In class today we were analysing the rhetoric of Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech.

(full text here)

A great linguistic analysis of the speech was done by David Crystal, here.

We then looked at will.i.am’s musical collage of the speech, and discussed the added layering of messages through the remixed version:

(song lyrics here)

One student then alerted me to a comedic remix of Australian PM Kevin Rudd’s speech, called “rudd.i.am”:

From the sublime to the ridiculous, from the serious to the comedic, from linguistics to multimodal semiotics… all offered material for some wonderful theoretical and analytical discussions.