Bowie cover of the week: Dennis Graumann performs “I’m Afraid of Americans”

Dennis Graumann is another professional musician, with a following and a substantial body of work … who I never heard of before finding this new video of him covering “I’m Afraid of Americans.” Graumann has his own extensive website, which you can get to from this link. According to that website, this is his 100th YouTube video. I also looked him up on Amazon, and he has many songs for sale in the MP3 form. I’m not entirely sure if he sells physical CDs, which is interesting in so far as it says something about what it means to be a professional musician these days.

Graumann’s performance is excellent and the video has unspectacular but professional production quality. His arrangement is similar to Bowie’s and he doesn’t really do anything new with the song, but I very much like how it sounds here. I recently reposted Bowie’s own video, and I think one thing that stands out to me is that Bowie used his video to add to or even change the song’s meaning, whereas Graumann doesn’t really seem to try to make the song his own (again, that takes nothing away from how it sounds). Not to repeat myself, but Bowie’s video suggests that the narrator’s fear of Americans is delusional, which is not a message conveyed by the actual lyrics.

Final note—this does seem to be the highest quality cover posted over the past week (there are too many to listen to all of them!). But I also like it because “I’m Afraid of Americans” is not one of the more frequently covered Bowie songs. Since I’ve been doing this series, I don’t think a week has passed without someone posting a cover of “Heroes.” “Heroes” is great, but Bowie wrote or covered around 400 songs— maybe more. As much as I like the “Heroes” covers, I’m glad this guy put his skills to use covering something else.