Writing Your Own Parodies I: Rhythm

Note: I am an engineer (software engineer, specifically). Like most programmers I'm much better with computer programming languages rather than natural languages (like English). I've not had one minute of creative writing in my lifetime and the two quarters I spent in English 1A/B in college were wasted figuring out how to pass the class with the minimum amount of work. Essentially, I'm admitting that I'm probably not the best person to be writing this essay. Most of the information from this essay comes from "The Complete Rhyming Dictionary" edited by Clement Wood and revised by Ronald Bogus (ISBN 0-440-21205), a book I highly recommend to anyone contemplating the creation of Parodeities. About the only defense I can make for why you should read this when I'm so technically unqualified to write it is because somebody had to write it. Note, by the way, that since my college days I have managed to get a couple of books published, so my writing skills have improved a tiny bit even if I've never really learned the art of writing poetry.

Writing lyrics for songs is just a special case of writing poetry. Therefore, to write decent parodies you should learn a little bit about writing poetry. This essay discusses rhythm in poetry and its impact on your lyrics.

Rhythm is a pattern of emphasis and de-emphasis of syllables in your lyrics. The Complete Rhyming Dictionary defines it thusly:

The successive rise and fall of sounds, in pitch, in stress, or speed; when used of words, depending on accents, pauses, or durational quantities.

While this is a fairly technical description that may not have a whole lot of meaning to the average person, it does hit all the major issues that parody writers must consider. It goes without saying that a song parody should use the same music and melody as the song being parodied (strictly speaking, this isn't necessary in the true sense of the word "parody" but violations of this rule are very rare). Most people wouldn't recognize a parody of some song (as being a parody) unless it used the same music and melody. Rhythm comes in a close second as being necessary for a good parody; that is, if the rhythm of your lyrics do not match those of the original song, it will be immediately obvious to the reader/listener and this will degrade their opinion of your work significantly. If the rhythm (i.e., timing) of your lyrics is off, the listener/reader will most certainly feel that your lyrics are awkward at best, destroying the illusion of the parody. This is true even if the rhythm in the original song was broken and your lyrics correct the problem. Unless the purpose of your parody is to emphasize the brokenness of the original song, changing the rhythm of the original lyrics is a difficult thing to get away with.

Although there are many aspects to rhythm, for our purposes we can probably get away with just worrying about the patterns of accented and unaccented syllables in a line of the original song. This pattern is known as the meter (or metre) of the lyrics. In the examples below, I'll mark the accented syllables using boldface and the unaccented using a normal font. "Real" poets generally use a handwritten notation like the following (showing "ac" to be unaccented and "cent" to be accented):

The nice thing about this notation is that it's quick and easy to write on paper and observe the results by quickly scanning over your work. Typographical limitations (and download times) prevent the use of such notation here.

Metric feet is the term that describes the common types of patterns that appear in poetry. There are six common forms that appear in English poetry given the names iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, and amphibrach. These metric feet take the following forms:

iamb: unaccented – accented; pronounced ta-TUM
(example: good-night),

troche: accented – unaccented; pronounced TUM-ta
(example: tow-ing)

anapest: unaccented – unaccented – accented; pronounced ta-ta-TUM
(example: un-der-mine)

dactyl: accented – unaccented – unaccented; pronounced TUM-ta-ta
(example: happ-i-ly)

spondee: accented – accented; pronounced TUM-TUM
(example: Dead-wrong)

amphibrach: unaccent–accent–unaccent; pronounced ta-TUM-ta
(example: re-ceiv-ing)

There are some other patterns that occur on occasion, but the ones above are the main ones you'll encounter in typical songs you'll want to parody.

The first step, therefore, when parodying a song is to take the original lyrics and determine the rhythm pattern to those lyrics.

I thought love was on-ly true in fai-ry tales

dactyl–iamb–iamb–iamb–iamb

Whatever new lyrics you come up with, they'll sound best if they have the exact same meter and the word boundaries are the same as the original lyrics. Consider the lyrics I've written for I'm A Believer/The Gospel According to Shrek:

I thought God was just a real big fai-ry tale

Consider also, J. Jackson's lyrics from I'm a Receiver (ApologetiX: Grace Period):

I thought God was on-ly Jew-ish fai-ry tales

Contrast this with the results you get if you try to write a line that doesn't follow the same meter (try and sing the following to the first line of "I'm a Believer" and see what happens):

I real-ly, real-ly want to tell you this tale

This line has 11 syllables, just like the previous lines. But singing it to the melody of I'm a Believer is very awkward and it doesn't sound at all line the line from the original song.

Once in a while you can mispronounce a word by shifting the accent from one syllable to another and get away with it (the rhythm stays the same, it's just the pronunciations of the word that change). Sometimes this can be done with great effect; J. Jackson is a master of this trick. Changing the meter, however, is a difficult trick and there are few survivors whenever someone attempts this. Once in a while you can get away with singing a triplet (that is, sing three notes in the time of two) and exchange an anapest for an iamb or a dactyl for a trochee (or, possibly, an amphibrack for either an iamb or a trochee), but this is an absolute last resort. Squeezing in extra syllables (or, conversely, dropping syllables) is a sign of weakness on the parodist's part.

That the meters must match between the original song and the parody is probably the number one rule of writing parodies. This isn't a rule you should violate very often, if at all. It's probably okay to sneak in (or remove) a syllable on an occasional basis; but be prepared for criticism whenever you do this and you certainly don't want to do it very often.