Fantastic.
Nirvana-Smells Like Teen Spirit Gayageum ver. by Luna
Via BoingBoing.
If you are like me, you’ve heard this song so many times that it’s just background noise now. And it certainly doesn’t carry the shock of the new, that its jagged dynamic shifts did when it first hit.
But what this amazing version does, played by Luna Lee on a gayageum, is really emphasize the melody; which circles tightly around and around those simple chords repetitively and worryingly, like a…well, like a mosquito.
The song has stopped carrying the shock of the new, but it actually never fails to stop me in my tracks, even today. Even in the grocery store. And wherever I hear it, whatever I’m in the middle of, I have to take a minute to myself, to be 14 again, and sit on my oldest friend’s bed even though at school she often won’t talk to me, and listen to this song, this song that sounds like nothing before it had sounded, and feel the hormones rush through my body, and smell the night breeze coming in through the window, and feel it rustling my quasi-Victorian cotton nightie, and realize that if a simple song can be so goddamn alive, maybe someday everything really will be okay.
So thank you. I needed that.Report
🙂Report
The first song of hers I’d ever heard was her cover of Voodoo Child.
https://youtu.be/NfOHjeI-Bns
On one level I know that she’s technically covering a song and it’s the same trick as, say, playing Led Zep on a violin or something… but, man, that is such a good trick!
She’s covered a lot of groups out there… AC/DC, RHCP, Derek and the Dominos, and, yes, Led Zeppelin…
She’s a true virtuoso. If she was only remaking power chord songs, it’d be easy to dismiss her as just doing the violin trick on a sufficiently exotic instrument that it feels new and fresh.
But she’s doing Page. She’s doing Clapton. She’s doing *HENDRIX*.Report
I don’t really think of it as “trick”. Like I said, what I like is the way that it really foregrounds the melodic element of the song.
When The Boy was born, we received a handful of those “Rock-A-Bye” CDs, with the songs of some alt-artist, recast as lullabies. There was a Cure one, a Radiohead one, and a Pixies one. The Cure and Radiohead ones were OK I guess, but didn’t really tell me much I didn’t already know, and didn’t get much play.
But the Pixies one was very much like this – stripped of the off-kilter aggression and noise and deranged Black Francisms, you really noticed how melodic the songs themselves actually are, how compactly and sturdily-constructed.Report
I’m sure we’ve talked about Apocalyptica before (googling says we haven’t?) but, if you’ve never heard it, it’s Metallica on four cellos.
https://youtu.be/UmGnvEiTCnA
I remember making jokes about how good Kirk was at doing scales… and, yeah, there’s a lot of that sort of thing going on in the solo… but the fundamental song is haunting and beautiful.Report
You should hear Tori Amos’ cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
… it’s a really, really awful cover (strikingly good music, mind, but it’s not covering the song…)
And yet, she’s got the suicidal depression angle that I’m pretty sure Kurt Cobain actually had while creating the song.
It’s a new song, with the same ol’ lyrics. But it’s almost the song that Nirvana should have been singing, if that makes any sense whatsoever.Report
@glyph Just saw this today. Fits the theme perfectly.
Great and weird job by these guys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpcReport
I saw that, pretty neat.Report