‘Still Beating’: How Mac DeMarco borrowed from Britpop for his biggest hit
Mac DeMarco‘s nonchalance endeared him to many fans during his early releases. The gap-toothed hero of the DIY would stroll onto stage, and innocently play his four-chord anthems with a wide grin and subtle glint of chaos in the eye.
He consistently tried to dismiss his brilliance as nothing out of the ordinary and would regularly brush aside his own innovation as a rip-off of artists who came before him. Whether it’s Paul McCartney, Neil Young or any of their other classic rock contemporaries, when people ask DeMarco what makes his music so special, he points your attention to those guys.
Maybe therein lies his unknown genius? Because, as he admits, his pursuit of the path those legends have beaten always generates something new and fresh. “Any time I try to emulate something, I come so far off the mark. Which is nice because then I end up with my own thing,” he told Ernie Ball on an episode of String Theory.
On his 2017 record, This Old Dog, he did indeed end up with his own version of a classic. In an album that was a somewhat muted step change for the slacker-rock icon, one track stood along as a mid-tempo singalong hit that was very much made my design.
“I was listening to this band, from the UK, called The La’s, and they have that song ‘There She Goes’,” he told La Blogoteque. “So I wanted to write a song like that, so I tried, doesn’t sound anything like that, and now I’ve got my own song”.
The Mac track in question is ‘Still Beating’, which boasts what can only be described as a tenuous sonic link to the Britpop hit. The vocal melody whispers the same notes as ‘There She Goes’, but generally speaking, it waltzes while the latter foxtrots, and it’s all the better for it. It effortlessly exudes DeMarco’s laid-back charm and underrated emotional tenderness against a landscape more suited for the soft onshore breezes of his LA studio than the angsty streets of adolescent Liverpool.
But it’s not the only time DeMarco has not so accurately ripped off a Britpop classic. Appropriately, on his 2019 record Here Comes the Cowboy, he leads with a single that could comfortably be regarded as the cousin of ‘Still Beating’ for its muted acoustic melody chugging along with a similar sentimentality. And while the twangy riff over the top sounds like something Waylon Jennings would have conjured up, apparently, it was the Gallagher brothers DeMarco had in mind.
“I had recently watched that Oasis documentary that came out,” DeMarco told Zane Lowe in 2019, likely referring to the 2016 movie Oasis: Supersonic. “For most of my life, I was always like, ‘Nah, Blur. I’m a Blur guy. I don’t know about Oasis.’ Obviously, I had heard ‘Wonderwall’ too many times like everybody else, but then I saw that documentary and was immediately like, ‘Oh my god. This is the best band that’s ever existed.'”
“That happens with me with every rock doc, like that Queen movie came out, oh my god,” DeMarco added. “See, so what happened was I was trying to write an Oasis song with this song. It doesn’t really sound like an Oasis song, but this was my attempt.”
