Okay, I watched Hazbin Hotel, I liked the music, so I looked to youtube for more of the songs to see if I wanted to go acquire them some other way, you know the thing.
And this led to the Youtube Cover ecosystem, which I normally really like! Like this Annapantsu cover of The Other Side? I like it a lot! I like it more than I like the actual source material it's building on.
Thing is, Helluva Boss' songs are...
Well, they're fun, but just as an example, here are some lyrics from Loser:
So things look bad, and your back's against the wall
Your whole existence seems fuckin' hopeless
You're feelin' filthy as a dive bar bathroom stall
Can't face the world sober and dopeless
You've lost your way, you think your life is wrecked
Well, let me just say you're correct
And a bunch of the cover artists, in the opening, will skip that 'fuckin' hopeless.' This is, I understand, part of the ritualistic discouragement of 'swearing in the first minute,' a thing I see Youtubers talk about but have never seen any confirmed statement from Youtube for monetisation. My own channel isn't monetised so I don't see a lot of those warnings.
But later in that same song here's another set of lyrics:
HUSK
We're both losers, baby
We're losers, it's okay to be a
ANGEL DUST
Coked-up, dick-suckin' ho?
This is a minute into the song. This is past that threshold, right? But a lot of the singers skip this or change the line somehow. Now some of this may be personal comfort, I guess, that's a valid reason to shy away from it, even if it means you're coward and will not survive the Theatre Kid Winter, but whatever. The thing is, then there are other changes that make less sense.
In Hell's Greatest Dad there's:
Oh, with the punch of a pentagram
I wap-bam-boom, alakazam
One of these covers changes the lyric to:
With a touch of his right hand
Now again, this might be a personal comfort in which case how fucking Catholic are you and also *why are you singing this song about Lucifer being dadcucked by a manipulative petty That Bitch deer boy, but people were talking in the comments about 'it's to skirt the algorithm.'
Now at this point, this is straight up superstition right? Like, people who have no way to know if it affects things are engaging in an apologetic ritual for a change in behaviour without access to information about whether or not it's true, and unable to affect any outcomes?
These are things I think about when being mad about cover songs changing lyrics to remove bite. Like I'm listening to a weird halfway kidzbopped version of really queer media.
