“Someday, we’ll find it / The rainbow connection / The lovers, the dreamers, and me”
Introduction:
Welcome back to Cover Me Badd, where we look at good covers, bad covers, and what makes them tick. It’s become something of a tradition for me to cap the end of the year with a Cover Me Badd article tackling a particularly noteworthy or legendary cover, one which undoubtedly requires special attention due to the sheer weight of the legacy it’s left behind. It’s far easier to talk about shit-ass one-shot covers from an artist’s random live performances, whether it be impromptu drunk jam sessions or low-effort acoustic covers, which is why I leave those to my normal schedule and wait until the end to tackle The Big Ones.
And if that’s where we’re at at this point in the year… then do I have a doozy for you, because today, we’re tackling one of the most acclaimed cover songs of all time, one which… involves an impromptu one-take jam session recording of an acoustic cover of a legendary showtune. That’s right, today, we’re looking at ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World’, a one-take medley by the one and only Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, released in 1993 off his second album Facing Future.
Of course, most of the world knows that the original ‘Over The Rainbow’ was performed by Judy Garland in 1939 for The Wizard of Oz. And while Ms. Garland and the movie have remained pop-cultural icons for the public at large, the original ‘Over The Rainbow’ seems to have been entirely subsumed by its acoustic Jawaiian predecessor. You ask your average person on the street what they think ‘Over The Rainbow’ sounds like and they’d be more likely to point to Iz’s version. Hell, this song, along with ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ and ‘Hey Soul Sister’, are practically the three songs most stereotypically associated with ukulele playing.
And despite that, the cover still retains so much of its power, doesn’t it? It’s been played to death and it’s become something of its genre’s own ‘Piano Man’. But it’s somehow avoided becoming a cliche; hell, I’ve never heard a single person say they were sick of this song or groan whenever it comes on. Is it just because the song and cover are that powerful? Or is it because it‘s become an untouchable sacred cow that no one is willing to criticize?
Well, that’s what we’re here today to find out, so let’s look over the rainbow to see what we’ll find in the land of Oz.
The original:
The year is 1939, and the world is in the throes of chaos.
Try to imagine yourself back in those days—the world was in the throes of economic recession, authoritarian regimes are popping up in all corners of the world with impunity, the world’s main international organization was increasingly powerless to stop the spread of fascism, race relations were at an all time low and people were still being segregated on the basis of skin color, and minority groups were being herded into concentration camps by one of the world’s foremost global powers. In other words, it has absolutely nothing to do with our current reality; but for the sake of our analysis, just try.
Enter two men—Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, two veteran songwriters who’d composed their most well-known pieces during the opening phases of the Depression. Arlen was a Broadway composer who was the brains behind songs like ‘Get Happy’, ‘Stormy Weather’, ‘Let’s Fall In Love’ and (for you Breaking Bad fans out there especially) ‘Lydia The Tattooed Lady’, while Harburg was a radical Jewish critic of organized religion and suspected Communist sympathizer who wrote the anthem of the Great Depression—’Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?’ among other things.
Both of these two men started working together in the mid ‘30s when Arlen moved to California and began writing for films, and it was then when they were hired by MGM to compose the music for a little film called The Wizard of Oz.
Yeah, you might have heard of it. It’s gone down in history as one of the most seen and watched films of all time, a highly influential work that’s a masterpiece of set design, cinematography and storytelling, and still as beloved as the day it first came out because of its stirring, universal tale of childhood insecurities and fears. It basically revolutionized film by being one of the first movies filmed in three-strip technicolor, a groundbreaking piece of technology that allowed films to contain both sound and color.
But that’s only half of the film’s appeal; it was going to take more than just advanced technological breakthroughs a la Avatar to speak to a 1939 audience. Society was falling apart, norms were crumbling left and right and the idea of world peace seemed like a pipe dream at that point. Hell, the war started just a week after the film’s initial premiere; it was not exactly a good time for the typical Hollywood brand of maudlin Shirley Temple-esque sentimentality.
No, people may have come for the flashy colors and sprightly musical numbers, but what made them stay was the emotional resonance of the story. Dorothy lives in less-than-ideal circumstances and she starts off believing she has to run away to find a better life, and along the way, she meets a whole cast of characters wanting to be something more than what they are—the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man wants a heart and the Lion wants courage. The film’s central message—that each of these characters had what they needed this entire time—directly spoke to the fears and anxieties most people were experiencing in those dark days before the war.
And nowhere is the film’s central thesis embodied better than on its most famous song, ‘Over The Rainbow’.
Yes, the song is called ‘Over the Rainbow; not ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. This song almost didn’t make it into the movie. It comes on during the five-minute mark when Dorothy almost barely rescues Toto from being euthanized; MGM executives felt that it slowed down the movie and broke the tension by coming on so early. But Arlen and Harburg really loved the song, and they threatened to quit unless the song stayed, prompting the execs to relent. And it’s a damn good thing they did, because this song practically made Arlen and Harburg and ensured they’d have a legacy far beyond their own time.
Like I said, a song about yearning for a better tomorrow was guaranteed to speak to a generation of anxious young Americans, but why has the song endured well past World War II? Well a big part of it is Judy Garland herself. Garland was an entirely different kind of child star altogether, especially contrasted with a performer like, say, Mickey Rooney, Deanna Durbin or even Shirley Temple. Shirley was all about the saccharine and fluff, but Garland had the tenacity and confidence of a more mature, seasoned performer. Her vocal timbre was very distinct, her vibrato very powerful, and her contralto allowed her to alternate between female and male-sounding voices.
She could deliver, is what I’m saying. And she sure as hell had range, to be able to deliver ‘Over The Rainbow’ the way she does. She was already pushing 16 by 1939, but she calls on all her memories of childlike wonder to give ‘Over the Rainbow’ the kind of delivery it needed. That final note, where she ends on a question—‘why, then oh why / can’t i?’ is extremely powerful; and honestly, the song had to end that way, otherwise it would just be another piece of ‘30s fluff. That uncertainty in her voice, that yearning and desire, is what makes the song so powerful, what gives it its humanity; Harburg insisted it be kept on there, and for good reason.
And that final note would go on to be an ironic echo for Garland, whose notoriously troubled personal life would take up too much space for me to chronicle. Safe to say that things were not all sunshine and rainbows for Miss Garland, and the more she overworked herself performing, the more this song would continue to haunt her and feel like a burden. To shake things up, she’d try to mix up her performance every now and then by altering her timbre, her pitch, her phrasing and diction; by 1961, if audiences wanted to hear her perform the song, they’d have to clamor for it.
One performance of the song is particularly gut-wrenching because she’s clearly struggling to hold back tears here; at that point, with the stress of her job, her failing marriage and substance abuse problems overwhelming her, you get the sense that she couldn’t bear how far her life was from the sunny idealism of the song. ‘If birds fly over the rainbow / why, then, oh why / can’t i?’ indeed.
And that’s the thing that really drives home how powerful this song is—it’s universal. It can be about whatever kind of yearning you want it to be. Many have applied this song to the Depression, to the immigrant experience, to Jews hoping for emancipation (the song’s writers were Jewish) and even the Holocaust. Hell, it’s the reason this song is so popular with LGBT+ circles; rumor has it that Gilbert Baker, the designer of the rainbow flag, was inspired by ‘Over The Rainbow’, which isn’t surprising considering Judy Garland was one of the very first gay icons.
So there we have it, a legendary musical number with a towering reputation, delivered by an artist with a troubled life who died too young. How do you even begin to tackle that?
The cover:
Well, as it turns out, you do it by being an artist with a similarly huge legacy. No pun intended.
‘Over the Rainbow’ has become something of a cliche since its initial release; it’s one of the most popular songs to cover, and it’s seen so many iterations over the decades that archivists will have a field day trying to get to them all. Think of any pop star in the last 40 years and I guarantee you they’ve most likely covered this song. Liza Minnelli? Check. Eva Cassidy? Check. Patti Labelle? Check. Ariana Grande? Checkarooni. It’s gotten to the point where it’s almost impossible to impress anyone with a cover of this song anymore.
So why is Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version still so popular?
Israel Kamakawiwo’ole is a towering legend in Hawaii to this day, so I have to be careful how I write his story. He came out as part of the group the Makaha Sons of Ni’ihau, which formed in the 70s and continued on into the 80s, where the group reached its greatest success. Iz went solo in 1990 and began putting out albums, the most successful of which was Facing Future, released in 1993 and going on to become one of the most successful Hawaiian albums of all time. It’s also the first Hawaiian album ever to go Platinum. That brought him international fame and he became one of the biggest Hawaiian performers of the 90s, until he tragically died of obesity-related complications in 1997.
A big part of why he’s so fondly remembered is his very vocal support of Hawaiian independence. Iz loved his homeland, and his homeland loved him back in return; it’s not hard to see why when you hear songs like ‘Hawai’i ‘78’ which has lines like ‘The life of this land is the life of the people/and that to care for the land (malama ʻāina) is to care for the Hawaiian culture’. Many of his songs address themes of alienation and displacement from his own home. He was indignant about the fact that Hawaiians were being treated like second-class commodities by tourists and that they’d effectively become strangers in their own land, and he often talked straight up about independence in his lyrics.
And whether he intended to or not, that message attached itself onto Iz’s eventual cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (this time, with the ‘Somewhere’ added onto the title).
This song is not the only cover on the album; there’s also bits of other popular English and Hawaiian standards on the album, including ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ and ‘Panini Pua Kea’. But ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World’ is definitely the best out of all of them. Something about it just feels different; yet I don’t really know what it is exactly. It’s just a guy playing the song over a (deceptively) simple-sounding strum pattern;. I could buy a ukulele, learn four chords and pump out something similar in no time.
It’s Iz himself who gives this cover all its power, and it especially comes through in the way he sings it. You hear this song and you hear a man with a deep sense of love and longing. But beneath it all, there’s also a sadness and yearning under it, a cry for something more, something better. He hopes he’ll find it over the rainbow, but will he now? It helps when you think about it in the context of the seeming futility of Hawaiian independence which many are still feeling now. It also helps that Iz is on the older side; he was already in his mid-30s when he released this, which helps give him that sense of world-weary doubt that really elevates his performance.
And considering my thoughts on acoustic music as a whole, as well as barebones reinterpretations of songs, I feel like I have to justify praising this cover especially after I eventually dunk on another lazy acoustic guitar song. Let me lay down a principle right here and right now—any song that relies on the bare bones has to make sure those bare bones are solid. Any Vance Joy or Matt Nathanson can just strum out a 4-chord cover and that’ll be it; but Iz’s version works because of how intimate and emotionally complex it is. It’s caught between two conflicting and seemingly unattainable goals and his solution is a pipe dream that he might not even physically achieve, but is he going to keep on dreaming? Hell yes, he is.
But most of those nuggets of subtext are derived from the original. What does Iz himself add? Intimacy. Iz has a very gentle, tender-sounding voice, one that gives you a sense of comfort just hearing it. Where the original was a very showy, theatrical number that can feel a bit remote at times, Iz’s version feels like it should be a personal experience, like the man is singing directly to you. It’s one thing to hear about someone wanting to go over the rainbow, but to be told of someone’s story, personally, helps make it more accessible and relatable to you. The song has to be stripped down because it needs that level of familiarity and warmth to really achieve its effect.
And it’s that central message of hope in trying times that really made me center the review on ‘Over the Rainbow’ rather than ‘What a Wonderful World’; let’s face it, one of those two songs matters more to this cover than the other. ‘What a Wonderful World’ is pretty incidental to this cover; yet, it had to be included, because it grounds Iz’s vision of a better tomorrow and gives it focus. That’s what makes it work so well when it pivots back into ‘Over the Rainbow’, it’s a full picture of what could be.
The verdict:
It’s a legendary cover that’s rightly earned its place in the pop-cultural pantheon.
A lot of what I’ve said of this song is just me echoing the words of better writers before me. But I feel like this song holds a special resonance especially as we close out the decade. Let’s be honest, these are not the easiest of days to be alive, with every day seeming closer to doom and destruction than the ones before. It’s getting harder and harder to hide behind the music of the past as a cloak and I don’t think the kind of blind starry-eyed faith we’re so used to is all that healthy anymore.
But at the same time, it’s not like songs like these have no more value. It’s songs like these that keep us hoping and looking towards a better tomorrow, or even to continue believing in the possibility of a better tomorrow. Back in 1939, nobody knew whether the Nazis were going to win or not; imminent doom and destruction seemed as likely as any, especially for the song’s very Jewish songwriters. And yet there they stood in 1945. And maybe we will, too.
In The Loop 