A friend of mine recently brought to my attention Gotye’s fascinating, innovative video for “Somebody I Used to Know.” While watching it on YouTube, I noticed a couple of cover versions of the song in the related content column. I was intrigued to discover that Gotye’s version of the song had amassed over 50 million views, while one cover version by a Canadian group called Walk Off the Earth had garnered nearly as many on its own. While the web is teeming with various musicians covering popular songs, this one is unique in that all five members of the band play one guitar. Simultaneously.
Walking Off the Earth’s version exercises a curious power of me, and, as a result, I’ve watched it more times than I care to mention. As I continued digging around on YouTube, though, I found a third take on the song, and this one, too, cast a spell on me. Take a look at Ingrid Michaelson’s one-woman-band version:
So what unites these two versions of “Somebody That I Used to Know,” aside from Gotye’s melody and lyrics? Both, I think, undo in interesting ways the cohesion that is the pop song. Generally, when we hear a song live—in our cars, in our headphones, in a club—we experience it as a unity. In the standard three-minute pop song, one might here guitar, keys, bass, drums, voices—all operating in harmony, hopefully. When performed live, individual musicians sound these notes in time: thus, despite the fact that they are all playing something different, they manage to coalesce around the patterns of rhythm and verse-chorus structure. A recording of a song works largely the same way: we hear these individual elements as a unity, as all the sounds a present to our senses at once.
Something about the audiovisuality of the cover versions makes the seams visible, however. The contrivance of having five people negotiate their normally separate duties on one instrument creates a rather amusing, impressive spectacle. If we close our eyes, the song sounds note-perfect, much like recorded music does on my iPod. The image, though, embeds the labor of the song’s production within it. How many times must the bandmates have fouled the song up? How fatigued must the arms of the gentleman playing the bass notes (second from the right) have become as he contorted his body to play, sing, and still not disrupt the person picking chords less than an inch from his own hands? It’s hard enough to coordinate the efforts of multiple people to one musical end—which is why they call it orchestration—, but to compound the difficulty by doing one instrument designed for a single pair of hands is astonishing.
Michaelson’s version does something similar, though by different means. In her video, the song is played back as a coherent whole. What we see, however, are fragments of the songs recording. The video opens with a snare drum with someone’s hands delicately tapping the rhythm of the song on a snare drum.
Within the next 18 seconds, we see, mostly in close-up shots, the same pair of hands playing a xylophone, both bass and acoustic guitars, striking mallets against a floor tom. In most, we see the microphones placed in front of the instruments, clearly suggesting that the sounds we hear emanate from the objects onscreen. As the lyrics begin, the screen divides, giving us simultaneously glimpses of the “core” instruments (guitar, bass, drums) on one-third of the screen, and Michaelson singing on the other two-thirds.
It is soon revealed the Michaelson is the owner of the hands we’ve seen. The video suggests, then, that Michaelson plays every instrument and sings every line of the song. Thus, in Walk Off the Earth’s version above, five people play one instrument; in Michaelson’s, one person plays seven. But whereas Walk Off the Earth’s video gives us unified space-time through a single, unedited take, Michaelson’s video, like the song the accompanies it, is broken into a number of discrete pieces.
In the song, most of the layers of recording are present at once. In the video, however, they are gradually revealed. Late in the video, the screen divides itself further, showing us the sources of the sound we hear—including a metal trash can lid that might have escaped our ears’ attention. Again, like our other example, the video gives us a sense of the apparently day-long recording session that rendered the four-minute pop song we hear, assuming of course that the images are the “authentic” session itself.
Another thing that fascinates me about Michaelson’s video is the interaction between the intimacy of the performance, the proximity of the camera, and the “presence” of the sound. First, in most of images of Michaelson playing instruments other than her embodied one (her voice), she is shot in close-up, often in shallow focus. Our attention is, thus, channeled towards the image of fingers on keys or strings. Take the opening shot of Michaelson tapping the snare drum with her fingers. The close-up functions here like a microphone, picking up the minutest of details, like the tiniest taps of her thumbs (called “ghost notes” in drum-speak: barely audible yet palpable nevertheless). Curiously, as the video shuffles images my way, I tend to hear the visualized instrument more prominently than before, as if it were keyed up in the mix to coincide with the image. Now, if we adopt Michel Chion’s technique of masking—that is, watching a audiovisual text without sound, or vice-versa—we notice that the mix seems constant when listened to on its own (187-88). The mere presence of the image seems to up the volume on a particular source. This inverts Chion’s notion of “spotting, wherein “the sound sumperimposed onto the image is capable of directing our attention to a particular visual trajectory” (11). Here, the image directs us to a sound, as if to underline it. Chion notes that sound is often thought to be mere accompaniment to film and television images; this particular text, I think, shows us how the image in music videos often is thought merely to accompany the song. I note this especially in the “bum-bum-bum” notes that Michaelson sings at the 2:25 mark. Her proximity to the mic and the whispered-yet-percussive quality of her voice seem to make this minor bit of vocal phrasing much more prominent to my ear.
It seems to me that videos of this sort—both Walk Off the Earth’s and Michaelson’s—make apparent the fragments that make up the pop song, which most of us hear as a unified entity, a song rather than a collection of disparate notes from multiple instruments. (The same may be said for any number of “dub” videos, too.) Thus, these cover tunes work to uncover the process of production while at the same moment highlighting the interplay between sound and image. The song, a purely auditory phenomenon, resonates differently when visuals accompany it.
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Bibliography:
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).