Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 09/19/2011 at 12:09 PM Videos

The Popdust Files: Cover, luke bryan

This is our musical moment, where nobody knows whether Taylor Swift qualifies as pop or country anymore (except purists, but they always have strong opinions) and where Lady Gaga can sound more and more like Shania Twain on every successive track and remix even when she’s not explicitly taking her singles down country roads. This isn’t blurring of pop/country genre lines, it’s moving the genres closer and closer to one another until they turn into one big Venn diagram with a decent-sized overlap in the middle.

All of this is to say that Luke Bryan’s cover of Lady Gaga doesn’t seem like a gimmick at all. RedOne’s electro stomp and country’s Southern stomp (and Luke’s literal stomp, as in stomping his foot on the stage) have a lot in common, as does Gaga’s yarling and Luke’s drawling. He omits most of the ra-ra-et-cetera in favor of a guitar solo, because some lines just don’t blur, but otherwise, it takes almost no adulterating for “Bad Romance” to go country. Now then. Your next challenge, Luke: “LoveGame.”

[Sound of the City]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oulIhTygrro