This project is fuelled by 140 songs. The most verbose is Notorious Thugs by The Notorious B.I.G.. The oldest is Rawhide by Frankie Laine from 1958. Songs are composed of lyrics, lyrics are composed of words. There are 54,178 words in this project, 7,238 of them are unique.
Songs are a powerful medium. They usually gravitate around an experience the artist has had, of which their audience can resonate with. Songs are poetic and expressive, which is what makes the language and words used in songs so interesting.
What I’ve done here is collect songs that belong to a particular topic, then decompose each of the songs into words and shuffled them. The end result is a vocabulary sharing the same topic.
With that shuffled vocabulary, I've created a little workbench where you can make your own statement about the topic. A poem of sorts. It can be sensical or nonsensical. It can have structure, or no structure. There’s no rules or expectations for what you create. You can submit your poem, and you can find submissions from people that have done the same.
First of all, thank you to the people who wrote these songs and continue to do so.
Mark Twain once said “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope”.
If I think about all the ideas that helped me arrive here, the first is Magnetic Poetry, which is an incredibly fun fridge based game, the interactive aspect of this site functions much like it (minus the fridge and magnets). Next is 100x1000 by Sterling Crispin, which was one of the first projects I came across which introduced me to creative coding. The last is Dylan Ipsum by Brody Smith which allows you to generate placeholder text from lyrics from Bob Dylan's discography.
I also pulled almost all the colour palettes used on this site from this incredible site created by Obys Agency. I used IBM Plex Mono for the font. Some of the playlists were greatly influenced those created by Up Bank.
If you have any feedback, or you'd like to request a topic you can contact me here.
If you like this project, you can see more of my work here.