DOKAKA - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (dokaka.com)

[dot_fennel]

If you don't already know Dokaka, listen to this first.

I've been amazed by Dokaka for about a year but as it happens, he's never recreated a song I was already familiar with before. I think I get it now: what takes him from 'talented' to 'great' is his single-minded refusal to change his source recording's arrangement at all. He's also a good interpreter, I suspect, but it's hard to judge that on the same scale as, like, June Tabor dusting off an old trad.

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

this is profoundly weird.

[bryttan.livejournal.com]

Pretty freaky. Thanks for sharing. :)

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Hmm. An interesting take on the acapella world. I'm not sure I agree that a refusal to arrange is actually a good thing, though. I mean, he clearly has no trouble using voice distortion (most is undistorted, but at points you can hear the modifications), so why not write an arrangement that suits the medium. I can't help but imagine a whole group of Fraggles singing this song now. Hmmm.

[dot_fennel]

I don't mean a refusal to re-arrange is inherently good, mind you, just in this case.

I guess I feel like, if Dokaka gave songs arrangements any less dense listening to him would be like looking at huge mural of a city street where, when you get closer to it, the people all turn out to be faceless smudges of paint. Hearing the original song reproduced as closely as possible with a hugely-inapposite set of tools means I can 'listen all the way down'.

So I think I had an unstated assumption that Dokaka is a very, very dedicated amateur, and can reproduce other people's arrangements with precision more skillfully than he can create his own. Which seems kind of true, in that his original songs sound, to me, like they have pretty mundane 'rock' arrangements, but maybe I don't give him enough credit.

[narcissuskisses.livejournal.com]

Dokaka is a righteous dude. :) Thanks for posting this.