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Music

This Country Cover of Major Lazer's "Cold Water" Feels like Taking DMT

It's the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

In a hundred years—when America is a smoking wasteland where three-headed nuclear squirrels play in the rusting craters of bombed-out Chipotles and the written word no longer exists—what songs will survive? Will the modern canon of folk songs prevail? Or, instead, will the bleeding-edge EDM anthems of today metastasize into the rustic hymns of a post-apocalyptic future, where urchins burning Yeezys for warmth in oil drums hum half-forgotten snippets of Imagine Dragons, the Chainsmokers, and Major Lazer?

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For a taste of what this might sound like, look no further than country sensation Thomas Rhett, who performed a cover of the latter group's Justin Bieber collaboration "Cold Water" on something called the Bobby Bones Show (if this show is actually a big deal, I invite you to spend your Friday evening dragging me on Twitter about it). His twangy, traditional version of a song that feels as of-the-moment as Zika and Rachel Dolezal offers a DMT-strength sensation of the past and future collapsing. If you've seen the Wachowski's 2012 epic Cloud Atlas—which stars Tom Hanks as a Stone Age villager battling demons amid the ruins of a technological past in Hawaii, 2321 AD—you can relate. If not, you better take a look for yourself.