An Infinite Playlist of "As It Was," by Kevin Nguyen
"I decided to investigate the state of the cover song on YouTube."
This is the sixth entry of Know-It-All, a zine about obsession and fandom. For this essay, Kevin Nguyen listened to several hours of YouTube covers of Harry Styles’ “As It Was.” Know-It-All zine is best read in print. To order a copy, go here.
One Sunday this summer, I decided to investigate the state of the cover song on YouTube. The cover is a long and underappreciated musical tradition that I happen to admire. For much of the 20th century, the strength of musical performance had everything to do with how well you played other people’s songs. That was the foundation of jazz; it was how Dylan and the Beatles got their starts. I wondered how well the art of the cover was faring today, on the largest music platform of this century.
It made sense to start with a popular song. I went with the second biggest song of 2022: “As It Was” by Harry Styles. I typed “as it was cover” into YouTube’s search bar and clicked the first result, preparing to submit to an evening of rapidly diminishing returns. But in fact there was something pleasing about letting the algorithm guide me, letting the tide of videos sweep me out to sea. I’m grumpy, but I’m also lazy.
I’d heard this track hundreds of times despite not being a fan of Harry Styles, an artist who has thrived on his good looks, penchant for pastiche, and the overcompensation of poptimism to justify why a catchy and cynically project-managed songwriting is more than a piece of commercial art. (McKinsey could not have built a more convenient vessel than Styles, whose name even suggests a lack of commitment to a single aesthetic.) Plus it occurs to me that the vaguely romantic refrain of the chorus—“you know it’s not the same as it was”—could just as easily be applied to bad cover songs.
I also find the song pleasant enough to endure several dozen different interpretations.
The first result for “as it was cover” is by PREP, which transmutes the Styles song into the predominant aesthetic of music on the internet: R&B by way of anime. The cover’s unhurried groove provides just enough new rhythmic texture to make the original feel thin, and the strange interruption of a saxophone solo imbues the song with a new sense of humor. It has 16 million views. Another cover with a more modest 836K views, by Aime Simone, tries a similar tact, stripping the instrumentals down into a slow jam that’s less sultry and more sadboi. It’s not especially inspired, but there is something newly intimate about the pared down bedroom recording vibe.
Further down the list I see a tightly produced video by the popular user xooos, who performs the song in her bedroom. This is a common type of cover—an amateur grasping at pop stardom by singing in what I can only describe as “sexy baby voice.” That video has 6.3 million views, an average number for her covers. Her original songs, meanwhile, tend to hover around 50K views. xooos’s fans have less patience for her own work, apparently.
It doesn’t take long for mainstream radio to appear in the search results. Radio promotion remains a powerful tool for artists touring the UK, and the BBC tends to ask even established acts to perform covers. (I’m not sure why, but Brits love their covers.) BBC’s Live Lounge in particular is so well known for covers that the show has run several small tours of artists performing exclusively covers. The “As It Was” covers on Live Lounge in my YouTube results include Jorja Smith’s stripped down, soulful version and Arcade Fire’s punchy rendition. Each is serviceable, inoffensive, and sounds like obligation. It’s the stuff you have to begrudgingly put up with for the sake of publicity. Both hover around a million views. (Harry Styles has also performed a cover on Live Lounge: “Wet Dream” by Wet Leg. He looks extremely bored.)
After the first dozen videos I watch, the quality of the performances rapidly deteriorates. A cover by Will Gittens gives itself away from the thumbnail: a guy with an acoustic guitar, gazing longingly into the distance. The simplicity of “As It Was” makes it an easy solo affair, but also leaves space for the singer to do too much. In Gittens’ case, the video becomes a showcase for the kind of over-singing you might expect from someone who goes to karaoke and queues up showtunes. He has a nice falsetto, and also proves how annoying that can still sound. There are a lot of covers in this vein—sometimes a solo piano instead of a guitar, or two guitars—and they all offer varying levels of pain for the listener to endure.
I land on a video titled “What if The Strokes covered As It Was by Harry Styles?” Someone named Matty Greg has asked this question, and also answered it, giving a decent impression of Julian Casablancas’s disaffected growl and the rapid downstroke chord progressions of Albert Hammond Jr.’s chest-high Stratocaster. Because I went to college during the early aughts indie rock boom, I’m sadly a sucker for this shit, so it’s probably my favorite cover of the bunch. (The song tacks the outro of The Strokes’ “The Adults Are Talking” at the end to prove how similar the chord progression is to “As It Was.”) But maybe going garage rock with it is an obvious idea—another one by Dunebather does exactly the same thing with a less convincing Casablancas impression. Demonstrating YouTubers’ total misunderstanding of copyright law, that video ends with the caption please don’t sue me :)
Then there are the total genre swaps. One is by Our Last Night, and it sounds less like a cover of “As It Was” and more like a parody of emo—earnest, angst-ridden, and embarrassing how readily it deploys the tropes of the genre. This video makes a strong case that emo music has always acted as a thin wrapper over traditional pop music, expressing suburban anxiety with even less commitment than nu-metal. This video ends with the band asking viewers to like and subscribe, as much of a plea as a statement of purpose.
After a couple hours, the videos veer into true amateur territory, and I stop watching. The collision of art and commerce has never been more clearly visible. The cover song is an inherently earnest idea—it is, at its core, homage. It is also derivative by definition. The content creators in my search results embraced that latter quality. The majority of the channels posting covers did that almost exclusively, always of whatever pop song was charting. They weren’t devotees of Harry Styles, nor were they trying to put their own artistic twist on “As It Was.” They were transparently attempting to siphon off a few views from people distractedly looking up a popular song. Basically, they were reinterpreting the cover song as the musical equivalent of SEO.
In a way the commercial incentives of these YouTubers is reminiscent of the cover’s origins. The term “cover song” emerged in the fifties as an invention of music labels. If a song was getting popular on the radio, a rival label rushed to record a sound-alike—a copycat, an imitation—and sell it on vinyl before the first label did. “A ‘cover’ back then was a trick, a con on the listener,” wrote music critic Ray Padgett in Cover Me, his book about cover songs. “The goal was not to raise the profile of the original song, but to bury it.”
Since then, though, close to a century’s worth of intellectual property law from the Copyright Act of 1909 to Music Modernization Act of 2018, personalized algorithmic feeds, and the consumption patterns of music shifting from performance to recordings has brought us to a place where every song has a single “true” version that is identifiable and protected. Cover artists have the right to re-interpret a song, as long as they pay royalties. (Since 2018, responsibility for payment has fallen to streaming platforms, including YouTube.)
The legal right to cover someone else’s music has also, funnily enough, reinforced originality. Today a cover, at least one on YouTube, will never bury the first version. The official music video for “As It Was” has an astronomical 761 million views.
Kevin Nguyen is a writer in Brooklyn.