On Demand
Cross-genre covers
Monday, September 15, 2008
As musical boundaries erode in the digital age, cover songs are becoming ever more farfetched – from indie boys covering teen starlets, to lounge lizards covering metalheads, to bookish singer-songwriters covering R&B Casanovas. Blender magazine editor and Slate.com contributor Jonah Weiner joins us to talk about this “thorny tangle of value judgments, power dynamics, and aesthetic agendas.”
Soundcheck blog: John Schaefer on the art of the cover song
Extraordinary Renditions - The problem of cross-genre covers
- About this program
- Staff Bios »
- Contact Us »
- Latest Episode
- Internship
- Tapes and Transcripts
- Show Archive »
Features & Series
Podcast
Stay up to date.
Subscribe to the Podcast
Comments
Refresh
Stars of Stage and Screen from Brooklyn (I think) covered Steppenwolf's Born to be Wild a few years back. It's an interesting and successful cover (in my opinion) because they took one of the most masculine rock songs around and made it overtly feminine - changing not only the mood and tempo of the original but also, skewing the lyrical meaning in the process. To me this is successful cross-genre cover because it uses the original as source material to create something new and interesting.
Oh, come on.
This has been going on in popular music for at least 60s years! "Tore Up" can be found as a rockabilly song by Sleepy La Beef and as R&B by Hank Ballard.
Ever hear Ray Charles' MODERN SOUNDS IN COUNTRY & WESTERN?
Tell me something I don't know...
This maybe a trend but its nothing new. Musicians cover other musicians songs, probably since the beginning of songs. Whats the big deal? Covers often are the way new artists get noticed. Tiffany. Travis became world famous and possibly started this when they covered Britney's Hit Me Baby One More Time.
John,
Can you play some Bad Plus? They are a piano trio that has an impressive quiver of rock covers.
Their album "PROG" is all covers.
another dumb topic on soundcheck. cross genre covers, not new. the examples your giving: just people looking to be noticed. yeah, even jay z. novelty, 'irony'. like 8 years ago some punk band did a whole album of movie theme song covers. it wasn't new then.
Great Jay Z ... these rocker wimp boys take them selves too seriously... do they think they OWN pop music?
I love when the covers are better than the originals. A good example is Tina's "Proud Mary."
I missed the beginning of the show, so maybe you talked about this, but my favorite cross-genre cover is Obadiah Parker's cover of Outkast's "Hey Ya". The original actually has somewhat melancholy lyrics despite its silly beats, and the slow acoustic and piano version really plays on that and makes you see the song differently.
you need to play a cover of don't fear the reaper. there are tons! and it's awesome.
Also, Gillian Welch's cover of Radiohead's "Black Star"! Covering Radiohead is fast becoming as sacrilege as covering The Beatles, but this cover is *good*.
The Flying Lizards were doing this in the early 80s. they had a hit single even, with Money(that's what i want). and in 1984, released a full album of covers that poked fun at mundane "hit" pop songs. look them up...
everytime i hear sonic youth I turn off my radio
John,
I don't think of a cover as a tribute to another artist but rather a quick way to get a hit with a proven piece of material when the coverer has run out of it's own ideas.
i love covers, but that last Sonic Youth cover of Madonna sounded like a bad karaoke performance. sometimes an original should just stand as it is.
Rage Against The Machine make Bruce Springsteen's Ghost of Tom Jones their own.
Two interesting sets of covers come to mind. First, The Bad Plus with their terrific Jazz takes on Blondie, Nirvana and others. They fully recreate and celebrate the originals.
Second are the Beatles covers in Across the Universe. There are a lot of bad Beatles covers (including a few in the movie), but some in the movie do what a cover should do - reimagine the song in a completely new way. I Wanna Hold Your Hand by TV Carpio is an example.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Okkervil River's Golden Opportunities album, released around Christmas of last year. It was both (a) a free album, downloadable from the band's website, which is interesting on its own, and (b) almost entirely comprised of top-notch covers. Has there been a better cover of Joni Michell than Will Sheff's version of "The Blonde in the Bleachers"? I've heard all the Joni tribute albums, so I think not...
Allison Krauss' cover of Paul Simon's Graceland at the Gershwin Awards last year FAR surpassed the original in that it sounded the way the song should have been done in the first place...dusty, slinky, Tennessee.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Tortoise did an album of great covers ranging from the Boss to Elton John, completely respectfully bringing a great deal of intelligence and love to the songs. No snarky or sarcastic
The thing I loved about Sonic Youth's cover of the Carpenter song was that it really brought out the inherent creepiness of what's essentially a stalker anthem. Similarly, to hear A Day to Remember tackle Kelly Clarkson's Since You've Been Gone really brings the underlying rage to the fore.
Finally, as a musician once told me, covers are instant crowd starters--a stone all can touch.
Joe Cocker managed to cover the Beatles "A Little Help from My Friends" and make it his own. Grace Jones is an artist whose entire careerer was based on covers.
Snarky? Maybe we (as in our current generation) don't hold all your baby-boomer music to such a reverent heights. I mean, really, is Dylan so untouchable? Gimme a break!
My favorite cover of all time might be a version of "It's Not Unusual," done by a group called the Wild Colonials for the 1996 movie "Mr. Wrong." Instead of Tom Jones' groovy, finger-snappin' Vegas anthem it was performed, in slow tempo with a female vocalist as a heartbreak song - which, if you listen to the lyrics, is what the song is about.
After I heard it on the Fordham college radio station & I found the CD on eBay & snapped it up. I'd love to see it on a CD compilation of great covers - creative variations on the original songs, not just rehashes.
I notice an interesting paradox when a band does a sarcastic cover: if the audience doesn't immediately recognize the song being mocked, then the joke fails. However, when most of the audience recognizes an Avril Lavigne song by the second line of the first verse, exactly how cool *are* these hipper-than-thou types?
the beatles, the who and the rolling stones all got famous doing cross genre covers, they just thought they were the same genre.
bpp mentioned The Flying Lizards. I actually have their cover of James Brown's "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine)" on my mp3 player. It's different. :-)
How 'bout Paul Anka's version of Van Halen's "Jump"?
Barenaked Ladies did lighthearted mocking covers in concert of whatever song was popular 15 years ago, way before they had a #1 of their own.
thanks for sticking up for me, john. i'm sorry mr. whiner finds me 'tedious', as he dismisses me in his slate piece.
it's a bit cynical to attribute the desire to pay tribute to the greatness of a song, or a band, to some sort of demographic rape. the cross-genre question is sort of beside the point if you consider that, at the most fundamental level, the most elementally inspirational aspects of music have nothing to do with genre and everything to do with a perceived and created universality.
I wonder if you've heard of the Coverville podcast by Brian Ibbott. It's devoted to playing various cover songs, all based around either a theme (cover songs done by surf rock bands), an artist (covers of Pink Floyd songs), or listener requests. It's on its 510th episode, and definitely merits a look, if only to raise awareness about another well-produced and interesting show.
Leave a Comment
Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Back to EpisodeEmail addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.