So this new cover of Sound of Silence came out this week, and it got me thinking of all the various music covers I've listened to over the years, and got me wondering about good vs bad covers. So I figured I'd open it up to our wonderful Escapist folks for their opinions as well.
Personally, I'm a big fan of covers, when they are done right. Of course I can't think of any bad covers at the moment but that's because I generally stop listening to them mid-way through and forget about them. I've heard some people say that this cover of Sound of Silence is the next big thing where a cover outshines it's original since Johnny Cash did his cover of Hurt.
Johnny Cash - Hurt (Originally By NIN):
JC did a far better job at it, to the point where even TR was like 'well, dayum son!'.
Ozzy has done MANY a cover:
"In My Life" - Which I thought was better than the original The Beatles.
"Fire" - See above, but, Arhur Brown.
"Sympathy for the Devil" - See above, but The Rolling Stones
"Stayin' Alive" - See above, but The Bee Gees
Orgy - Blue Monday (Originally by New Order):
I thought was a LOT better than the original.
Man, that Disturbed cover is terrible, but then again I tend to hate all of their covers because they turn everything in a Disturbed song and it loses all personality. The band just has a really distinct sound and they should stick to that because they don't have the range to do anything more.
There are good covers out there, but there's also a seas of bad ones and picking through then can be very tough.On youtube there are some really well made fan covers though, if you're willing to dig around and find them.
Here's a pretty great instrumental cover of Blumenkranz
Sometimes they can be better than the original. Sorry Bruce Springsteen, but Manfred Man did it better. I love ya' Boss, but lets just all forget about your work before Born To Run huh?
The MLP Xmas Album is funny. Its not good, but its funny.
If I recall Glee had a few covers that were decent. Most of it was tween neo-ironic bullshit, but the occasional song was good. I remember they did a good cover of No Surrender when that one guy died.
This is a frequently expressed sentiment, and one I disagree with. Cash did a very good job of it, but Reznor's is still the definitive version. It's not like Cash was the first one to bring the weight of personal experience to it, Reznor invested a significant degree of his own trauma into that song. And it's still HIS song, for heavens sake. The only time I ever thought someone who wasn't the original artist performed the definitive version of a song was Buckley's Hallelujah, and he had to go and die to make that possible.
OT: I really like covers, to the point where I'll actively scour YouTube for amateur covers of songs I like, or even just catchy/well known songs I recognize, to see what people do with them. A lot of things can go into a good cover, from an artist bringing their own unique vision of it, to someone just doing a bang up job of capturing the spirit of the original.
There's a lot of bad covers too. Probably the most egregious and common cover sin is someone doing a good technical cover of a song and capturing none of the emotion. I don't know if I've heard a single decent cover of "Chandelier", for instance, and 95% of them seem to be operating under the delusion it's a happy-go-lucky song. Cash didn't do anything new with Hurt, but he captured the emotional crisis at the heart of it.
For an example of a good transformative cover, I submit Emm Gryner's "Pour Some Sugar on Me", in which she turns one of the most ridiculous songs of all time into a heart breaking ballad.
But "Crazy Train", after all, was a sad song to begin with, and Ozzy's new role as the patron saint of blunt-headed "extreme" metal results, I think, from a fundamental misunderstanding of the pervasive melancholy behind most of his singing with Black Sabbath (and most of the parts of his solo career that weren't self-abnegatingly stupid or medicated into unintelligibility). The conversion of "Crazy Train" into a sad piano ballad, then, is nowhere near as shocking or impressive as the corresponding deconstruction, and reconstruction as a tentative plea, of Def Leppard's lip-smackingly nonsensical, testosterone-addled seduction anthem "Pour Some Sugar on Me", from their 1987 status-consolidation album Hysteria. You will find few more blatant examples of smugly lascivious rock-and-roll doltishness, in both lyrical and musical senses, than the original of this song, a lumbering wreck that I believe could only have been written by a band whose judgment had been totally destroyed by stardom, which makes it one of the uniquely modern song-types that modernity will be uniquely embarrassed about when it grows up. When Joe Elliot sings this, I feel queasy. He knows with such certainty that he's going to "get" the girl (the entire interaction paradigm of arena-hair-metal backstages dictates the scene's resolution) that he simply sputters out every ridiculous stream-of-consciousness come-on he can think of, less as endearments than as ululant celebration of his impending conquest. Emm's version, with every word and phrase coherently enunciated, runs the risk of sounding like Steve Allen reciting "Hot Stuff", but somehow she manages to sound sincere, as if she's found a thread of meaningful metaphor running through this rant after all. Emm's version realizes that the rock cliches are actually a barrier between the two people, if not between the swaggering star and his groupie prey then between the songwriter the star used to be and someone who won't regard him as just as superficial a conquest in return. In this context, the randomized lyrics amount to a frantic attempt, using the grammar of the dream logic, to formulate a rescue entreaty. "Pour some sugar on me" turns into a plea not just for attention, but for everything bigger the singer should want, but has no idea how to request.
Apologies for the weirdo link, the YouTube version is live and frankly, not very good. I had to look hard to find this! Not that anyone will actually listen to it, but hey. It's the thought that counts.
I like covers. Most fall well short of the original, but sometimes a creative twist can reinvent a great song, and make it better, or at least different.
Obviously, they vary widely. Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" has been mentioned, of course- and while it's a very different take, it's also one that I've heard many people regard as better than the original. (It's certainly easier to listen to.) Three Dog Night's version of "Momma Told Me Not to Come" is far better known than Eric Burdon's or Randy Newman's, though the latter wrote the song (a fact many seem unaware of.) And then there's "Mad World", whose original version is a forgettable dance number by Tears For Fears but suddenly became the theme for every serious tragic-introspective moment after Michael Andrews and Gary Jules' cover in "Donny Darko".
Then there's the "it's so much cheaper to get this popular song covered by someone no one's ever heard of than to pay the licensing fee for the original" versions, often seen in commercials, television, and video games. Those tend to range from "competent" to "someone please pour bleach in my ears."
And it would seem somewhat remiss not to mention that some artists feel a need to release twenty different "remixes" of their own work, by themselves or others; usually there's a huge case of diminishing returns.
Short version: I try to judge covers individually. Sometimes they're hack work; other times, a different artist manages to pull something different and even better than the original artist out of the song. I rarely think "modernizing" (read: add a drum track and synthesizers!) is a good move; the artist has to have some vision, some particular idea that they want to bring out, for it to be much more than an imitation.
But I will admit this: I am tired beyond all measure of "slow, downbeat, usually female-led" covers trying to lend pathos and depth to grimdark movie trailers whose movies have all the actual depth of a bent thimble.
That Disturbed cover if just awful. He has that awful US radio-rock croon like the guy in FFDP, it makes my ears vomit.
A lot of people prefer Johnny Cash's version of Hurt, but I have to say I still think the original is better, purely down to the context. JC's version is an old guy looking back on all his regrets, NIN's is more of a young man in the throes of depression. For obvious reasons, I find that a lot more relatable.
I love this cover, Paranoid might seem like an obvious choice, but nothing TDEP have ever done has been run-of-the-mill. Plus it pisses a whole bunch of people off, which I love. Butthurt metal diehards are the funniest.
Generally speaking, I like them. The idea of a good song being covered immediately makes me happy rather than sad. There are some songs that used to be my favourites, but after a while you just get tired of listening to them. A new cover can instill some of that old spark back into it, not for someone who didnt know the original to begin with, but for me personally. Sometimes I browse through youtube just by entering [fav song] + 'cover'.
I am a sucker for bad cover versions, even. Well, I guess most people would call techno/trance remixes of classic rock songs bad covers, but I like them. I mostly only like those songs that lend themselves well to such covers, anyway. I like the melodies.
Sometimes though, you find a cover version that messes with the originals flow just for the sake of being different, and destroys it. That's dumb. Mostly it's singers putting emphasis on the wrong words, I have no idea why they do this.
The only time I ever thought someone who wasn't the original artist performed the definitive version of a song was Buckley's Hallelujah, and he had to go and die to make that possible.
Common mistake. Before that, there was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOZLQ3d1FI
OT: Eh, I don't think you can have a general policy in these matters. Sometimes a cover just works, for whatever reason. But it's not a matter of "better" or "worse", or even authenticity.
As a bonus for y'all, here's a song that was literally credited as "Bad Cover Version" on the record sleeve:
It's probably easier to list the musical artists who HAVEN'T covered Hallelujah at this point. I just think Buckley's is the "definitive" cover, which is atypical, as generally I award that distinction to the person who wrote the goddam song.
Alas, 'tis true. If ever an exceptional song was thoroughly banalized by ubiquity in singing contests featuring Simon Cowell, it is that one. Still, I got what you meant, just wanted to shill for my personal favorite, which I believe was the version that inspired the younger Buckley to do it.
I think it's very rare that a cover is better than the original, but I often enjoy listening to them simply because it's another take on a song I like. One cover, however, that I think surpasses it's original is Am I Evil by Metallica(originally by Diamond Head). Haven't got much love for Metallica in general, but damn. The heavier tone and vocals fits the song much better.
Depends on how well they're done, I think. Some covers I like include:
Johnny Cash covering "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails
Asking Alexandria covering "Youth Gone Wild" by Skid Row
Red Hot Chili Peppers covering "Higher Ground" by Stevie Wonder
Jimi Hendrix covering "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan (Yeah, bet you didn't know that was a cover, did ya?)
Disturbed covering "Land of Confusion" by Genesis.
I'm weird in the sense that I tend to like these covers as much as the originals... except NIN's version of Hurt, the cover by Johnny Cash is better in my opinion.
I chose Other because Cradle of Filth can't do a good cover to save their lives but one of the best things Iced Earth has ever done is a cover of Transylvania. Thinking about it, Cradle of Filth's cover of Black Metal was alright in that it isn't garbage when compared to the original...
I voted "other" because I felt the choices were too binary. I don't particularly like the term "flawed" originals, because that's a matter of taste/opinion.
A good cover manages to be faithful to the spirit of the song AND add something new. For example, Stevie Ray Vaughan covering "Voodoo Chile", Red Hot Chili Peppers covering "Higher Ground" or even Jimi Hendrix covering "Sgt Pepper".
None of the originals were "flawed". However the artists who covered them took the material and made it their own.
Sometimes taking a risk works (Johnny Cash covering "Hurt", Alien Ant Farm covering "Smooth Criminal") and sometimes it doesn't (Cowboy Junkies covering "Sweet Jane"...my opinion, Miley Cyrus covering "Smells Like Teen Spirit")
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