Covers of Radiohead's Creep

This is the best cover of Radiohead's "Creep".

There is one flaw of many "Creep" covers: the singer tends to make it about themselves. For example, the following cover of "Creep" featured on America's Got Talent, which garnered 23 million likes, is funereal.

The performance does its job in that it highlights the singer's skill, but it's not a particularly emotionally engaging version of "Creep" - your eyes are drawn on the singer's voice alone and not on the meaning of the lyrics.

Take this video too, attracting 100 million likes, where the arrangements are an after-thought and the singing is a half-emulation of Billie Holliday or Ella Fitzgerald.

When considering the arrangements of a song, the necessary thing to ask is: what purpose do they serve? What does the sax do, except to merely stand in for the jazz idiom? The piano is only there because it's expected. Obviously your eyes are attracted to the singing itself, which is notable for fake growls and inflections that don't convey any unique emotion apart from the lyrics themselves. Shall we call this "surface-only jazz", without the performance, the energy, the suffering, the swing?

There are so many bad versions of the song trying to recreate its drama through performance alone, when their performance does not arise from their personal circumstances and enters the public space for the audience's hearing.

What is a good cover of "Creep"? This is one:

Here the arrangements actually control the audience's eyes and the singer works with the band, not in spite or against them. You can dance to this version of "Creep" - as you can for the original version of "Creep". Not speaking for the band's technical accomplishments, on a thematic level it's a "Creep" sung by someone who feels loneliness on the dancefloor, not unlike Robyn's "Dancing On My Own".

Another great version of "Creep"? How about Dave Chapelle's?

Dave Chappelle is absolutely a shit singer, but what's important is that he's having fun with the song. Yes, fun! Did people forget "Creep" is a rock song? You can absolutely jam to "Creep". The best part of the song is that the crowd sings along and Chappelle guides them, because it's a song about everyone, not just the singer. And it's something special when Chappelle belts out "fucking", because it is indeed a dark word.

The song's ability to make people jam is something I hadn't thought about until a friend paraphrased a famous jazz guitarist: There is a technical aspect to playing jazz, but to play real jazz depends entirely on your lower body - that is, your ability to dance. That's where the emotional quality of the music comes from. No matter how blue the blues are, the songs still have to make you jig.

If "Creep" was so private and tormented then it wouldn't be a song. Songs are meant to be shared, after all. The most important factor is that you can shake to "Creep" - in fact, I covered this in a review for Weezer's "Pinkerton". "Creep" revels in its darkness, and dances to it - the narrator takes some self-satisfaction in being a creep, hence the soaring chorus. (Perhaps that is the reason why Radiohead doesn't like to play the song live - isn't it kinda weird people are self-congratulating themselves for being creeps?) People tend to forget the song's manic quality.

Gura's cover has flaws. I need more fingers to count her flat deliveries and stumbles. She self-censors the "fuck" initially, then gives in. She says "weir-do" and "spe-shul" funny. She essentially gives up on the "Run" verse. But the singing itself is not important to the song - who the hell thinks Thom Yorke is an excellent singer? The emotional delivery is the most important.

If there is a test for "Creep", it is right before the chorus kicks in. The measure is how the singer goes from 0 to 100 in the chorus, because of the song's manic qualities. If the singer ends "You're so fucking special" at 0 and starts "But I'm a creep" at 100, they failed. The ascent needs to be nuanced and complicated, because that is the literal bridge from depression to self-flagellation.

I'm actually astounded by Gura's performance. She passes the above test with flying colors, her voice gradually escalating in a swift, solid motion, not getting off track from the ultimate destination like a swan soaring into the clouds. She underplays the verses, not opting for anything flashy, but also not pretending to understate the song by mumbling or crooning. (Goddamn do I hate people who croon covers. The worst is for ABBA's "Mamma Mia".) Her cover is largely straight and clear while retaining the song's fantastical elements, which are the qualities that attracted people to it in the first place.

And the following is my reading more into it than I should. V-tubers are a very odd sort of star. Usually a star is identified by some visual element, but theirs is an illustration which is a fantasized version of a person, not at all close to adjacent to how they look in real life. Furthermore they do all sorts of strange things, like, say, play Twister or crack jokes on people's rooms, creating this bizarre voyeuristic relationship with their audience. But, I want to emphasize, these are pretty darn creative artists we're talking about, with many things to express - this is of course the case, because they don't manuever hundreds of thousands of viewers with only a moderate amount of skill. Furthermore, they're pretty darn diligent, as they seem to study the works of their co-workers and prep often for certain shows. So they run into this very odd dilemma of being at once private and public, casual and professional, especially when their management company controls many aspects of that public persona.

I discerned, where I possibly shouldn't have, a great deal of honesty in Gura's cover of "Creep", through embodying the narrator's public/private persona. I think that's another reason why she falters at the "Run" section - it's really the chorus and the other verses that seize her attention. The "I don't belong here" is delivered with her full knowledge that thousands of people are commenting on her performance as it is happening and she is making it happen. Towards the middle of the song she has given up on self-censoring the word "fucking", though the use of profanity is likely not approved by management.

At the end of her performance Gura plops herself back on her chair, rocking the mic, and resumes her regular persona by commenting on the mic's rocking with a curt "Whomp". "It's not a good song," so she says.