I Thought That I Heard Glee Sing….

Note the spike.

It was the moment I’ve been worried about since I first heard that Glee was going to cover “Losing My Religion.” “NOOOOOO!!” I cried into the night sky. “How dare they take such an important song and turn it into a trivial pop hit sung by actors in their late 20s pretending to be high-schoolers!” And thus began a full half-minute of pouting.

The thing is that so many of us grew up with “Losing My Religion.” When you think about Glee’s target audience, most would be in the “under 30” range, perfectly in line with those of us who practically have this song embedded in our DNA (along with the random Wallflowers tune from the later 90s but I digress).
It was everywhere in the early 90s, a hit. People all over the world know this song. So why wouldn’t be up for the Glee treatment?

So I watched “Grilled Cheesus” and found that it circled around my favorite Gleek, Kurt. Now, religious affiliations aside, I thought the episode was pretty solidly written. But what of the music? I winced, remembering how U2’s “One” was used last season and waited for the moment Finn would bust out LMR. While it wasn’t a bad cover, I had two issues. First, did it have to be so damn literal? Wiki it if you don’t know some of the lyrical background. Second, the Disney-fication.

Yes, Corey’s a good singer and no, I’m not expecting him to recreate any sort of emotional range that the original had. That’s what shows like Glee and things like Kids Bop do. They take songs and puree them until they’re singable for all us talently uncoordinated folk. I’m not gonna bash Corey for his take because it’s a hell of a lot better than I can do (but I’ll kick ass singing E-Bow.)

Which brings me back to the literalness of the video. “Finn” is walking down the school hallways, in the library, looking at Kurt in the corner. Yup. A corner. Though we know how fond R.E.M. photographers are of sticking people in corners. And yeah, I can see how my uber-fandom of the band could be biasing me a bit in terms of interpretation. When you and your friends can pretty much redo the entire original video from memory, that’ll color things a bit.

Overall, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. It was short and within the context of the show, pretty forgettable.

So listen if you dare and lemme know what you think