TLDR; The answer is yes. And roots reggae, blues metal, country, EDM, glam rock, and philosophical jazz rap. Because when gods turn people into trees for sport, a single genre feels insufficient.
I’ve spent the last two weeks inside Ovid’s head, and I need to talk about what I found there.
It started simply enough: a contemporary translation of the Metamorphoses, something that let the poem breathe without the Victorian gloves. Did this together with my man Claude. Then the images came—oil-painting style covers for each book, along with little visual easter eggs hidden in the code. Then the music. Oh god, the music.
Here’s what happens when you live inside a 2,000-year-old poem: you start hearing voices. Not the solemn, academic voices of classical reception. I mean Daphne spitting hyperpop verses about how escape means turning into a tree. Medusa doing roots reggae about how “weaponization’s just another cage they built.” Phaëthon dropping a progressive rap track about imposter syndrome while literally falling from the sun-chariot.
The website went live last week. The songs are still multiplying. And I keep asking myself: what is it about this particular poem that makes you want to throw every genre at the wall?
The answer is: Ovid was a genre-hopper first.
We flatten him into “epic poet” because the academy needs categories. But read him fresh and he’s doing cosmic horror (Deucalion’s flood), MeToo testimony (Philomela’s tapestry), dark comedy (Midas’ donkey ears), and cosmic jazz improvisation (Pythagoras rapping about metempsychosis). The Metamorphoses isn’t one thing. It’s a jukebox someone smashed with a celestial hammer.
That’s why the playlist goes from glam rock (Lycaon’s disco-dining on human flesh) to country-folk (Orpheus’ second loss) to witch house techno (Medea boiling her revenge). Each story demands its own sonic vocabulary. You can’t sing Callisto’s bear-transformation in the same register as Narcissus’ mirror-pool dissolving into a flower. One’s a trauma narrative. The other’s a diss track about vanity.
The darkness is the point.
Let’s be honest: this poem is rough. Gods rape. Fathers kill daughters. Women get turned into trees for saying no. If you translate it like it’s some delicate artifact, you betray the text. Ovid wasn’t writing with gloves. He was writing with a knife.
The songs let the characters fight back. Philomela’s tapestry becomes a ragecore jazz scream. Caeneus gets a punk rock anthem. Myrrha’s incest confession is a gothic piano ballad that doesn’t flinch. The music gives them the interiority Ovid only hints at.
Suddenly, it’s alive.
That’s the magic. When Medusa spits “Perseus means ‘avenger’ but I’m the one who paid the price,” she’s not a mythological footnote anymore. She’s a person arguing her case across millennia. These aren’t stories about transformation—they’re arguments for why transformation was the only weapon left.
And yes, there’s disco. Because when Europa gets abducted by Zeus-as-bull, that bassline needs to thump with the cosmic absurdity of it all. The horror and the beat can coexist. In fact, they have to.
The project lives at ovid-metamorphoses.joonaheino.com. The songs are stacking up. I’m not sure when it’ll be done—maybe never. Ovid didn’t finish his poem either. He just stopped writing when exile got too loud.
But here’s what I learned: just because something’s 2,000 years old doesn’t mean it should sound 2,000 years old. These stories are still arguing, still transforming, still needing new voices to sing them wrong enough to be right.
Turns out, all you need is a week, and the willingness to let gods be assholes in 15 different musical registers.
Nothing retains its form. Not poems. Not genres. Not even the people who make them.
And that’s the whole point.