You Tube

Matthew Keene

Reviewing the Arts

4/23/2011

You Tube: The Ultimate Open Mic

Do-it-yourself artists are not just going to have a more fair competition with modern commercial pop thanks to the internet, but they are going to give music lovers of more acquired tastes better versions of that material. While Savage Garden and Katy Perry will be temporary glimpses of what twelve year olds are into, artists like Pearl and the Beard and Matthew Gaydos will tap into the emotion of Katy Perry and Savage Garden songs for the all-grown up fans the way the original artists couldn’t.

            Most twenty-two year-olds living today will remember the good old days of whatever commercial pop they were into and want to temporarily re-live it, hence the Ravinia Festival selling out with the Backstreet Boys’ two night stint. But  the sound will no longer effect the minds of these now-grown up fans. Matthew Gaydos is a young tattooed college student broadcasting on You Tube from his dorm room with an acoustic guitar covered with stickers of the Sex Pistols and Yes. He has an eighteen song album for only five dollars and promotes it by covering an old pop song, taking requests and then giving us one of his songs immediately afterwards.

            So when he played Savage Garden’s “I Want You” he brought back old memories of grade school, but he also adapted the song for older and slightly more jaded ears. The verses in “I Want You” are hard to understand, minus the line “Like a cherry cola”, and they lead up to the direct and cuttingly catchy chorus. But on Savage Garden’s version the song is backed by a pulsing drum machine and the vocals are auto-tuned. These effects on the song will make it drop out of the psyche of old listeners once they reach a less suceptable age.

            Gaydos strips it down to just him and his guitar and his version brings out a drive that will make some one who never liked the original version in the first place nod right along. In his you tube video he asks his viewers to ask him to do more “unexpected” acoustic covers. “Songs that everyone else isn’t covering on You Tube” as he puts it. Seeing “I Want You” covered this way was unexpected and much more enjoyable. Before the world of You Tube Gaydos wouldn’t stand a fighting chance against the corporatized Savage Garden. He would be playing his version of “I Want You” at open mics and while his version may be well received by the small crowds it wouldn’t be on such a level playing field.

            People are leaving comment after comment on how his version is better. Savage Garden’s version isn’t terrible, but the sound of the song, even live, is so artificial and the grown up fans and former fans of Savage Garden are going to resonate more with Gaydos. His version represents where that song is going: covered acoustically by kids in dorm rooms and around campfires.

            Gaydos’s album is an 18-song original work and has a punky cleverness in his lyrics. His punchy playing on the acoustic guitar drives that cleverness even further so his ironic cover of a pop artist is fitting to his character.