Novelty, Hipsters, and Torpor: Dissecting The Onion’s A.V. Club Undercover
By Chris Polley
When you’re on doctor-ordered 24-hour bed rest in the middle of May and the World Cup hasn’t quite started yet, you take pleasure in the littlest of things, like online web video series. This was me in 2010 following a nasty foot injury. One of the many vaguely interesting (but not vital) web series I became obsessed was the first annual volume of A.V. Club Undercover from everyone’s favorite satirical newspaper/pop culture junkie source The Onion. For those unfamiliar, the staff of the web site put together a list of 25 of their favorite songs, ranging from iconic indie rock staples like “Cut Your Hair” by Pavement” to allegedly ironically loved tripe like “We Built This City” by Starship, then asked in 25 different modern indie bands/artists to cover the tracks. The trick was that once a song was done, it was crossed off the list and each successive band had less and less options to pick from as the series went on. Being a fan and/or hater of many of the songs on their list and the bands they invited in, I was fascinated with how the whole thing panned out, so I paid attention. One thing that always stuck with me, though, was that with every video I watched, whether from someone I adored like Superchunk to someone I had little to no opinion on, like Owen Pallett, came a weird pit in my stomach that made me feel like something was off. Like these people weren’t enjoying themselves as much or as honestly as they could have been.
Of course eventually my foot healed, the summer got brighter, and I got off my ass, and thus I never allowed myself the opportunity to follow up on the inclination. But now that changes, as A.V. Club Undercover has returned recently with their second installment of 25 bands/artists and 25 supposedly beloved songs, this time all of them picked by A.V. Club readers that stuck with the series through its culmination last summer. And I honestly didn’t even remember that terrible feeling of ruin when I first read about the series’ return, but it all came flooding back as an ad for it lingered in the background of my internet browser after watching an episode of one of my favorite new shows on television, Happy Endings, on Hulu. Take a peek at the embedded video below and see if you can predict it before we move on to the next paragraph.
Happy Endings “Dave of the Dead” [ABC]
Now obviously not every indie musician inherently fulfills the reductive stereotypical requirements espoused by a sitcom character on the American Broadcasting Company, but you’ve got to admit that some of the unclassifiable everyman rhetoric rings true when watched alongside the A.V. Club Undercover series. Depressing, but true. The most blatant example, even more so than the song chosen or even the mode of dress of any given artist (though Dum Dum Girls make a strong case for the latter in the video embedded below), is the little impromptu interview that is conducted as guitars are slung on and drumsticks are twirled in mental preparation for the actual performance. Part of the series’ visual hook is that it all takes place in a small white circular room, which already makes for a certain sterile brand of claustrophobia, even with autographs/doodles from other artists lining the cylindrical space, which just makes it even more awkward when an eager bespectacled journalist pops his head in to ask you why you chose the song you’re covering for the series. So the surprise factor offers us, depending on your perspective, either an authentically lifeless and bland answer from the performer, or if you’re more sympathetic, an unfair and poorly organized/executed look into the psyche of the modern day independent musician.
As you may be able to tell from this essay’s title, with a few exceptional artists who are able to defy expectations, I tend to side with the former, more cynical view. It seems like this should be a rather simple but fun exercise in instrumentation and stylistic voice, but much of the time we’re instead treated with a group of hipsters that have wandered into a comically tiny room, are about 86% unsure why they’re there, and suddenly are forced to come up with a lackluster arrangement of a song they may or may not like. Even when Singer X or Guitarist Y stutter incoherence, bad jokes, or talk about how they always meant to cover this song until finally just coming to the rushed conclusion “uhh I think we picked this song because we love it?” or some iteration thereof, the ambivalence soaks through the digital divide like a juice spill on Bounty, even if there may be a glimmer of hope in the fact that they used the word “love” instead of the phrase “over it.” Luckily the jump cuts bring us so erratically and quickly through the interview that we are often only coerced into suffering through a brief selection of Q&A results before the music abruptly begins. This is good and all, but it also doesn’t bode well for what was left on the cutting room floor.
Dum Dum Girls cover Big Star
Then there are the songs themselves. Once again, there are exceptions to the rule, especially in the songs that are chosen from the indie canon, such as “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem (covered nimbly by Baths) and “Dylan in the Movies” by Belle & Sebastian (covered breezily by Telekinesis), though those also have their minor pit-in-the-stomach issues, which will be discussed momentarily. No, the more serious offenders are those that attempt to capture some kind of pure essence in a song that admittedly has a strong pop backbone, but ultimately isn’t framed with nearly the amount of vibrancy and, to be frank, fun that the original contained. Don’t get me wrong – I’m as much of a victim to novelty as any other American, but the whole point of temporary pleasure is that it’s actually pleasurable, and arguably even ecstatically so, as there’s only so much time until the pleasure wears off.
Iron & Wine’s dusty take on George Michael’s “One More Try” is the most aggravating example because Sam Beam is so deft at his eclectically minimal style that you want the thing to swallow you whole and take you to a soft yet heavenly place that you weren’t sure half of Wham! would have ever been able to. And then, two minutes in, you realize it’s just kind of been sitting there, lifeless as ever, even with Beam cooing into the mic like the song is a dirge for slain soldiers whose bodies just arrived home from an epic battle. The woodwind instrumentation is lovely, to be sure, especially for being an off-the-cuff recording for a gimmicky web series, but it repurposes the song so much that you’re left with a taste in your mouth not unlike when your tongue “accidentally” touches a battery for the first time as a kid. You react harshly, as if it’s the worst and most surprising thing in the world, though it’s really just mild bitterness. The latest vid from Smith Westerns, covering Tom Petty, acts likewise, but without the care and precision at I&W were ambitious enough to inject. Instead, “American Girl” just sounds like a teenage Strokes cover band that took a bunch of Quaaludes from their parents’ medicine cabinet, minus the suburban social commentary.
Titus Andronicus - AV Club Undercover
Titus Andronicus covers They Might Be Giants
Even a band like Titus Andronicus, who are physically incapable of sounding sedated, even if they did manage to swallow a bottle of downers, sound limp when thrust into the “quick, pick a cover!” mentality of this addictively disappointing series. Like the pretentiously rambunctious chaps they are, they want to jump around but also be introspective, which is the modern indie band’s version of having your cake and eating it too. Somehow, with their original compositions, it works like gangbusters. Their lyrics read like a manic Upton Sinclair novel and their instrumentation is frantic and engaging. But give them someone else’s material, especially a legendary quirk-pop outfit like They Might Be Giants, and they’re going to want to shoehorn in something more than just a nasally carefree jam about self-sustaining motivation. So what do they do? They play an effing reading of a Bukowski poem over a sustaining note before going apeshit with their mics and instruments, completely decimating many fine hooks and melodies with their unrestrained brashness. Take it from me, someone who enjoys when bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor get overly dramatic and have spoken word interludes to build tension – there’s a time and a place for this kind of thing. And it’s not during a They Might Be Giants song.
Maybe I’m being overly harsh. I have no problem with Wye Oak covering Danzig (though it may be forgettable, it’s at least pleasant) and I have no problem with The Low Anthem covering Wilco (I may even finally give this band a proper listen-through after their rendition of “A Shot in the Arm”, if only because of the singer’s signature register), but once again, it neither stimulates me like the original version of the song they’re covering or the actual voice that indie band has cultivated for themselves. In fact, I’m fine with covers in general; especially in a live setting, they can be an unpredictable treat during an encore. But even when there’s so much love for music in the actual rendition, like the aforementioned Baths and Telekinesis examples, it’s still so incidental in a day and age where we’re overly bombarded with music, that I just want to grab all of these mopey half-smiling hipsters by the shoulders, shake them, and say, “do it with some passion, dammit! Forget about the cameras! But for the love of crap, make sure you know what you’re doing first!”