Great Cover?!


I have always harbored very strong opinions on Live albums and Covers of other songs. In this post, I wanna focus on the Covers!

When an Artist does a Cover of another song, they are in fact doing one of two things: either paying homage to the original, or are just out of ideas and need filler of a popular song! To pay homage to a song is great, but I think that it takes little talent to do it exactly like the original... what value does that add? On the flip side, to do a cover and to interpret it with your style, approach and sound, and by doing that, to bring a new dimension to a song, is the greatest form of homage that can be paid to the original, while at the same time demonstrating the creativity and vision of the Artist covering the song.

Having spent countless hours on thesixtyone, I have noticed a lot of covers. Some of them are just a rehash of the same song and they make me wonder what value is added here? Others are great re-interpretations, where the Artist deconstructed the original song, reformed it and created something truly extraordinary. Below are some examples of songs that add new dimension to an already well known song and some of my favorite covers on the site:


The quintessential cover



Great reinterpretation:



And a haunting Cover to a familiar classic:



We'll get into Live songs in another post...

-Apoc

7 comments:

Michele Yamazaki said...

My favorite reinterpretations are Toxic - Yael Naim, Time is Running Out - Sarah Morgan, Surrender - Ox and who could forget Sunday Bloody Sunday - RX2008.

My favorite though, is The Lunatics are Taking Over the Asylum by Collide. What a terrific cover. Fun Boy Three was such an innovative band. I'd love to see one of those accapella groups cover 'It Ain't What You Do It's the Way that You Do It'.

TheFakeAnnieB said...

Too Polite, Apocalypse. How about the overly shitty songs that get Covered, because there is much Bumpage to be had? I can think of a few artists who've leveled up simply by taking a four minute song and with little imagination, turned it into mad bumps (Flomid , I'm looking at you!). At least give me something original.

And to the listeners, just because Bowie won't post a song on t61, doesn't mean you have to kiss the lazy bottom of those artists who post nothing but a dank remake of a stale song you made-out to when you were in middle-school. There is so much original stuff there.
/my 2cents

Anonymous said...

I thought about doing a piece on covers, looks like you got it covered.
I'm not sure what's with the'thefakeannieb' but I've got to agree. On the whole Flomids contributions have been piss poor, or at least not worth the high bump count. IMO ;)

Batface89 said...

I think thefakeannieb has a crush on the real AnnieB!

Jon Clark said...

I enjoy the odd cover every once and a while, but there are some artists I want to go back and revoke my bumps from (also looking at Flomid).
A few other well done ones on the61 would be...
Careless Whisper - The Gossip
Levi Weaver - Idioteque
Jose Gonzalez - Teardrop
and, even though I'm sure some people thought it was a travesty
Saul Williams - Sunday Bloody Sunday

timyjl said...

I think batface has multiple personalities : )

Michele Yamazaki said...

Haha, it would seem.

I would rather not use my real name here, so I'll have go back and update a few things. I opened a new account just for this.

I run about 8 other blogs and they all use my real name (for work).