German DJ Robin Schulz’s 2015 “Sugar” (feat. Francesco Yates) achieved more success in Europe than it did in America. However, it still was certified platinum and charted on the Billboard Hot 100. It played on the top 40 radio stations for long enough that by the end of my freshman year of high school people grew sick of it. In fact, I’d forgotten about the song entirely until last month when I saw Francesco Yates as the opening act at a concert I attended. He was truly awful at pretending to play the guitar, but his voice sounded eerily familiar.
“Sugar” borrows its entire chorus from the hook of Baby Bash’s “Suga Suga” (feat. Frankie J). The one difference between the two is that Yates sings “drifted” instead of “shifted”.
“Got me lifted, shifted higher than the ceilin’
And ooohwee, it’s the ultimate feelin’
You got me lifted, feeling so gifted
Sugar, how you get so fly
Sugar, sugar, how you get so fly (x4)”
In the transition from hip-hop to pop and from American to European Schulz chose to make some interesting changes. The first change noticeable from just the song titles is the careful pronunciation of “sugar” instead of Bash’s “suga”. Schulz takes his chorus from a hip-hop song, but choses to change the spelling and pronunciation to something more palatable to his white, European audience. While singing it’s interesting to note that then 19-year-old Yates wavers back and forth sometimes pronouncing “sugar” and sometimes “suga”. He sounds cool enough, but I find humor in imagining Schulz reading Bash’s lyrics in his German accent.
The second prominent change is how drastically Schulz speeds up the song’s melody. Doing so seems to energize the song, a shift from the calming lethargy felt in Bash’s original. Schulz’s song is definitely meant for dancing unlike Bash’s. Bash’s song is all about the lyrics and the beat. Contrastingly, even though both songs serve as odes to tantalizing women, Schulz’s lyrics seem secondary to the music. Sure, they’re enjoyable if you take time to focus on them, but they don’t register without careful listening. The change in rhythm and addition of a heavier baseline in “Sugar” shifts the song into something almost unrecognizable despite the matching melodies and choruses.
The third prominent change is the change in lyrics outside of the choruses. Bash’s lyrics draw frequent parallels to attractive women and smoking marijuana. In his music video he cycles through serenading six different women (although multiple other scantily clad ladies serve as extras). He fixates on the sexiness of each woman he meets and how good it feels to be with her. The slowness in which his lyrics are delivered allows Bash’s emotion to seem real, if spread out between a plethora of women. Schulz’s lyrics are more repetitive. They also set a clearer story. Yates is dancing somewhere and sees a beautiful woman under the club’s colored lights. He praises her beauty before cautioning the listener that she’s a “cold-blooded vixen”. Even though there is only one object of Yates’s affections, she seems less important than Bash’s given the lack of original lyrics about her and emphasis placed on other parts of the song.
In an interesting parallel to the dialogue concerning Earth, Wind, and Fire and Taylor Swift’s versions of “September”, Schulz seems to have done to opposite to “Suga, Suga” that Swift did to “September”. Swift took the groove from September and focused entirely on the lyrics. Schulz switches his song’s focus from its lyrics to its melody. This is probably why, although he stripped the song of some of its depth, Schulz’s cover was so much more well received than Swift’s was. He took Bash’s song and imbued it with the danceability expected from a DJ, with comparatively small sacrifices from the meaning. Obviously, many prefer Bash’s original to Schulz’s cover, but making covers is always tricky due to the direct comparison it opens up, and I believe Schulz did a commendable job.
Baby Bash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rgStv12dwA
Robin Schulz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvC_0foemLY
