Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Jack White's "Entitlement"

I’m currently listening to Jack White’s Lazaretto for the first time.  I noticed an interesting poetic/lyrical device he uses in the first verse of “Entitlement”:
Every time that I’m doing what I want to,
Somebody comes and tells me it’s wrong.
Whenever I’m doing just as I please,
Somebody cuts me down to my knees.
He uses structural parallelism between the two lines, so that the first part of the first sentence (“Every time that I’m doing what I want to”) is similar to the first part of the second sentence (“Whenever I’m doing just as I please”) and the second part of the first sentence (“Somebody comes and tells me it’s wrong”) is similar to the second part of the second sentence (“Somebody cuts me down to my knees”).