I’m learning to dance salsa and bachata. I don’t speak Spanish and have no real desire to learn, which is a bummer since that’s 95% of available music and I spend many hours a week practicing. Which means my options are:
Dance a pandora playlist composed entirely of songs in Spanish which is fine I guess but not terribly engaging.
Dance to salsa/bachata covers of extremely popular English songs. Boooring.
I have been investigating a secret option 3: make salsa/bachata soundtracks with Suno using English lyrics that I actually like! This works better than it has any right to; Suno is great these days.
But where would I get these lyrics, you ask? Well, we have a few options:
Old Poetry
Did you know that over the last several centuries people would put out absolute banger musical lyrics but, for unguessable reasons, never actually set them to music? Absolute madness. Criminally wasteful. Then they just put them in an unlocked room where anyone could just walk in and take them!
Anyway, I present to you the following:
a salsa rendition of Saltbush Bill’s Second Fight, a poem by Banjo Paterson about a scumbag sheep herder (Saltbush Bill) and the owner of a beautiful grassy hill (Stingy Smith) trying to get said sheep the hell off his land. It was written in 1897 and it’s still great today.
(The last time I was dancing to Saltbush Bill’s Second Fight with a practice partner, my dance instructor happened to walk in and she immediately yelled “FOR A LARGE NUMBER OF REASONS YOU NEED TO DANCE TO ACTUAL SALSA” which I found hilarious. Listen, if it has the conga drum hitting on 2 then it’s salsa!)
Phantasmagoria, a VERY LONG poem by Lewis Carrol (this is part 1 of 7) featuring an explanation of the bureaucratic process by which ghosts are allocated houses, is also excellent as salsa:
The Man From Ironbark is about an Australian big-city barber who pranks a farmer by pretending to cut his throat with a hot razor (!!!!) and this jape is taken very poorly. Works amazingly as smooth, sensual bachata:
Sidebar: The Swing Alternative
Salsa, if you're dancing on2 (which I do), requires you to dance to music that plays a conga drum on beat 2 of each measure or it feels really weird. Which means you have to dance on2 salsa to… salsa music. A regrettable limitation of the style.
But Bachata has no such constraints! All bachata needs to be danceable is a song with 8-count musical phrases, which really is most music. So there's quite a lot of— for instance— electro swing that you can just dance bachata to and it works great! The following is an electro swing mix of (part of) G.K. Chesterton's Lepanto, about that one time Europe really stuck it to the Ottoman Empire:
So far, so respectable. But you know what’s less respectable to dance to?
Your Dance Partner’s Random Life Complaints
She has many of these. For instance, she has been trying to get the Community Supported Agriculture mailing service to stop sending her emails about the service she already cancelled. Regrettably, its customer support is staffed by an LLM. After several emails she came to the conclusion that the chatbot would never actually solve her problem so she stopped replying.
Anyway, this is the CSA Chatbot’s Lament, about a rather pushy chatbot who would really like it if you responded to his emails. I was attempting a blend between salsa and dubstep but it has the conga on-2 so it’s still danceable!
My dance partner also feels strongly that a lot of the homework assignments for her education degree program are kinda stupid and pointless and don’t teach anything genuinely useful.
In that spirit, this is the Instructor’s Polka, from the perspective of her ed instructor who is sexually attracted to wasting your time.
You Can Also Port Whole Essays To House Music With Basically No Alteration
Behold, The Self Is A Policy Document! This went shockingly well. I really like Big House music as a stupid and dramatic thing you can set preachy essays to. It hits. Regrettably, this is not super danceable as salsa or bachata but it’s magnificent so I have decided to forgive myself in advance.
You’re welcome.
FAQs:
So, how hard is it to generate these tracks?
For generating song lyrics with Claude:
It’s a bit tricky since Claude and other LLMs tend to gravitate toward extremely hackneyed rhymes and things which technically fit the meter but don’t sound very good. These coexist with lyrics that are truly excellent in the same output.
Consequently, putting together a song with Claude involves reprompting a few times (I often have to tell Claude to take more risks and to be weirder), sifting out the flawed gems from the garbage, correcting inevitable rhyme/meter issues (LLMs are still very inconsistent at this), frankensteining together the best parts of the different generated lyrics, and giving the end product a once-over for consistency.
I’ve also noticed that for whatever reason, Claude does way better if you force it to write in any format that isn’t iambic poetry in an AABB rhyming scheme. I wonder if it’s because, being the most common poetic format, the median example of iambic AABB poetry is far worse than the median example of any other rhyme/meter scheme? Who knows. Regardless of why this is, it remains that ABAB is ~fine; ABBA is ~fine; AABB is a dumpster fire.
Lastly, I observe that the creative (lol) process is helped dramatically by feeding specific written materials into Claude that it can riff off of— the CSA chatbot’s actual sent emails, for instance, or the specific written assignments my dance partner has received for her ed degree.
For generating music from the text of lyrics:
Suno makes it really easy to generate a track that’s like 94% dead-on excellent and 6% weird AI glitches or things that don’t quite work right. With a lot of elbow grease and annoying labor you can get it to 97% excellent, and you will never get up to 100% without exporting all the stems from Suno and messing around with an actual music program like Audacity or something.
This is especially true with spoken-word stuff— Suno’s AI doesn’t understand how to pronounce acronyms (such as “SEC”) or years written as numbers (such as “2025”) and also doesn’t use appropriate vocal inflections all the time. You can in-principle just replace that section of song with Suno’s AI but I’ve noticed that these section-replacements don’t always slot neatly into the original song. For instance, I tried to remove some weird vocal glitching from The Self Is A Policy Document but failed to generate acceptable replacements for the relevant sections; eventually I said “fuck it, it’s good enough as-is.”
At some point I’m probably gonna try exporting the instrumental stems from Suno and recording the vocals myself. It’s basically spoken-word prose poetry overlaid over a soundtrack, how hard can it be?
Isn’t it weird to dance sensual bachata to a song about an Australian farmer assaulting a barber?
Nah.
Why is there a polka song in there?
Really the conga requirement for salsa only exists if you’re dancing on-2; if you’re dancing on-1 you can dance salsa to anything of an appropriate tempo. And we needed to drill on-1 that day.
Also, polka is delightful.
Won’t you miss out on important skills by dancing to weird DIY Suno tracks instead of real music?
A complicated question!
As I understand it, in salsa music you can dance to one of a number of different instruments that might be prominent in a given song. The conga drum is what you dance to by default if you’re dancing on-2, but the clave and cowbell are also sometimes options, and if they are then you get style points for dancing to them. Also, dancing to real music means that in the wild you’re more likely to recognize specific places where you can do something cool in response to a musical hit, which also gets you style points.
These are real benefits! And there’s a point of view (why my dance instructor holds) that if a theoretically optimal practice arrangement exists then you should do it or else you’re leaving skill on the table for no good reason.
But I disagree. In the long run “how much fun you’re having practicing” is the most important metric to optimize for in this or basically any other complex skill. Most guys flake out of learning to dance because the learning curve is brutal; dance is a slavering beast that will devour as many hours as you can heap into its terrible maw, and if you don’t find ways to enjoy working the metaphorical hours-shovel then you will eventually find other ways to occupy your time.
In conclusion, I'm not saying you have to turn the long-winded emails from your dance partner’s second-level manager into bachata tracks and then practice dancing to them for three months. I'm just saying: Suno is right there.