Erik Didriksen, a New York musician and Tumblr poet featured in Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and the A.V. Club, has cleverly reimagined more than 100 classic pop songs as 14-line iambic pentameter Shakespearean sonnets.
Cross David Bowie with William Shakespeare, as Erik Didriksen did after the influential rocker died earlier this year, and you get this throwback take on Bowie’s hit “Heroes”:
We, with our time borne ceaselessly away Can heroes be, if just for one brief day.
Didriksen, a New York musician and Tumblr poet featured in Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and the A.V. Club, has cleverly reimagined more than 100 classic pop songs as 14-line iambic pentameter Shakespearean sonnets. He started with an adaptation of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” in 2014, and since has tweaked the works of artists such as 50 Cent, Adele, Justin Bieber, Green Day, and Drake.
He discusses and performs some of his best works, pulled from his Tumblr and his book Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs.