This week’s Midweek Makeover comes courtesy of Peej, commenter extraordinaire and friend. Many many thanks for this, Peej.
I think there is definitely an art to making a good cover. There is a delicate balance to be struck between paying appropriate homage to the original, and putting your individual stamp on it. The cover has to reel in new fans, while retaining the old. You don’t want to be the New Coke version, pleasing no one but yourself.
Of course, all that goes out the window if you just happen to really like that particular cover. And that’s what great about covers; there’s definite rules to play by, except when there isn’t.
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It is a clever cover (or, as was the case here, a parody, which is a cover after all) that surpasses recognition of the original, especially when we’re talking about a classic. It is a brilliant one that exorcises the hold the first cover has over your mind. (Until the next time you remember the parody, of course).
Don’t Fear the Reaper covered by Gus (Scream soundtrack)
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Not all covers have to have a higher goal in life, but it certainly helps if they help make your 70s’ guilty pleasures acceptable to blast and sing along to out loud.
Top of the World covered by Shonen Knife (The Last Supper soundtrack and If I Were a A Carpenter tribute album)
I Think I Love You covered by Voice of the Beehive (Honey Lingers album)
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Covering Queen songs is sacrilege in my eyes. Unless it is done by Rolf Harris, of course.
Bohemian Rhapsody covered by Rolf Harris (release unknown)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONrIByBGW_M[/youtube]
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College a cappella covers. A lovely little subcategory that can make songs you’ve heard played to death sound fresh and exciting again. It’s only fair that I give a shout out to my alma mater’s award winning group. Please note the kick ass female beatboxer.
How to Save a Life covered by Rutgers Deep Treble (Take the Cake album)
[official video]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMaUvh-KjBU[/youtube]
[live performance at ICCA]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSb9g-jq0p8[/youtube]
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I am sure somewhere some Police fan is going to yell (as much as I would, if anyone dared suggest someone sang a Queen song better than Freddie) when I say I think this is miles better than Sting’s version. But then, I am always right about these things, and everyone else is always wrong, so that’s okay.
El Tango De Roxanne covered by Ewan McGregor, Jose Feliciano and Jacek Koman (Moulin Rouge soundtrack)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN9fmQrW2u4[/youtube]
MB
Love the Gus cover – never heard it before (and I’ll try and forget where it came from).
Peej
Well, I do believe it was also played during a key scene in season two of Smallville (although not included in either of the show’s soundtracks). Does that make it better?!
(Incidentally, that show, or at least the first couple of seasons that I watched, was very fond of covers. There was a great Eva Cassidy cover of Time after Time, which *is* on the soundtrack. Man, that woman could sing.)
MB
Actually, that does make it better.
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Still trying to figure out if the Shonen Knife cut adds to or diminishes the awfulness of the original.
MB
Huh. I did not realize that in order to hear the whole cut on (some of) the imeem tunes, you have to be logged into imeem.
I refuse to be a (recruiting) tool!
Sorry about that, folks.
Itadaki
You could really break out the general topic of cover songs into various sub categories, like a capella covers (which really need to be seen to be fully appreciated, so thanks for the Youtube vids!).
Even sub categories like covers that cross musical genres (“Top of the World”, “Roxanne”) are so rich, you could devote an entire article to just a fragment of it: like bluegrass and country covers of heavy metal hits.
Some of my favorites…
Cardigans cover Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgZJEpLuw0
Iron Horse covers Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R-2Hi9j4yM
Rachid Taha covers The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg
And something a bit in reverse, The Toy Dolls (Brit punk) covers Bach’s “Toccata in D minor” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wNS7uqu1hk
…or if you prefer spoofs,
Bob Rivers spoofs “Iron Man” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ4nndbOT6k
MB
Itadaki, I hope you don’t mind, but I (slightly) edited your comment to make the links clickable (hopefully encouraging clickthrough).
Big bluegrass fan, so really dug the Iron Horse cover.
And the Taha cover has everything – Algerian rocker in Mexico covering an English hit. I dig this planet, sometimes.
Peej
I tried not to talk about the subcategorization too much, because if we go down that road, we’ll be talking until next week about the different ones you can obsess about…err, I mean be interested in, like:
– Focusing on a single classic song (Don’t Fear the Reaper) and all of its covers, in order to find the best one (for the record, still Gus’s, although I’ve heard rumours of a bootleg live version by Elliott Smith that could surpass it for sheer sentimental value, if nothing else)
– Discovering covers (Baby, More Time) by some of your favorite bands (Fountains of Wayne)
– Tribute albums (like Two Rooms or Legacy) or soundtracks (I Am Sam) can offer hours of debate in and of themselves (is the band worthy of a covers tribute? Should it be an album or selections from their discography?)
– Then there’s the covers by folk who are independently talented artists in their own right, but who initially came to the general public’s attention because of of those covers(Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Baby Got Back; Eva Cassidy’s cover of Fields of Gold)
– Sometimes there’s the cover songs that didn’t depart noticably from the original, but nevertheless stand out like an original by virtue of the voice delivering it (Amy Ray’s [of the Indigo Girls] cover of Romeo and Juliet).
– Finally, there is the rare category of an artist covering their own song years later, where the difference in voice and emotional interpretation makes the two seem completely separate songs by two different artists (like Marianne Faithfull’s As Tears Go By, first sung in 1964, and then rerecorded in 1988 for her Perfect Stranger anthology. Course, this song is special, anyway, in the covers universe because of its interesting backstory: Supposedly it was the first *original* song penned by Jagger and the Stones manager, to add to the Stones’ repertoire of covers(!) they’d been performing live up to then. Except that Faithfull, who was also known to the Stones’ manager, was given the song to record first (and had a hit with it), and so the Stones ended up recording it about a year or so later themselves, essentially making a ‘cover’ of what was supposed to be their first original song!)
Okay, I’ll stop there before MB pulls a bartender on me and cuts me off…