Lyrical Lesson 2: Assonance with Pink Floyd

Assonance is the resemblance of sounds. 

Besides an awesome bass riff, brilliant guitar solo, and tongue-in-cheek rebellious lyrics, what makes Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall one of the most memorable rock songs of all time is its use of assonance.  You will notice in the example below that none of the words strictly rhyme (unlike the refrain: All in all you’re just another brick in the wall where ‘all’ and ‘wall’ are a perfect rhyme). 

Assonance is not the same as rhyming; rather it is the repetition of similar sounds within a sentence or piece of writing.  Pink Floyd use a long ‘e’ sound, a long ‘o’ sound and long ‘ah’ sound in repetition throughout the song as follows:

We don’t need no education (We need)

We don’t need no thought control (don’t no control)

No dark sarcasm in the classroom (dark sarcasm classroom [if you sang this line with an American accent, you’d find two lots of assonance with sarcasm and class])

Teachers, leave them kids alone (Teachers leave picks up the long ‘e’ sound and Alone picks up the long ‘o’ sound from the first two lines.

Assonance can be used to great effect in both poetry and prose.