I first had this idea in like 2017, and, fair warning, it is a very silly idea.
so, the idea is that it’s like the Pokérap, but with toki pona words instead of pokémon.
you know, the “tokirap”. and uh, there’s a very good chance that you’re unfamiliar
with at least one of those things. please bear with me.
the Pokérap is a song created for the 4Kids dub of the Pokémon anime, with lyrics that
are, for the most part, just a list of every single first generation pokémon, and toki
pona is a minimalist constructed language that I’ve talked about quite a lot on this
channel.
I’m making this video as part of a celebration of the twenty year anniversary of when toki
pona was first published online, which was on August 8th, 2001. I figured that this is
the perfect opportunity to finally do something with this very silly idea that I’ve been
sitting on for so many years.
I don’t want to just show the song though. I also wanted to present my process in writing
it, as an homage to a certain row of a consonant inventory table.
first of all, uh, why? why would you want to make a parody of the Pokérap where instead
of listing pokémon it’s listing words in a constructed language? well, the main reason
is that the names sound vaguely similar, so it makes for a good pun.
the secondary reason is that listing things in song form just happens to be a good way
to memorize things in general. /b d ɡ/ criticized the Pokérap for its “educational rap flow”,
saying that it sounds more like an educational song than actual rap. so, why not repurpose
it into something that actually is educational? the tokirap could, in theory, be helpful for
people who want to memorize toki pona’s vocabulary.
I am not the first to do something like this for toki pona. kalama nimi pi toki pona is
a song inspired by Tom Lehrer’s Elements, listing toki pona words to the tune of Modern
Major General. I went out of my way to make sure this tokirap is sufficiently different
from kalama nimi pi toki pona, and I definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t
heard it before.
so then, let’s get into the process!
the first problem to deal with is the question of exactly what words to include!
well, this would have been a bigger question if I were doing this at pretty much any point
in the past. like, there’s the one twenty canon nimi pu, but there’s also a lot of
pretty important words that aren’t part of that set, so I’d need to either not have
any of those, or pick and choose which ones to put in the song. but luckily for me, the
first official Toki Pona Dictionary was recently released! so, I’ll be using the 137 nimi
ku suli as the set of words to use for the tokirap.
this leads to a secondary problem. the general flow of the Pokérap, which I want to preserve,
is structured with pairs of lines that have four pokémon each, and you can only really
do that if the number of things you’re listing is a multiple of eight. that’s why the Pokérap
ends awkwardly with “that’s all folks!”, because the 150 pokémon included is two fewer
than a multiple of eight.
137 is going to cause the opposite problem; it’s exactly one more than a multiple of
eight. to solve this, one line somewhere in the song is going to need to have one extra
word compared to all the others. fortunately, toki pona has a lot of single-syllable words,
so it shouldn’t be too hard to get this to work.
great, so now all I need to do is get these 137 words and arrange them into seventeen rhyming
pairs of lines. toki pona has more than enough rhyming pairs for this to work, so this should
be easy, right? so easy that I was able to write up a program to randomly generate tokirap
lyrics.
well, I don’t want the order to literally just be random. ideally, the lyrics should
actually be memorable. like, if someone hypothetically were to decide to memorize this song to help
them remember toki pona vocabulary, it would be helpful for them if the words were in an
order that actually made sense.
so that’s one extra goal that makes it a little harder, the other is that I want it
to like, sound decent. I am absolutely not a rapper, and this is an educational song
parody of the Pokérap, so it’s not going to sound cool, but there are some things I
want to avoid. one major one is having any of the rhyming pairs I use be single syllable
words.
in my opinion, something like rhyming “jan” with “tan” just doesn’t sound that good,
and I’d prefer if every single rhyming pair in the song is more than just one syllable.
now this means that there’s no longer enough perfect rhyming pairs in the language to do
the whole song, but there’s still a lot of near rhymes that will work just fine. so,
something like “pakala / kalama” is preferable to “jan / tan”.
also, the original Pokérap’s rhymes are pretty rough anyway, so at the very least
there’s a precedent for not caring that much about having the rhymes actually be rhymes.
great, so with those general guidelines, I’m now ready to actually turn this list of words
into the tokirap.
my first idea was to organize the lyrics phonetically, so similar sounding words would be grouped
together.
this is what kalama nimi pi toki pona does, and it worked pretty well for that song! it’s
not exactly the same though. kalama nimi pi toki pona’s lyrics mostly use alliteration,
but what I did was organize words by their rhymes, which is the opposite of alliteration.
although, one thing I did just copy directly from kalama nimi pi toki pona was having the
very last word be kijetesantakalu. it really just doesn’t fit anywhere else!
anyway, these lyrics kinda work, and if I were actually a rapper I’d probably be able
to make them sound good, but there’s still some things that I’m not happy with. there’s
a lot of parts in here where there’s three one-syllable words in a row, which makes those
parts feel really slow and boring. I’d like to have those words be spread out more throughout
the whole song.
another thing is that this completely ignores uh, everything about these words other than
what they sound like. so even if I iterated this method and got lyrics that I was completely
satisfied with aesthetically, it would still feel like a random order, one that just happens
to sound nice.
so, I tried another approach.
my next idea was to have the words organized roughly by frequency, starting with really
common basic words and getting to less common words as the song goes on.
honestly, this turned out even worse. this was not a very good idea. not only do the
resulting lyrics not sound very good, but altering the frequency data to fit the structure
of the song means that this isn’t even that representative of how frequent these words
really are. while I do like having basic grammatical particles towards the start of the song and
more obscure nimi pi pu ala towards the end, it doesn’t work to use frequency alone to
determine the order of the song.
another problem I realized is that words mean things. like, right at the start, I somehow
ended up putting “pona” next to “utala”, just because I was paying more attention to
the overall structure than the actual order of the words. and like, I could go through
and manually rework any individual parts that don’t work very well, but in the end I decided
to just do yet another pass from scratch.
this time, I went through and sorted the words mostly by meaning. and I’m not showing you
the order that came from doing that, because that’s what I ended up actually using in
the final song that you’re going to hear at the end of this video! I couldn’t get
everything sorted entirely by meaning, but for any leftovers that didn’t fit neatly
into a set of four similar words, I used one of the other two methods to figure out where
to place them, and generally went with just whatever I thought sounded better.
so, cool! I now have everything I need to perform the tokirap.
wait, hold on, the Pokérap isn’t literally just a list of pokémon. there’s other parts
to it too. what do I do for the verses? the Pokérap contextualizes its list of pokémon
by chanting the tagline “gotta catch ‘em all!” at various points throughout the song.
like, that’s why we’re listing all of these pokémon, because these are the “all”
that you gotta catch.
so, pretty much every parody of the Pokérap that lists something other than pokémon needs
to come up with some equivalent of that. what is it that we’re doing to all of these toki
pona words that makes it make sense to list all of them? well, the actual answer is that,
you’re memorizing all of them, so that you can learn the language.
and, honestly, the idea of coming up with some variant of “gotta catch ‘em all!”
that refers to the act of memorizing a list of words in a constructed language is so unbearably
dorky. like, what would you do, “gotta learn ‘em all!”? ugh, it makes me want to push
myself into a locker for even thinking of the idea.
and like, that’s pretty much unavoidable. this is an inherently dorky idea. I am a massive
dweeb for wanting to do something like this. but what I could do is obfuscate the dorkiness
a little bit.
if the verses are written in toki pona, then the only people who will know that I’m singing
about learning this conlang will be people who themselves can speak said conlang, and
really, that makes them the dweebs. that way, I won’t get pushed into a locker for making
this, I’ll be pulled into the locker instead.
and that pretty much covers my thought process writing the tokirap. however, there is still
the matter of turning it into an actual song. I could just use the instrumental for the
original Pokérap and rap over that, but since there’s fewer nimi ku suli than gen 1 pokémon,
I’d need to mess around with it to make it actually work.
also, like, if hypothetically someone wanted to learn this song, which is definitely a
major part of what this song is, it would be nice to have a dedicated instrumental for
the tokirap that isn’t literally just the Pokérap.
so, to help me out with that, I got my friend Sapaa to do the actual mixing for this track.
you might know them from BöpGil, their remix of the Vötgil episode of Conlang Critic.
and since this is a pretty big aspect of the way the final song sounds, I’ll let them
explain it to you themself. take it away, Sapaa!
SAPAA: thanks, jan Misali! hey everyone, it's Sapaa here, the producer behind this track,
and I just want to get into a little bit of how it was made. so, without spoiling too
much of it, jan Misali basically sent me a collection of vocals that I built the track
around, which isn't how I usually work, so it was pretty interesting. it has kind of
an atypical structure, you could say, but I started with the backing beat, laid down
a simple but very prominent bassline (you know, in true toki pona fashion) and I let
the melody and everything else kinda build out from there.
in between, I spiced up the track with a bunch of little details and vocal splicing that
I thought might give it some extra flavor. but you know, I'll let you hear it for yourself.
and one last thing, I actually just released my debut album, so if you like what you're
about to hear, check out Clavinetic on whatever streaming service you prefer. well, without
further ado, here's the song!