How do songwriters get away with non-rhyming lyrics?

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
It’s only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost...
And what you had...
And what you lost

[whole thing]

I don't see it.

now here I go again, I see the crystal visions, I keep my visions to myself
it's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams and have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

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dreams of loneliness, like a heartbeat, drives you mad
in the stillness of remembering what you had

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for some reason i always cringe once i hear the rhyme. feels like a crutch to me. also makes me feel like i am 5 years old and so the singer feels that they need to talk down to me.

maybe those are just my own issues.

An internal rhyme is where you just have the same syllable sound?

Well, content for one. There are also plenty of poetic devices to keep a lyric interesting and rhythmic or whatever you want, like assonance, consonance, alliteration (cf Blackalicious), slant rhyme, use of meter. And Merritt's wrong that nonrhyming poetry's been around since Milton. In English, it's been around at least since Gawain and surely much longer.

The same stuff that makes non-rhyming song lyrics work is also the same stuff that can make prose fluid and enticing.

Sometimes it can come off as too self-conscious, I think. I have definitely heard instances of non-rhyming where I wished it had rhymed. (Can't recall any at the moment.)

An internal rhyme is where you just have the same syllable sound?

Okay, this right here is assonance. [good kiddy poetry tutorial]

PEDANT.

Ha -- you should feel pleased
That you didn't dead the thread.
I think that's my job:
I can't contribute, so I kill instead.

How about Weezer, "Beverly Hills"? Not that that would fix everything that's awful about the song, but it'd be a start.

Clearly I remember picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
OOh but we unleashed lion,
gnahsed is teeth in with the recess lady's breast
How can I forget?
And he hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurtin' -- dropped wide open
Just like the day I heard
Jeremey spoke in class today

she gets confused
flying over the dateline her hands turn red
cause the days change at night change in an instant the days
change at night change in an instant

As for Pearl Jam above, the foregrounding of narrative (compelling or not) is probably what allows it--when you're telling a story, you don't have to rhyme, it's prose (though breast/forget/left is there).

By the way, isn't Alanis's "difficult" follow-up album to Jagged Little Pill somewhat infamous for not having a single rhymed line?

Well, the two are held to different standards: if you use a rhyme in a song just to be clever, it's taken (and left) as such, but if you do so in a poem, you'll be called out on it critically.

rap has shown us that you can rhyme anything with anything if you slur the endings enough

OTM.

When a rhyme's unexpected or surprisingly placed (dropping some syllables or carrying it one more measure than feels comfortable), it can really make for a nice formal quality.

Not that I can think of a good example of this, of course.

Search: Caedmon's Hymn

Right. I kind of hate that rhyme has come to signify whimsy. It really doesn't have to; it's just an organizing device that makes poetry what it should be: HARD TO WRITE WELL.

That's my (and Edmud Wilson's) major beef with Nabokov's literal, free-verse translation of the very rigidly rhymed Eugene Onegin (okay, this is moving into the I Love Books territory, sorry): he says, in the preface, "I sacrificed euphony for truth" etc. But euphony is half of that poem's truth and no one should have known that better than Nabokov.

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you.

on the other hand, rap has also been a forum for much more complex rhyming than almost any other popular music. it uses way more internal rhyming than any other genre does, and probably a lot more two- and three-syllable rhyming too.

More specifically, English poetry existed for hundreds of years before rhyme became a standard organizing principle. Rhyme was just a fad for a few centuries.