Hiiiii now that I'm back home I am noodling around with this :D I have been spending entirely too much time trying to figure out digital audio -- I still haven't really figured out any of the hard parts that would make it sound decent, but at this point I have a reasonable working solution so that I can start practicing. Turns out, er, singing without lots of errors is harder than I thought! I now have a copy that's scribbled all over with things like "go from A to G here" and "PRACTICE THIS" :)
I've been adjusting wording slightly as I go :) but a couple of questions I had for the salon mind:
Ice Palace, Force Vive, Émilie du Chatelet
Should this internally rhyme, or is it OK that it doesn't?
Christian Wolff, Pöllnitz, Franklin prints and flies kits
So, this should be "kites," not kits, which kind of destroys the rhyme here; is there a better way to do this?
Slaves get dumped into the sea
OK, sorry, what does this refer to? (From my American-centric viewpoint, I keep wanting it to say "Tea gets dumped into the sea"...)
Also, I just want to reiterate that the Guillotine ending the song is just genius :D
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Hiiiii now that I'm back home I am noodling around with this :D
Hiiii this is awesome to hear!
Turns out, er, singing without lots of errors is harder than I thought!
Omg, I had the same experience, and I wasn't even trying to carry a tune! I was just trying to pronounce the words right and get the same rhythm as the bardcore version. And it took surprisingly many tries to get it even mostly right! (Admittedly, it's a pretty fast-paced song, but still.)
I will leave poetic decisions to selenak :), but for historical background:
Slaves get dumped into the sea
Coming after "English colonies dodge tax," my brain wants to do the same as yours, *but*, I also happen to know that as part of the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of slaves did get dumped into the sea. Maybe there's a specific event Selena's thinking of that she will tell us about, but it was also just a *thing*. You died in the horrendous conditions of the crossing from Africa? Overboard your body goes. Okay, fine, probably better than keeping a rotting corpse on the ship. You were sick? Overboard, rather than infect the whole shipment. Injured and not likely to bring a profit upon landing? Not worth the cost of feeding you, overboard you go. You were a baby and your mother wasn't behaving like a proper submissive slave, but was trying to ~resist~? Overboard, pour encourager les autres! A baby won't make a big dent in the profit margin anyway.
The key here is that slavers were insured against drowned slaves, so anyone who went overboard could be replaced later. So the threshold for which it made economic sense to treat slaves as damaged merchandise and dump them in the Atlantic was appallingly low.
There's a reason I put "slave trade" next to "colonies" in my version. Lest we forget.
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Poetic decisions later, but in addition to what you said, I was thinking of a very specific case, the Zong massacre, which in the long lung helped turning the tide against slavery in GB, where the owners of the ship which did the dumping were taken to court - not because they murdered 142 living but sick or otherwise deemed not profitable enough slaves, but for insurance fraud (as they wanted compensation from their insurance company, as was customary in "act of God" cases where the slaves actually did die of natural causes. This went through several instances, attracted a lot of publicity on both sides of the Atlantic and in the end was decided in the insurance company's favour.
ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.
Edited 2024-08-07 06:06 (UTC)
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Ahhh, thank you! I figured you might have something specific in mind, and I didn't know about the Zong massacre until now.
ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.
The hive mind at work again. :)
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
I'm thrilled that you are really really considering a musical rendition!
Should this internally rhyme, or is it OK that it doesn't?
I know that the e in "vive" is silent in correct French, but I mentally pronounce it incorrectly to rhyme with Chatelet, so "vivé" - but if you can't bring yourself to do it, it's okay otherwise as well.
Argh, kites, of course! Curse you, Franklin, for the flying the unrhyming kites. Hm, how about:
Christian Wolff, Pöllnitz, Franklin prints, lots of quips
Which is what we call an "unsauberer Reim", an unclean rhyme in German, but it's close enough.
I already replied to the dumped slaves question.
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
I know that the e in "vive" is silent in correct French, but I mentally pronounce it incorrectly to rhyme with Chatelet, so "vivé" - but if you can't bring yourself to do it, it's okay otherwise as well.
I don't think I could bring myself to do it, but I leave that up to our singer and musician. :) This is also where I have to confess that my version, if you want it to follow the original scansion perfectly, requires pronouncing the 'e' in "Diderot"...but it probably still works if you want to pronounce it with two syllables, Cahn.
"Chatelet" I managed to fit in so that the meter's expecting two syllables.
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Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
I've been adjusting wording slightly as I go :) but a couple of questions I had for the salon mind:
Ice Palace, Force Vive, Émilie du Chatelet
Should this internally rhyme, or is it OK that it doesn't?
Christian Wolff, Pöllnitz, Franklin prints and flies kits
So, this should be "kites," not kits, which kind of destroys the rhyme here; is there a better way to do this?
Slaves get dumped into the sea
OK, sorry, what does this refer to? (From my American-centric viewpoint, I keep wanting it to say "Tea gets dumped into the sea"...)
Also, I just want to reiterate that the Guillotine ending the song is just genius :D
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Hiiii this is awesome to hear!
Turns out, er, singing without lots of errors is harder than I thought!
Omg, I had the same experience, and I wasn't even trying to carry a tune! I was just trying to pronounce the words right and get the same rhythm as the bardcore version. And it took surprisingly many tries to get it even mostly right! (Admittedly, it's a pretty fast-paced song, but still.)
I will leave poetic decisions to
Slaves get dumped into the sea
Coming after "English colonies dodge tax," my brain wants to do the same as yours, *but*, I also happen to know that as part of the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of slaves did get dumped into the sea. Maybe there's a specific event Selena's thinking of that she will tell us about, but it was also just a *thing*. You died in the horrendous conditions of the crossing from Africa? Overboard your body goes. Okay, fine, probably better than keeping a rotting corpse on the ship. You were sick? Overboard, rather than infect the whole shipment. Injured and not likely to bring a profit upon landing? Not worth the cost of feeding you, overboard you go. You were a baby and your mother wasn't behaving like a proper submissive slave, but was trying to ~resist~? Overboard, pour encourager les autres! A baby won't make a big dent in the profit margin anyway.
The key here is that slavers were insured against drowned slaves, so anyone who went overboard could be replaced later. So the threshold for which it made economic sense to treat slaves as damaged merchandise and dump them in the Atlantic was appallingly low.
There's a reason I put "slave trade" next to "colonies" in my version. Lest we forget.
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.
The hive mind at work again. :)
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
Should this internally rhyme, or is it OK that it doesn't?
I know that the e in "vive" is silent in correct French, but I mentally pronounce it incorrectly to rhyme with Chatelet, so "vivé" - but if you can't bring yourself to do it, it's okay otherwise as well.
Argh, kites, of course! Curse you, Franklin, for the flying the unrhyming kites. Hm, how about:
Christian Wolff, Pöllnitz, Franklin prints, lots of quips
Which is what we call an "unsauberer Reim", an unclean rhyme in German, but it's close enough.
I already replied to the dumped slaves question.
Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version
I don't think I could bring myself to do it, but I leave that up to our singer and musician. :) This is also where I have to confess that my version, if you want it to follow the original scansion perfectly, requires pronouncing the 'e' in "Diderot"...but it probably still works if you want to pronounce it with two syllables, Cahn.
"Chatelet" I managed to fit in so that the meter's expecting two syllables.