Okay, okay, a lot of you might have already heard the song I just attached. That’s not the point of this post—although if you haven’t heard it yet, you might be in for a surprise.
Let me tell you how this song was born. On the main Latin Discord server, we wanted to celebrate Christmas together. However, most of us spend the holiday with our families, and so organising some Christmas event was out of the question. Which is why we resurrected the Ancient Roman holidays called the Saturnalia, which take place just before Christmas.
One of the events during the Saturnalia was, jokingly, called Latin Rap Battle, where we would write funny little Latin poems addressed to each other. As the Romans did. So when I was writing my iambics, I began hearing the beat behind it, and decided to turn it into a full blown rap song. It’s basically “dissing” two friends on Discord, PK or Philippus because of his French accent, Andreas Lodfredus because his is the de facto historian on the server. But seriously? Writing the history of an online Discord server? Of course, it’s all in good jest.
To the point of this post: in the first half of July, we had a lot of relatives over, a lot of grill parties, birthdays, namedays, and other stuff, but I also met with someone who creates music for advertisements, films, and, well, rap albums. If you want to check out his handiwork, both the beat and the piano solo is him in this song.
He had heard the Latin rap snippet I attached to this post and fell in love with it. So, here’s the deal. We’re now working together on more songs. Of course, baby steps, baby steps. We have about six concepts in total. We decided not to bother with it in July because of my trip to Rome, but August is writing lyrics wearing a full cap and consuming as much rap as I can.
When will the songs be released? We can’t tell yet. However, I’d like your feedback. If you were to listen to Latin rap, what would you like the songs to be about? I’m open to your ideas, even if I won’t be able to implement all of them.
Finally, I’d just like to share the original lyrics picture to the above song so you can follow along.
Curate ut bene valeatis!