PREAMBLE RAMBLE

first let's get to the bottom of what a bad cover doth make. take this example of afi covering the cure. technically, it's not that bad - all of them play their instruments reasonably well and the singer seems to hit most of his...um, 'notes.' but from their arrangements all the way down to the inflections of the singer's voice, a doppelganger has been born.

(sidebar: speaking of doppelgangers, doesn't the afi singer look freakishly like a screamo version of another well known singer? i'm just sayin'. oh, and what's up with those retarded michael bay-esque quick edits in the first 50+ seconds of the clip? you shouldn't have to suffer full blown dimentia while watching some shitty music vid.)

they even ape the drum fills and guitar solos ver batim. even though it's these elements that make the song so uber-recognizable in the first place, this is the equivalent of (upcoming analogy for any chicks stumbling onto my bandwidth by mistake) not just wearing the exact duplicate of another girl's dress to prom, but the same dress worn by the prom queen the year before. from a musician's standpoint, where's the challenge in that? someone might tell me...

'but it's those guitar leads, vocal inflections, and drum fills that make the song what it is. it's impossible to expound on. by the way, on a somewhat related note, i'm a homo and i want to fellate you.'

to them i'd say something like, 'robert smith and co. already did that version. it's called the original.' it'd probably be peppered with no fewer than 18 'fucks' and a punch to the dick for saying 'expound', but i digress.

furthermore, let's approach this from a different angle. say you're cruising down the road in your 1999 black chevy cavalier when, BANG!! the engine explodes. you realize that you need to buy a new car. you have two options:

a) seek out another new 1999 chevy cavalier, identical in every way except this time it's grey instead of black
b) exercise a morsel of creativity and get something different

if you picked 'a', you're a boring, unimaginative little shit and i'd rather have cancer than be your friend. i tend to explore the validity of a cover song in kinda the same way. you're dismissed.


so you need to make a great song better without ruining the allure of the original. that's the whole crux of the cover song concept - to pay homage, not to replace. nor to imitate. so, i'd also offer my hypothetical antagonist from two paragraphs ago this version of that same song by georgia's katie melua (not the one in the states, the one in europe. check out her accent.) and to be fair, it's a live version too (there's a studio version online, but rather than a music vid or something, it's oddly set to a slideshow of joaquin phoenix. since i like the song so much, i'm now gay for joaquin phoenix. thanks for posting it, fucker).

anyhoo, you'll notice right off the bat that all the guitar solos are elegantly different (only hints of the original chops remain), her (absolutely mesmerizing) vocal licks are stylishly different, and whoa, is that a completely different drum pattern altogether?? you heathen!! and look at her. she's so freakin' sexy. step aside, joaquin, now all i can think about is eastern europe. critical mass averted.

but alas, melua doesn't crack my list...
(what a monumental step back for the space program, btw...right?)