Antonio's Music Dumping Ground

Antonio · 06-17-2012, 04:29 PM

REFLECTION:
I Don't Give a Fuck About Your YouTube Cover

YouTube is a great place. I think it is one of the most important websites ever, and it is also has a monolithic presence in our current society, whether we know it or not. One of the most interesting (read:ironically hilarious) things about YouTube is how it's basically become a glorified music player over the years. At this point people more consistently use it for streaming music than for watching anything that shows up on it. I mean, while it isn't the most optimal form of sharing or listening to music, it's still the most accepted by everyone as a whole and it still works at an ok level to keep most satisfied. So yeah, I would say that (seeing 99% of the links I have in this thread) I use YouTube for my quick play needs and for my musical enjoyment.....

…..And the last thing that I want to do is watch some fucking asshat butcher one of my favorite songs in some arbitrary manner that's of use to NO ONE.

Now, I'm not talking about people doing a cover because they genuinely respect/like an artist and want to show their love for a song they feel should be heard. Sharing others' music with people is what helps them be successful and a well done representation of it is what can keep it alive, not to mention kicking.

No, I'm talking about stuff like this

and this

and this

Oh, you can play Beethoven's 5th Symphony with your tongue while juggling? Great, now can you play the Legend of Zelda theme with pipe cleaners while singing “this is gimmicky bullshit”?

Being a guy who plays a number of video games and enjoys reading up on them and their history, I find this a lot with old-school game themes. Countless times have I had some video shoved into my face of “Metal/Bluegrass/Acapella cover of Mario/Zelda/Sonic/etc.” and people around me fawning over it. I usually find that these people also have little knowledge of or don't really care about music and are just watching it to see the one tune from their childhood being “re-imagined”.

But it's not. It's not at all. The only difference is that the instrument or method may have changed, but many times the ideas that make up the songs are played as straight as an arrow. There's little deviation except for the outlandish manner that the song is being played in, and that's not as musical as it is just visually different.

What really pisses me off is not that people do stuff like this (to each his own, I guess) but that they get POPULARITY AND RECOGNITION for doing so. Even if the cover isn't bad I still feel like it cheapens the experience of the original song, turning it into some sort of punchline for the musically retarded to go “OMG LEIK, THIS IS SO ORIGINUL AND GOOD BCUZ IT WAS DONE IN ON BONGOS WHILE UNDERWATUR DURRR”.

I believe that if you have to tack on some needless visual stuff to get people to watch your cover of a song then it's not really worth watching in the first place. I especially feel sorry for the original artists, many of whom have tons of other songs that are equal or better in quality but people only want to hear the one song that they can immediately recognize. Not only that, but 9 times out of 10 a lot of those people don't even know the name of the artist and just see them as the “<insert song title here> guy”.

Really, it's kind of a kick in the teeth to see a great song by an artist that should be respected reduced to some idiot thinking that he needs to add a needless gimmick to become “Internet famous”. Most of the time when people do this they think that they can keep up the same gimmick with different songs, but once the novelty wears off they just become another flash-in-the-pan expendable musician. Think the next generation of the One-Hit Wonder.

And as a musician of about 8 years, it feels like my craft has been cheapened to the point where I'm messing with my guitar and someone who wouldn't know an oboe from their asshole thinks I'm immediately shit just cause I didn't learn how to play random ass song from random shitty game.

In short, if you're going to do a cover on YouTube please have something to offer me that I wouldn't be able to get on the street or at some side show for 5 dollars. And if you try to show me a “re-imagining” of a song, I’m not going to watch it, but I'm going to listen to it, and if it doesn't interest me musically then it goes right back into that part of the internet where uninteresting crap goes to die.

Goddamn do I have a headache now..... :S