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Friday, October 03, 2008

The return of Arbitrary But Fun Friday

A few years back, Amanda Marcotte was so kind as to guest-blog here for a few weeks, and for her very first post, she offered a memorable Arbitrary But Fun Friday®, Insufferable Music Snob edition, in which she asked readers to name some of the best cover songs of All Times.  Well, my friends, the time has finally come for me to offer the obvious followup: worst cover songs of All Times.

For me (and I know this is arbitrary, but hey, it’s kinda fun), there are basically two kinds of awful covers: one, covers that do nothing good with a song and lead you to wonder why anyone bothered recording the damn thing, and two, covers that actually suck all the life out of a song, give you severe chest pain, and make the entire world worse.  Notable examples of the former include:

-- Uncle Kracker’s boring version of Dobie Grey’s “Drift Away,” which is very much like the original except for the fact that poor Mr. Shafer, with his half-octave range, proves unable to hit the song’s high or low notes, thus rendering the quite lovely melody as something like the hideous three-note drone that is “Follow Me”;

-- Pearl Jam’s even more boring version of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss,” which is marked by Eddie Vedder’s inability to hit notes or get lyrics right; and

-- Gloria Estefan’s unfathomably boring version of Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around,” which is very much like the original and . . . um . . . yeah, that’s about it.

Notable examples of the latter would have to include Manfred Mann’s version of Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light,” perhaps the most bombastic treatment of a song ever, though a close competitor is

-- Whitney Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which takes a delicate and beautifully understated song and hits it with sledgehammers followed by a 21-gun salute followed by cluster bombs and capped off with a Truck Driver’s Gear Change; and

-- Rita Coolidge’s version of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” which not only manages to take a crisp soul classic and turn it into a warm bath of easy-listening mush, but can also induce nausea in laboratory monkeys as early as the 45-second mark.

Surely, however, no list of Covers That Suck would be complete without the Grateful Dead’s stupefying renditions of “Good Lovin’” and “Dancin’ in the Streets,” which, like the aforementioned Coolidge atrocity, take uptempo soul classics and force-feed them acid until they’ve lost the will to live and all that’s left of them is Bob Weir’s breathless vocal meanderings.  Back in ‘06, Amanda noted that “Devo are the kings of the great cover song,” and she was entirely right; she’s not really an Insufferable Music Snob, you know—she just has really good taste.  And Devo’s evil counterparts in the world of covers are the Dead, the kings of the truly terrible cover song, the kind of cover that makes you wish the giant enlightened insects would come and devour us all, preferably before the next chorus.

Any more you can think of?

Posted by Michael on 10/03 at 02:03 PM
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