On the lighter side: The eldritch horror of “Jolene”

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the subject of Dolly Parton’s classic ballad “Jolene” were to be transformed into a Lovecraftian horror mid-song? Wonder no longer (h/t LGM commenter Clark Ashton Kutcher):

The first comment to this astounding performance is: “I’ve taken in a lot of versions of eldritch Jolene and yours is by far the best out there.”

I assumed this was a dry witticism, but that only reveals the depths of my ignorance of the treasures that lie buried beneath the cyber-oceans of the Internet.

It turns out that Eldritch Jolene is a whole musical sub-genre, featuring heated arguments between aficionados regarding who has truly understood the assignment.

Seriously though, all this is just another illustration of the Merit Myth: the idea, so critical to the very structure of the Meritocracy [sic], that “talent is in short supply.” H.P. Lovecraft pretty much starved to death, and the fact that this world features uncountable numbers of wildly talented artists who struggle to find any audience for their work, let alone any route to making their art their livelihood, would elicit its own flavor of eldritch horror if one were to contemplate it for any length of time.