Travis Barker Forces Existential Crisis With Boring Drum Covers On YouTube

kater | January 15, 2008 1:30 am
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Ever since reaching the end-all, be-all creative apex that was Blink 182, Travis Barker has wandered aimlessly through Garnier Fructis commercials and short-lived MTV reality shows. But now it seems he’s found his niche: drumming furiously over vapid pop-rap while stationed in his walk-in closet. At the height of the Soulja Boy “Crank That” frenzy Barker pounded out his own shirtless rendition, and now he’s at it again, this time with Flo Rida’s T-Pain-assisted ode to gifted club girls, “Low.”

YouTube itself is a massive exercise in futility, but I have to say–and do remember what my specialty is around here–that Barker’s videos just might be the most existentially exhausting clips on YouTube. A shirtless man more or less drums along to the beat of a song. What does it mean? And why do we need to look further than the kid next door with the drum set for this? At least with something like the sleepy kitten videos you get a modicum of preciousness.

It would be one thing if Barker improved upon or at least rearranged the original songs. But–and maybe this is due to my lack of formal percussion eduction–it kind of just sounds like he’s adding an extra layer of cacophony. God forbid he ever set his drumsticks upon Flo Rida’s five-minute birthday cake opus, which is already so offensively overproduced that an extra drum track might explode it into infinity:

Either way, we should all just keep our fingers crossed that he never considers the Alvin and the Chipmunks version of “Low” for the drum treatment.