Words by Emma Marchetti

Have you heard the news? Pop music’s favourite Mean Girl has just dropped her sophomore album!

Singer and actress Renèe Rapp’s Bite Me, her second studio album, has been teased for quite a while now, first with the lead single Leave Me Alone in late May, followed by Mad and Why Is She Still Here?. While it has only now come out, the record is sure to become everyone’s end of summer soundtrack, and what better way to do it justice than to join me in this lyric nerding session?

Before Bite Me, Rapp went through a period of burnout, she states, which led to the elimination of anything she felt was bad for her from her life. As a result, the album is deeply personal and unapologetic, unafraid to embrace every aspect of her personality – even the chaotic ones. The second track, Mad, is exactly that: truthful, blunt, no sugar coating needed: the singer brings us right in the middle of a fight between her and her partner, showing all the frustration, the pettiness, the exasperation involved. Despite Rapp’s numerous attempts at taking a break, and her recalling the many things they could have been doing instead, the other person still insists on fighting, keeping the tension high throughout the whole song. Lyrically, however, it is Rapp who does that: her use of words gives Mad a quick, agitated pace, which mimics the anger of the moment and keeps listeners on their feet… but the question is, how does she do that? Why, but with brilliantly crafted rhymes, of course!

We all know what rhymes are, but have you ever stopped to think about all of the different types? If you have, you will have noticed how much variety there actually is within the world of rhyme, something so vast yet so seemingly simple. There are perfect rhymes, matching two completely identical sounds, or imperfect rhymes, like assonance, consonance, family rhymes (aka assonance rhymes for those who know their phonetics); there are hundreds of rhyme schemes, couplets (AABB), alternate rhyme (ABAB), enclosed rhyme (ABBA), terza rima (ABA BCB) and many, many more. What immediately caught my attention when looking at Mad, though, is a little thing called internal rhyme, which connects words within lines instead of limiting itself to end words. Take a look at the lyrics for the first verse, for example:

Take five, we been at it all night
Not a sorry in the world I ain't already said
Ugh, Christ, getting hard to be nice
Not a single little curl that's on your head don't want me dead
Okay, I get it, you wanna be mad

See what I mean? In terms of meter, ‘five’ and ‘night’, ‘Christ’ and ‘nice’, ‘head’ and ‘dead’ all fall within the same line, but by using this clever trick Rapp breaks up the pace often enough to keep the tension up, denying our brains the comfortable predictability of end-of-line rhymes and making the verse sentences sound short and frantic. Viceversa, the choruses make use of more conventional rhyming, slowing down the rhythm.

Hey, you
All of the time you wasted being mad
We could've been cute and
We could've been stupid
Hey, you
All of the time you wasted in your head
We could've been having sex
You could've been gettin' all of my time
But you were being mad

In my opinion, that is not a coincidence at all: while the verses talk about the present, the negative moments of the fight, the choruses focus on imagining hypothetical positive moments instead, with no need for agitation in the lyrics nor the music. If you are already sufficiently expert in songwriting, you will recognize this as a beautiful example of prosody, the appropriate relationship between the elements of a song.

Rapp has surely played around with rhyme even more here and there, and my personal favourite detail is the subtle innuendo implied by the pause after ‘gettin’: your brain expects a rhyme there (or at least mine definitely does), but she denies it until the very last lyric of the song, when the line ‘gettin head’ finally arrives. It is always really fun to mess with the listener’s expectations, if you ask me. However, her biggest merit remains making the rhythmic function of rhyming such an integral, prosodic structural feature of the song that it cannot be overlooked… besides writing this wonderful bop, of course!