Spotify Playlist of Sad Ass Cover Songs That White People Like
Leave it up to White people to take an upbeat, joyous piece of pop music, strip it down to its morose, 6-string basics, and just, bum out about it.
There’s something about a succesful pop song, say “Take On Me”, that White people just hear and think, “yea, yea, that’s cool, but what if it was slower!?. Right? Riiiiight?”
It’s almost as if all of us, us White people, at the same time, like a cohesive unit, hear a successful song – sometimes an already sad one – agree that the way this song could be better was if it had less instruments.
Especially if those instruments are strumming, or plinking, directly on the quarter – or even sixteenth – notes, a 4-on-the-floor with a piano or guitar. So dramatic.
Every cover song that isn’t slowed down and sung while the performer is hungover, upsets us.
We White people have this place in our soul (yes, we have souls), I’ll call it the Might As Well Be Kristen Stewart Place.
As in, somewhere deep in the center of every White is this gif of a young woman who may or may not, but Might As Well Be, Kristen Stewart, saying sad-sack stuff like,
If we walk into one coffee shop – non-chain of course, unless its a local chain, but not one of the bigger local chains, the good local chains with just the right amount of locations – and someone isn’t playing a song that sounds like it Could Be Bon Iver, our days are fucking ruined.
As a White person, I can attest, we like our emotional catharsis via a song we have heard before, but wait, what’s this?
Just a guitar?
And is that…a falsetto?
How familiar yet different-but-in-a-familiar way, you know? Like I’m hearing a song I know in a new way, but like, that new way is also comfortingly not-new.
We want our nostalgia acknowledged, sung through the song itself, the cover version containing within its performance our longing for the original.
The First Time
I remember where I was – well, down to a general 15 mile radius – when I first found my own Might As Well Be Kristen Stewart Place.
“Hey Ya” had just finished rocking the world in a way that puts it – still – in the running for the biggest song of the 21st century. The popularity of “Hey Ya” was like “Single Ladies”, if every place you went was also a suburban wedding.
After the world woke up to a post-“Hey Ya” version of itself, the roar of dopamine now crashing back at low tide, Matt Weddle stepped in and gave us White folk what I, at the time, didn’t know we needed.
It was my first experience with the melonchollie cover of an otherwise uptempo pop song, and it was, as well, the first Youtube video I remember needing to have.
Like, this cover version of “Hey Ya” made Youtube an essential website, elevating it from its cat videos, nice-to-have status.
What Makes A Great Cover Song
The legacy of the sad, often acoustic guitar, version of a song appears to be never ending.
As I mentioned earlier, a song can already be sad, emotive, sung over acoustic guitars, and White people will still flock to a further stripped down, infinitely less complex version of it.
I like most of the cover versions I mention in this post, and include in the playlist. I am, after all, a White.
But Birdy goes too far.
This 1 video has 186 Million views. More than the top 10 Bon Iver versions on Youtube combined, by far.
Why is the Birdy version bad?
Because this is What Makes a Good Cover Song.
- If the original is uptempo, the cover will be more successful slowed down
- If happy, make sad, or vice versa
- If the original is in a tenor voice, a baritone version would be more interesting
- If a male sings the original, give the cover to a female (keeping all pronouns the same, ideally)
- If the first song uses digital instruments, sure, strip it down to acoustics
The most successful version of a cover song – and certainly strongest proponent for my set of What Makes A Good Cover Song criteria – may very well be Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2U”.
Where Prince’s original was big on production, and swung with rhythm, O’Connor successfully slows it down while (take note Birdy) still emoting.
Cornell than strips it down further, while still emoting, adding layers of feeling to a song that was written by Prince (an enigma of a man who played with masculine, feminine and androgynous powers), covered by Sinead O’Connor (a Catholic Irish heroine), and covered again by Cornell (a White, Northwestern rocker).
Each iteration adds to the history of the song, even if each iteration strips it down further musically. Each voice adds a layer of meaning, Cornell’s hits us because we didn’t expect it after O’Connor’s, the same way O’Connor’s surprised us after Prince’s.
Justin Vernon, on “Skinny Love” did everything that “Skinny Love” is supposed to do.
Birdy, of all my Rules to a Good Cover, only happens to be a different gender than Vernon. Everything else she brings to the song is completely unnecessary.
Vernon is already painfully soulful, he’s already stripped the song down to its bare essentials, and most importantly, he gives the song enough dynamism to make the minimal amount of instruments on the track a pitch perfect decision, not a lazy, no-better-ideas fall back.
Birdy says, “fuck all that” and just plunks clumsy hands on basic keys.
I don’t like to attack musicians. I think there’s enough criticism in the world. I by and large chose to focus on positive things to write about.
That’s how bad the Birdy version of “Skinny Love” is. Abandon-your-principles bad. Scathingly unnecessary, a live-action Mulan of a cover song.
Fear of a White Planet
Why do some of these cover songs make me so angry?
I think it has to do with Vernon’s “my my my” in “Skinny Love”.
It’s at this moment (“my my my”) in the song that he switches from falsetto to his deeper voice, and moments later, switching back to a scratching howl for “and I told you to be…”.
Birdy’s version has none of these vocal dynamics. And that lack of emotional range, lack of emotional expression, is a constant theme of White culture: “discomfort with emotion and feelings” being a key facet of our organizations built in a White Supremacist culture.
Birdy’s version of “Skinny Love” does to “Skinny Love” what White girls in vests, leggings, and Uggs did to pumpkin spice.
It’s the same devaluing of emotion that allowed the original sin of white, watered-down cover songs, which came to be more popularly known as, “Rock ‘n Roll”.
Birdy covering Bon Iver is itself a watered down version of this original sin, but it the roots of that sin are there, nonetheless, available to mix my metaphors and irritate my delicate sensibilities.
We White people are not entirely comfortable with public displays of emotion. We associate emotional outbursts within our own community with poverty or being Italian.
In a checkout line at Target I want everyone to act like robots until we get through with the purchasing of our goods as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But music is not the place to hold back, it is the place to push up against our boundaries, to question the faulty logic that created them, to acknowledge and move past the errors in thinking that box us into our comfort zone. Music is the place we go to go all out. If not there, where?