While looking up some info on Post Malone’s Better Now I came across Simon De Witt’s (AKA Blanks) 80s Version of Better Now. Here are both versions:
StyleSwap(s) and Music Education
De Witt (Banks) refers to his 80s vision of Better Now as a StyleSwap. In fact, Banks has a YouTube Channel of StyleSwaps I’ll post below. Whether you think of a StyleSwap as an arrangement, stylistic transformation, or creative cover or some other concept, from my perspective it has a lot of potential as a form of musical engagement for students in music programs.
Inviting students to take an existing song and transform it stylistically is a great context for developing and demonstrating musical skills and understanding. If you are interested in this and similar approaches, I’ve explored stylistic transformation in the article “From musical detectives to DJs: Expanding aural skills and analysis through engaging popular music and culture” and the article “Toward convergence: Adapting music education to contemporary society and participatory culture.” We can also think of StyleSwaps as potential projects or context of project-based learning in music programs.
StyleSwaps as Projects or as Project-Based Learning
For those who embrace “projects,” a StyleSwap can serve as a culminating project through which students apply skills and understanding they have been developing ranging from aural skills and specific performance or production skills to specific characteristics of genres.
For those who embrace “project-based learning” in music education, (which I and others differentiate from doing projects), a StyleSwap can serve as a context through which students can learn and develop skills. For instance students might learn about different genres, learn how to arrange or cover an existing song, develop aural skills needed to learn a song and transform it in a creative manner among other skills and understandings. In this case, generative questions such as “How might people transform an existing song so it can be experienced differently?” or “How might genre impact the way a song sounds?” or any number of other questions can drive students’ inquiry as they learn through creating a new version of an existing song by transforming its style. Through project-based learning students would engage musically in the StyleSwap AND also address the generative question(s) to leave with a broader and deeper ways of understanding the issues related to whatever question(s) they engage with through the project.
Both approaches (doing a project or project-based learning) provide students with opportunities to explore their own and others’ aesthetic preferences, enjoy being musical, deepen their own skills and understanding, and connect to popular music and culture. Both approaches also provide opportunities to discuss and address related complicated topics such as cultural appropriation, stereotypes, and tropes that sometimes emerge in this type of musical engagement.
So, why not invite students in your music program to create their own StyleSwap in your music program?
Here is Banks’s StyleSwap Youtube Channel:
Here are some other resources related to stylistic transformations (scroll to the bottom of the post).
And because I can’t resist, here are some other versions of Post Malone’s Better Now: