The Particular Cruelty of Disney Songs

Four notes into Part of Your World and something in your chest just gives. It’s Pavlovian and slightly undignified and completely unavoidable—those Disney songs from the early nineties are wired into something pre-rational, bypassing whatever critical faculty you’ve spent years developing.

Alex G, a singer-songwriter who built her following through YouTube covers, recorded a medley drawing from The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin—entirely a cappella, no instruments, just her voice layered over itself. It works better than it deserves to. A cappella arrangements of emotionally loaded material can tip easily into gimmick, but she doesn’t oversell it. The restraint is the thing—she lets the songs do the work they were already built to do.

Three films from the same five-year stretch, three completely different registers, and when you hear them collapsed together like this the underlying structure becomes clearer: all of those songs are built around a single voice confessing something it can barely contain. Which is, now that I think about it, a pretty complete description of adolescence.