By Roland Betancourt
The
cover video is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous YouTube videos out there.
They can be immensely complex music-video renditions, or simple a cappella vlog-style iPhone videos. Its
prolific character makes it difficult to categorize or to produce any
all-encompassing argument about the format. Here, however, I am more interested
in sketching out a conceptual system for the
logic of the cover as a prevailing
structural mode of thought and production, rather than an all-encompassing
survey of the trend. My interests lie
precisely in the cover as a structure of
thinking creatively and originally about an inherently derivative product.
The
discursive sphere of contemporary pop operates within a strange double bind. On
the one hand, it glorifies stereotypical postmodern culture of manic citation
and reference, identifying the layering of source material as an indicator and
generator of complexity and erudition. On the other hand, these layers of
citation are simultaneously criticized as unoriginal, derivative, and as
rip-offs.
The
former is the logic of BuzzFeed, for
example, whose litanies of gifs, short analyses, and iterative comparisons
construct compendia of intertextual, intervisual analyses, which find their
gravitas in their iterative power. Like the florilegia of
medieval authors who appended their texts with lists of excerpts from canonical
sources that supported the claims of their arguments, the BuzzFeed lists allow for the
construction of relational knowledge through short, rapid-fire, sequential
captioned images that, while seemingly unrelated, generate logics through their
encounter upon this tabula.
For
example, a few weeks ago Aylin Zafar expertly composed a cohesive litany of
Gaga’s cultural citations in “Applause” entitled, “Every
Cultural Reference You Probably Didn’t Catch in Lady Gaga’s New Video.”
Aylin Zafar’s florilegium of sources
was a fascinating moment for contributors of a blog like Gaga Stigmata: it
demonstrated a form of scholarly, academic production that was self-reflexive
on both the medium of its circulation (pop), and the content it addressed (pop).
That is, it was a rigorous discussion of
pop in the medium of pop.
Consequently,
this manifested the possibility of academic writing and presentation that is
often difficult for us – those who are often steeped in the academy – to
willingly explore. To a certain extent, it
requires that we relinquish our agency as authors who construct robust and
well-argued theses, and instead present
audiences with rigorous fragments through which we enable readers to
conduct their own analyses in the comments. However, this is not a full
relinquishing of agency, since it is the manner in which those fragments are
arranged and what fragments are included that enable arguments to arise.
Reading
through Zafar’s compendium and noticing how Gaga
Stigmata was cited presented a model where the tl;dr (too long, didn’t
read) assumed logic of a project like BuzzFeed
collided head-on with a project like Stigmata,
which allows for concerted, longer analyses that for me – and my overly verbose
approach to things – has always been a draw and an exciting aspect of GS. Let’s face it: in the digital
blogosphere there is a lot of discussion, but even the lengthy posts are often
quite limited comparatively. On Gaga
Stigmata we often encounter what are essentially 20-minute conference paper
length works – hence being true to the form of a common scholarly method of
exchange, and not sacrificing the space to allow thoughts to develop and
explore various options.
In
contrast, Zafar’s incisive observations in a bullet-point format readily
enabled users to produce a critical analysis of “Applause” by providing a
robust and deep vocabulary that not only featured external sources, but also
presented Gaga’s own precedents for much of the imagery of her “Applause” video
– a crucial element that is often overlooked by such blog-driven posts,
particularly when their intentions are to prove a dearth of originality. Hence,
projects like Gaga Stigmata and BuzzFeed
find a generative collision precisely in the friction generated from their
contact.
How
then does this play in at all with the logic of the cover?
I
do not see BuzzFeed as a derivative
or condensation of Gaga Stigmata’s
work simply because it took some of its information or arguments from it.
Instead, I see the two as covers of one
another, understanding that knowledge is not just produced by some and
disseminated by others: the two constantly feed upon one another and
develop audiences not as mutually exclusive spheres, but in the interstitial
sites that occur between the two. One does not merely read Stigmata for the whole/longer argument,
but rather for a different form of argumentation.
The same system is in play with
the cover video, which cannot be said to copy or riff on an original, but rather generates audiences through the
iterative permutations it enables.
A
key illustration of this function of the cover emerges when we encounter covers that engender their own covers,
and therefore muddle the chains of contribution and alteration. This was evident
when Glee blatantly used Jonathan
Coulton’s cover of Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back” without giving any authority
or recognition to Coulton for his slowed-down cover, despite the fact that the Glee cover even featured a lyric alteration
from Coulton’s song (where they sing “Johnny C’s in trouble,” a change that
Coulton made to adapt the original’s “Sir Mixalot’s in trouble”). This then led Jonathan Coulton to release
another version of his own cover “in the style of Glee,” making the chain of
covers nearly unrecognizable – a
veritable snake biting its own tail.
This
is a process that occurs daily as YouTubers constantly cover and re-cover songs
not only from their favorite artists, but also from their fellow YouTubers and
other permutations – such as a performance on Glee. What is noteworthy here is that just as you learned from
playing telephone in elementary school, with
each transmission information is radically reconfigured and repurposed, thereby
leading to the creation of new and unique performances – not only when a
quasi-heroic figure takes on the task to reimagine a classic or contemporary
tune. For example, one group that came to fame with its creative takes on songs
is the real-life couple Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan of Karmin. Karmin went
viral following their 12 April 2011 cover of Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now”
(ft. Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes), which was even featured on Ellen. The song
not only involved an impressive rap session by Heidemann, but also included the
use of internal covers and citations – such as fragments of the Lord of the Rings main theme woven into
the song itself.
After
the hits from their first album Hello
– “Crash My Party” and particularly “Brokenhearted” – this summer Karmin
released a new single, “Acapella,” off their upcoming album Pulses. While “Acapella” has not received
the attention it deserves (drowned out by all the other mega-songs of the
summer), the song manifests precisely the generative logic of the group’s
roots. True to their original medium, the song has its origins in Anna
Kendrick’s “Cups (When I’m Gone)” from Pitch
Perfect. As Heidemann describes it, “Acapella” reflects on the use of
household, unorthodox objects to produce unusual beats. This fits in as part of
a Do It Yourself (D.I.Y.) trend, rooted in the proliferation of YouTube videos
and covers. Given their origins on YouTube, they produced this song with the
perspective that if you can do it yourself, you can also do it a cappella. Hence the song relies mainly
on beats created through the use of their own voices.
As
such, Karmin’s song falls within an long line of covers. Not only does it riff
on “Cups” – a song that itself has inspired a slew of covers on YouTube, and is
in itself a complex cover (see below) – but “Cups” itself manifested the logic
of household production that both speaks to a drive to make do with what one
has immediately around, but also to create innovative products that emerge from
such a D.I.Y.-aesthetic, which has now become in itself a specific
medium or trope that constantly tries to outdo itself with new and unique types
of covers or music videos.
This
medium of cover productions is best exemplified by the formerly Yale-based duo,
Sam Tsui and Kurt Hugo Schneider, YouTube stars whose claim to fame is a series
of early covers where Tsui sings on stage alongside many iterations of himself,
and their web-series College Musical,
primarily with the hit “I Wanna Bone My TA.” Tsui and Schneider’s early cover
videos fit well into a category of covers that play directly with the notion of
singing a cappella and pushing it to
its limits, by recording different elements of the song and syncing them
together in a video.
Mike
Topkins is one YouTuber who has uniquely utilized this method by producing
simple videos that show him at the center of the screen and surrounded by close-ups
of his mouth, each labeled with the instrument or element of the song’s mix
that it is playing. It is perhaps quite fortuitous that Tompkins is currently performing
along with Karmin as part of the Jonas Brothers tour. Tompkins’ videos manifest
the technical complexity of a cappella musical
production that mimics the full-bodied sound of the original song through the
human voice alone.
Similarly,
Sam Tsui’s early videos use the singular person as a way of producing the sound
of a college a cappella group, like
the well-known Yale Whiffenpoofs. As
with his “Michael Jackson Medley” (which has over 30 million views), Tsui’s
early videos usually began the same way: he walks onto the stage and is soon
joined by other reduplications of himself who play various parts of the harmony.
The non-existent audience cheers as he walks onto the Yale stage, emulating the
experience of an a cappella group
performance or competition. As such, his
videos seek to make manifest – and internalize – the very logic of viral
reproduction that his videos partake in. The performer is reduplicated
across the stage in a microcosmic manifestation of the logic of the cover, and of
the video’s own unfolding across the Internet.
