Fetus employment surges among professional songwriters

Topic(s): Humor, songwriting

If anyone listening to popular music these days finds themselves asking "Have I heard this song before?" well, the answer is Yes, you have. Probably a thousand times since birth. Maybe not literally, but the song is probably so similar to the Platonic form of a cliched song that it sounds like it has always been written. I recently turned on the radio and cringed at the first words I heard - some guy saying, "Ooh, baby I miss you," or "Oh, blah blah blah..." Whatever.

Let's take a look at the first verse of the first song from John Legend's latest CD. I picked it because he's the only popular contemporary R&B singer whose name I know off the top of my head. Fortunately, the absolute randomness of this song selection proves the point much better than any deliberate selection would have...

Say that you'll stay a little dont say bye-bye tonight say you'll be mine just a little bit of love is worth a moment of your time. Knockin' on your door just a little it's so cold outside tonight let's get a fire burning oh I know I'll keep it burning bright

Ignoring the still-born nature of the song's premise itself, let's look at the quality of these lyrics. The stanza contains three rhymes: "say" / "stay," "mine" / "time," and "tonight" / "bright." The first rhyme, "say" / "stay," is officially one of the most common rhymes among in utero compositions. "Tonight / bright" gets fancy with a two-syllable word, but its fetal appeal remains. Rhymes like these write songs themselves, through their immediate and obvious suggestion of additional similar and generic words. Which is particularly useful to unborn fetuses, who technically have not even been exposed to the English language yet.

To demonstrate:

"Say" gives you: day, gay, hay, hey, jay, lay, may, nay, pay, ray, stay, way, and those are just the obvious 1-syllable words. Line these guys up properly, mix with a few generic love-related verbs, and you've got a hit:

Example:

Baby, baby, what a bad day You got me baby, in a bad way You tell me you want me You want me to pay, But I still love you, I'm begging you to stay.

Damn that's a fine verse. And remarkably faithful to the conventions of lame songwriting. The one problem is that after the third line, the listener would expect the opposite of the 4th line. Reconciling this may require computation powers beyond those of the average fetus, and therefore could be misleading. Perhaps I've been away from the womb too long.