I work at a grocery store and as you know we don’t get to pick the music that comes over the speakers that we have to listen to. That being said at times we get pretty good music, sometimes we get ok music and other times we get just horrible music. Now this isn’t just at my job but I’ve noticed it a lot on the internet as of late but has been a thing for a long time.

I personally am not a big fan of people taking soul or hip-hop tracks and trying to do an acoustic or accapela cover of these songs. Of course sometimes these work if you have a really great voice and I love it but then you have people who can’t really sing and take all the soul out of the song & it just becomes plain oatmeal with no brown sugar.

The best two examples that have happened a few weeks ago are Taylor Swift’s cover of Earth, Wind & Fire’s September and Post Malone covering Return of the Mack. Both covers were TRASH!!! I hated both because I don’t think either are good singers and they are both horrible people who don’t really support black people so they really shouldn’t touch our songs.

Taylor’s cover was a banjo version with no soul, no horns, no runs, just some soulless trash.

Post Malone’s cover at least had a jazzy band behind him but his vocals were horrible seeing as though he is not a soul singer.

I even the other day at work heard a cover of Rihanna’s Please Don’t Stop The Music sung by a man trying to do a soft acoustic rendition of a turn-up Rihanna song and that had a Michael Jackson sample in it.

This even became a big thing on YouTube and some of these singing apps where they took hip-hop or R&B songs and tried to do them acoustic or accapela to make them more appealing to a certain type of audience.

It’s kind of like how back in the day Michael McDonald used to do all those Marvin Gaye covers and then thought he was good enough to come into the soul/R&B space when nobody gave you the right to do that.

Now of course it worked in some cases like with Bobby Codwell and Lisa Stansfield but that was only because for a very long time we all thought they were black. But take the cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares To You by Sinead O’Connor even though her cover was bigger then Princes that was because at the time we didn’t know it was Prince’s song but I definitely like Prince’s version way more.

I guess my point really is that if you have no rhythm or soul please stop trying to make covers of songs with rhythm and soul. And sadly I know this goes into more of a racism type mentality where like we have said for ever people love to listen to black music from non black people. That is why covers on YouTube are so big still. It’s like that with a lot of black things though like our food which can become bland without the right spices or no spices, our slang which sounds weird coming out of certain peoples mouths, or our body parts/hairstyles. They all will act like those things are so much better when not done by or on a black person. But to me all these covers done so badly are more of an insult to the creators of these songs and to the fans because it makes us feel that you don’t care about the song or artist really.

Anyway this was really more of a hot take cause this was getting on my nerves a lot the past few weeks listening to this stuff at work.