Illicit repost about covers
Fri 26 Feb 2016 09:30 AM
Last week, Rob Loftis was musing about covers over on Facebook:
If there's a song that sucks, but then someone comes along and does a cover of it that rules, does that mean that the song didn't really ever suck to begin with?
Have I violated a norm by cutting and pasting this comment into a blog post? Facebook is only a semi-public space. I can link to his comment, but it shows up as not available right now if you're not logged in and if you don't occupy a point close enough to Loftis in Facebook-space. This ambiguous publicity irks me about a lot of conversations on the internet: What we would have said in the comments section of a blog five years ago now gets said as a comment in somebody's Facebook feed. The Facebook algorithm might cough it up five years from now to say "Remember this!", but you've got little chance of finding it again if you just go looking and no chance if you do a general search.
In any case, I followed up with a comment about some of the literature on cover songs. The answer to his question is that it depends. Sometimes your reaction to the original version was an unfair condemnation of the song, sometimes the later cover is great despite the song being terrible, and sometimes the cover is transformative and creates an awesome new song that's a descendant of the crummy old one.
In any case, Rob looked at the paper and left this comment:
You mention that recorded mimic covers are rare because they don't really serve a purpose, but I can think of two kinds of exceptions to that. Sometimes movie producers will actually record a mimic cover because it is cheaper than licencing the original. Also, you sometimes see hastily done mimic covers on iTunes trying to capitalize on people who search for a song, but don't know the name of the original artist, and might wind up downloading the wrong track.
Cool examples. They're kind of odd cases though, and so I take them as friendly adjustments to our claim that mimic covers aren't usually recorded.
Someone else in the comments on Rob's post mentions the Onion AV Club Undercover, which had somehow escaped my attention. It's been going on for six years.
They Might Be Giants do a brilliant cover of Tubthumping that brings in all the Onion office staff.
The Polyphonic Spree does a cover of Neil Young's Heart of Gold that tampered with my memory of the original. It made me uncertain as to there were horns in Neil Young's version, because they fit so well into the song.