skant rhyming

[TheShaman]

Yeah, I didn't know the actual term slant rhyme, I just went with what you guys seemed to use it as. I would also just say near rhyme. But sources like wikipedia and rhymezone aren't really that credible vs. actual battle rappers, hehe.

Btw I don't quite get what you guys mean with "phonetic rhymes". Phonetics just means the study of the sounds of language, i.e. everything that can be notated via Indian Pale Ale a.k.a. the International Phonetic Alphabet; so all rhymes are actually phonetic, so "phonetic rhyme" is redundant (/pleonastic).

In old days in poetry and whatnot, ppl used to rhyme way more on the page than through the sound. So maybe that's what you are hinting at? When the actual letters align, even if the sound does not. That way of rhyming definitely has it's charm, because it shows a grasp of grammar and a literary sensibility. It's hard for me to think of an example in English right now, but there are many in Danish. The only one that comes to mind, which is an actual rhyme, though, but which I think is beautiful, is one I did with "ideal man" and "pineal gland", because the internal letters are actually the same in ideal and pineal, even if something could have rhymed just as well with double e instead of ea, for instance. But yeah, probably not the best example, since it's an actual rhyme, both orthographically and phonetically. I guess I would call the other ones orthographic rhymes, actually. But maybe it's more of a Danish thing..?

[Virbius]

Yeah ‘phonetic rhyming’ sounds like a tautology because rhyming is necessarily phonetic, but I guess it’s used here to denote perfect rhymes as opposed to slant rhymes.

In old days in poetry and whatnot, ppl used to rhyme way more on the page than through the sound. So maybe that's what you are hinting at? When the actual letters align, even if the sound does not. That way of rhyming definitely has its charm, because it shows a grasp of grammar and a literary sensibility. It's hard for me to think of an example in English right now, but there are many in Danish.

Huh coincidence, yesterday I had a conversation with my mum about the pronunciation of the word ‘symmetry’ in Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.

“Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?“

I was wondering whether it was supposed to be pronounced to rhyme with ‘eye’, but apparently not, I think William Blake was just trolling. (Actually I guess the pronunciation of the word ‘symmetry’ has changed since it was written, but now it’s usually recited with the modern pronunciation so it doesn’t rhyme anymore).

Edit to add: I did actually post earlier in the thread to say similarly to Shaman, but then I deleted it because I wasn’t certain. I equate slant rhymes with assonance, so based largely off of vowel sound placement. I initially thought the can grin / mad pill example was technically a slant rhyme, but now I’m not sure. Wikipedia seemed to indicate that it isn’t.

[TheShaman]

Yeah, precisely! I actually thought of looking up some Blake to prove my point, but didn't bother. I'm not sure if all old examples like that was because it used to rhyme. Because it's still used today, even though we don't have the rhyme. I think, as I indicated, it was because there was a bigger focus on the written word than for instance in rap, which is all audial. So I think there was just a culture by poets of doing this to make things rhyme, kind of like we slant rhyme today.

And don't trust wikipedia, Virb.. Can grin/mad pill is obviously a slant rhyme, you can see it right there with your own eyes. It's obviously either a slant rhyme or not a rhyme at all. Some will claim that grin/pill doesn't rhyme, which it doesnt, but it's all about context. Especially if there's some gravitational semantic content to make up for the lacking perfection of the rhyme.

[Virbius]

Yeah, definitely down to context. Perfect rhymes in rap can come across a bit Dr Seuss whilst imperfect rhymes can be pretty swagged out (think MF DOOM’s slant rhyme style in particular, sometimes his are slightly off and all the more pleasing for it, not sure why it works so well).

I mean, much as I’d be interested to hear a definitive answer it doesn’t really matter whether we say assonance is or isn’t the same thing as slant rhyming. Either way it’s a great tool for developing flow / rap cadence. I find that some bars just sound better than others and it’s not immediately clear why, and it usually comes down to assonance. Sometimes ‘wordy’ is used as a criticism and imo it’s not saying that the lines are necessarily too long, it’s saying that there isn’t enough assonance (or internal rhymes) to carry it off,

[TheShaman]

I think slant rhyming is the broader category where assonance (vowel rhymes) and alliteration (consonant rhymes) are subcategories of the same thing. But yeah, the more slanted it becomes, the more it's just about vowels. When I wrote lines like super-cali-fragi-listic-expi-ali-docious / Luke he jacked a Harrier on Dagobah with Yoda, I just focused on hitting certain vowels in the end, where it's mostly the fact that it's a meaningful thematic entity that binds it together. Doom is a good example on the swagger of slant rhyming that I mentioned in my first post, which I think is basically derived from freestyle or non-written rap.

I also think you're right about long phrases needing a lot of internal rhymes (even if heavily slanted or purely assonantic (?)) to be carried off. A lot of modern battle rap kind of annoys me because there are so few rhymes. Sometimes they spit like 2 long ass goddamn setups lines with no rhymes and it's like all the original musicality of the genre is gone.. Hadn't thought about it in terms of lacking assonance or subtle inner rhymes, but I think it makes sense.

[pointproven]

^ Imo those are slant rhymes. If they had the same endings, i.e., mad pill and cad grill or can grin and man pin, it would just be actual rhymes. What matters are the vowel sounds, more or less exclusively.

In your other example you had bitches senseless > sister wretches > fifth dimension. What would you call fifth dimension if not a slant rhyme? The second syllable is actually closer to the vowel sound of "bit-CHES" in "fifth DI" than in "sis-TER", whereas the last syllable is closer in "wret-CHES" than in "men-SION".

There are no hard definitions of this stuff, as far as I know. So it's just a matter of degree. Mad pill and can grin is a bit of a stretch, but it's all about the context. And I would define slant rhyme pretty much from vowel sounds alone.

i knew i was correct.

[Virbius]

I think slant rhyming is the broader category where assonance (vowel rhymes) and alliteration (consonant rhymes) are subcategories of the same thing

Isnt that consonance, not alliteration? The counterpart to assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) is consonance (repetition of consonant sounds).

I think alliteration could be considered the counterpart to rhyme, in the sense that alliterative words start with the same sound whereas rhyming words finish with the same sound.

[in perfect rhyme] The stressed vowel sound in both words must be identical, as well as any subsequent sounds. For example, “sky” and “high”; “skylight” and “highlight”.
The articulation that precedes the vowel in the words must differ. For example, “bean” and “green” is a perfect rhyme, while “leave” and “believe” is not.

See in the above quote where it says ‘subsequent sounds’. Multisyllabic rhymes make this a bit more complicated as we’re no longer dealing with individual words and their endings so much as syllable strings. The division of separate words within those syllable strings doesn’t matter beyond its effect on the placement of stressed syllables.

B-Rhymes, also called slant rhymes or half-rhymes, are words that have a high degree of consonance, or similarity in sound. Words that fully rhyme are exactly the same in HOW THEY SOUND in their last 1,2 or 3 syllables. B-Rhymes have sounds that don’t rhyme, but still sound similar. Slant rhymes have the advantage of being novel, different or unexpected. This can be used to avoid rhyming clichés (e.g. rhyming “love” with “dove”) or obvious rhymes, (“me” and “see” and “be”) and gives the writer greater freedom and flexibility in forming lines of verse. Additionally, many words have no perfect rhyme in English, necessitating the use of slant rhyme.

The use of half rhyme may also enable the construction of longer multisyllabic rhymes than otherwise possible, for instance in rap, free verse or prose poetry.

So yeah I think the ‘mad pill / can grin’ example isn’t any kind of rhyme as the ending sounds are totally different, but it does have assonance.

[TheShaman]

I just used alliteration to denote reoccuring consonants in any part of the word, as opposed to assonance with reocurring vowels. But I guess that was a bit sloppy of me.

The Oxford Reference definition of assonance is: "The correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the accented and following vowels, but not in the consonants, as e.g. in Old French versification."

And of consonance: "Is the repetition of end or medial consonants, as in ‘blank’ and ‘think’, or ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day’ (Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy’)."

So what I meant was assonance (vowel rhymes) and consonance (consonant rhymes). And again, they are both subdivisions of rhyming. A perfect rhyme would be one where the first letter differs and all the rest are exactly the same, whereas the more they start to differ, the more slanted the rhyme becomes, which is a gradual scale. Mad pill / can grin has assonance, which is a form of rhyme between vowels, but not between consonants. In the example Bag gave earlier, "fifth dimension" is a slant rhyme on "bitches senseless", mainly because of the vowel sounds (the assonance), but actually if we added the "s" at the end, so it became "fifth dimensions" it starts to rhyme with the original word even more. So a slant rhyme can make use of both assonance of consonance.

I would for instance also call words that rhyme mainly in the consonants but not in the vowels slant rhymes. This is a big kind of swaggalicious rhyme when done right. It would be something like "king" and "dung". (Although this example sucks; I have the examples I'm thinking of in Danish, but you get the point). This is basically an imperfect rhyme, i.e. a slant rhyme. But of course we are mostly used to the vowels rhyming cuz it just sounds better.

But basically, slant rhymes or near rhymes or whatever you want to call it is anything that doesn't rhyme with the original word perfectly (which is almost any kind of rhyme in rap, including multisyllabic rhymes). There are no clear cut boundaries after that, so it basically becomes a matter of taste whether something rhymes or not. Imo mad pill / can grin rhymes in the right situation (like the Yoda rhyme I just mentioned). Only the vowels rhyme, but that's usually enough in a battle rap context. If I was writing a celibratory song for a confirmation, I wouldn't use that as a rhyme, because the standards are higher for perfect Dr. Seuss type rhymes in that genre.