Review: Four Cover Songs by Dorian Electra (Written in 2022)
This review was written sometime in 2022. It’s about some goofy cover songs by an alt-pop musician, but it’s really about what I consider the most important artwork of the 20th century.
The late 1910s in Europe must have felt apocalyptic. Colonialist expansion had reached a fever pitch of extraction and atrocity. Rapid industrialization had choked every city in smog, crushing workers under market economies unless a workplace accident got them first. New technologies from radios to wristwatches to automatic rifles to airplanes were evolving at a blinding pace. A geopolitical Gordian knot had escalated a terrorist attack into a Great War so inhumanly bloody that the optimistic opinion was that it would scare everyone out of war forever. And as that war ended, a global plague kept the death toll running.
The War to End All Wars killed forty million. The following influenza pandemic killed another twenty-five to fifty million. The world was getting faster, more complicated, and more divided. The “progress” promised by the last few decades had wounded the world, and it was only getting worse.
Imagine being in your late twenties during the war. You’re from a family of art lovers—your grandmother’s paintings decorated your home, and three of your siblings are now artists. You’re a painter yourself, drawing influence from Cubists and Post-Impressionists. You even made a splash with a painting that was weird even by the standards of other avant-garde freaks.
And then war breaks out. Your friends and your brothers are sent to the trenches, but you get a health exemption—the privilege of watching the world end at a distance.
And you’re still in the art world, putting up with smug fiftysomethings with strong opinions about what is “good art,” getting mad at you for making “ugly” paintings. And you keep thinking of the bureaucrats, robber barons, and military officers sending young men like you into meat grinders, chatting over hors d'oeuvres about those lazy kids with their bad art and Communist books.
Maybe you think it would help if someone took a muddy Lebel rifle into one of these posh events and started firing—but you’re an artist. You can do better than that.
Between April and July 2021, indie pop artist Dorian Electra released four cover songs with accompanying videos on their personal YouTube channel: “The Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran, “Positions” by Ariana Grande, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala, and “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.
Each cover tears ragged holes into the original songs, with mumbled vocal performances run through screeching Autotune, overcooked drum tracks, distracting sound effects, and abrupt digressions in the backing tracks. The videos are similarly surreal—Dorian’s outfits are garish and uncanny, and the videos are layered in strange visual effects that keep time with the music. Every cover ends with the production falling apart in a dense cacophony of noise.
These covers are not listenable in a traditional sense—but they’re not supposed to be.
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp is a Dada masterwork because new generations of reactionaries keep discovering this piece and getting mad at it for the exact same reasons—and it manages this feat because it is actively ugly.
Some art pieces require context to make an impact, like Félix González-Torres’s heartbreakingly beautiful Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Some art pieces are vanguards for a new aesthetic paradigm, like Kanye West’s controversial-at-the-time 808s and Heartbreak. By contrast, there is no way an overturned urinal with a pseudonym scrawled on the rim can be beautiful.
And crucially, only a skilled artist could have made something like Fountain at the time. It was submitted to an organization of which Duchamp was on the board. He burned bridges with this piece.
A bad artist would have submitted a boring artwork. It would have been forgotten.
A child would have submitted an earnest attempt at high art. It would have been endearing at worst and promising at best.
Duchamp, by contrast, knew what would scandalize art snobs the most, and he did exactly that.
To be clear, Dorian Electra is a skilled pop musician. Their debut album Flamboyant was at once slickly produced, funny, eminently danceable, and boldly political. In these four cover songs, they deliberately and intentionally break pop music rules, most significantly the need for clear lyrics and well-differentiated instrumentation.
Even the crunchy hyperpop of 100 gecs is fundamentally polished. Underneath the pitched-up Autotune, the duo sing clearly enough that listeners can hear the lyrics; and the music itself is professionally mixed so that the drums don’t overpower the lyrics and the lyrics don’t overpower the chords.
Dorian does the opposite—they mumble the lyrics, sing too close to their microphone, and attempt ludicrous falsettos only kept in place by Autotune. The mixing is also intentionally bad—sometimes the drums are too loud, sometimes the bass is too heavy to carry a melody, and in the last section of the “Shape of You” cover, the backing track is abruptly made far too quiet for the vocal track. These aren’t rookie mistakes, because even a beginner wouldn’t add glass-breaking sound effects that drown out the singer.
In fact, most of the off-putting elements of these covers reflect Dorian’s real experience in music, fashion, and video direction. In the “Shape of You” cover, they wear knockoff Air Jordans with an Amazon logo replacing the Nike swoosh. The choreography in the “Positions” cover juxtaposes Evangelical Christian imagery with the open sexuality of the original song, resulting in an uncanny performance that ends with humping a Bible. The video for “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” uses the exaggerated fisheye perspective of ‘90s music videos, but it also displays a can of Bang energy drink in the corner, referencing “sponcon” (sponsored content) TikToks that would keep a can of the drink in frame as casual product placement. The video for the “Happy” cover, made in collaboration with 645AR, is shot in an alley, mirroring the opening alley shot of Pharrell’s original music video.
These songs are not the work of a bad musician—there are too many moving parts, too many instruments, too many obviously botched sound effects.
It took work to make songs this ugly.
By modern standards, Fountain is the ultimate Dril post. It angers everyone Duchamp wanted to anger, and it’s deeply hilarious to everyone else. But it’s a vindictive work. It barged into the art world screaming, “The way things were always done made things worse, and they deserve to burn.” Duchamp couldn’t destroy capitalism, or colonialism, or the military industrial complex, but he could break art with a vandalized urinal—it was the only weapon he had.
A century after Fountain, the world is once again getting faster, more complicated, and more divided. The “progress” promised by the last few decades has wounded the world, and many young people fear it will only get worse.
And we’re all stuck online, putting up with smug fiftysomethings with strong opinions about what is “good art,” getting mad on social media about how pop culture sucks now. And we keep seeing the bureaucrats, robber barons, and government leaders sending young folks like us into meat grinders, moaning in op-eds about those lazy kids with their bad art and Communist streamers.
Is it any wonder that the memes have been deep-fried, that the pop has gone hyper, that the Zoomer-dominated internet has embraced the “shitpost?” If you can’t destroy capitalism, or colonialism, or climate change, then you can at least break the internet—it’s the only weapon many young folks think they have.
Dada is back, because if the rules gave us this, then they deserve to burn.