About

Collective Poetry is a series of videos remixing a small extract from American rock band Collective Soul's hit song Shine, replacing a specific lyric with various random noises, mainly from animals, while taking Sounds Like Music as a direct source of inspiration.

Origin

Shine is the debut single by American alternative rock band Collective Soul, serving as their lead song for their debut album Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid, first released in 1993 (official clip shown below, left).
On September 12th, 2012, famous Mashup artist and DJ Gregg Gillis (stage name Girl Talk) uploaded a video to YouTube featuring his cat meowing to the tune of the song pre-chorus, seemingly covering the muffled "Yeah" from the lead singer at the end of each guitar riff. (shown below, right). This video has gained more than 6 million views in the next six years.

Spread

On July 16th, 2014, YouTube user SpazzTH uploaded a video titled "Collective Peent" (shown below, left) and taken from a Tumblr post of theirs from July 9th that would feature, this time, a bird. While being the initial instance of this specific parody, it was a reupload by user steelels1 on September 22nd, which named the bird an American Woodcock, that attracted attention, gaining, as of January 2019, over 500 000 views. Both the initial cat version and this latter one would then be featured as entries on the r/SoundLikeMusic sub-reddit, respectively in 2015^[1] and 2017^[2]. However, what would greatly launch a slew of parodies under the "Collective Poetry" name was a peculiar compilation of clips, broadly titled Collective Poetry, edited by sound engineer Kevin Carafa and posted under his username kevinerror to the related sub-reddit r/YouTubeHaikus on July 3rd, 2015^[3] (shown below, right). This version has gained more than 1 500 000 views on YouTube and about 4 100 upvotes in the reddit thread over the next 4 years.

Based on the name and concept of Carafa's parody, YouTube user Ochre Jelly would upload ten different videos on April 8th, 2017, that served as a "10-verse video poem". (first parody shown below)

Various Examples

Common variations

Collective Poetry variations

External References

^[1] Reddit – Collective Soul Cat

^[2] Reddit – an American Woodcock helps out Collective soul

^[3] Reddit – [Poetry] Collective Poetry