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57-428: At slightly over 17 minutes, it occupies the entire second side of the album. The lyrics , a love song from the biblical Adam to his mate Eve , are simple and are heard only at the beginning and the end. The middle of the song features a two-and-a-half-minute Ron Bushy drum solo. A 2-minute-52-second 45-rpm version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was Iron Butterfly's only song to reach the top 40 , reaching number 30, while

114-497: A caesura . Dactylic pentameter is never used in isolation. Rather, a line of dactylic pentameter follows a line of dactylic hexameter in the elegiac distich or elegiac couplet , a form of verse that was used for the composition of elegies and other tragic and solemn verse in the Greek and Latin world, as well as love poetry that was sometimes light and cheerful. An example from Ovid 's Tristia : The Greeks and Romans also used

171-543: A musical quotation of the Christmas hymn " God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen ", included by Ingle because he "wanted to touch the spiritual." The song's structure and drum solo refer to the Congolese Christian Missa Luba , which Erik Brann introduced to the group. Cash Box said that it was an "eerie blues work with a pounding rhythm backing and hypnotic chord structures". The Incredible Bongo Band covered

228-463: A trochee ( daa-duh ). The initial syllable of either foot is called the ictus , the basic "beat" of the verse. There is usually a caesura after the ictus of the third foot. The opening line of the Aeneid is a typical line of dactylic hexameter: In this example, the first and second feet are dactyls; their first syllables, "Ar" and "rum" respectively, contain short vowels, but count as long because

285-478: A " libretto " and their writer, as a " librettist ". Rap songs and grime contain rap lyrics (often with a variation of rhyming words) that are meant to be spoken rhythmically rather than sung. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form , articulation , meter , and symmetry of expression. The word lyric derives via Latin lyricus from

342-570: A U.S. federal court has ordered LiveUniverse, a network of websites run by MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan , to cease operating four sites offering unlicensed song lyrics. Lyrics can be studied from an academic perspective. For example, some lyrics can be considered a form of social commentary . Lyrics often contain political, social, and economic themes—as well as aesthetic elements—and so can communicate culturally significant messages. These messages can be explicit, or implied through metaphor or symbolism. Lyrics can also be analyzed with respect to

399-476: A close (featuring a cadence ); in German Vordersatz - Fortspinnung - Epilog . For example: In the lyrics of popular music a "shifter" is a word, often a pronoun , "where reference varies according to who is speaking, when and where", such as "I", "you", "my", "our". For example, who is the "my" of " My Generation "? As of 2021 , there are many websites featuring song lyrics. This offering, however,

456-529: A dactyl, then two more trochees. In the Sapphic stanza , three hendecasyllabics are followed by an "Adonic" line, made up of a dactyl and a trochee. This is the form of Catullus 51 (itself an homage to Sappho 31 ): The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics : The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, like those of classical Greek and Latin,

513-400: A line with six iambic feet. Sometimes a natural pause occurs in the middle of a line rather than at a line-break. This is a caesura (cut). A good example is from The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare ; the caesurae are indicated by '/': In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. Each line of traditional Germanic alliterative verse

570-469: A name of a song, Google can now display the lyrics directly in the search results page. When users search for a specific song's lyrics, most results show the lyrics directly through a Google search by using Google Play. Meter (poetry) In poetry , metre ( Commonwealth spelling ) or meter ( American spelling ; see spelling differences ) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse . Many traditional verse forms prescribe

627-461: A non-trivial case). The most famous writers of heroic couplets are Dryden and Pope . Another important metre in English is the common metre , also called the "ballad metre", which is a four-line stanza, with two pairs of a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter ; the rhymes usually fall on the lines of trimeter, although in many instances the tetrameter also rhymes. This

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684-471: A number of lyric metres, which were typically used for shorter poems than elegiacs or hexameter. In Aeolic verse , one important line was called the hendecasyllabic , a line of eleven syllables. This metre was used most often in the Sapphic stanza , named after the Greek poet Sappho , who wrote many of her poems in the form. A hendecasyllabic is a line with a never-varying structure: two trochees, followed by

741-399: A poem's metre is to use a concatenation of various derivations of the verbal root F-ʿ-L (فعل). Thus, the following hemistich قفا نبك من ذكرى حبيبٍ ومنزلِ Would be traditionally scanned as: فعولن مفاعيلن فعولن مفاعلن That is, Romanized and with traditional Western scansion: Al-Kʰalīl b. ˀAḫmad al-Farāhīdī's contribution to the study of Arabic prosody is undeniably significant: he was

798-547: A specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody . (Within linguistics , " prosody " is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose , whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.) An assortment of features can be identified when classifying poetry and its metre. The metre of most poetry of

855-406: A syllable to end in more than one consonant or a consonant to occur in the same syllable after a long vowel. In other words, syllables of the type -āk- or -akr- are not found in classical Arabic. Each verse consists of a certain number of metrical feet ( tafāʿīl or ʾaǧzāʾ ) and a certain combination of possible feet constitutes a metre ( baḥr ). The traditional Arabic practice for writing out

912-414: Is tetrameter ; five is pentameter ; six is hexameter , seven is heptameter and eight is octameter . For example, if the feet are iambs, and if there are five feet to a line, then it is called an iambic pentameter . If the feet are primarily dactyls and there are six to a line, then it is a dactylic hexameter . In classical Greek and Latin, however, the name " iambic trimeter " refers to

969-495: Is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short". The basic principles of Arabic poetic metre Arūḍ or Arud ( Arabic : العروض al-ʿarūḍ ) Science of Poetry ( Arabic : علم الشعر ʿilm aš-šiʿr ), were put forward by Al-Farahidi (718 - 786 CE) who did so after noticing that poems consisted of repeated syllables in each verse. In his first book, Al-Ard ( Arabic : العرض al-ʿarḍ ), he described 15 types of verse. Al-Akhfash described one extra,

1026-451: Is classified according to the same system as Classical metre with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively. The most common characteristic feet of English verse are

1083-502: Is controversial, since some sites include copyrighted lyrics offered without the holder's permission. The U.S. Music Publishers Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, launched a legal campaign against such websites in December 2005. The MPA's president, Lauren Keiser, said the free lyrics web sites are "completely illegal" and wanted some website operators jailed. Lyrics licenses could be obtained worldwide through one of

1140-469: Is divided into two half-lines by a caesura. This can be seen in Piers Plowman : By contrast with caesura, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Also from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale : Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation

1197-435: Is equivalent to two morae. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong , or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants. Various rules of elision sometimes prevent a grammatical syllable from making a full syllable, and certain other lengthening and shortening rules (such as correption ) can create long or short syllables in contexts where one would expect the opposite. The most important Classical metre

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1254-407: Is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. In English poetry, feet are determined by emphasis rather than length, with stressed and unstressed syllables serving the same function as long and short syllables in classical metre. The basic unit in Greek and Latin prosody is a mora , which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable

1311-545: Is often considered alien to English). The use of foreign metres in English is all but exceptional. The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the iambic pentameter , in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations are practically inexhaustible. John Milton 's Paradise Lost , most sonnets , and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse . Blank verse in

1368-782: Is particularly common with hymns and ballads ). Possible classifications proliferate (under anthem , ballad , blues , carol , folk song , hymn , libretto , lied , lullaby , march , praise song , round , spiritual ). Nursery rhymes may be songs, or doggerel : the term does not imply a distinction. The ghazal is a sung form that is considered primarily poetic. See also rapping , roots of hip hop music . Analogously, verse drama might normally be judged (at its best) as poetry , but not consisting of poems (see dramatic verse ). In Baroque music, melodies and their lyrics were prose. Rather than paired lines they consist of rhetorical sentences or paragraphs consisting of an opening gesture, an amplification (often featuring sequence ), and

1425-416: Is set to music , to the point that any distinction becomes untenable. This is perhaps recognised in the way popular songs have lyrics . However, the verse may pre-date its tune (in the way that " Rule Britannia " was set to music, and " And did those feet in ancient time " has become the hymn "Jerusalem"), or the tune may be lost over time but the words survive, matched by a number of different tunes (this

1482-399: Is the dactylic hexameter , the metre of Homer and Virgil. This form uses verses of six feet. The word dactyl comes from the Greek word daktylos meaning finger , since there is one long part followed by two short stretches. The first four feet are dactyls ( daa-duh-duh ), but can be spondees ( daa-daa ). The fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The sixth foot is either a spondee or

1539-420: Is the dactylic pentameter . This was a line of verse, made up of two equal parts, each of which contains two dactyls followed by a long syllable, which counts as a half foot. In this way, the number of feet amounts to five in total. Spondees can take the place of the dactyls in the first half, but never in the second. The long syllable at the close of the first half of the verse always ends a word, giving rise to

1596-449: Is the inversion of a foot, which turns an iamb ("da-DUM") into a trochee ("DUM-da"). A second variation is a headless verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. A third variation is catalexis , where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof – an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci": Most English metre

1653-625: Is the metre of most of the Border and Scots or English ballads. In hymnody it is called the "common metre", as it is the most common of the named hymn metres used to pair many hymn lyrics with melodies, such as Amazing Grace : Emily Dickinson is famous for her frequent use of ballad metre: Versification in Classical Sanskrit poetry is of three kinds. Standard traditional works on metre are Pingala's Chandaḥśāstra and Kedāra's Vṛttaratnākara . The most exhaustive compilations, such as

1710-519: The Less than Zero soundtrack . Rapper Nas sampled the Incredible Bongo Band's cover version of the song on his singles " Thief's Theme " and " Hip Hop Is Dead ". Lyrics Lyrics are words that make up a song , usually consisting of verses and choruses . The writer of lyrics is a lyricist . The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as

1767-517: The Greek λυρικός ( lurikós ), the adjectival form of lyre . It first appeared in English in the mid-16th century in reference to the Earl of Surrey 's translations of Petrarch and to his own sonnets . Greek lyric poetry had been defined by the manner in which it was sung accompanied by the lyre or cithara , as opposed to the chanted formal epics or the more passionate elegies accompanied by

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1824-591: The flute . The personal nature of many of the verses of the Nine Lyric Poets led to the present sense of " lyric poetry " but the original Greek sense of "lyric poetry"—"poetry accompanied by the lyre" i.e. "words set to music"—eventually led to its use as "lyrics", first attested in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms . Stainer and Barrett used the word as a singular substantive: " Lyric , poetry or blank verse intended to be set to music and sung". By

1881-408: The hendecasyllable favoured by Catullus and Martial, which can be described as: x x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — — (where "—" = long, "∪" = short, and "x x" can be realized as "— ∪" or "— —" or "∪ —") Macron and breve notation: – = stressed/long syllable , ◡ = unstressed/short syllable If the line has only one foot, it is called a monometer ; two feet, dimeter ; three is trimeter ; four

1938-704: The iamb in two syllables and the anapest in three. (See Metrical foot for a complete list of the metrical feet and their names.) The number of metrical systems in English is not agreed upon. The four major types are: accentual verse , accentual-syllabic verse , syllabic verse and quantitative verse . The alliterative verse found in Old English, Middle English, and some modern English poems can be added to this list, as it operates on somewhat different principles than accentual verse. Alliterative verse pairs two phrases (half-lines) joined by alliteration; while there are usually two stresses per half-line, variations in

1995-542: The 16th. A short syllable contains a short vowel with no following consonants. For example, the word kataba, which syllabifies as ka-ta-ba , contains three short vowels and is made up of three short syllables. A long syllable contains either a long vowel or a short vowel followed by a consonant as is the case in the word maktūbun which syllabifies as mak-tū-bun . These are the only syllable types possible in Classical Arabic phonology which, by and large, does not allow

2052-477: The 1930s, the present use of the plurale tantum "lyrics" had begun; it has been standard since the 1950s for many writers. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song by authorities such as Alec Wilder, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Sondheim. However, the singular form is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. The differences between poem and song may become less meaningful where verse

2109-442: The English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson ( Ulysses , The Princess ) and Wordsworth ( The Prelude ) also make notable use of it. A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a heroic couplet , a verse form which was used so often in the 18th century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect (although see Pale Fire for

2166-535: The Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called qualitative metre , with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in iambic pentameters , usually every even-numbered syllable). Many Romance languages use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable (e.g.

2223-471: The accomplished scholar cannot utilize and apply it with ease and total confidence. Dr. ˀIbrāhīm ˀAnīs, one of the most distinguished and celebrated pillars of Arabic literature and the Arabic language in the 20th century, states the issue clearly in his book Mūsīqā al-Sʰiˁr: “I am aware of no [other] branch of Arabic studies which embodies as many [technical] terms as does [al-Kʰalīl’s] prosody, few and distinct as

2280-449: The album itself reached number four on the album chart and has sold over 30 million copies. An 8-minute-20-second edit of the song was included in the soundtrack to the 1986 film Manhunter . In 2009, it was named the 24th-greatest hard rock song of all time by VH1 . It is also often regarded as an influence on heavy metal music and one of the firsts of the genre. Though it was not recorded until their second album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

2337-439: The first scholar to subject Arabic poetry to a meticulous, painstaking metrical analysis. Unfortunately, he fell short of producing a coherent theory; instead, he was content to merely gather, classify, and categorize the primary data—a first step which, though insufficient, represents no mean accomplishment. Therefore, al-Kʰalīl has left a formulation of utmost complexity and difficulty which requires immense effort to master; even

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2394-680: The idea of turning the minute-and-a-half-long ballad into an extended jam emerged very early. Jeff Beck claims that when he saw Iron Butterfly perform at the Galaxy Club on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in April 1967, half a year before the band recorded their first album, their entire second set consisted of a 35-minute-long version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida . The track was recorded at Ultrasonic Studios in Hempstead , Long Island , New York. The song contains

2451-455: The last) needs to be fixed. The alliterative metre of the old Germanic poetry of languages such as Old Norse and Old English was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns. Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as quantitative metre , where patterns were based on syllable weight rather than stress. In the dactylic hexameters of Classical Latin and Classical Greek , for example, each of

2508-435: The meters are: al-Kʰalīl’s disciples employed a large number of infrequent items, assigning to those items certain technical denotations which—invariably—require definition and explanation. …. As to the rules of metric variation, they are numerous to the extent that they defy memory and impose a taxing course of study. …. In learning them, a student faces severe hardship which obscures all connection with an artistic genre—indeed,

2565-465: The metre of a verse can be described as a sequence of feet , each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types – such as relatively unstressed/stressed (the norm for English poetry) or long/short (as in most classical Latin and Greek poetry). Iambic pentameter , a common metre in English poetry, is based on a sequence of five iambic feet or iambs , each consisting of a relatively unstressed syllable (here represented with "˘" above

2622-521: The modern ones by Patwardhan and Velankar contain over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition. The metrical "feet" in the classical languages were based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (indicated as dum and di below). These are also called "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels. The foot

2679-450: The most artistic of all—namely, poetry. ………. It is in this fashion that [various] authors dealt with the subject under discussion over a period of eleven centuries: none of them attempted to introduce a new approach or to simplify the rules. ………. Is it not time for a new, simple presentation which avoids contrivance, displays close affinity to [the art of] poetry, and perhaps renders the science of prosody palatable as well as manageable?” In

2736-481: The music would have made for a much more complicated critical feat. A 2009 report published by McAfee found that, in terms of potential exposure to malware , lyrics-related searches and searches containing the word "free" are the most likely to have risky results from search engines, both in terms of average risk of all results, and maximum risk of any result. Beginning in late 2014, Google changed its search results pages to include song lyrics. When users search for

2793-419: The number of stresses do occur. Accentual verse focuses on the number of stresses in a line, while ignoring the number of offbeats and syllables; accentual-syllabic verse focuses on regulating both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in a line; syllabic verse only counts the number of syllables in a line; quantitative verse regulates the patterns of long and short syllables (this sort of verse

2850-547: The number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrin , with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone , classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules, such as thematic parallelism or tonal antithesis between lines. In many Western classical poetic traditions,

2907-408: The sense of unity (or lack of unity) it has with its supporting music. Analysis based on tonality and contrast are particular examples. Former Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks famously published Dylan's Visions of Sin , an in-depth and characteristically Ricksian analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan ; Ricks gives the caveat that to have studied the poetry of the lyrics in tandem with

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2964-664: The six feet making up the line was either a dactyl (long-short-short) or a spondee (long-long): a "long syllable" was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit , Persian , Old Church Slavonic and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew ). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on

3021-427: The song in 1973. The composer and percussionist David Van Tieghem released a version and two remixes in 1986. 16 BIT (a German dance project from 1986 to 1989 by Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti) recorded in 1987 a single "(Ina) Gadda-Da-Vida", also included in album Inaxycvgtgb . New Jersey psychedelic band 6 Feet Under recorded a version in the late 1960s. In 1987, Slayer recorded a cover version that appears on

3078-562: The syllable) followed by a relatively stressed one (here represented with "/" above the syllable) – "da-DUM"="˘ /": This approach to analyzing and classifying metres originates from Ancient Greek tragedians and poets such as Homer , Pindar , Hesiod , and Sappho . However some metres have an overall rhythmic pattern to the line that cannot easily be described using feet. This occurs in Sanskrit poetry; see Vedic metre and Sanskrit metre . It also occurs in some Western metres, such as

3135-456: The two aggregators: LyricFind and Musixmatch . The first company to provide licensed lyrics was Yahoo! , quickly followed by MetroLyrics . Several lyric websites are providing licensed lyrics, such as SongMeanings and LyricWiki (defunct as of 2020). Many competing lyrics web sites are still offering unlicensed content, causing challenges around the legality and accuracy of lyrics. In an attempt to crack down unlicensed lyrics web sites,

3192-445: The vowels are both followed by two consonants. The third and fourth feet are spondees, the first of which is divided by the main caesura of the verse. The fifth foot is a dactyl, as is nearly always the case. The final foot is a spondee. The dactylic hexameter was imitated in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Evangeline : Notice how the first line: Follows this pattern: Also important in Greek and Latin poetry

3249-551: Was written during Iron Butterfly's early days. According to drummer Ron Bushy , organist-vocalist Doug Ingle wrote the song one evening while drinking an entire gallon of Red Mountain wine. When the inebriated Ingle then played the song for Bushy, who wrote down the lyrics for him, he was slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be "in the Garden of Eden" was interpreted by Bushy as "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". Even though nearly all of Iron Butterfly's songs were quite structured,

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