In a college class on modern poetry, the professor, poet and publisher Keith Waldrop, remarked that no one had successfully set Yeats’ poetry to music. There was already enough music there–the poems’ rhythms didn’t give music enough space.
I thought of this remark as I watched the video for the song will.i.am wrote using a portion of Barack Obama’s speech after the New Hampshire primary.
Take a look and listen here.
Here, music is easily accommodated, and neatly aligned. The speech isn’t so much set to music as music is set to speech. In New Hampshire, as Obama reached the “Yes, we can” sequence near the speech’s end, a meter became evident. In a YouTube world, this made its becoming a music video inevitable. Lucky for him will.i.am did a terrific job, and for free.
Hillary Clinton’s attack geese have been nipping at Barack Obama for oratory like this. Language itself is in the headlines. Back in the headlines, is more like it. It used to be that our current president’s homemade language poetry of slurred syntax incurred scorn. Now a candidate who puts words together well gets it.