Hey Ya

Remember 'Hey Ya'? Of course you do, four and a half years ago you couldn't go two hours without hearing it. Well it's happened, it's been covered. I suppose it was ultimately inevitable considering its former popularity. The group in question is the aptly named Supersuckers and according to their website they are "the world's greatest Rock N' Roll band." I've never heard anything else by them, but according to what I heard tonight they're another poppy neo-punk band that will mass produce a bunch of radio friendly rad tunes for high school students to skateboard and fuck to.

So anyway, they covered 'Hey Ya.' Check it out if you like packing buffalo shit in your ears. Essentially they've added nothing new or original to the song. They've put no interesting new twist on it. The guitar is more distorted, the vocals are flatter and that's it. The whole rock covering rap thing is tricky, but it has worked before. Probably the ultimate example would be Dynamite Hack's cover of 'Boyz In Da Hood' by Eazy E, which is absolutely genius in my opinion. But first of all, 'Boyz In Da Hood' was never the most popular song in the world. Second of all, the lyrics and original beat were so hardcore that there was absolutely no way a bunch of white guys singing it with guitars could ever be taken seriously. And that's the point, it was never meant to be taken seriously. They even corrected the grammar in the title for christ sake, renaming it 'Boys In The Hood.' It was white boys with an acoustic guitar singing an Eazy E song. It was fresh, it was original and it was funny as hell.

There's nothing funny about this Supersuckers travesty though. They play the song as closely to the original as humanly possible, so much so that during the opening riffs, before the vocals kicked in, I thought it was the original. So essentially what you're hearing is 'Hey Ya' with all of its soul ripped out by a legion of pop-punk succubi. But what originally caught my attention was the fact that at first I did think it was the original...on rock radio. "I've never heard this on a rock station before," I thought to myself. And then it hit me, all it takes for a couple of rappers who write one of the biggest songs to ever hit the charts and one of the most original of their genre to get said song heard on rock radio is for four or five talentless bastards who know a couple power chords to butcher it less than five years later. And who the fuck covers a song that's less than five years old anyway?