Anyway, we're going to talk about cover songs for a second, because I'm bopping around on iTunes right now, digging up covers to well-known songs, and some of them are good, but some of them are notoriously, tremendously, awfully bad.
Take for example the Lemonheads version of "Frank Mills," originally from the Hair soundtrack, is a good cover. You can recognize that it's supposed to be the song "Frank Mills" immediately, even though Evan Dando is singing a song that is clearly meant for a woman. That the original version is, in my opinion, far superior is beside the point. The point is, Evan Dando decided to do the song, and managed to essentially stay true to the original while also putting his own spin on things. Ben Folds' cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit" or even The Carpenters' version of "Desperado" fall into this category. I'm still quite happy with the Nada Surf cover of OMD's "If You Leave" that I downloaded quite some time ago.
And then you've got the abomination that is the Frou Frou version of "Holdin' Out for a Hero." This is clearly a musical crime that has been perpetrated against humanity with malice aforethought. At first examination, it's not even obvious what song it's supposed to be, and you're just sitting there going, "Oh, god, what is this crap? Bjork?" And then it dawns on you that you're listening to a song that was once popular on the radio and now is a guilty pleasure to play on your guitar, and you realize that you've been personally assaulted by a poor man's Bjork, and that you'll never think of the movie Footloose again without raising your middle finger to the Dreamworks company for releasing this discordant monstrosity to the public with the soundtrack to Shrek 2.
Anyway, I'm going to bed now. Magic Eight-Ball, will I listen to Cake's Fashion Nugget album tomorrow?
Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.
AIM: therbmcc71
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