Unhip hop ... MC Nuts performs the Daffodils rap
Jesus, we have really reached the giddy limit. Thanks to Cumbrian tourist board Wordsworth's most famous poem, Daffodils, has been turned into a rap (with an accompanying video of the rapper, dressed as a squirrel, high-fiving it around the Lake District) in order, they claim, to boost tourism and reawaken people's interest in poetry.
On that last point the Cumbrian Tourist Board have some task at hand, as sadly not even poets can interest people in poetry any more. As the old adage goes, most publishers would rather have a burglar in their office than a poet. Furthermore, I think it's safe to assume that those who visit Cumbria do so precisely to get away from Snoop Dogg blaring out of passing cars.
Would tourism to Florence and Siena be improved by setting Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova to a Dr Dre backbeat and getting 50 Cent to perform it? Not even Baltimore, America's most blighted city, uses rap to sell itself, and there at least there might some justification.
This is not to say that poetry cannot be set to music. Jim Parker's series of exquisite collaborations with John Betjeman spring readily to mind. But rap, that most determinedly modern and metropolitan of musical genres couldn't be more wrong for the Lake District.
One could, for instance, see how Eliot's The Waste Land (not all of it, just the stanza that begins "Unreal city") might, whilst doing nothing for tourism, at least reflect the sullen, frightened mood of many Londoners. Equally Tennyson's Charge of Light Brigade is arguably quite gangsta.
And Coleridge's druggy Kubla Khan could probably be employed quite effectively as a voiceover to some Goa Trance track. For all I know that may have already happened. But which rapper could ever convincingly claim that he "wandered lonely as a cloud"?
