Cool article on this cringeworthy phenomenon http://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/blog/why-do-white-people-insist-on-fucking-up-hip-hop-songs
Yeah, I legitimately hate this shit. More so when girls do it to male rappers' songs and beautify it further. Maybe it's because you can't associate "white people" with any kind of swagger or flow, generally. "White people can't dance" - isn't that a thing? Damn, I didn't realize how much this angers me - this is my third time coming into the thread to edit my post Anyway, my new tidbit is that it's clearly done by folks who, have no intention of actually covering the song and retaining its original tone whatsoever, but instead have nearly zero musical abilities themselves in terms of innovation and would rather take lyrics someone has worked on, slap on some pretty chords, and make a melody by singing on some major chromatic scale with dramatic, "spontaneous" pauses. Wow, that really is the Ed Sheeran legacy, but at least he makes original stuff.
I care about this "issue" as much as I care about the fact that a llama might have just farted in Chile.
I would call these all amateur which is my main problem with them. They suck because the people are kind of sucky musicians. I think it doesn't happen the other way around a lot because it's just easier to sing a rap song that it is to turn a rock song into a good rap verse without a melody. Most end up just sampling said rock song. You could do this with almost any genre and an acoustic guitar and find a "trend". It's honestly just hard to be a rapper and cover a song when your main structure is a 16 bar verse and you want to cover "Hotel California" lol. I find professional covers of rap songs are pretty good like this Kendrick cover http://hypem.com/track/20qbt/Sarah+Winters+-+Swimming+Pools+(Kendrick+Lamar+cover) I find the same trend with taking a universally overplayed or "hated" song and covering it. My band covered Miley's "Wrecking Ball" and turned it into a Florence + the Machine sounding cover with a ska dance outro lol.
I only listened to about half and in general, they were pretty mediocre. The cover of Straight Outta Compton was good musically but that 40 something white guy looked so out of place singing all that. The worst was the Niggas in Paris cover though. That was absolute shit.
this is honestly the only acoustic rap cover i could ever stand listening to [video=youtube;c745E7T_Wvg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c745E7T_Wvg[/video] being featured on Scrubs might have something to do with it. also i think it's one of the earliest covers of this style. glad you cared enough to come to the thread to say that
Yeah, coming into the thread saying "I don't care about the intended topic of discussion at all" is counter-productive... --- [video=youtube;nmy113gMds0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmy113gMds0&feature=kp[/video]
Oh my God, if he said this on a Sandy Hook shooting thread, I'd understand it, but no one should give a shit about how horrible acoustic covers of rap songs are. It's just bad, get on with your day.