[Intro] Ladies Gentlemen And others Lend an ear Assemble near Tonight we tour the tuneful zoo of style and schmaltz and sneer A promenade through every mode From pompous to profane A syllabus in silliness In four-four and in duple… And if the meter’s getting tortured Well That’s sort of the refrain [Verse 1 – Broadway Patter-Song] Observe the Broadway number Briskly blaring from the pit With tempos so accelerando Actors almost quit The lyrics fire like verbal shrapnel Hyperactive quips Designed to test the tensile strength of unsuspecting lips The orchestra’s exuberant The storyline’s irrelevant We camouflage our exposition In exposition that’s self-evident While triple rhymes in tricky time Are tumbling out my mouth And if you miss a joke Don’t fret There’s fifty further in the next eight counts [Chorus – Broadway Refrain] It’s a genre medley Mind the modulations Every verse a different station Changing keys and expectations From the brassy to the classy to the crassly adolescent Each cliché we quote and gloat about in diction luminescent [Verse 2 – Jazz Ballad] Now Glide into jazz Where the consonants melt And the vowels take a long-legged walk We bend every note like it’s guilty of something And scrawl lazy loops in the chalk The bass does a courteous Furtive perambulation The cymbals exhale like a sigh The singer pretends that forgetting the lyrics Is actually part of the style Scatting is simply strategic evasion Of words you were meant to have learned in rehearsal Elongating syllables Filling up bars With semantically vacant reversal [Chorus] [Verse 3 – Bubblegum Pop] Cut to pop Effervescent Adolescent Fluorescent Where profundity is banned as an unpleasant depressant We compress our conversation To a hook and exclamation Then repeat it till it’s fused with your subconscious inclination We choreograph emotions with an algorithm’s care Every “yeah” is lab-tested Every “whoa” is engineered to share The bridge exists exclusively so We can half-time clap and sway Then hit that chorus like a product You’ll be humming while you pay [Chorus] [Verse 4 – Faux Rap / Hip-Hop Musical] Observe the didactic Dramatically active “Let’s rap to the kids” bit Suspiciously didactic The rhythm’s approximate Flow is prophylactic Protecting the audience from anything too authentic We rhyme “democracy” with “ferocity” and “velocity” Then awkwardly insert a moral On the merits of verbosity The beat politely offers you A sanitized sensation While I enunciate my way Through forced alliteration We’ve weaponized the rhyme scheme as a curricular device Because nothing says rebellion Like a chorus that is focus-group nice [Bridge – Mock Operetta] And now we swell to operetta Pseudo-classical and plush With trills that frill the narrative and brass that makes you blush The tenors launch torpedoes made of tremolo and tears While mezzos melodramatize their way through sixteen bars of fears We ornament our ornamentation Overstate each state of heart And if you dare to sing along You’ll likely tear your throat apart For music of this pedigree is vocally sadistic The vibrato’s so vibratory It’s medically ballistic [Chorus – Grand Finale] It’s a genre medley Mind the modulations Every key change like a dissertation On the art of overstatement and thematic iteration We have jazzed and popped and rapped and mocked In earnest ostentation [Coda – Quiet Epilogue] So if you leave with anything From this instructive spree It’s that style’s a shiny wrapper On essentially one plea We dress the same four chords in different hats and shoes and ties Then use polysyllabic patter To distract you from that Prize
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