The continuous attempt to remake good songs
Why do we keep making the same song? Better yet, why do we keep remaking everything? Novel into movie, television show into movie, novel into radio drama into movie into remake of movie, comic book into movie into comic book adaptation of movie, movie into musical and back into movie, just what are we trying to reach? We have cover bands, tribute bands and even prolific song writers with a well established repertoire can’t get through a set without throwing in a couple of covers. Are we merely trying to capitalize on someone else’s success or is there something more to all of this replication?
The first time I heard Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah I thought it had to be the greatest song ever recorded. Actually, I still sort of think that. Being ignorant of Leonard Cohen, it wasn’t until I heard John Cale singing it on the Basquiat soundtrack that I realized it was a cover. Of course later I heard Rufus Wainwright, K. D. Lang, Damien Rice and too many others try to bellow out its brilliance only to fall short of Buckley’s paramount interpretation. The point is they still tried. There is a compulsion to sing a good song. It is why people karaoke. For an artist there is an even greater compulsion. A good performer wants to teach others about music by sharing the same songs that taught them something about music.
Whether it’s The Fugees or The Jackson 5 singing Roberta Flack or Soft Cell singing Gloria Jones, covers speak to the innate immortality of music. Each version emphasizing some other isolated nuance of the melody—some new adaptation of the progression. Fact is, the continuous remaking of a song is one of the true proofs that the song is actually good. Sometimes you can’t trust your own taste. We can find ourselves admiring a song for sentimental or nostalgic reasons that have nothing to do with melody or harmony, structure or innovation. So then, what is the scale with which we can use to measure music?
Every year there are dozens of one hit wonders cramming into our radios and streaming over our music apps. And every time we are convinced they are the absolute best there ever was. And in another year or so they are sitting on a yard sale table or a pawnshop rack, or being deleted to save space on our hard drive. And we are left wondering why we ever even liked it, equating a work of art to a seasonal wardrobe accessory.
What we can trust is time. Time judges all things fairly and you can’t keep a good song down. Every wonder why Mozart or Schubert are still around? Music is meant to be played. Songs are meant to be sung. It is the very nature of the art form. If a song is good, it will never cease to be. If it must, it will trudge its way from aberrant obscurity to take its place in the annals of musicdom. Or the canon. Or your Top 25 Most Played playlist as the case may be. So this is not a call to start a tribute band. (Those guys are actually trying to capitalize on someone else’s success.) But keep reinventing. Keep innovating. What if Buckley hadn’t covered Cohen? What if Eva Cassidy hadn’t covered Sting? Or the Ransom Notes had not covered Over the Rhine’s Latter Days, one of my favorite examples of why we should keep reinventing good songs. You never know what song may next transcend everyone’s expectations, even the artist who wrote it. You never know when you might just stumble onto something new, in something old. So remake all you want, I’m fine with covers, as long as they don’t make The Langley School Music Project into a video game.
S. Andre Crosby
