As long as the snow emergency continues I will continue to use it as an excuse for these posts being pathetically short. Anyway, another cover today, guys! I’ve made fun of certain folks for doing cheesy acoustic covers of classic hip hop (see the third installment in this series), but what I didn’t make clear is that if your acoustic cover of a classic hip hop song is really good, it’s totally not cheesy. If you’re anything like me (unlikely), you first got your hands on today’s recording via Napster, when it was attributed to the great jam band/drug haze soundtrack artists, Phish. But as we all learned eventually, it was actually an “american alternative country” band from Austin (what is it with Austin bands and great cover songs?) called The Gourds, and as you have probably figured out by now the song was a cover of Snoop Dogg’s seminal work, “Gin and Juice“.
So what’s great about this? Well, the initial appeal is the contrast between the kinda old-fashionedy sound of the music and the profanity of the subject matter. But after a few hundred listenings you start to realize that the arrangement is actually really good, and so is the performance. And, I swear, after you get halfway to a thousand plays, you start to think of this cover as the quintessential version of the song. And then you track down the Gourds’ performance on Austin City Limits and you realize these guys rule so much that it kinda sucks that most people will never think of them as anyone but the guys who had that cover of “Gin and Juice” 10 years ago. Okay, you get the idea. Enjoy the song.
Live version embedded below, studio recording here: Gin and Juice – The Gourds.
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