COVER ME BADD: “Cups (When I’m Gone)” as covered by Anna Kendrick

“You tell me you don’t love me / Over a cup of coffee / And I just have to look away / A million miles between us”

Introduction:

Welcome back to Cover Me Badd, where we look at good covers, bad covers and what makes them tick. Now, I admit my usual tight schedule for pumping this series out monthly has slipped in recent days; blame that on an increasingly packed schedule and workload, which has prevented me from really finding the time to devote energy writing articles for this blog. But then as now, I remain the same stubborn guy I used to be, and by God I just cannot find it in me to quit working on this entirely; so I persist once more in my ways. But I didn’t want my continued insistence on maintaining this blog against all good judgment to translate to a decline in the quality of the writing or the subject matter; so today, we’re going to go outside of a box a little, to focus on a subject that arguably doesn’t constitute a cover at all, but is certainly interesting enough to merit its own article. That’s right, we’re going back… to 2012 (again).

Ah yes. The end of the world. The heyday of millennial culture, Buzzfeed quizzes, Glee, “Call Me Maybe”, Obama’s reelection, the breakthrough year of One Direction, the absolute peak of Tumblr culture and the insane shipping wars, the ascendancy of 8tracks, and where every twenty-something East Coast apartment dweller’s favorite hobby was shitting on Lena Dunham’s character on Girls (don’t believe any TikToks that try to convince you otherwise). Though 2012 was only twelve years ago, it feels like the world has changed drastically enough in that relatively brief window of time that you can easily look back on this era as a nostalgic one. I certainly feel the gray hairs sprouting on my head as I write this article! Ha ha ha… But if you were a teenager in late 2012-early 2013, then there’s one major artifact of that era that you will most certainly remember

Towards the end of that year, we were treated to a little movie about a college acapella group called Pitch Perfect. It was a snarky teen movie that dropped in during an era where musical teen shows and movies were all the rage, and it was so massive that it made huge stars out of its leads, including Skylar Astin, Anna Kendrick, Ben Platt, and especially Rebel Wilson, arguably the movie’s biggest beneficiary. But perhaps its main contribution to that canon of chipper Obama-era fluff was to set off a goddamn acapella craze on a scale few ever imagined could even be possible and bringing a new level of prominence to a long-maligned performance style that had hitherto been relegated largely to being a punchline representative of the most regrettable facets of college life. Yes, for a good two or three years, joining an acapella group was seen as the height of taste, and everyone was lining up to join their local college or community center acapella group just to get some of that sweet, sweet Barden Bellas clout. It was honestly endearing to see then, and even looking back now, through my considerably more withered heart, I can still find it within me to appreciate this relatively more optimistic era where the biggest pop culture event of the year inspired young musical hopefuls to start making music come out of their mouths.

But though the movie gave us plenty of great musical moments and memorable quotes that I reckon have found themselves irrevocably lodged into every single millennial’s brain cavities, those aren’t the movie’s biggest musical legacy. No, believe it or not, this movie catapulted what is perhaps one of the biggest viral internet hits into the summer, one of the very first examples of Youtube streams actually pushing a song atop the charts—and it was basically Anna Kendrick humming along to a little ‘30s ditty while tapping on a cup. That’s right, today, we’ll be looking at the one, the only, the unforgettable 2013 internet smash “Cups (When I’m Gone)”, an ode to simplicity and sheer minimalism that, even today, still stands as one of the most bizarre, unexpected, and off-the-wall Top 10 hits ever to hit Billboard. When people my age first heard this song on Pitch Perfect, most of us didn’t really know how to process what we were hearing, because the melody just sounded so intrinsically familiar and classic that most of us had Mandela Effect-ed ourselves into believing that it was some old ditty our parents had hummed to us when we were kids or something. But no, the song she was humming was not a classic tune beloved by generations and irrevocably lodged in the public—hell, in the form she was singing it, it was actually extremely recent, and extremely obscure even for early 2010s internet standards.

That song, “When I’m Gone”, is from the 1930s, but it did not exist in that form upon its original release. Instead, it’s based on a Carter Family composition, one of the many country and bluegrass songs they recorded in their many long tours throughout the country collecting and recording new music from local bluegrass musicians. It’s significantly different from the version that we would all come to recognize, and because of the relative obscurity of most Carter family recordings, not to mention the fact of them being country stars right before country music would become walled off from the rest of the music world, the song was too far removed from any generations adjacent to ours for it to become a well-remembered classic or anything. No, the song, in its most recognizable form, was a creature of the internet first and foremost, because the reworked version we’d all become familiar with originated from viral internet band Lulu and the Lampshades, who covered it in 2009, smack dab in the Wild West days of Youtube, and it became a massive viral smash, owing to its novel use of the cup game to serve as the song’s beat. From there on, it made history.

So what exactly is it about this song that it was able to transcend its origins and status as a Youtube viral hit to become an actual artifact of early 2010s millennial pop culture? Well, grab your ticket to the long way ‘round and buy some whiskey along the way, because I sure could use some sweet company as I dive into the long, storied history of this unique cultural touchstone.

The original:

Now it’s an open question as to what exactly “the original” we’ll be talking about today is. Like I said, the song would go through a great many incarnations before it transformed into the version that would make it to the big screen, so take note of that when we describe this section. Which of the “original” originals will we be talking about? Exactly how long ago are we talking? Well, for starters, to begin this article, we’re going to go way back, starting off in a place I didn’t think an article involving this song would ever go — let’s talk about the early history of country music.

Oh, country music. Today it’s most familiar to us for being the bizarre, walled-off ecosystem that exists in parallel to the rest of pop culture, but doesn’t quite intersect with it, whether thanks to its own penchant for isolation or a deliberate exclusion by the rest of the world. For this reason, it’s easy for a lot of pop music fans to dismiss country music or ignore its existence entirely, and given the types of people the genre has been associated with throughout the years, it’s led to a largely negative perception of the genre in the public eye—i.e. that it’s backwards-looking genre filled with hicks who hate women, black people and anyone leaning anywhere leftward on the political spectrum. In fact, for a long time, the old adage amongst most casual pop listeners was that they liked “everything but hip-hop and country”, which subsisted for a long time until hip-hop eventually became the sound of mainstream music. This left country as the black sheep of the music world, bizarrely in its own lane but with its own separate traditions, institutions, megastars and narratives. And yet, even so, it’s had a history almost as long as, if not longer than, rock and roll, pop, or any of the other streams of “popular music” throughout history, and some of the biggest-selling acts of all time have been country artists. Which begs the question—how did it become so isolated?

Because country music was not always this separated from the mainstream musical landscape. If anything, at one point it was intrinsically, inseparably intertwined with mainstream music. Country traditions and sounds were at the genesis of what we consider “popular music”; hell, even as late as the 1950s, at the dawn of rock and roll, many of these mainstream trends either intersected with, or had to reckon with country music and Americana tropes in some way. After all, the first wave of rock and rollers were country enough that we now refer to their particular sound as “rockabilly”, with acts like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Johnny Cash all either bearing a country music affect or having one foot in the door of both country and rock. Ray Charles’ game-changing album, released at the dawn of the ‘60s and which basically set the tone for the next few decades of rock and RnB, was called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and it was lauded specifically because it blended together country and soul at a time of rampant racial segregation. Like it or not, at one point in history, “hip” genres like rock were inseparable from country.

But the two worlds were torn apart not because of their inherent qualities, but due to a series of sustained and deliberate marketing strategies that sought to elevate one art form to cater to White tastes, while relegating the rest to Black audiences in their own sort of musical ghetto. I talked about this a bit in the recent Beyoncé article I did last March, but to recap what I said there—country music sounds had come up alongside Blues and other similar rural art forms and many of the tropes surrounding them had been pioneered by Black artists, but there was also a window in which the color barriers between the races had broken down and there was participation by both Black and White artists, not always in flattering ways. When White record executives realized the mainstream potential of the country music they were hearing at these minstrel shows and vaudeville performances, they knew who they wanted to market it to, and who they wanted to exclude. So there was a long period in which Blues, RnB and other “Negro” art forms were pigeonholed into their own little category, whereas the “White” elements were filtered out into the mainstream “country” sound. The differences between these two strains of what essentially used to be the same general sound became more pronounced over the years. Coincidentally, it was the “Black” half of this equation that birthed rock and roll, and here was where the sound of what became the mythologized “popular” music of the next few decades arose—albeit also overtaken by White performers. It’s this split that explains why rock institutions, which eventually came to encompass other art forms like soul, RnB, hip-hop, and even modern pop, continues to exclude country, the original “White” country half, which had broken away long ago and had never truly reintegrated back in.

Today’s story takes place at the dawn of this era, long before this split became that pronounced, but far enough in that you could still mark out today’s performers as being specifically country pioneers despite having more of a general folk influence. Today, let’s talk about the Carter Family.

Ah yes, A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter—also known as the Carter Family. If you don’t listen to country or aren’t an old-time country or bluegrass afficionado, you might not be familiar with these people, even though they’re easily one of the most influential musical groups around. If the name does ring familiar to those of you more inclined towards classic rock or ‘50s music, you might recognize them for the fact that one of their scions, June Carter, wound up being the partner and significant other of Johnny Cash, who often toured with the remaining Carters in their twilight years. These guys came up in an era so far removed from our own that many elements of their story may not read as familiar to most of you, but that’s only because much of what they pioneered is so embedded into modern music that it’s impossible to really appreciate how pioneering the yare given how oversaturated and copied their sound has become.

To put it simply, the Carter Family basically invented many of the tropes that would come to define modern country music to this day. And they did that by basically being one of the first vocally-oriented groups to hit it big in the country and bluegrass sphere, which had otherwise been dominated by instrumental and primarily musical groups before this. See, they came up in the late 1920s, when country music was still in its infancy, and the primary instrument of choice was the fiddle. This meant that the fiddler was largely the star of the show, as evidenced by the many, many early country artists who bore the title “Fiddler” or “Fiddlin’” in their stage names. And while the instrumentals are a core component of the Carters’ sound, it was their focus on lyrics, songwriting, composition and vocals that really set them apart. Ironically, the group did not write many original songs, with many of their biggest and most enduring hits being based on rural American folk standards, compiled, reworked and recorded mainly at the initiative of their leader and primary arranger A.P. Carter, whose work as a traveling salesman had exposed him to a diverse array of American folk traditions that he would eventually draw upon for the group’s repertoire.

And because of this, the Carters, along with contemporary and fellow country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers, played a significant role in transforming country music into the primarily vocal and lyrical genre it is today. But though their approach leaned more towards emphasizing songwriting and composition, they did not lack for instrumental chops, either, with the gorgeous voice of A.P.’s wife Sara carrying many of the group’s best-known songs. But perhaps the group’s most visible legacy lies in the unique and pioneering guitar playing of Sara’s cousin Maybelle (who also married A.P.’s cousin Ezra). Maybelle, or “Mother” Maybelle Carter as she’s still popularly known in the country world, pioneered a sort of simple yet innovative style of picking in which she used the bass strings to play lead while strumming the treble strings, effectively allowing her to play both lead and rhythm. It was an approach so basic but effective that it single handedly turned the guitar into a lead instrument, shaping the next few decades of rock and roll to come.

But as successful and influential as the Carters were in their day, even the stress of the relatively small-time touring they did throughout the country began to take a toll on their marriage and their personal relationships. The Carters had achieved their first taste of success in 1927, but their rise to fame coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, and the combination of the economic hardships levied by the recession, combined with the pressures of their new recording career, eventually chipped away at both the Carters’ recording career, and the fraying marriage of A.P. and Sara. Though the Carters would eventually rebound in 1932 with a series of lucrative radio contracts with stations along the Texas-Mexico border (which could broadcast at higher frequencies than most inland American stations), this did nothing to save A.P. and Sara’s marriage, which eventually ended in divorce by 1939 when Sara was caught with another man. It eventually became difficult for the group to record consistently, not just because of the disintegrating interpersonal dynamics within the group, but also because Maybelle and her husband had relocated to Washington D.C., which meant the Carters only ever really saw each other during recording sessions that were increasingly requiring more effort to put together. By the 1950s, the group had largely splintered, with A.P. and Sara continuing to perform sporadically while Maybelle took the Carter Family name and toured under it with her own daughters, including the aforementioned June Carter.

But for all that the Carters were prolific artists who leave behind a diverse array of classic Americana and country standards, the song we’re focusing on today is actually a lesser known entrant into the Carters’ repertoire.

In 1931, right as they were on the cusp of one of the most difficult periods of their career, the Carters recorded “When I’m Gone”, one of the few wholly original songs in the group’s catalogue not taken from a classic American folk tune. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly noteworthy entrant into their repertoire, either—their Wikipedia page doesn’t lit it as one of their more notable songs right out o the gate, you barely hear anyone, even serious country music aficionados and scholars, mentioning it as one of their foundational masterworks or important must-listen entries, and the actual song’s own Wikipedia page is a pathetic two-paragraph stub that gives you no actual information on the song itself. It’s not exactly a cornerstone of the Carter family legacy, to put it bluntly. Of course, it also doesn’t help that the Carters have another similarly-titled and much more popular song, their 1928 composition “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?”

And what’s it about? It’s a fairly simple song whose essence is captured right in the title — it’s about a woman who’s leaving and saying a few parting words to the person, most likely her lover, that she’s leaving behind. Or is it? Because I first encountered this song through its many reworked incarnations, I initially assumed that this was some sort of breakup song or allegory, but in its earliest form, this song consists only of a few short refrains, with the lyrics zeroing in mainly on the “when I’m gone” aspect, and the more they repeated that line, the more I realized… holy shit, this song is about death. It certainly explains the song’s mellow, almost lethargic atmosphere—it communicates an almost eerie sense of peacefulness, most certainly not the kind you have when you’re relaxing at the beach. It’s also why the emphasis is about what you, the recipient of this message, are going to miss about the narrator. I mean, just look at it —

You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone