Freestyle Debate Summary
I believe it was some famous guy whose name eludes me (Thomas Jefferson? Mark Twain? Karl Marx?) who said, “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” I think I’ve never appreciated that as much as I do now, having just recorded my summary of the second presidential debate. See, for my previous two debate raps, I’ve spent hours (in the first debate, way too many hours) reading the debates and writing up rhymed summaries for myself to rap later.
This time, I wanted to take less time. So after watching a brief clip of the debate to hear the candidate’s voices (conclusion: I don’t care), I brought up the debate transcript, turned on a looped backbeat, and began freestyling. I had gotten maybe a quarter of the way down the page when I realized: “Crap, I’m already ten minutes into this!”
Since the whole thing was freestyled and recorded real-time with no pre-writing, you actually get to hear my realization on the podcast. Anyway, the whole thing clocks in at nearly 23 minutes, which is a lot longer than the previous debate raps, a little longer than I’d like, but still not nearly as long as watching the debate itself. More importantly, it took me much less time to do, so I’m likely to freestyle a summary for the final debate next week (unless I get a lot of people emailing to say “the first two were much better, please pre-write the last one!”)
Anyway, enough written blather. Time for rhyming verbal blather!