Singers and covers or remakes

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2004-12-29 01:46pm

I listen to the Oppie and Anthony show on my XM radio. Jim Norton, a comic on the program, went on a rant the other day about singers remaking songs and how musicians can get away with the lack of creativity but if he as a comic were to redo Richard Pryor or Chris Rock jokes he would be booed off stage.

What is it about musicians that they can cover other bands songs or simply redo a popular song from the past and still be considered talented or orginal? For instance IIRC its Jessica Simpson who has redone the "Take your breath away" song from Top Gun. Now that song is fine as it is, she adds NOTHING to the song when she resings it. So why is that OK for musicians and not OK for other artistic types. I mean can you imagine some schmuck trying to rewrite LOTR? And to tell you the truth even that would be more creative than simply singing the lyrics someone else wrote.

The Aliens · Post by **The Aliens** » 2004-12-29 02:49pm

Well, look at the recent "Do They Know It's Christmas" re-make- people are throwing all sorts of shit at Chris martin because they don't think the re-make is particularily good. The only real way that covers can be properly successful is if it brings something fairly new in ("Boys of Summer" as covered by the Ataris, for example), or if the song is an homage (a son singing his famous father's song, as a general example, but I can't think of a specific one). Cover versions that add nothing to the song are decried as crap, but ones that put a new spin on it are celebrated. If someone took other comedians' gags and improved them, they wouldn't be blasted as much as if they were copying it verbatim.

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-12-29 02:53pm

Man, Stravo, you said what I've been thinking for a long time. For every "Sympathy for the Devil" by GNR you have "Behind Blue Eyes" by Limp Bizkit. And don't forget all the fucking crap rap that liberally samples from anything and everything.

It seems that whatever sells records is OK with the music industry. That's why I have a lot of respect for musicians like Prince, because they put their heart and soul into making good music and don't give a fuck about what the studios want.

CmdrWilkens · Post by **CmdrWilkens** » 2004-12-29 03:00pm

Well here's my get plastered for liking something post:

Yes there are a shit-load of covers and rap rip-offs of older songs but it doesn't take away from the value of the orginial nor is it in some way unique to music.

Question 1) How many versions of Miracle on 34th Street are there? I know Italian Job has at least 2 versions, Dracula probably 20, Frankestein ditto. don't even start into TV shows turned into movies.

Question 2) No one re-writes Tolkein, they just write the same damn thing under a different title and perhaps with slight exaggerattion. You have perhaps heard of the Sword of Shannara?

Every modern literary and artistic form takes and borrows from other older material in the same vein. Modern music is nothing special in that regards.

To that end some of them tend to be good. For myself Mandy' Moore's Coverage was an excellent album because it brought back some very classic pop songs with new energy. Yes some were pale shadows against the original and some were excellent remakes I might rather listen above the original but just because the songs were written and sung by someone before isn't going to dampen my enthusiasm for them if they are well sung and pleasing to my ear. Get off the high horse and deal.

Damaramu · Post by **Damaramu** » 2004-12-29 04:17pm

I prefer covers that are completely different from the original; done in a different musical style.

For instance, The Gourds' cover of Gin and Juice or Save Ferris' version of Come On Eileen.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2004-12-29 04:18pm

Johnny cash doing Nine Inch Nails is an example of a cover done well

DocHorror · Post by **DocHorror** » 2004-12-29 04:33pm

Or George Harrisons cover of 'I Got My Mind Set On You' - class.

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2004-12-29 05:27pm

Zac Naloen wrote:Johnny cash doing Nine Inch Nails is an example of a cover done well

No. >_< I hate that song with a passion. Argh, Johnny Cash pissed me off with that.

Anyway, as to the OT-- it's okay because people buy it. I think a large problem is that most of the generation the covers are marketed for generally hasn't (in my experience, anyway) heard of the original song, and doesn't know it's a cover. People buy the songs, and the artists get away with advancing their career a little bit using someone else's work.

*shrugs* some covers can be done well-- it's still not right though. I don't anticipate it stopping anytime soon though.

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2004-12-29 06:24pm

Damaramu wrote:I prefer covers that are completely different from the original; done in a different musical style.

For instance, The Gourds' cover of Gin and Juice or Save Ferris' version of Come On Eileen.

i thought that was Phish that covered Gin and Juice. THAT kicked some serious ass. But then you have Jessica Simpsons steaming pile of shit remake of Take My Breath Away

thecreech · Post by **thecreech** » 2004-12-29 06:54pm

most covers do suck ass and it is bad for the original artist in most cases because the people who are hearing the new version think that it is an orignial song. Covers i do like are

Baby got back covered by the band "Throw down"

and Hurt covered by Johnny Cash. Not often that you see an older artist covering a newer artist

Chmee · Post by **Chmee** » 2004-12-29 06:59pm

Damn all those modern wannabes who play Mozart's music!

I guess I'm saying it's not very new ... a great musical composition can be 'interpreted' many ways, and it's been an aspect of popular music for a very long time. Half the original pop hits by groups like the Stones and Who were covers of blues bands. Jazz 'standards' are constantly reinterpreted. Sometimes they're great, sometime they suck.

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2004-12-29 07:56pm

Chmee wrote:Damn all those modern wannabes who play Mozart's music!

I guess I'm saying it's not very new ... a great musical composition can be 'interpreted' many ways, and it's been an aspect of popular music for a very long time. Half the original pop hits by groups like the Stones and Who were covers of blues bands. Jazz 'standards' are constantly reinterpreted. Sometimes they're great, sometime they suck.

Bah, that's different. Of course the music itself is borrowed and reused-- there's only so many notes out there, you know. What Stravo and others are talking about, I think, is when artists just re-do an entire song, changing nothing save their voice singing it. If you wanna interpret a song some different way, that's fine.. change it how you see fit and cover it.

... and I still maintain that Johnny Cash killed Hurt, damnit. >_<

Damaramu · Post by **Damaramu** » 2004-12-29 08:15pm

Col. Crackpot wrote:
Damaramu wrote:I prefer covers that are completely different from the original; done in a different musical style.

For instance, The Gourds' cover of Gin and Juice or Save Ferris' version of Come On Eileen.
i thought that was Phish that covered Gin and Juice. THAT kicked some serious ass. But then you have Jessica Simpsons steaming pile of shit remake of Take My Breath Away

Yeah, that song (among many) is always mislabeled. I've seen that song listed as the String Cheese Incident as well.

If you check out The Gourds' website, they actually have a video of Snoop Dogg listening to the song for the first time. It's amusing.

Executor32 · Post by **Executor32** » 2004-12-29 09:58pm

As far as I'm concerned, covers can be a mixed bag. They can suck even with new content, like that "Nasty Girl" song, or they can be better than the original even with just the singer changed, like Laura Branigan's "I Need a Hero." Say what you will, but I think Bonnie Tyler sounds like she's about to cough up a lung on the high notes in the original.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2004-12-29 10:57pm

Music has far more room for interpretation & artistic expression than jokes in comedy. I wouldn't compare remaking a song to be the same as ripping off a joke, rather, it's more like re-doing a specif genre of jokes. For instance, many comedians have a set of "when I was a kid we were so poor..." jokes, or "your mother is a ....." jokes, they're pretty much standards for many comedians. Every one has a different take on them, but they're all more or less the same jokes, and they mostly get away with them.

Of course there's always bad covers and good ones. Suck it up like Jessica Simpson and the unwashed masses will buy it thanks to heavy MTV promotion, but it'll be frowned on by many and forgotten within a short time. By this time next year I can guarantee no one will remember Jessica made a cover of "Take your breath away".

Do it right, take it in new directions, or improve it in some way and the cover version may become the one to be remembered. "All along the watchtower" as done by Jimi Hendrix is the version that everyone knows of, nevermind that Bob Dylan was the one who wrote it. "Sweet Jane" is a Lou Reed song, but many prefer the Cowboy Junkies version. And "Leaving on a jet plane" was fading from memory until Chantal Kreviazuk sang it for the Armageddon soundtrack.

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-12-30 01:39am

Am I weird for thinking that A Perfect Circle covering "Imagine" (and thus making it sound like a funeral dirge) is sacrilege?

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2004-12-30 01:42am

Dalton wrote:Am I weird for thinking that A Perfect Circle covering "Imagine" (and thus making it sound like a funeral dirge) is sacrilege?

It's not quite sacrilege... it did really suck though. They've taken an absolutely beautiful song and turned it into something horrible.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2004-12-30 02:24am

What about Kid Rock's "On the Road Again"?

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2004-12-30 02:35am

Mostly cause the people doing these remakes, their (semi)original work is just as bad.

On a sidenote, why haven't a large mob stoned Lenny Kravitz yet?

Alex Moon · Post by **Alex Moon** » 2004-12-30 02:44am

A good cover needs to capture the underlying message of a song. For example, I don't like the Ataris' cover of Boys of Summer because I don't think they got across the song's theme well. Specifically, they changed one word and it lost a lot of the power that the song had.

Perinquus · Post by **Perinquus** » 2004-12-30 02:55am

Let's keep things in perspective here. There was a time when practically all popular music consisted of covers. Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstong, Glenn Miller, et al... none of them wrote their own material. And many of their greatest hits, which became practically their signature tunes, were old songs that had been done many times before. And these are artists who are deservedly ranked as among the very foremost musical talents of the 20th century.

A lot of people forget it today, but it was really the Beatles who raised the bar on this issue. They wrote their own material (they covered a lot of songs early in their career as well, but once they became successful in their own right, they recorded almost exclusively their own material), and after them, it became expected of popular musicians to be good songwriters as well, instead of just performers. A lot of people denigrate the Beatles these days, and underrate both their talent and their influence, but this is one reason why they are always ranked among the greatest musicians of the 20th century. Technically, none of them was the greatest musical performers, either vocally or as instrumentalists. Neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon can hold a candle to Frank Sinatra (or even Elvis Presley) as singers, and they can't stand stand in the same league with Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn as guitarists. Ditto for George Harrison. But they not only performed and recorded well, they wrote their own material, which is something few really successful popular musicians before them had done. And because of them, we today tend to regard musicians who don't write their own songs as slightly inferior talents. And we forget that that used to be the normal state of things.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2004-12-30 05:16am

Mitth`raw`nuruodo wrote:
Dalton wrote:Am I weird for thinking that A Perfect Circle covering "Imagine" (and thus making it sound like a funeral dirge) is sacrilege?
It's not quite sacrilege... it did really suck though. They've taken an absolutely beautiful song and turned it into something horrible.

Which is precisely why I love APC's 'Imagine'. Yes, I really hate Lennon's song.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2004-12-30 06:43am

Have anyone here heard Anal Cunt's cover of "Staying Alive"?

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2004-12-30 09:09am

Dalton, maybe it's just me but the GNR cover of Sympathy for the Devil is horrible. Also, as a GNR fan i want to go on the record as saying that every copy of the "Spaghetti Incident" album needs to be burned in a sacred cleansing ceremony and erased from our minds forever. Especially that god awfull cover of "Since I Don't Have You".

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2004-12-30 09:30am

Covers need to take a song in a new direction. Like the Cream version of Crossroad Blues, which updated the blues sound to sound more rock and roll, or the aforementioned Jimi Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower". Of course, this can totally destroy a song, like Joss Stone and her cover of "Fell in Love With a Girl", in which she sang it slowly, dragging out the words, thereby totally destroying the thing that made the original song good in the first place.

Otherwise, there's no point. I've heard that Alicia Keyes covered Knockin' On Heaven's Door, and that she did it exactly like the original. Well, what the hell is the point, then?