There is literally a line about not knowing how to stick together, and another line wondering if love can’t actually last forever.) Is it then impossible to actually cover “Hey Ya!” without making some kind of weird statement about covering “Hey Ya!”? I’m starting to wonder, and here’s eight reasons why. Musicians might catch on more distinctly than your average casual wait-for-the-hook listener as to the fact that it’s a real paradox of a song, almost as famous for being deeply disillusioned and unhappy underneath its danceable sing-along surface as it is for anything else. It is endlessly quotable, despite being a fool’s errand to reproduce, though fools aren’t the only ones that’ve tried. OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” is a solid choice, a two-way gateway both into a deeper catalogue and outside its earlier constrictions, even if I still feel like it can’t and shouldn’t definitively represent its artist (it’s an Andre 3000 solo joint in all but billing), its era (it broke through because it sounded drastically unlike anyone’s idea of 2003, then or now), and especially its genre - since it kind of doesn’t even really have one. But this very idea of a New American Songbook simultaneously has to account for what being part of a “songbook” could even mean for hip-hop - a genre that never really standardized songs so much as breaks, lines, hooks, in-jokes, and regionalisms - and reconcile the fact that it gave the listicle’s top slot to the most wait, is this even hip-hop? smash of the list’s 25-year purview. The results were alternately dispiriting (do people really enjoy “Smooth” or do they just like to smarmily reference it?) and fascinating (a world in which Liz Phair’s “Fuck And Run” somehow becomes a standard is a far better one than the hellworld we’re stuck with now). (Though at least my 21-year-old self would still be amped to know that, 20 years later, El-P and Orbital and Neko Case would still be putting out great albums.) Slate recently attempted to tackle this question with a package on “ The New American Songbook,” in which a bunch of writers tried to figure out what songs from 1993 onwards would stick with us the same way “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Mack The Knife” have. Ask me now what songs of the past two-and-a-half decades are going to keep getting covered and sampled and versioned and interpolated and otherwise made memetic long after we’re gone, and I doubt I’d have a better answer than the one I’d have given back when I was 21 when I thought my generation would discard Toto and Journey once and for all.
Predicting the future of music is a dicey bet, even when you extend the footprint back a quarter-century.
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