S04:E09 | Remix: On Rap as Disco Renaissance, Poetic Resonance, and Ripping Ourselves Off

What do Biggie Smalls, the Queens of Disco, and the poetry community have in common? Find out in this episode, wherein we talk about remixing ourselves as a way to recontextualize, reimagine, and regenerate our creative work.

Resources

• Lovelorn, my line-lifting solo poetry RPG (Part IV of the Western Cantos)
• The poetry of Deadliest Catch: S04:E07 | Refract: On Mirror Rot, Idiosyncratic Inspo, and Hailing the New Year

IG: @littleoracles

Transcript

[Intro music]

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.

Hello, hello; I hope you’re doing well. It’s been a bit since we last spoke — if you’re listening to this in real time, that is — but that’s for a reason: I’ve been pretty heads down for the last month or two on a poetry manuscript. And this is a first for me as a writer, you know, working toward submission to publishers and print journals, which is, as you can imagine, both exciting and nerve-wracking as I shape and shift and finesse these poems into some kind of final-ish form. And all this generation and all this revision that I’ve been doing is what brought me here to you, today, because I happened upon this interesting new approach to editing and altering that, in turn, led to the creation of a whole bunch of new work; so, naturally, I wanted to share that process with you, and in a nod to the great DJs and MCs and sample-savvy artists and producers of yesteryear and today, it’s a process I’m calling: the remix.

Before we get into that, though, a little bit of social and personal history for you: I came of age in the 1990s, during the pivotal moment in music history when rap and a fresh take on R&B were redefining the radio — of course, you know, alongside, the post-punk, grunge garage sound, or what we used to call “alternative music,” whatever that meant — but for the purposes of this discussion, I wanna focus on rap and R&B, because those genres were really steadily laying all this new track with old materials: they were remixing riffs and beats and melodies from late-‘60s, and ‘70s, and even early-’80s-era funk and disco, and layering all this new meaning, all this historical reverence and social resonance on top of these culturally significant tracks.

And I was anachronistically obsessed with funk and disco at the time, and I remember hearing songs like The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” and immediately recognizing bits from Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out,” and also Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy with It,” which samples not one, but two funky pieces: that “na-na-na” chorus is from the Bar-Kays’ “Sang and Dance,” and the recurring guitar riff that undergirds the whole song, from Sister Sledge’s “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” and if you happen to know the gist of the Will Smith joint, which is basically about having all the right moves [chuckles] in any given situation, you can see how these three songs triangulate, and start to flow, and create conversation with one another. And this phenomenon isn’t unique to Biggie and Big Willie; no, no, no: it’s– it’s all over rap and R&B, and it’s so edifying and satisfying to witness these connections, and to listen to these confabs, and to watch these artists generate within the context of a single song this little powerbank of cultural cruciality.

And, pre-dating but nonetheless apropos to rap and R&B remixing — and very much related to my poetry project at hand — is the age-old practice of line lifting in poetry, which, if you’re not familiar with that, is just the borrowing literatim (so, word-for-word) or rearranging or paraphrasing other poets’ or writers’ or speakers’ or singers’ lines within your own work. This is a practice that is so common as to be almost requisite in any given modern poetry collection, especially; when I pick up a collection I expect it, and I’m excited to see how a poet positions themself in conversation with another poet or writer or thinker or creator, and how they use other people’s work to add texture and dimension to their own.

And I’m so fascinated by this practice [chuckles] that I even wrote a solo poetry-based roleplaying game about it — if you didn’t know, I write writing-forward games, specifically a suite of them set in the American West of the 1880s; it’s called the Western Cantos Poetry RPG Cycle — but the game in question is called Lovelorn, and the primary action of the game is expanding on lifted lines to create a prose poem in the style of a journal entry, and I’ll link the game in the show notes if you want to read more about it and/or support my creative endeavors beyond listening to this podcast.

But it’s this process of segmenting and recontextualizing — this intentional remixing — that I found to be so helpful as I was considering my manuscript and reworking individual poems and prepping submissions. It was so helpful, in fact, that I’m here to spread the good news, as it were, [chuckles] and to offer it to all of you as a possible method for revising — or, if we wanna get etymological about it, which if you’re a longtime listener, you know we are wont to do — of re-seeing your own pieces and projects.

What’s a bit different though, is the source material. Now, I lift other people’s lines like there’s no tomorrow because let’s be real, there’s poetry everywhere (and if you missed Episode 7, wherein I discuss the poetry to be found on the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, I’ll link that in the show notes); but this time, my friends, I’m talking about lifting from within: [chuckles] I’m talking about remixing yourself.

So practically speaking, as I was revising my manuscript, I decided to lift lines of my own from what I thought were basically finished poems, and planting them like little kernels on blank pages and seeing what I could cultivate from them, unyoked as they were from their previous context, and unfettered by their previous station in a stanza, or whatever — and yeah, I realize I’m mixing my agricultural metaphors here, where the line is acting as both seed and earth-shearing steer, but my point is this: by untethering the component parts of our creative work, by disassembling our work, kind of like a reverse Ship of Theseus [chuckles], we can reorient ourselves to the parts of the whole, and possibly discover in those parts, new significance, or new resonance or new ways to map the territory that is our lived experience as expressed and shared through our art and craft.

Does that makes sense? [laughs] Can Allison talk like a regular guy challenge 2025. [laughs] No, let’s just– let’s– let’s bring it back to earth just a little bit [chuckles]: essentially, what I’m saying is that I’ve found a lot of new inspiration, and I’ve generated a lot of new work by breaking down and spinning off and, yes, remixing, my own work.

And I do recognize that my medium is particularly suited to this kind of segmentation by its nature, because it’s discreet, it’s made of building blocks — you know, it’s made of words — that I can arrange and rearrange, and so I admit that this approach might not come so quickly to someone working in a more solidified and bound medium, like painting or woodworking or quilting, let’s say. But in those more rigid — or maybe the word is cohered — media, I think there is space to remix, too: you know, you could focus on subject, or style, or method, and use those as your kernels for cultivation.

Any way you do it, though, whether you’re taking a melody from one song and building a new beat underneath it, or you’re taking an ingredient and reimagining its place and purpose in a dish, or you’re, like me, pulling a line from a written piece and fully regrading it, giving yourself the latitude to winnow and parse and reappraise your own creative output is giving yourself the leeway to hold up a mirror to your past creative self — and it’s not just any mirror, right? It’s not just reflecting what you’ve already made: it’s redescribing and refracting your work in its all its many facets: it’s not just a mirror, it’s a disco ball; it’s so many planes; it’s so many potentialities; it’s so many ways to revisit, and to redefine, and to respin. It’s your work, it’s your creativity: the remix.

And that’s all she wrote for today, at least; if you wanna see what I’m up to, what I’m reading, what shenanigans my cat Mitch is getting into, you can find me at arthograph — that’s a-r-t-h-o-g-r-a-p-h — on both Instagram and Bluesky, and if you’re looking for more big book energy and creativity content, you can find every episode of the podcast at little oracles dot com. Until next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]

[Secret outtake]

[sings] Oh, what, wow; he’s the greatest dancer. Oh, what, wow, that I’ve ever seen. [cat meows] Hello, Mitchelli; you’re the greatest dancer. Ohhh. [licking noises] Oh, thank you for licking my nose! [giggles]