Skip to main content

Rap star Lil B gets remixed into poetry on Tumblr by a bot

lil b poetryRapper Lil B is a Twitter maestro, but he’s getting a very unique Tumblr treatment. Tumblr intern and coder Mehan Jayasuriya developed a program to turn Lil B’s lyrics into poems called “Based Poetry,” a play off the rapper’s nickname “Based God,” and the result is an odd hodgepodge of boasts and bad words arranged in familiar lines.

At first glance, it looks like the most profane poetry you’ve ever seen – so profane, we can’t quote it here. But the vulgar, bombastic vocabulary arranged as five-line poems are fun because they’re so incongruous-looking. Is it simply silly or a pointed project poking at our expectations of what poems should look like?

Recommended Videos

Digital Trends caught up with Jayasuriya and asked what inspired him to created Based Poetry. “First off, I’m a huge fan Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 11.01.37 AMof the Based God, so there’s that. I did find that the sort of surreal, impressionistic slant to his lyrics plays really well with this kind of recontextualizing – pretty much all of the randomly-generated poems feel like they ‘work’ in a way, which is satisfying. And then there’s the word ‘based,’ which is so malleable that it can mean just about anything–that’s the glue that really holds these poems together, I think.”

A poetry professor could parse the poems and find a number of classic poetic elements, that’s for sure – there’s repetition, alliteration, and allusion in nearly every short poem. It’s just a little unusual since many of the repeated words wouldn’t be printed in a Norton’s Anthology.

Are poetry bots the Next Big Meme? In April, we covered the New York Times’ haiku bot, a program built by Jacob Harris that chisels the Grey Lady’s journalism into perfectly structured haiku. The results for that project were a little closer to what we expect poetry to be – which isn’t surprising, since Lil B and New York Times journalists don’t really write in the same register.

And in addition to the Haiku bot, there’s plenty more algorithm-culled poetry on the Internet. The Pentametron 2013 scans Twitter and re-tweets text written in iambic pentameter, highlighting how close the banal and the beautiful can be. Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 11.09.18 AM

If you love Based Poetry, there may be more rap-inspired poetry bots around the corner. Jayasuriya said he tried the algorithm with Kanye West and Rick Ross lyrics, and talked about the wide range of possibilities for poetry bots. “I would definitely love to do a few more of these if I can find the right source material. All of the code for this is open-source and available on GitHub, so I’m hoping that other folks will take this idea and run with it as well. I’d love to see someone use this framework to make poetry bots that draw from other artists’ lyrics, political speeches, technical documents or whatever.”

Kate Knibbs
Former Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
Bluesky finally adds a feature many had been waiting for
A blue sky with clouds.

Bluesky has been making a lot of progress in recent months by simplifying the process to sign up while at the same time rolling out a steady stream of new features.

As part of those continuing efforts, the social media app has just announced that users can now send direct messages (DMs).

Read more
Reddit just achieved something for the first time in its 20-year history
The Reddit logo.

Reddit’s on a roll. The social media platform has just turned a profit for the first time in its 20-year history, and now boasts a record 97.2 million daily active users, marking a year-over-year increase of 47%. A few times during the quarter, the figure topped 100 million, which Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders had been a “long-standing milestone” for the site.

The company, which went public in March, announced the news in its third-quarter earnings results on Tuesday.

Read more
Worried about the TikTok ban? This is how it might look on your phone
TikTok splash screen on an Android phone.

The US Supreme Court has decided to uphold a law that would see TikTok banned in the country on January 19. Now, the platform has issued an official statement, confirming that it will indeed shut down unless it gets some emergency relief from the outgoing president.

“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19,” said the company soon after the court’s verdict.
So, what does going dark mean?
So, far, there is no official statement on what exactly TikTok means by “going dark.” There is a lot of speculation out there on how exactly the app or website will look once TikTok shutters in the US.

Read more