Watch: This Youtube star’s covers of popular music are a huge hit (and absolutely horrendous)
If you can’t be very, very good, be very, very bad.
Now here is a YouTube artist you wouldn’t imagine having such a grand following. But “Shittyflute” makes decidedly horrendous covers of songs on his recorder flute and posts them online, and everyone seems to be hitting the play button. The covers are so bad that they’re really very good – a bit like cringe-pop. But perhaps more on the lines of Ross Geller’s attempt at playing the bagpipes in an episode of Friends...you get the drift.
Shittyflute – who is nothing if not acutely self-conscious – has been at work on this noble project for a couple of years now, gathering more than 200,000 subscribers with his “shitty” covers of popular and classic music, typically featuring squealing, off-key, incompetent flute notes layered over the original tracks.
This is how he describes himself on Youtube: “Hello, I am Shittyflute, on my channel you will find the shittiest flute covers and some kazoo as well. I am happy to make your day happier and your ears hurt.”
The introduction is quite apt, to say the least.
But one can’t doubt his repertoire, surely, as over a hundred tracks he has covered everything from the popular theme music of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, to classics by The Beatles, Queen and Abba, pop hits of Britney Spears and Usher, plus tracks by metal bands Lamb of God, Dream Theatre and Metallica. Not to mention covers of a bunch of famous speeches including Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream”.
One of his covers, featuring the 20th Century Fox theme music, became so popular that another Youtuber, Soo-Hon Kim, made a Halloween costume on it. Not surprisingly, the video of the costume went viral, too, and led to a stream of memes.
That’s not all. On May 9, Shittyflute posted a sincere video on Youtube requesting fans to send in...recorded farts. Whatever it is that’s coming next, it won’t be pretty.
