Word game

Chris — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:39:21 GMT

Stolen from Indiefunk's blog. Stolen from Kat's Blog ...then Sarah's and then Heather's... Please leave a one word comment that you think best describes me. Then copy and paste this in your blog so that I may leave a word about you!

Remakes and Covers

Chris — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:56:38 GMT

Sunday afternoon around 5 o’clock I got a call from my wife saying I should listen to someone perform Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”. She said it was on Yahoo. I’m glad she called. Someone named Chris Cornell did the song excellently. He brought exciting and different instrumentation, and his tempo choice was also new. More importantly, all of this was sound. That’s probably the crucial decision: what Cornell decided to do was sound; the song breathed. To perform someone else’s song well doesn’t necessarily entail performing it differently. If you can’t be exceptional when being different, do the song the same way. Too few musicians do this. Their idea of bringing something different to a song often and predictably means mucking with melody lines, usually important, memorable, or beautiful melody lines. In making a performance their own, they turn something that was great or at least listenable into something merely good, or worse. I’m sure that performers of bad remakes can explain why they did what they did. I’d guess the explanations would probably be something like wanting to express themselves, wanting to make the performance their own, wanting to make something new. But they want to bring new life to something which might not need it. Great songs aren’t fragile, but their parts can be. And good or middling songs could often use better parts. But making something that’s adequate better takes skill, making something good better takes skill and talent, and making something great better takes skill, talent, and vision. Few popular music artists possess enough of all three to take someone else’s work and beautifully, powerfully, truly remake it. More often, a band or solo performer would do better to cover a song than to try a remake. I can think of bands and solo artists—and I’m sure you can, too—who covered songs essentially note-for-note and yet made them their own. It was their virtuosity or passion which transformed the song, not tinkering with what already worked well. What these people have in common is their performing talent. However, the very reason that most bands and solo performers should cover songs instead of try to remake them is that they don’t have that talent. They can’t cover a song because their voice—be it a particular musician’s voice or a band’s collective one—won’t carry someone else’s work. They have to remake a song. Instead of copying, they plagiarize. If back in high school or some other period you recall plagiarizing, you might recall how your re-wording was worse than the original. It’s possible that it takes more courage to cover a song than it does to change one. Your soul, your artist’s soul, is really on the line when you copy a song as opposed to change it around. That’s not say great or good bands can’t screw up covers or remakes. And it’s also not to say that a great cover or remake has to come from a great band. A great remake or cover is beautiful. Even if you don’t like it, you can know it to be great. Yahoo is my wife’s home page. I can picture her logging on, seeing the panel announcing a Michael Jackson remake, and because she’s a Michael Jackson fan, being unable to ignore it. I think Chris Cornell for the most part performed “Billy Jean” song as written. Aside from the tempo and instrumentation changes, he didn’t do much. He didn’t make a forced-sounding attempt to invest the song with his own personality or compelling vision. He didn’t have to. They were already there when he chose to play the song. I like what Cornell did with it. And if in his version you hear echoes of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” in the guitar, and think, well this is a copy that copies something else in its copying, I’d agree with you. But his version isn’t a series of bad decisions piled one on another. And it’s fun to listen to.

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Remakes and Covers