Blowing my cover

Scott over at Messages from the Ether has posted some thoughts on cover songs responding to the CBC article I discussed previously. I cut my discussion short before, distressed at how much like an old man I sounded for contrasting the "good old days" when people did good covers with the present, when "kids these days are doing god knows what that sounds like a bunch of noise... hrmph..." (I didn't really say that, but the thought was there.) I remember a bit in American Heritage magazine from some years ago, in one of their "most overrated/underrated" issues, declaring Stephen Sondheim the most overrated songwriter in history, but not before the writer making the choice said that, in this day and age when most pop singers write their own songs, they all qualify. Now THAT'S a grumpy old man.

Anyway, several of Scott's points of dispute with the article, especially some of the overbroad assertions made in the course of the piece, are well-taken. It takes a bit of grappling with the purposes of song performance to distinguish the "insincere" cover from the "genuine." The author never does address the question raised after the title of how this state of affairs came to be. It also takes a lot of thinking about what one likes and doesn't like about various cover versions to figure out what one thinks about covers generally. I'm a long time fan of jazz, where spending time with songbooks is a necessity to distinguish yourself, so the idea of covers itself can't be the problem. At the risk of turning into the guy from American Heritage, I don't see what was wrong with letting songwriters write songs while talented performers perform them. Nowadays (there's that word) it seems like everyone needs to write all their own songs or they're not real artists. Like Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra weren't real artists. Still, with the strong creative element inherent in the good cover, the line between writing and interpreting songs gets a bit hazy.

To gripe a bit about current trends in popular music for just another minute, why do pop singers feel the need to create the transparently false pretense of offering millions of people access to their most intimate thoughts and feelings? Do I really want to listen to The Diary of Alicia Keys or Ashley Simpson's Autobiography (I'm talking about the concepts raised by those titles, not the albums themselves)? Good artists create a sense of intimacy or sincerity without explaining to me on the cover that that's what they're doing. Anyway, some artists are capable of creating work that conveys depth and feeling without the illusion of verisimilitude. I know, hip-hop is the guiltiest of them all, with nonsensical gangster fairy tales passed off as The Documentary.

OK, enough of that. On a more positive note, there are covers of a sort out there now that I really dig. I've mentioned MIA's "Sunshowers" before. It's a song that isn't quite a cover of, but refers back to Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band song "Sunshower." I still don't have MIA's album, but that song is neat. I'm thinking I'll have to pick up the last Trick Daddy album as well, since I've been liking the latest radio cut, "Sugar (Gimme Some)" featuring Cee-Lo singing the hook. I almost couldn't believe it at first, but it's straight from the Talking Heads' "Sugar On My Tongue," which first appeared (as far as I can tell) on the Sand in the Vaseline collection. Sure, it's not obscure at all in DJ Shadow terms, but for a radio thug like Trick Daddy, it's pretty deep."