Stuck on the Covers

The first time I stayed awake plus 24 hours was due to Skate or Die and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on a rented NES. Almost twenty years later, video games still have a purgatorial effect on me. 9:30pm, blink blink, 2:30am.

Consciously avoiding any intellectual projects, I’ve been stuck on covers, cover songs that is. It started when I picked up a CD of cover songs by Ministry succinctly named “Cover Up.” Some good ones, some laughable ones, some which were terrible, terrible because the original was terrible. (Their version of “Radar Love” will soon be staple in strip clubs across America. A thankful refreshing.) And this is where I get confused. The term “cover” doesn’t always make sense. By remaking a song already on record, isn’t that an act of “uncovering?” But then if you take a crappy song and overlay it with a new and legitimate version, that seems more like a cover? This seems like a true cover, like when a cat rakes litter over their shit and the crystals absorb all the toxins giving us the chemically-reacted mountain rain scent. But like the kitty litter scent, it only smells “better” because we know how bad the original smelled.

I’ve always been a sucker for the good cover, though. With a better organized music system, I was able to pin down roughly 180 cover songs in my collection. Punk bands noticeably were responsible for roughly 70% of what I had. Through them runs a pattern of subversion, songs that are wonderfully irreverent. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are probably responsible for most of these. Shot through with punk energy and subtle sarcasm, many of the “classics” become laughable if they were not already. The Gimme Gimmes also have their moments of cover magic when they simply produce a good version without apparent subversion (Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” comes to mind). I’ve noticed another strain that I don’t care for, the "karaoke" cover. I notice this with many tribute records where a band basically plays the same song the same way with the only difference being the musical technology--Wow, you played a Presley song through a Marshall amp and added crunch distortion.

One that really disturbed me was a Misfits tribute record. There were some good ones, but some sapped all the dirty, garaged, and literal slashed-speaker sound out to replace with clean guitars and distinguishable snare drums. The worse I have is a cover of The Bangles' “Manic Monday” by a band called Relient K. This version was pure turd polishing. It looked like a promising trashing song, but quietly performed it much like the Bangles. One version of that on record was enough.

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When I started this post I thought I would say something about dead George Carlin (I see the Stygian did one, though). I re-read Napalm and Silly Putty and Brain Droppings as a personal tribute. My conclusion was that any elegiac thoughts may cause a haunting from Mr. Carlin. So long George, and thanks for all the stuff.