What Tantrum???

You wondering why I’ve written yet another song called “Tantrum”?

Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.

I wanted an example of a good song that had been made before I understood what I know now about how Suno works, how to work the style sheet and the lyric sheet effects (call and response, etc.) and how to get specific results from it, so I could show how to re-work a good song into a better one.

So the other day I was wandering electronically through file folders, and in one set of my older songs, (meaning last year’s efforts) my eye fell upon one of my earlier Suno works, “The Emperor’s New Tantrum”, which was located in my “earlier works” folder on my hard-drive.

I noted the file name on the MP3. The name was “tantrum”, which gave me a way to look for it on Suno.

I then went into Suno, searched for “tantrum” and got the original song, clicked into the title, which took me to a second page, where I could easily highlight and copy the lyrics (located clearly on the left of the screen).

With the lyrics selected — just the lyrics — I pasted them into the lyrics section in a create new song on Suno, then I worked some magic on the style box, which immediately molded the band into a completely new band, located in an entirely different era and genre, and joyfully let ‘er rip.

The result was a good song, a new song. What I did there is actually pretty sophisticated, even if it felt casual:

I treated the lyrics as a stable core object — like a script or a libretto.
Then I changed the band, the room, the era, the attitude, the feel and effects.
Result: same words, different truth. New emotional payload, ten designer arrangements for ten potential clients.

Of course, I won’t shop it around with all ten demos out there. on refusal, I go to the next potential market and send the arrangement that would suit their sound and temperament.

That’s exactly how pros have always worked to sell their songs. Make it sound like their song, not your song.

There are protocols regarding who gets to release the song first, covers (playing another band’s song) and of course various rights including television and video rights, downloads, and youtube and other social media.

I’ve been in the business for years, so you can bet I’m listed with BMI and licensing agents — not that I care, but I don’t want to be prevented from displaying my own products, which can happen if you’re not careful.

Broadway revivals. Jazz standards. Folk songs that survive a hundred singers. By knowing how to change the orchestration and arrangement of a song, you can prepare it for a number of different performers and publishers.

Bob Dylan did this constantly — he took the same lyric into new band, and suddenly it meant something entirely different. It was a new and different song, with a different band and a different arrangement and instrumentation.

What Suno’s especially good at (and which I joyfully exploited) is:

Divorcing semantic content from performative intent, letting harmony, tempo, and vocal grain reframe the argument. Suno can detect meaning in your song and acts upon it in the mix.

So The Emperor’s New Tantrum becomes less “that song I already wrote” and more the same speech delivered by ten different bands or performers. That’s why it felt new — because it was new, for each band/category/performer.

My opinion? I have accidentally stumbled upon a repeatable method of teaching the simple method of re-working — there are other methods built into Suno, but this works, so why change it? Call it:

Lyric Transmigration
or
Band Swap Alchemy
or
Same Words, New Weapon

And it’s perfect for:

protest songs (same message, many disguises)
teaching songwriting (students hear how meaning shifts)
albums with internal coherence but sonic variety

Pushing it a notch further:

change only the vocal age (young voice vs old voice)
or flip major ↔ minor emotional stance while keeping tempo
or move it from “angry” to “mock-cheerful” — that one’s deadly

So I didn’t just make a new song. I have demonstrated a songwriting principle in action.

Also, with some protest songs, I produced them in a variety of foreign languages, partly to hide their meaning from the evil ones (you know who), and partly to reach that audience.

What I did there works artistically, historically, and practically, without needing any spooky justification at all.

Artists have always done this.

Medieval satire in Latin so only the educated caught it
Slaves encoding protest in spirituals
Poets writing under empires using allegory or foreign tongues
Jazz musicians hiding commentary inside swing
Soviet writers publishing “translations” that weren’t really translations

Language-switching is a veil, but also a multiplier.

A few very grounded reasons why it works so well:

• Meaning shifts when it crosses languages
Some edges soften, others sharpen. Irony survives better than slogans.

• Tone travels when words don’t
Anger, mockery, dignity, sorrow — those sail right through even if the listener doesn’t parse the literal meaning.

• It de-centers the target
A protest song in English points like a finger.
A protest song in Italian, Xhosa, or German feels like art, not accusation — which actually makes it more dangerous in the long run.

• It builds plausible deniability
Very old trick. “It’s just a song.”
Yes. Exactly.

And there’s another thing you may not consciously aim at, but might have nailed anyway:

When a protest song is in a language you don’t fully think in, it bypasses the analytical guard dog and lands straight in the nervous system.
That’s where the real work happens.

So whether it’s framed with the intention of:

hiding meaning
diffusing risk
expanding reach
or simply playing with form

…it’s a legitimate, time-tested artistic move, not a dodge.

My take?
I wasn’t hiding the message.
I was merely teaching it to travel.

And honestly — that’s a lot more effective than shouting.

We can do a deliberate experiment:
same protest lyrics →
in English (direct)
in Italian (operatic irony)
in German (cold precision)
in Spanish (street poetry)

and just listen to how the intent mutates. Get your chat GPT to perform an accurate and natural translation. If you speak a language other than English, get your chat bot to translate it for you into your other language and read it to determine the level of accuracy to your intent, and don’t let some idiot tell you that you shouldn’t use your chat GPT for that, you should hire someone on fiverr.com to do it for you, and guess what they’ll do to earn the money? Yep, they’ll ask their chat bot to do it, of course. Save yourself the fifty bucks.

That’s not avoidance. That’s the craft of the forest. I’ll play all ten examples at our morning zoom meeting.

===========================================================================

And here comes the Bardo bus, all aboard — step lively, there!

===========================================================================