#I love reinterpretations and now they're being dragged through the mud

[shakibone]

I hate AI voice replicators

See, I like musical genre remixes. Things where a popular song is done in the style of another artist, or another era. The Baseballs understood this, with their cover of Rihanna’s Umbrella:

I’m about to go off, so more under the cut!

Neil Gaiman once said (here on Tumblr, which I'll have to paraphrase due to an unfortunate inability to find the source):

“I enjoy songs. Sometimes I enjoy them too much and they grow tired. A good cover allows me to enjoy them again for the first time.” -Neil Gaiman, heavily paraphrased

Scott Bradlee understands the power of these covers, stylistic remixes, enough to launch multiple careers off of it. Such as with his own remix (featuring Casey Abrams & The Sole Sisters) of the afore-featured Umbrella by Rihanna:

Or one of my own personal favourites, Sugar, We’re Going Down originally by Fall Out Boy:

But!

These era-adjacent (or era-divorced) covers need not be wholly original performances to have value. Let’s return to Sugar, We’re Going Down by Fall Out Boy. While Scott Bradlee and singer Joey Cook reworked it in their own way, YouTube user Johann Olsson made his own era-divorced remix, this time transplanting them Boys what Fall Out to the 80′s using the original singer’s (Patrick Stump) vocal recording re-interpreted to an entirely different genre, rythm, and style:

Listen to both covers listed here and then the original and tell me they don’t each reveal something different about the subject, that they don’t highlight new facets of the same material. This is why I love covers that work on the premise of transplanting a song to a completely different style/genre. And it’s not just divided by era! Here’s what you get when you take John Denver’s classic anthem to pastoral paradise and nature’s magnificence and run it through it’s philosophical antithesis. This is Melodicka Bros rendition, which (to my reading) seeks to find that same beauty in an industrial world stripped of it:

You can hear the singers (identified only as Joe and Dave) yearning for that beauty which John Denver knew but they will never be afforded. Or at least...

That’s my interpretation.

These stylistically remixed covers afford such great exploration of the original work alongside what the covering artist bring to the material, that it inspires awe in me. I adore this genre of remixes and covers.

And now

AND NOW.

YouTube reccomends me garbage AI covers. I’m served up the digital ghost of Frank Sinatra singing Poker Face, Spongebob (which is to say Tom Kenny, the actor who gosh darn voices him) singing Gangsta’s Paradise or some nonsense, and the entire Team Fortress 2 cast (Nathan Vetterlein, Rick May, Dennis Bateman, Gary Schwartz, Grant Goodeve, Robin Atkin Downes, John Patrick Lowrie, and Ellen McLain) singing Bohemian Rhapsody or whatever. Stolen voices twisted to shallow purposes, with no regard to the artists whose voices are taken and their wishes regarding such uses:

https://catnippackets.tumblr.com/post/722596290851176448/catnippackets-listen-i-say-this-with-patience-bc

The use of these human beings voices to speak words they did not utter is horrifying, but on a personaly level it fill my algorythmically generated feed with utter tripe.

I don’t want to end on a downer, so here’s a final example of the types of stylistic remixes I adore. Presenting Brady Love with a beutiful rendition in the style of Luciano Pavarotti of Apple Bottom Jeans (Originally by Flo Rida):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIZz2PMnEDM

This one is without preview due to Tumblr’s limitations. Perhaps we can find a metaphor in that.