That Stupid Cover Version of Misery Business by mgk

In honour of a person close to me saying my slightly unhinged rant about a cover of Aïcha was their favorite blog post, I decided to add another weird musical rant.

I was recently unwittingly and unwillingly confronted with the fact that mgk recorded a cover of Paramore’s Misery Business. Out of morbid curiosity I decided to check it out.

First, a disclaimer: I’m (shockingly) not a fan of Machine G. generally, which includes all of his forays into different genres. I don’t think he is a particularly gifted songwriter and I don’t like his weird autotuned voice. I am a big fan of pop punk though so maybe Mr. Kelly will score points that way. We’ll start with the music and then we’ll move on to the lyrics, which (as is the rule for bad covers) include some weird and funny changes.

Musically, it’s a mixed bag. Colson’s voice is something of an acquired taste generally, and this song does him no favours. This makes sense, as it was written by and for someone with a higher register and a much larger vocal range. Also, the energy feels off. The original song has a low BPM, but has a high energy and pace, primarily driven by Hayley Williams’ excellent vocal performance. Even though Mr. Baker tries, his voice just can’t drive it the same way, which makes this version a bit of a slog.

The lyrical changes are a confusing mess. The song is now sung from a male POV, with the romantic rival being a man and the romantic interest being a woman. This makes sense on a surface level, but it breaks the songs premise and even strays into the absurd at certain points. This starts right at the beginning, which seems to suggest his romantic interest having a “body like an hourglass” being a bad thing, because time destroys all. In the original this feature is ascribed to the (female) rival in a Jolene-Esque way which makes a lot more sense.

She's got a body like an hourglass, it's ticking like a clock
It's a matter of time before we all run out

The second verse drifts into the completely nonsensical as he calls his (male) romantic rival a whore and then compares both the rival and himself to women.

Once a whore you're nothing more, I'm sorry, that'll never change
And about forgiveness, that we're supposed to have exchanged
I'm sorry, homie, but I passed it up, now look this way
There's a million other girls who do it just like you
Looking as innocent as possible to get to who
They want and what they want
It's easy if you do it right
Well, I refuse, I refuse, I refuse

Props to Mr. k for being the first heterosexual man in existence that makes clear he isn’t like other girls. With this he does something I never would have thought possible: making Misery Business more sexist than it originally was. Quite a feat.

In conclusion, there isn’t that much to be said about the song. The original song is not that deep and the cover follows along those notes, turning a slightly weird fun song into a slightly worse version of itself. It was made during COVID-19 and watching the music video of it, it’s clear they had a lot of fun making it. If I didn’t have a specific dislike of bad covers I probably would have never noticed it in the first place.

I liked one part of the song: Travis Barker’s drum performance. It is perhaps an unfair comparison but he outplays all other members of this ensemble. This song just makes it more obvious than usual.

Damn, I gotta listen to some more blink-182 now.