List song

A list song, also called a laundry list song or a catalog song, is a song based wholly or in part on a list. Unlike topical songs with a narrative and a cast of characters, list songs typically develop by working through a series of information, often comically, articulating their images additively, and sometimes use items of escalating absurdity. The form as a defining feature of an oral tradition dates back to early classical antiquity, where it played an important part of early hexameter poetry for oral bards like Homer and Hesiod. In classical opera, the list song has its own genre, the catalogue aria, that was especially popular in Italian opera buffa and comic opera in the latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.