{"id":1065,"date":"2007-01-26T11:27:46","date_gmt":"2007-01-26T11:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/26\/cover-songs-that-shouldnt-be\/"},"modified":"2007-01-26T11:27:46","modified_gmt":"2007-01-26T11:27:46","slug":"cover-songs-that-shouldnt-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/26\/cover-songs-that-shouldnt-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Cover Songs That Shouldn’t Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits’s Orphans<\/cite> collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his “lounge singer from another planet” treatment. Most notable among these is probably “Sea of Love,” which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by approximately a billion people. Waits’s take is weird and creepy, but actually kind of interesting.<\/p>\n

A little more recently, I bought the Alabama 3 album La Peste<\/cite>, which includes a cover of “Hotel California.” A pretty bad cover, actually– I junked it almost immediately. I’m not sure “Hotel California” really rates as one of the all-time greats, but it didn’t deserve what they did to it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about cover songs a bit recently. Which brings up the question:<\/p>\n

\n

What are the songs that shouldn’t be covered by anybody?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m not talking about bad<\/strong> songs, here, I’m talking about really good songs, songs that are so good done by their original artists that you really shouldn’t mess with them. Anybody can make a bad cover of a bad song, or even a good cover of a bad song, but there’s something really annoying about making a bad cover of a great song.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s a tough question, though, because it’s hard to think of songs that are so good and so individual that they really shouldn’t be touched. There are lots of dreadful cover songs out there– the rap\/reggae version of “Angel of the Morning” that went around a few years ago, Matisyahu’s novelty-act “Message in a Bottle”– and lots of pointless note-perfect imitations– the Sixpence None the Richer “There She Goes,” the pop-punk “Boys of Summer” from a few years back– but not that many songs whose very existence is an affront to all that is good and decent.<\/p>\n

The two biggest offenders would probably have to be the Sean Combs (I forget if he was “Puffy” or “Diddy” or “Siddy” at that point) violation of “Every Breath You Take,” and whoever it was that did a semi-rap take on “No Woman No Cry” some years ago– the Roots, maybe? Those were both pretty horrendous, and the latter was especially bad– the Bob Marley version of the song is just perfect, and I don’t understand why you would feel compelled to mess it up.<\/p>\n

Elton John, of course, gets a special award of merit for doing an unforgivable cover of his own song<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What other cover songs are out there that are not just flawed in the execution, but in the whole concept?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits’s Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his “lounge singer from another planet” treatment. Most notable among these is probably “Sea of Love,” which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by… Continue reading Cover Songs That Shouldn’t Be<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}