The mish-mash of genres in “Up With People” is something that kind of fascinates me; the gospel-inflected backing vocals, the ska guitar, the soul horns, all covered with Kurt Wagner’s fragile (weak) indie lead vocal. It’s a confusion that works, something that pushes an inclusive agenda suggested by the title of the song, if not necessarily its lyrics (Although, maybe those lyrics are inclusive as well, in a different fashion; maybe we’re all “screwing up our lives today”). That everything goes together so well in this song is a surprise, but a pleasant one. With so many ingredients, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to see the whole thing fall apart.
Oddly, I hadn’t heard the original version of this song before; I know it from the Zero 7 dub mix, which I’d discovered via some compilation or another, more than a decade ago:
Even stranger, it turns out that Zero 7 covered the song using its own arrangement rather than the original, with Sia as vocalist, and it turns it into a different experience altogether:
It’s more of a… performance, perhaps, than the Lambchop original; Sia works the whole thing more than Wagner’s relaxed take, but it’s not in an unpleasant way. There’re important stories about the differences in musical genre to be found in the comparison, I feel…