I Hate the Acoustic Covers Spotify Playlist More Than Jair Bolsonaro Hates the Amazon

You heard me. I hate the Acoustic Covers Spotify Playlist more than the current president of Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, wants to burn the lungs of the planet just so he can collect a few bucks and doesn’t have to accept the charity of the literal world, and instead just the Queen of England, due to the fact that he does not want people to see him as a Weenie Boy. Let’s begin.

The Acoustic Covers playlist has 3,438,570 followers on Spotify. That makes it easily one of the most-followed playlists on the most ubiquitous music-playing app of the moment. That doesn’t mean everyone uses Spotify, or that that’s an accurate rendering of how many people “love” acoustic covers. I’m sure a couple thousand of those follows are coffee shops and healing crystal places needing some soft jamz for their patrons so that the white subway tile/raw wood/little succulents aesthetic doesn’t seem so overwhelmingly sterile. But it’s an indication that over 3 million people want that playlist so easily find-able that they have clicked follow, and I’m assuming a large chunk of that number also actually likes the playlist, which sucks. Because when you’re just really into Acoustic Covers, it means you don’t really want to think, and you’re probably viewing one of the most important forms of art and cultural thought throughout the centuries as something that is purely a consumable that can be relegated to the background, and you’re ultimately isolating yourself from the sacred, communal elements that music has to offer.

I’m not here to argue with you about this. I don’t want to hear about how you like the Acoustic Covers because they send you to the original song. I just want to tell you you’re wrong.

Sometime around my senior year of high school (Bath, New York, Class of ’09, back-to-back Section V Class B Boys Soccer Champions), I became aware of the growing tide of acoustic music entering both the indie and mainstream music scene. That was mostly due to a fairly sheltered upbringing in combination with a tiny, tiny hometown. Acoustic music was Amy Grant, Rich Mullins, and that one song Audio Adrenaline did. Our town had one (1) Top 40 radio station in range. But music found a way, as it usually does, and I was getting into more alternative music scenes as a junior and senior. Some late-to-party-but-kinda-hip folk soon followed. Mumford & Sons debut album and I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers soon entered my regular rotation. So it goes.

This was also around the time that I became aware of the existence of Boyce Avenue. When I got to college, people were listening to this shit everywhere. Their YouTube page was blowing up. People were covering songs in the exact style of Boyce Avenue or Birdy at open mics. It was a phenomenon.

And it was…very boring? I could not, for the life of me, understand the appeal of listening to someone sparsely cover other songs in an adequate manner with just a piano or an acoustic guitar, or go absolutely ballistic, maybe you had both of those things and a mandolin in there to really give it some zing. Every single song was the same. Some person, usually a Caucasian person who is the type of attractive that has no distinguishing characteristics which makes them practically invisible in most social settings, with a voice that matches their looks in its adequacy and indistinguishable prettiness, would sing a song. Nothing would really change from the original. If anything, the original would be simplified. And THEN, people would cover the same song, but in the style of the cover. A cover of a cover. Like Barthes and Saussure formed a coffeeshop duo.

I wasn’t immune to this either! A brief history of the songs I have covered at open mic functions:

• ”Banjolin Song” by Mumford & Sons
• “Dearly Departed” by Shakey Graves
• “Crazy/Ain’t No Sunshine” by Gnarls Barkley/Bill Withers, a mash-up acoustic cover, truly the sunshine of young white millennial ingenuity
• “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, a song that was practically required to graduate from colleges in the late Aughts/early Teens of the new millennium

And so on. Acoustic covers are relatively simple feats of musical talent to pull off, which makes them easy fodder for impressing your friends and the people you want to be kissing on the mouth.

Legitimate artists were made out of this phenomenon. Acoustic covers had been encroaching on jazz’s territory as the official background noise of public spaces in a very quiet turf war for years, but this was completely different! Birdy released an album that was entirely covers and it went Platinum IN SIX COUNTRIES! Which made me realize:

I fucking hate Acoustic Covers because that style of contextless rendering of songs requires minimal talent and elevates what should be parody to the realm of art. And I bet some of you feel somewhat the same, even if you haven’t given the thought a bunch of flowery, academic-lite words to the white-hot rage you feel whenever you hear another guy covering “Hey Ya” on guitar.

Let’s break down that sentence from the start: acoustic covers are contextless. They neuter songs of their place and voice in favor of palatable melody, until you barely know where it came from anymore. How many dudes have you seen cover “Fast Car” ad-nauseam, until you can no longer associate its lyrics with anything more than a guy trying to get laid? How many of you currently don’t know that Tracy Chapman, the artist who wrote and recorded “Fast Car,” is a black woman? That sucks! Fast Car is a great song that I can barely listen to anymore! And it’s going to happen to more songs! There’s an acoustic cover of “Black Beatles” by two girls called The Mayries, so how much longer before half of the Acoustic Cover playlist is just acoustic Lizzo with a classical flute solo?

Next bullet: minimal talent. “Crazy in Love” did not become the biggest song in the world because it has such an optimal chord structure that you strumming those chords and vocal-frying your way through the lyrics makes me want to listen to it again. It became the biggest song in the world because Beyonce has a far better voice than you ever will, and can dance better than you ever could to boot, and it became the biggest song in the world thanks to a lot of producers and technicians and sound engineers who are extremely good at their jobs. Covering a song and just stripping it to it’s most bare elements is the song-writing equivalent of pivoting to video.

The final bullet is the elevation of parody. We laud cover artists for their bold interpretations of songs you would never think belong on an acoustic guitar. This is hilarious, because of what acoustic music does: puts all your attention on the lyrical content of the song. And guess what! A lot of lyrics in pop music suck, but the songs work because the music is great! I think the best example of this is Ryan Adams recording that entire cover album of 1989 (yes, I know it’s not acoustic, but it feels like an acoustic cover album in its supreme lack of musical imagination and old-guy-former-ground-breaker-“take me seriously”- dweebiness). 1989 is a great pop album. There is song after song of earworm melodies that rattle around your skull for weeks. 1989 does not have phenomenal songwriting. It’s riddled with stupid stuff. But that’s ok, because when you can’t help shaking your ass to it, no one cares. It’s not ok when you’re groaning out the lyrics like it’s a dirge about how you can’t pay your family’s medical bills. Even the best lyrical song on the album, “Blank Space,” falls completely flat because of how out-of-context it is. Taylor Swift has fielded criticism her entire career for mining relationships for songs, so she made fun of that criticism in a song, and it’s great. The closest Ryan Adams has come to that is the numerous claims of emotional abuse and untoward sexual advances he’s made toward dozens of women.

You see what I’m saying here? Acoustic Covers are bad. Music, at its best, makes people evaluate and discuss worldviews, or smile together, or cry together, or dance in a large group, which are all small sacred events that bind us together. I believe that God exists, among other places, in the art that we create and in the community we form with other people, whether you believe in that or not. Acoustic Covers, for the most part, accomplish none of that. And for that reason I hate them, think they’re eroding our society, and wish to see them destroyed with the fire of a thousand suns.

In an unrelated note, I am currently acting in a play where I cover “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak on acoustic guitar.