Bad Cover Alert
I won’t call it a trend—I’d need more than two examples for that—but I’m already exhausted by white guys deploying acoustic guitars to make ironic commentaries about hip-hop. Last fall a Chicago act called Nice Peter got some attention with “50 Cent Is a Pussy”, a diss track that isn’t exactly sure what it’s dissing. (Frontman Peter Shukoff’s hamhanded attempt to explain the song is here.) And currently rising up Technorati’s list of most popular YouTube videos is a cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” by Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton. The guy has clearly spent too much time reshaping the song into an oozing adult-contemporary number for it to be a total goof, but the joke’s obvious ten seconds in. It’s also kind of a bore—doing the song James Taylor–style stretches it close to six minutes.
Cover track, guy making a funny, or example of sublimated anxiety about race? Mark your calendars: Coulton plays Jammin’ Java on Sunday, March 11, which may answer the question.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
I’m partial to the cover of “Straight Outta Compton” by Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon. It’s benignly ironic, if such a thing is possible. Pair it with ni9e.com’s “Explicit Content Only” version of the N.W.A. album itself, and you got yourself an afternoon o’ fun.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
OK, gotta investigate further here: The Nina Gordon cover (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otL6FvpALQg), combined with Dynamite Hack’s “Boys in the Hood,” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgT9UpyYDis) leads me to think we now have a serious problem with acoustic guitars and last generation’s hip-hop. I preferred it when the nerds left the songs well enough alone but made videos with action figures like that one for “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIIsOdTc2RQ
March 9th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
I think you’re discounting the pervasiveness of hip-hop. If somebody did an ironic acoustic version of the song for Honeycombs cereal, you’d probably be ambivalent about it. Redoin’ a hip-hop track acoustic-style is the same thing, though: The omnipresent sound of culture reprocessed as an in-joke.
‘Cause where I come from, Honeycombs and N.W.A. were the constants, yo.