” And yes, it proves that she still has an unshakeable love for the former grandeur of Americana.
