AJ of PaperCuts fame has a new blog, and his first post is on a subject I felt inclined to write about a few days ago. He calls for a moratorium on what he calls “wistful, mournful cover versions” of songs. His examples of the trend include Frente’s cover of “Bizare Love Triangle” and Tori Amos’ version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’m not sure this really constitutes a trend, since many of his examples come from the 1990’s.
I can sympathize, however. Over the weekend I watched Thumbsucker on DVD, and at one putatively tender moment the soundtrack swelled with a jarringly bad cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen.” The performance was too close to the original to make it new, so I wondered if the producers couldn’t afford the rights to the Big Star recording. Perhaps it was intended to have a distanciation effect in a moment of teen eros, but I had to stop the movie, pull out my copy of #1 Record and listen to the original a few times before starting the movie again. I first thought, “This is one of those songs that should never be covered” but then realized that a band like Galaxie 500 could have brought something new to the song.
Similarly, I recently watched a “Veronica Mars” episode from the first season where Veronica works to solve a mystery at a utopian hippie community. In one scene, a character sings “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” by the campfire. I was a little confused. It seemed like the producers were trying to evoke some notion of sixities-ness, but The Velvet Underground were about as un-hippie as it gets. They were all about black leather and IV drugs, not peace and love. It’s clear that the creators of the show like to mess around with intertextuality, so perhaps that accounts for the disparity between music and plot. Still, TV and movie producers need to be cagey about using covers for emotional effect - it seems as likely to alienate the audience than to draw them in.
AJ’s post informed me that Cat Power performed the cover of “Hangin’ on the Telephone” used in those Cingular commercials. The music certainly got my attention - Marshall’s voice is familiar enough that I wondered who was singing. I think I object more to a prominent indie rock figure appearing in a mobile phone commercial than the cover. She’s made a career out of “wistful, mournful cover versions,” so his moratorium would eliminate some of her best recordings. It’s probably better to admit that songs are often covered by lesser talents than the original artists, and leave it at that.
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