“When the war is over, got to start again / Try to hold a trace of what it was back then / You and I we sent each other stories / Just a page I’m lost in all its glories / How can I go home and not get blown away”
Introduction:
Welcome back to Cover Me Badd, where we look at good covers, bad covers, and what makes them tick! Now, this series serves as my main window of opportunity to talk about older music, sometimes to the point that I pick articles sometimes solely because it gives me an excuse to geek out about the music of the past. And I’m not gonna lie, to the extent that I still have any free time away from my job, looking back on the past is something I’ve increasingly taken to lately. Maybe it’s something you naturally do as you get older, especially if you’re a critic who’s slowly aging out of the pop music demographic and inching towards the oldheads’ retirement home, but lately, I’ve been finding myself increasingly unable to keep up with modern music. It’s a development I’ve been trying to forestall for some time now; I’m a stubborn guy, which means I regularly make a habit out of fighting the inevitable, but lately, with the increasingly hectic workload I’ve been dealing with, that’s become much more challenging. Let’s just say I now fully understand and empathize with why older people lose the ability to connect with modern trends.
I suspect the only reason I’ve even been able to write about the new pop music coming out this year is because most of it has been by millennial-era artists who were big during my time. The big splashes of pop music lately have been by artists like Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, goddamn Usher; hell, the big flop records everyone was talking about just a few months ago was by Justin Timberlake, who hasn’t even been relevant as a pop star in years. With how fractured the Gen Z pop cultural landscape is, it’s perhaps unsurprising that millennial pop culture still maintains such a chokehold on the collective public imagination (to the extent that such a thing still even exists). Given that, then I think it’s about time we take this series back to the heyday of millennial internet pop culture —
The year is 2012. Youtube is not quite the upstart video hosting platform it began as, but it’s not exactly the cold, unforgiving beehive of corporate meddling and negligent content moderation standards it is today. We’re in the halfway point where funny, unique and novel video content could still go viral in a more or less organic manner; there was still joy to be found on this godforsaken website. And one of those pockets of joy came at us in the form of a quirky Canadian indie pop band who, one day, decided to upload a video of the five of them playing one guitar at the same time, in a perfect note-for-note recreation of the upstart indie pop smash “Somebody That I Used To Know”. The band was Walk Off The Earth, and with their quirky dynamics, memorable appearances, novel video concept, and surprisingly credible cover of a hit pop song, they quickly rocketed up to viral superstardom in an era not exactly shy of Youtube cover artists. It was just good vibes all around, right?
Of course, the song they’re tackling is not good vibes at all; if anything, it may be one of the most intense and gripping breakup (or post-breakup, I guess) songs ever put to record. The song, “Somebody That I Used To Know”, was the breakout hit of one Belgian-born Australian indie pop artist named Wouter DeBacker, better known by the bastardized French transliteration of his name, Gotye. In 2012, he became one of a wave of unexpected indie pop successes who rose to the top of the Hot 100 in the opening months of that year, sharing the stage alongside acts like Fun, the Lumineers, Carly Rae Jepsen, Mumford and Sons, Imagine Dragons, Lana del Rey, the Weeknd, Macklemore, and the most influential of them all, Lorde. Mr. Gotye never quite reached the heights of success that his peers would go on to experience throughout the decade, but Mr. Gotye’s contribution to this exciting new wave of eccentric young artists should not be dismissed. Of all the artists I just named here, aside from maybe Lana, Lorde and the Weeknd, Gotye’s song may arguably have had the biggest impact of all, simply by virtue of being a song so extremely well-written that it was practically destined to have a long shelf life. In fact, it’s kind of a tragedy to me (and many others, I’m sure) that he largely ended up being a one-hit wonder, although as we’ll see later on, it’s not necessarily due to the songs themselves.
What happened? How could a song this brilliant not translate into lasting success for its lead performers? Well saddle in and take a trip with me down memory lane as we walk you through one of the most singular periods of recent pop music history.
The original:
When we think of the pop music of the early 2010s, we’re most primed to think of the candy-colored turbo pop which defined the start of the decade, dominated by pop titans like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj. But as with most historical perceptions, it doesn’t capture the whole story in truth, there are many phases to this era of pop music, of which today’s subject serves an important demarcation line.
But it’s undoubtedly true that when the decade opened, it felt like one big party. I call this the ‘Obama era’ of pop music because its rise is perhaps more directly tied to Barack Obama’s 2008 election than you might think. As America’s first Black president, Barack Obama represented what seemed like a monumental sea change for race relations in American politics; considering that Black people were barred from the echelons of power for the longest time, obviously a Black man ascending to the highest office in the United States was a momentous occasion, and because all it took to get there was to campaign and vote, it was a cause a lot of people, ordinary or otherwise, felt that they could get behind. It’s why you saw so many celebrities, and not even just Black celebrities, rallying behind Obama and getting people to vote—even people like goddamn will.i.am stepped up to the plate by putting himself all in behind Obama’s reelection, and it paid off, seeing as he and the Black Eyed Peas were bigger than ever by 2009. Of course, to credit will.i.am for Obama’s re-election is pushing it, but it speaks to the sense of optimism and euphoria represented by the victory of the first Black American President—and the music world responded in kind by essentially launching one giant celebration from 2009 onward. We were partying in the USA, dropping it low, feeling like tonight was gonna be a good night, the little shawties were fire burnin’ on the dance floor, everything truly felt like it was gonna be okay, so it felt okay to just dance.
This state of affairs persisted for the next couple of years, without interruption—2010, in particular, felt like a year so thoroughly dominated by club music that even names like Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift lagged behind the charts simply because they didn’t mention clubs enough. But the non-stop party had to end somewhere, and by 2011, it felt like we were slowly realizing our collective exhaustion at all the clubbing and partying the world was shoving down our throats. Which is why it’s in that year where you start to sense a sea change around the sound of popular music. The Dr. Luke-era Big Pop of Katy Perry and Kesha was still bigger than ever, of course, but you also started to see pockets of diversity springing up in what was otherwise the Party Rock Anthem year—the unexpected smash successes of Adele was certainly a major indicator, but aside from them, you also had oddball hits by the likes of Cee-Lo Green, Hot Chelle Rae, Lupe Fiasco, and Foster the People. Things were clearly heading towards a new direction, but at the time, it still felt like flukes that wouldn’t amount to much of anything. The Neon Trees had a big hit the year before, after all, and it didn’t exactly lead to anything revolutionary in popular music.
No, it was only in 2012, when we saw the back-to-back successes of two incredibly off-the-wall #1 hits, that it truly felt like things were finally changing.
The first was “We Are Young”, the debut single off of the album Some Nights by indie rock upstarts and Fueled by Ramen-adjacent indie power pop outfit Fun. This song, a crowd-pleasing stadium rock anthem with an unconventional time signature, scream-sung vocals comprised of absolutely nonsensical bonkers lyrics, sounded absolutely nothing like the predominantly glitzy oontz-oontz club music and EDM of the day and absolutely stuck out like a sore thumb in the music environment of the day. And yet, it became a massive unexpected smash hit in the waning months of 2011 up to the turn of 2012, hitting #1 by the spring of that year, in the face of competition by other smash debuts from the likes of Katy Perry, Rihanna, One Direction, The Wanted, Adele, and Flo Rida, which was no mean feat. And while we know in hindsight that Fun would go on to dominate between 2012 and 2013 before going on hiatus and spawning the next generation’s new superstar producer in Jack Antonoff, at the time, it felt like just another fluke indie hit, the way “Pumped Up Kicks” had the year before. But when that song was followed by a second #1 hit that proved equally left-field, if not moreso, then that’s when it started to feel like something bigger was happening.
To have one indie pop hit go mainstream and top the Hot 100, that’s a one-off and it doesn’t automatically translate to anything revolutionary. But two of them going back-to-back is a trend, and the viral success of “Somebody That I Used To Know” represented for me, both at the time, and even moreso now, looking back on it. They say the 2010s, as a decade, is difficult to pin down because it’s more like a collection of various distinct phases that don’t really tie well together; and when people say that, they’re usually referring to the split between the sunshine-y Obama era and the moody, downbeat Trump era. But even within the Obama era alone, there’s a pretty serious demarcation line between Obama’s first term, which was dominated by the club pop and EDM music I alluded to earlier, and his second term, which was a lot quirkier, more off-beat, and a lot more eclectic, if a little difficult to define sonically.
Most people credit this shift to “Royals”, Lorde’s revolutionary anti-pop pop song which is (correctly) seen as having shifted the trajectory of pop music by directly challenging the perceived shallow and materialistic attitude then prevalent in the mainstream. But Lorde was arguably just the culmination of a slow, gradual shift away from the candy-colored pop that had opened the 2010s with, the seeds of which were sown in the dark depths of the early blogosphere. Most people credit the start of it with Robyn’s Body Talk in 2010, then Lana del Rey and The Weeknd, both of whom debuted in 2011, but the trickle didn’t really begin until the year, and even when it finally went mainstream, it took a chain reaction of oddball kits to really keep the momentum going. After Lana and Abel, you had Drake’s Take Care, you had the increasing ascendancy of Bon Iver’s breathy indie sadness, Mumford and Sons’ speed-strummed Americana, the folk-pop of Ellie Goulding, the disco-pop stylings of Capital Cities, the initially promising stadium-rock of Imagine Dragons, the sugar-pop of Carly Rae Jepsen, just a whole mess of swirling influences all unexpectedly making headway between 2012 and 2013. But for my money, it would have never gotten as big without “Somebody That I Used To Know”, the quirky handoff duet by Australian indie artist Gotye, whose rocket atop the #1 spot right after “We Are Young” helped cement this anti-pop pop revolution as the next big thing in music.
But one thing that illustrates how chaotic this era of pop music was is precisely how these two off-the-wall #1 hits got big in the first place. Those of you who didn’t grow up in thar era might be surprised to learn how it happens. You ready? Here it is…
Sorry. It’s an article about Obama-era pop music; you knew it was going to pop up somewhere.
I don’t know what the current Gen-Z perception of Glee is today—to the extent that anyone even remembers the show at all. Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong spaces, but it feels like it never comes up on TikTok or on any of the discussion spaces popular with today’s young-ins. All I can directly attest to is what it was like to live through the show at the time, especially as someone who religiously consumed the show in its heyday and fell off right around the time it went completely off the rails (debate prompt—when?). But all I can tell you is that when Glee existed, there was absolutely no other phenomenon like it on television. That’s not entirely a compliment, either. The show was supposed to be just a normal show, a musical TV comedy-drama about a bunch of theater kids, jocks and high schoolers from all sorts of backgrounds finding solace and refuge in their high school’s glee club, but steered by the creative vision of its lead showrunner and camp extraordinaire Ryan Murphy, it ballooned into a cacophonous tempest of baffling writing choices, inconsistent character development and plotting that has all the object permanence of the late-period Game of Thrones seasons, and an obnoxious self-awareness that only intensifies its stupidity rather than subvert or rehabilitate it.
It’s hard to really quantify what gave Glee its unique character without you having actually sat down to watch it, but if I had to sum it up to someone who had never seen the show or lived through its heyday, I would use the word “inexplicable”. This show about a struggling show choir populated by bullied geeks and other minorities (minorities by virtue of being part of the glee club, of course) somehow became an unparalleled monstrosity, full of divisive, inconsistently written characters who zigzag in terms of how much sympathy you can levy at them; but their dynamics would take so many soap-opera level twists and turns that it eventually became impossible to follow. This intense, sprawling universe spawned a fan culture like nothing else, one that flourished in spaces like Tumblr to such an insane degree that it led to an endless bevy of fan wars, shipping wars and long, drawn-out discourses that, by and large, spawned our current internet discourse hellhole, with terms like “problematic” emerging from this very community. So yes, cancel culture, that great bogeyman of conservative discourse constantly misunderstood and blown out of proportion by its detractors, emerged out of the internet flame wars of a bunch of hormonal teenagers discussing fucking Glee.
But the impact of Glee was not merely limited to spawning our currently dystopic nightmare internet age; trust me, we’ll get to that later—it also played a big role in pushing both of these songs to the #1 spot. “We Are Young” was released in September of 2011, but it wouldn’t receive a big push until the head of Fueled By Ramen records recommended it to Glee’s musical director and it got used in the Season 3 mid-season finale. “Somebody That I Used To Know”, meanwhile, was already slowly climbing up the charts on its own, but it was the momentum caused by its usage in Season 4 of the show, sometime in mid-2012, that pushed it all the way to #1. So if we’re subscribing to the framework that these two songs kickstarted the musical trajectory of the rest of the 2010s, then Glee casts a truly horrendous shadow on our modern landscape, indeed.
But enough about Glee—what about the people who actually made “Somebody That I Used To Know”?
Well, for that, we need to take a look at the naked Australian man and the naked Kiwi who sing the song for us. The former is indie pop artist Wouter DeBacker, also known as Gotye, while the other is fellow indie pop artist Kimbra, both of whom had achieved modest commercial success in Australia and New Zealand, but had never quite crossed over into the mainstream. Let alone the global mainstream. Gotye had already released two album before this, including 2003’s Boarface and 2006’s Like Drawing Blood, the latter of which gave him his first taste of commercial airplay with singles like “Heart’s a Mess” (which later found its way into the 2013 Great Gatsby soundtrack), coupled with the most ghoulish, bizarre-looking music videos this side of Tool. Meanwhile, Kimbra had come out the gate with her 2011 album Vows, an album which I am intimately familiar with because it was one of my favorite albums when I was in high school—it’s a really good album; really, go check out “Cameo Lover”, “Call Me”, “Two Way Street”, “Warrior”—okay, sorry, I’m rambling; it’s just, it really means a lot to me.
But that actually brings me to my next point, which is that its a shame these two guys are known only for the one song, because they’re actually both really great artists with substantial, diverse, and mind-expanding discographies that are even arguably ahead of their time in certain respects. Gotye especially; I remember digesting his entire discography in the wake of his one hit, and then relistening to it for the purpose of this article, and it actually reminds me of the same kind of breathy, ghostly-wail indie pop that Harry Styles is constantly trialing in his music. And I’ve already mentioned how much I loved Kimbra’s music back in 2011, so it became weird for me that she was exclusively known as the naked chick in “Somebody That I Used To Know” to most people. These two should have absolutely become bigger and more influential than they were; maybe not mainstream famous, but at least prominent enough to transcend one-hit wonder status the same way other borderline acts like Bastille and Foster the People have.
But it might also just be the curse of having crafted a song so perfect that it was too big to not swallow up its creators.
“Somebody That I Used To Know” is a masterclass of songwriting in a lot of ways, which is why though it did not sound like anything else that was charting in the spring of 2012, its massive success makes a lot of sense. The conceit of the song is fairly easy to sum up if you’re paying attention to the lyrics—it’s about a guy reminiscing about an ex, then suddenly being flooded by the bad memories of “when we were together”. He then recounts his own personal feelings about his time in the sun with his ex, remembers them as being mainly a hassle, but overall casts the breakup in an amicable, borderline sentimental light—”But that was love, and it’s an ache I still remember” and “So when we found that we could not make sense / Well, you said that we would still be friends / But I’ll admit that I was glad it was over”. But you can already sense certain dark undertones in the first verse that suggest that not everything is as rosy and peachy-keen in the present as the guy wants you to think it is, and his cheery reminiscing is undercut by the decidedly un-cheery sentiments of the chorus, perhaps the most gaslight-y chorus ever put to record. You all already know how it goes —
But you didn’t have to cut me off
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
And I don’t even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger, and that feels so rough
No, you didn’t have to stoop so low
Have your friends collect your records and then change your number
I guess that I don’t need that, though
Now you’re just somebody that I used to know
This verse unfolds and the reality of the situation seems to present itself wide open. Pay close attention to the lyrics in the first verse—the guy uses noncommittal words like “now and then I think of when we were together” to play it off as if this is just a random thought that came to him, a stray memory creeping up on him, to make it seem like he totally doesn’t care. But then the first verse grows progressively more detailed and intense until it culminates in the chorus, in which it becomes apparent that he still cares deeply about this failed relationship and has yet to truly move on. He’s still smarting from the perceived audacity of this girl for supposedly going back on her word and refusing to remain friends. It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that this reeks of deeply entitled, narcissistic behavior, and in case you’re reading this and actually need to be told this—no, no one owes you friendship after they’ve broken up with you. Maybe it’s said in the moment, maybe the soon-to-be ex just wants to be polite or let you down easy, or maybe they really wanted to only to change their mind, but whatever the case, if they don’t want to be friends anymore, that’s their decision and you have no right to step on that. It’s especially egregious on this chorus, where it’s clarified that the girl not only cut ties with him, she even changed her phone number, which is not something you would normally do in a breakup unless you felt like you really had to. It does not speak well of this guy, let’s just say.
Of course, in this case, it’s all intentional, and it’s made abundantly clear when Kimbra, taking the perspective of the ex in the situation, comes in and delivers the rebuttal to Gotye’s self-serving whining —
Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over
But had me believing it was always something that I’d done
And I don’t wanna live that way
Reading into every word you say
You said that you could let it go
And I wouldn’t catch you hung up on somebody that you used to know
Damn.
This is the verse that flips the entire song right around. And it’s an incredibly brilliant piece of character writing, because it’s consistent with, and conforms, what you’ve been suspecting about Gotye’s character all along. The patterns of gaslighting and blame-shifting suggested by the first verse are shown in full view in Kimbra’s second verse—”But had me believing it was always something that I’d done / And I don’t wanna live that way”. But what makes this verse so special is that it’s the complete opposite of Gotye’s in a lot of ways—Gotye blathers on for two whole verses in vague, self-serving generalities, whereas Kimbra’s verse is direct and cutting and fills in the missing details conveniently left out of Gotye’s too-rosy narrative. It hits hard, so hard even that you actually start to sympathize slightly with Gotye, who’s driven to wailing in agony right as he delivers the final chorus, whose meaning has been entirely rewritten by this point.
The song would already rank as an all-time classic on the basis of the lyrics alone, but for my money, what takes it over the top is undoubtedly the music, which is so intricately arranged and composed that I’m just honestly stunned listening to it. From a compositional standpoint, this is unassailable—it may sound like a sparsely arranged track, but in truth it’s made up of a bunch of interwoven notes and flourishes, all sown together in a tight pattern, a dozen alternate counter-melodies all playing off against each other to form the bedrock upon which the song’s most intense moments play off of. The various constituent parts of the instrumentation are so tightly woven and interlocking that you can’t separate any one note from it without materially altering the entire song. Everything works perfectly together, an the song doesn’t really soar to the heights it does without this intricate production. This brings me to my final point about the song—no cover of this song is going to work without taking this compositional intricacy in mind. You have to account for it, or you’ve already lost.
Can that be said for the most famous cover version of the song?
The cover:
2012 was, for better or for worse, a singular moment for pop culture in general.
That’s not something I was immediately conscious of until quite recently; maybe it’s because that era in general happened far too recently for me to really try and memorialize it as a specific historical moment, maybe I just don’t want to concede that such a pivotal year of my coming of age journey was that long ago, or maybe it’s just difficult to set any of the early 2010s years of Big Pop music apart in general, considering how the trends of these days all seemed to bleed into each other without much of a dividing line. Whenever I talk about the history of pop music in this column, I obviously usually approach it from the lens of hindsight, and it’s usually easier to tell a more coherent historical narrative when you’re talking about an era that happened long enough ago that it’s enmeshed itself in the history books. It’s a lot harder to sift through your memories and really analyze a specific period when you lived through it not that long ago. I wasn’t even sure I could do a full on objective recap of a year that close to my heart—how am I supposed to have an accurate gauge of the year in retrospect if I can’t even parse through the things that really happened versus the specific things in my orbit that only I remember? In pop cultural history terms, 2012 did not feel like anything particularly special to me… at least, not until I saw this TikTok.
As someone who still remembers when millennials were the great bogeyman of society, it’s weird to now have hordes of Gen Z-ers pathologizing and romanticizing this era. Holy fucking Christ, do I feel old. But in hindsight, for 2012 to go down in history as the definitive millennial year (the way 1968 seems to be for Boomers or 1991 for Gen X) felt accurate somehow. The early Obama era was a time of great social and cultural progress, where social media and the Internet still felt like a force for good that was bringing people together in ways we hadn’t conceived before, where greater access to information allowed the average person to educate themselves on relatively obscure topics and we saw an unprecedented rise in acceptance of long-suffering marginalized groups who finally found ways to be heard through nontraditional, mostly online platforms. And because of that, there was certain sunny optimism that definitely permeated through most pop culture, a type of sanguine sunshine that can only come in those young and innocent days when you feel like you’ve reached the end of history and progress is just a forward march away.
I talked about Obama’s presidency earlier as a major catalyst of this atmosphere of sunny optimism, and I can tell you, that sunny optimism permeated through all corners of internet life, even the parts that you wouldn’t think fit that progressive image. What about all the edgy humor that permeated early 2010s meme culture? It’s part of that, too—why else were people so comfortable making edgy jokes if we weren’t all living under the illusion that racism no longer existed and thus it was okay to drop the N word at the most random, seemingly innocuous occasions? Truly, it was a different time, and while the specifics of internet developments from this era are difficult to chart, you can still map out the trends with some level fo certainty. And in this era where it felt like we didn’t have a single other care in the world, one genre proliferated Youtube in a way that feels like it can’t really happen today—the acoustic cover artist Youtuber.
In late 2000s and early 2010s Youtube, we witnessed the rise of an entire wave of Youtube cover artists who became viral mainly on the strength of acoustic covers of well-known pop songs. This movement also came in several waves—the first wave was populated mainly by relatively DIY acts like Boyce Avenue, Tyler Ward, Sam Tsui, Kina Grannis, Christina Grimmie (may she rest in peace), Alex Goot, Marie Digby, Chester See, just a whole slew of attractive young-ish acoustic guitar or piano-playing musician all specializing in perpetuating a very scrub-clean, mellow, and (in a lot of cases) store-brand acoustic versions of charting pop hits from around that era. Now, by the way I’m talking about it thirteen years later, you can tell I wasn’t exactly a fan of this MTV Unplugged-lite sort of arrangement. In fact, it was instrumental to solidifying my dislike of acoustic music, because the covers never sounded like anything special to me, and the fact that they were regularly making the rounds drove me insane as the pretentious teenage snob I was. But years down the line, I listen to these and I at least get the appeal—they’re pleasant little ditties that put a new spin on the otherwise suffocatingly-overplayed pop songs of the day, who couldn’t love that?
With the relative timelessness of this format of video content, I’m not exactly clear on why the early 2010s specifically became its most fertile period, but if I had to guess, it was because it made for an easy and convenient source of musical content at a time when Youtube was only really beginning to diversify, plus Youtube has always appealed to those with ton of things to share who were looking for a platform to share them, and there’s lots of musically-oriented people who fit that description. Since this was before the time when Youtube became the megalomaniacal monopolistic overlord of content creation it is today, it still felt like a safe space to wilfully post this kind of thing and to hopefully gain traction. It felt like the Youtube space was still democratic enough that anyone could become a star on the platform, so millions of young people tried their hand. But most all, there’s an argument to be made that these kinds of artists represented the first incarnation of bedroom pop or Soundcloud artists, before most kids had unmitigated access to professional-level recording technologies on their laptops or iPhones—so it represented an era where kids were figuring out they could do this on their own, albeit with limited technology.
And the development of this movement allows us to chart the development of Youtube itself as a platform, because the further we get into this story, the quirkier, more gimmicky and more slickly professional these acts became. By 2012-2013 you were getting more sophisticated varieties of these types of acts—we were beginning to hear from acapella groups like Pentatonix, Lindsey Stirling, Todrick Hall, the Piano Guys, and the scale of these projects grew grander and more epic. At this point, you had to really go out of your way to stand out.
And stand out is exactly what these five guys did.
This is Walk Off The Earth, a Canadian five-piece indie rock band made up (during their peak years) of multi-instrumentalist frontman Gianni “Luminati” Nicassio, drummer Joel Cassidy, second vocalist Sarah Blackwood, Ryan Marshall who mainly played bass, and Mike “Beard Guy” Taylor, the band’s ostensible keyboardist who, strangely enough, doesn’t actually do anything on camera except give off this stoic, intensely focused stare that somehow made him the most iconic of all the band’s members (at least before his untimely death in 2018). And I describe their roles in the vaguest possible terms because, in all honesty, these guys have never been limited to one musical role—they will play whatever instrument the context requires. Youtube has spawned a good number of quirky cover acts, but Walk Off The Earth still strikes me as the most batshit, off-the-wall of the early 2010s musical cover acts, simply by virtue of the fact that the on-camera aesthetic and the gimmick matters as much as the actual cover. Of course, this style of theirs may have been dictated by their big break in more ways than one.
Of course, we all know the story—they did a cover of “Somebody That I Used To Know” with the novel gimmick of all playing the same guitar simultaneously to reproduce the song’s instrumentation. And as you can expect by the novelty of having such a premise, it basically guaranteed that the video would go viral and spread goddamn everywhere. It was an immediate viral smash that launched the band into internet notoriety, and I mean, really, how could it not? This is an incredibly difficult arrangement to pull off, a masterclass of coordination that would have taken hours of practice, and for these five ordinary people to pull it off, I mean, that had to count for something. The video’s overall DIY aesthetic really helped sell the feeling that these guys were just amateur musicians who happened upon a killer idea and rode with it, increasing the feeling of relatability mixed with genuine achievement that really helps sell most viral videos.
Of course, that’s not exactly how it happened in real life; these guys were not unwieldy amateurs riding a gimmick, but actual musicians who’d been in the game for quite some time. Walk Off The Earth were not industry plants or anything, of course, but they were professional musicians who’d had some experience working in the business, releasing music independently, doing small tours in their home state of Ontario, the usual small-time indie rock band thing. And that was just the four main guys—Blackwood had been in an actual major label rock outfit, the Burlington-based psychobilly band The Creepshow, who were never the biggest thing in the world, but were at least big enough to have merited the attention of bands like Volbeat, Tiger Army and Anti-Flag. Blackwood wasn’t even an official member of Walk Off The Earth at first; she’d been recruited to guest star on the one video to do the Kimbra voice, but her tenure proved pivotal to the song’s success, and with her having been publicly identified with the band, it was no surprise that she went on to join the band permanently, and even getting into a long-term relationship with Luminati which is still going strong to this day (they have three kids together! Good for them).
So there’s your obvious answer, at least; this song went viral because of its killer arrangement. End of article, right? Not exactly. I think to credit the song’s success entirely to its gimmick actually does it a disservice, because Walk Off The Earth get “Somebody That I Used To Know” right in ways that very few of the artists that have tried their hand just don’t seem to get. Remember how I said that every single note is foundational to the song’s success, and it all has to work together to achieve the desired effect? Most of the artists who’ve covered this song utterly fail to realize this, and trust me, there are many many artists who’ve attempted this song, to increasingly diminished returns.
And they fail precisely because they attempt to reproduce the bones of this song, without paying attention to the little nuances in the instrumentation, all of which are crucial to the song’s entire identity. But to be fair, it’s difficult to accurately capture all of it because, sparse as the song may be, there’s so goddamn many of these little notes sprinkled throughout the song that it’s easy to miss them even when you think you have a handle on the song. There are covers where it’s okay to deviate from the core instrumentation and to try something different, but “Somebody That I Used To Know” is one of them—you want to cover the song, you have to cover all of the song. This is something that Walk Off The Earth’s cover masterfully addresses. They understand that to really do justice to the song, they are going to have to reproduce it down to the letter. And so they do. There’s a real attention to detail present throughout the cover, and because it’s being played on one acoustic guitar, you notice it a lot more.
Yes, it’s a note-for-note recreation, but sometimes, that’s really the only thing you need to make a song work. That, and a novel gimmick doesn’t hurt.
The verdict:
It’s a pretty goddamn good cover, and the fact that it’s so amateur-looking despite the high-level of musicianship on display only makes it even more remarkable. I dearly miss this era of internet video, and I can’t pretend I haven’t been extremely nostalgic for the days of my youth, so doing this article was kind of fun. I don’t think this will be the last time I delve into this particular year in pop culture. Stay tuned for more, I guess.
In The Loop 