When did you last see the Rising?
Paul's Unofficial Remix Challenge
Written for Paul's challenge, remixing the following piece of his. More details at the bottom:
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when did you last see the Rising?
when did you last feel the Uproar?
these are the moments I live for - Serendipity
the slight of injustices
the gunpowder in the morning
the afterglow aftershock of the Revolution before
Why did you last laugh until you cried?
Why did you last cry until you laughed?
these collective, pivotal moments
worth protecting
Righteously celebrating, commemorating, memorializing
to yesterday's sublime wins, losses, bad days, holidays and high days
Defiantly, when did you last touch the sky?
when did you last reach out and freely grab for the clouds, sun, moon, and the stars
as I grow older, I want to stay radical
More inclined to reach up
More inclined to reach out
Because I should
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Ah, Paul, Paul, Paul...Since you've laid down the gauntlet, you, like some poor Vocal Admin, must read the musings and ramblings of my mind. Let me peel back the proverbial curtain for you and indulge the audience in the secrets of my mental stage.
Three songs popped into my head when I read your challenge: Walk This Way, Ice Ice Baby, and the collective brilliance of Hamilton (one of those three I'm not proud of, but I digress). These three songs guided my form.
I once saw an interview with Vanilla Ice about how, his opinion-not my own, could not have ripped off Under Pressure by Queen because he changed a note. Tenuous, but it gave me the idea of taking your prompted piece and changing or adding but a single word each line. I bolded words that were changed/added.
But that obviously didn't go far enough. At that point, I was just playing with synonyms, so in came the inspiration from Walk This Way Remix with Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. There are way better writers out there with works on the influence of the quintessential remix. It's a remix that follows nearly the exact same form but spins the tonal impact of it for a genre-bending masterpiece. It inspired me to take the form Vanilla Ice laid out for me and twist the tone completely - to make a poem of the same form, but that takes a tone antithetical to the original, a juxtaposition of peace and justice, calm and violence, passivity and activity.
And in comes Mr. Alexander Hamilton with his songs of revolution.
So there you go, Paul. Enjoy and great challenge!
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A/N:
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About the Creator
Matthew Fromm
Full-time nerd, history enthusiast, and proprietor of random knowledge. The best way to find your perfect story is to write it yourself.
Here there be dragons, and knights, and castles, and quests for entities not wishing to be found.
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Comments (7)
Well I had avoided this until I had done my own but I do love how you approached this!
You put remix back into remix, Matt. Well done. By the by, Walk this Way - both the original and the Run DMC remix are fav's of mine! Ice, Ice baby not so much.😂
You brilliantly executed this with changing/adding some words! Like whoaaa, it was awesomeeee!
I so enjoyed reading about how you came up with this Matt… so thanks for sharing this!!! I hope everyone else follows suit! The thinking process and inspiration behind the veil of the creative piece is even more fascinating to me that the poem itself! (Which was of course well done!)
Goodness I love words!! And you really did a fantastic job with Paul's prompt/original text and making it feel completely different with so few changes. Loved it!
Oooh boy. That felt like a mic drop to me. 😁😮 awesome job!
lol, dude, we share a lot of strange things. I always loved that comment by Ice about his argument over whether he truly ripped it off or not. The problem, is that it's not bad that he stole it...it's that he didn't seek out permission properly first. Anyway, this is gold and the Run Remix is better than Aerosmith's original...I will die on that hill. The original is boring. Also same goes for It's Like that by Run DMC vs Jason Nevins...the updated version is much better. Anyway, all that aside, I enjoyed your ramblings as much as I loved your anthemic take on this challenge. What an entry! I am humbled that you put forward that gold for this challenge and will add it to the list of entries on the original post in due time. Well done and thank you, Matthew. Sorry I spent an inordinate time going through your ramblings more than the piece. I love the lines that you flipped and the way you took the original premise and made it different, important and poetically just brilliant! Well done.