Acoustic Throwback: The Surprisingly Beautiful Covers Of 90s RnB Songs

Cover songs can sometimes sound surprisingly better than the original — or at any rate, become significantly more popular. Take Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah", Jimi Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower" for example — but there are dozens of other such intelligent covers that have made it to the shelves of musical classics. Over the past few years, the rise of online platforms such as YouTube and the increasing accessibility to recording devices has led to cover songs becoming somewhat of a musical genre in its own right.

BBC Radio 1's Live expand=1] Lounge, for instance, records well-known artists covering the songs of other artists of a completely different genre. The Arctic expand=1] Monkeys covered Girls Aloud, Queens expand=1] Of The Stone Age took on Robin Thicke. Choosing a song and transforming it to make it sound at the same time completely different, yet recognizable, is a good reminder that hits are just a succession of chords and lyrics, and that anyone can have a expand=1] go at making LMFAO's "Sexy and I Know It" slightly more listenable.

In Nashville, Tennessee, a musician called Ernie Halter just successfully funded his project via the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform: an album consisting solely of 90s RnB accoustic covers. "I present to you "Acoustic Throwback." Naked versions of your favorite 90s RnB jams. Let's take a ride on a six-string time machine, back to when MTV still had videos, and you still had a landline phone (and an answering machine)," says Halter. Here's a good sample of his work — a cover of TLC's "Waterfalls". Worth the listen:

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Migrant Lives

Migration

What's Driving More Venezuelans To Migrate To The U.S.

With dimmed hopes of a transition from the economic crisis and repressive regime of Nicolas Maduro, many Venezuelans increasingly see the United States, rather than Latin America, as the place to rebuild a life..

Photo of a family of Migrants from Venezuela crossing the Rio Grande between Mexico and the U.S. to surrender to the border patrol with the intention of requesting humanitarian asylum

Migrants from Venezuela crossed the Rio Grande between Mexico and the U.S. to surrender to the border patrol with the intention of requesting humanitarian asylum.

David Peinado via Zuma Press

Julio Borges

-Analysis-

Migration has too many elements to count. Beyond the matter of leaving your homeland, the process creates a gaping emptiness inside the migrant — and outside, in their lives. If forced upon someone, it can cause psychological and anthropological harm, as it involves the destruction of roots. That's in fact the case of millions of Venezuelans who have left their country without plans for the future or pleasurable intentions.

Their experience is comparable to paddling desperately in shark-infested waters. As many Mexicans will concur, it is one thing to take a plane, and another to pay a coyote to smuggle you to some place 'safe.'

Venezuela's mass emigration of recent years has evolved in time. Initially, it was the middle and upper classes and especially their youth, migrating to escape the socialist regime's socio-political and economic policies. Evidently, they sought countries with better work, study and business opportunities like the United States, Panama or Spain. The process intensified after 2017 when the regime's erosion of democratic structures and unrelenting economic vandalism were harming all Venezuelans.