Puddle of Mudd's Cover of Nirvana's "About a Girl"

Submission 9,509

About

Puddle of Mudd's Cover of Nirvana's "About a Girl" is a viral video featuring the rock band Puddle of Mudd performing an acoustic rendition of the song "About a Girl" by Nirvana. Some online criticized and mocked the video, focusing on Puddle of Mudd lead singer Wes Scanlan's singing.

Origin

On January 27th, 2020, SiriusXM, the satellite radio station, published the video on their YouTube page. Within four months, the video received more than 1.3 million views, 19,000 dislikes and 2,800 likes (shown below).

Spread

On April 14th, 2020, Twitter ^[1] user @_samsmith90 shared the video with the caption "this is the funniest thing I've ever seen." The tweet received more than 340 likes and 125 retweets in less than two weeks (shown below).

That day, the Instagram page @catatonicyouths, which regularly features videos of rock bands considered cringeworthy, published a clip of the video. Within two weeks, the video received more than 115,000 views and 17,000 likes (shown below). Additionally, Redditor ^[7] desenagrator_2 shared the video on the /r/cringe subreddit, where it received more than 8,400 points (95% upvoted) and 1,100 comments in less than two weeks.

On April 18th, Twitter user @supermilk4u tweeted a video of the audio from the Puddle of Mudd video overdubbed atop Nirvana performing the song. They wrote, "got bored so here's nirvana covering puddle of mudd covering nirvana you're welcome." The tweet received more than 12,000 views, 355 likes and 110 retweets in less than one week (shown below).

The following day, the band published a response to the video on Instagram.^[8] They wrote, "Rise above others who try and take you down… I’m at my BEST NOW… and that’s all that matters. I pray for all of you because we care. Jealousy is toxic, and toxic people are a waste of time. We walk away with nothing but a SMILE." The post received more than 350 likes in less than two days (shown below).

Several media outlets covered the video, including Loudwire,^[2] BlabberMouth,^[3] AltPress,^[4] Consequence of Sound,^[5] The Daily Dot ^[6] and more.