NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and a suggestion of sensuality.
Introduction
My
daughter’s violin instructor is taking leave for five weeks to tour with a
well-known rock band. If my daughter
ever becomes self-conscious about playing nerdy classical music, perhaps she
can look to this for inspiration.
For this
post I use the term “music fusion” to encompass a number of ideas: classical instruments in rock music; covers
of rock songs; amateur covers; cross-genre exploration; and fusion I’d like to
see.
Classical in rock
I’m not a
musician. Though my mom wanted me, as a
kid, to learn the cello, the orchestra teacher thought better of it. So I’m just a listener. Perhaps with a better trained ear I’d pick
out all kinds of classical instruments in the rock music I listen to. Watching a documentary on “Pink Floyd The
Wall” recently, I got the answer to a question that had long troubled
me—how do they get that strange menacing backdrop of vague sound?—when I saw
four cellos performing with the band.
I’ve also picked out some violins backing up Eminem songs. At a Radiohead concert a decade ago, I
watched one of the band members carefully playing an xylophone during “No
Surprises.”
Sometimes
rock music gets treated to a stronger dose of classical instruments. A string quartet called “The Section” did an
entire album of classical arrangements of Radiohead songs. After reading some reviews to make sure it
wasn’t just a gimmick, I bought the album, and I love it. And there was the Metallica album, S&M, of a live performance where the rock band played alongside the San Francisco
Symphony. I haven’t heard the album, but
one of its songs, “No Leaf Clover,” got a fair bit of radio play and I liked it
fine. And I love that Devo decided to do
their own elevator music; the 30-second snippets I’ve heard of their E-Z Listening Disc sound pretty good. (I'm not about to shell out $193.97 for the
disc, which must be a collector's item or something.)
Cover versions
Some years
ago I was flipping through the FM stations in the car when I heard a song that
was both familiar and not. It was a
cover of Radiohead’s “High and Dry,” and it sounded great—which intrigued me
because though it’s a neat song, I’ve never liked it. (To my ear, Thom York, the lead singer,
sounds too whiny in this song. Perhaps
this is because he never wanted to record it anyway; in an interview he once
said of the song, “It’s not bad ... it’s very bad.”)
But who
did the cover? Alas, modern deejays are apparently
too cool to bother themselves with announcing what song you just heard and who
played it. When I googled “High and Dry
cover” I discovered a dozen versions of this song. I figured out pretty quickly that what I’d
heard on the radio wasn’t from Amanda Palmer’s album of ukulele-based Radiohead covers. I think the version I heard was by
Jamie Cullum, but I’m not sure I want to shell out $13 to
find out if I was right.
I also
like Urge Overkill's cover of “Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon” whereas I could
never stand Neil Diamond. (I suffered an
overdose of secondhand Neil Diamond at a moldy-oldies radio station where I
worked, as a receptionist, in the ‘80s.)
I also love The Breeders’ version of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” by the
Beatles.
Not all
covers are good, of course; Limp Bizkit did what I can only assume is a
sarcastic version of George Michael’s “Faith,” which strikes me as a kind of pointless
exercise. I mean, making fun of a mediocre song by squawking the chorus? And this
gets airplay? According to Limp Bizkit's
guitarist, George Michael hated the cover and ‘hates us for doing it.’” Oddly, the copyright law concerning covers
doesn’t require the covering band to get permission from the original artist,
though royalties must be paid.
There’s a
pretty cool website listing cover versions of everything, including “cover
chains” (“a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the artist
who covered the preceding song”); the longest chain listed is over 300 songs
long. Click here for
The Covers Project.
Amateur covers
Of course
it would be impossible to count the number of times a startup band of aspiring
musicians plays a cover at some tiny venue.
I also figure that anytime I sing at home, that’s a cover, and not a
good one, though I take some satisfaction in my kids not always asking me to be
quiet (which is especially remarkable when I sing Pink Floyd's “Vera,” which in
my rendition is particularly maudlin). Aside
from quality issues, the most distinctive trait of the “home cover” is that
it’s almost always sung a capella, unless
a wooden spoon on Tupperware, or some foot-thumping, is employed (which works
best if your audience is babies or toddlers).
Of course around
the kids I have to sometimes alter the lyrics—I can't sing "Maxwell's
Silver Hammer" (of which I count five actual covers, by the way) because
it’s about a serial killer, so I do “Maxwell's Silver Platter” (e.g., “Maxwell's
silver platter made sure that she was fed”).
Other kid-targeted enhancements: Thorogood's “Who Do You Love” is corrected as
“Whom Do You Love,” and the final line of “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” becomes
“that book by Vladimir” (since Sting pronounces “Nabokov” completely wrong, and
the right pronunciation would throw off the meter of the line).
But enough
of this childish stuff. The best
enhancement opportunities involve some thought and sophistication. Here’s an example. Say you’re tired of getting your brother’s
voice-mail and tired of leaving boring messages, so instead of a normal message
you rap Ice-T’s “The Girl Tried to Kill Me” into the phone. Doing this straight would be amusing enough,
but then you think, wouldn’t it be even better to refashion the song as a poem,
presented at a cozy poetry reading by a tweedy professor, a dignified man much
like your father? And if he were to read
it in a gentle, thoughtful, caring voice? Imagine:
“Yo.” [This spoken a bit uncertainly, as if the
professor isn’t quite sure what to make of this word.]
“I met
this girl the other night.” [Pause.]
“Hype.” [Spoken with a trace of wonderment: what is this word, exactly?]
“Super-dope
body and face, her mini-skirt ... tight.”
[“Tight” given after a pause, and without the slightest trace of
salaciousness. The professor is now adrift,
and just sounding out the words.]
“Talking
about legs and lips, mind-blowing hips,
Had to cross
my legs just to look at her...” [Here the professor falters as he cannot bring
himself to utter the vulgar word “tits,” and eventually substitutes:]
“Vipassana.” [You hang up immediately after this, as if to
suggest that the professor has suddenly realized that, though “Vipassana” was
the gentlest word imaginable—one of his favorites—in this context it sounded lewd,
and he has blushed and abruptly abandoned the lectern for his seat.]
Genre-bending covers
Some
covers seem pointless to me—e.g., Billy Idol’s version of “Money Money” and the
Lemonheads’ cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”—because they’re
too similar to the original. They add
nothing. The best covers, I think, are
the ones least faithful to the original, where the band doing the cover sees a
way to present the song in a totally new way.
For example, the Jamie Cullum cover of “High and Dry” isn’t even
rock—it’s something more like jazz. (Not
everybody likes this genre-bending; an amateur reviewer of a Cullum album complained,
“Over here in the U.K Jamie Cullum is regarded as the saviour of jazz. [But] he isn’t jazz. It masquerades under that name in order to
make jazz trendy and saleable.”) Whatever
genre this cover is, if it can lure me out of my rock/rap rut, I’m all for
it.
I can say
the same of Amanda Palmer’s cover of “Idioteque,” which you can listen to here. I expected the ukulele bit to be a
gimmick (I mean, c’mon, a ukulele?)
but the song is brilliant. (For one
thing, with Palmer’s clear vocals instead of Yorke’s mumbling, I can actually
make out the words.) I also cannot categorize the Cowboy Junkies and their great cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sweet
Jane.” Though their cover bears little
resemblance to the original, Lou Reed reportedly called it “the best and most authentic version I have ever heard.”
Often a
cover is done whimsically (though can’t be only
whimsical or it wouldn’t hold up musically). At a Bob Schneider concert many years ago, I
was delighted to hear a rockabilly version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give
It Away.” I didn’t even recognize the
song until about a minute in. But later Schneider
outdid even this feat with a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel
Like) A Natural Woman.” Only the choice was whimsical, though. Had he played the song ironically—if he’d thrown in any hint of wink-wink, nudge-nudge—it would have
been a silly and pointless stunt, but he played it completely straight. Even his (male) backup singers came in
perfectly (“Womaaan!”) and Schneider did a call-and-response thing with the
audience—well, at least with the many females in the audience—and I can’t
imagine any singer has ever had better opportunities with groupies after the
show.
Devo
co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh, in a bio you can find here, acknowledges the
value to a song’s creator of hearing a good, creative cover of it. Of the Teddybears’ version of “Watch Us Work
It,” he says, “They took Josh Freese’s drums off and put on a sample from
something we did back in, like, 1982. And
I thought, ‘That actually is better!’ That
was when I first really saw that Devo had something to absorb, as well as
something to impart.”
Odds and ends
Some
covers aren’t exactly covers, like the brilliant “20 Dollar” by M.I.A., which
is really its own song but grounded in Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” (which has spawned
some eighteen covers). M.I.A.’s liner
notes in say “Incorporates elements of ‘Where Is My Mind,’ written by....” Of the twelve songs on her “Kala” album, six
of them say “Incorporates elements of....”
In rap, of
course, infusion of one genre into another via sampling is standard—like the
guitar lick from Heart’s “Magic Man” in Ice-T's “Personal,” or the chorus of
Aerosmith’s “Dream On” throughout Eminem’s “Sing For the Moment.”
Music fusion I’d like to see
It's a
pity, I think, that bands mainly do covers early on, when they don’t yet trust
their own material. As
Mothersbaugh suggests, an established artist or group might really learn from
hearing, or doing, outlandish covers (in the spirit of Devo’s own cover of
The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”).
Perhaps
some bands are shy about covering bigger bands’ songs. It seems that the more a song gets covered,
the more likely it is that somebody else will cover it, as memory of the original
becomes more distant and vague. We
associate “Hey Joe” with Jimi Hendrix, though his cover is one of hundreds, and
the song’s original authorship is a matter of debate. Richard Berry’s “Louie Louie” has become a
staple: all kinds of bands have covered
it, including the Troggs (whose big hit, “Wild Thing,” was itself a cover);
Swamp Rats; Motörhead; Led Zeppelin; Black Flags; Joan Jett and the
Blackhearts; and the Smashing Pumpkins.
In my
perfect world, I could compel bands to do covers of my choosing, which would
propel them into totally new musical directions.
Some music
fusion I’d like to see:
- Eminem doing James Taylor;
- James Taylor doing Eminem;
- My own dad doing Ice-T;
- Radiohead doing a rockabilly version of “Optimistic”;
- Metallica doing Kenny Rogers;
- George Michael covering Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl (and I Liked It)”;
- Tom Waits doing Dido;
- Dido doing Tom Waits;
- The Rolling Stones doing a Devo song;
- Amanda Palmer covering Pink Floyd’s instrumental “One of These Days” on the ukulele.
Of course
this list is incomplete. I encourage you
to list your own fusion ideas in the Comments section below.
dana albert blog
