When you wind up killing a lot of time in coffee shops like The Culture Tsar, you find yourself subjected to quite a lot of music selections you might not ordinarily choose. Setting aside the weird trend of Starbucks starting to feature bands a few weeks after The Culture Tsar writes about them (Cut Copy, Cults, and The Horrors come to mind), some of these choices can be a nice surprise. For instance, Starbucks is apparently on an Elton John kick recently, which is kind of nice because The Culture Tsar forgot how much he loves the song “I Don’t Want to Go on With You Like That”. Unfortunately, it also means they’re featuring an album of Elton John covers performed by various pop, rock, and country music artists.
Now, we could spend this entire post talking about how Miley Cyrus’s cover of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” makes The Culture Tsar want to throw a chair through a window, but that would be dealing with the symptoms rather than a much more troublesome disease (but for the record, it’s an awful cover). The problem here is that there are no agreed upon standards for a recording a cover version of a song. To address this issue, The Culture Tsar is proposing the not so humble and decidedly authoritarian solution of establishing a “Cover Council” charged with approving all such releases.
Obviously, there’s little to be done about an artist performing a cover song in a live performance, but the potential damage of this situation is limited to the scope of the audience. For actual recordings, however, some kind of standard clearly needs to be applied. Before anybody gets near a recording studio, the first order of business is establishing why a cover needs to exist in the first place. The best songs to cover, of course, are songs that nobody knows very well. You get more leeway when you’re working with another artist’s deep cuts rather than their biggest hits. Unfortunately, part of the reason for doing a cover is to garner more attention for yourself. What’s the point of covering a song nobody remembers, after all? It’s not an accident that when Alien Ant Farm decided to cover a Michael Jackson song, they went with “Smooth Criminal” instead of “Speed Demon”. There’s a case to be made against overly cynical cover recordings. Did Brittany Spears really want to cover “Satisfaction” because the song had deep personal meaning to her as an artist or was it a sales gimmick? The Culture Tsar’s Cover Council would subject each song proposal to a rigorous vetting process to ruthlessly strike down these sort of unnecessary covers. Context is also important too. For example, One Direction’s cover of Blondie’s “One Way or Another”, which is an early 80s song about a girl stalking a guy, takes on an entirely different meaning when sung by a group of guys in 2013. Somebody should have thrown themselves in front of that tone deaf idea.
If the first question focuses on intent, the second is one of execution. Generally speaking, there are only two ways to do a cover properly:
Method 1: A complete reimagining of the original song (Examples: Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics).
Method 2: A modernized, but otherwise totally faithful rendition of the song (Examples: Metallica’s cover of “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger or Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” by David Bowie).
Where artists go wrong is when they try to put a “twist” on the song, changing just enough to sabotage the original aesthetic of the song without giving it a new identity. Spears’s cover of “Satisfaction” sucks because it tries to take a rock song and turn it into a pop song while retaining enough of its original sound to remind you that it’s a Rolling Stones song. The result ends up being a shitty pop song that doesn’t remind you of the Rolling Stones. A slightly less offensive example might be the Ataris cover of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer”, which basically bolts the original’s distinctive keyboard part onto a pop punk rhythm section and hopes for the best. It’s not terrible, but only because the best part of it reminds you of the original version. If a cover makes you think about the original, then it’s probably failing as a song.
The next question comes after the recording is finished. Every cover should be submitted to the Cover Council to determine whether or not it needs to see the light of day. A lot of songs are going to fall down here, honestly. This is where the aforementioned Miley Cyrus cover of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” would get shot down. Nothing about her version is comparable to the original. It’s just inferior in every way, which begs the question of why it exists at all. Now, a cover doesn’t have to be better than the original; it just has to not be significantly worse. There’s nothing intrinsically great about No Doubt’s cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life”, but it doesn’t embarrass itself. You might question whether or not it needed to exist in the first place (see Cover Council Question #1), but it’s fine. Fall Out Boy’s cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”, on the other hand…
Having said all of this, The Culture Tsar actually loves covers quite a bit, provided they’re done well. Sometimes a cover can bring new life or context to an old song, but he’s decidedly against the idea of recording a cover for the sake of doing a cover. While the top-down solution of a Cover Council obviously isn’t feasible, it would be nice if artists considering recording a new version of their favorite song stopped and put a bit of thought into what they’re doing and whether or not it needs to be done. Playing a cover live at a concert is one thing and can be a great experience (seeing Collective Soul play Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” at Woodstock 99 is among The Culture Tsar’s greatest concert memories), but recording a song for widespread release is a totally different animal and should be approached with the utmost caution and respect.