More songs should take advantage of the rhyming relationship between “Dance” and “Pants”
"Dance in my Pants" isn't enough for you?
I listen to music fairly often...just a thing I do. I also tend to over-analyze things, often more for fun and amusement than anything else, but I also find patterns to be interesting. One pattern I've noticed is among those without a rhyming Beck-tionary, what words are used when a rhyme is necessary. It's remarkably easy as a lyricist to paint yourself into a corner and have a word that you need to rhyme with, but nothing seems to make sense in the counterpart position. It's unfortunate, and is probably what led to "freestyle" poetry replacing iambic pentameter and limerick as the style of choice. Validating my evolution of poetry is left as an exercise for the reader.
As an easy out, many lyricists stick with canned words and phrases when writing songs. For example, "Meet" and "Street" are used as a rhyming in at least 3 songs (See if you can name them), "Sun" and "One" is another common one, "Soul" and "Rock and Roll"...you get the idea.
Since it's musically related, many songs tend to involve the word "Dance". This leads to numerous opportunities to use words that rhyme with "Dance" to create lyrics. Sings like "Do You Wanna Dance," "Romance Dance," and "Romance in a Slow Dance" chose to use "Romance" as the rhyming pair. It fits, both logically and lyrically. It's also overused and cliche. The other overly common pairing is "Chance"...also fitting contextually as well as poetically.
Near as I can tell, and I can't be bothered to look it up, there is only one song in existence that uses the slightly loose rhyme between "Dance" and "Pants" to form a lyrical goldmine. Hats off to Jim Steinman for his genius in writing "Dance In My Pants." I invite other lyricists to follow suit and let "Pants" catch up to the cliched "Romance."
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