In the era of mismatched samples and breakout TikTok covers, SOUNDS writer Ed asks what makes or breaks a cover song…

If an artist covers the right song in the right way, the results can be incredible. The greatest covers can even end up outshining the original. Most people aren’t aware that Soft Cell’s eighties hit ‘Tainted Love’ was originally written as an RnB track almost 20 years earlier, for instance, or that Gary Jules’ ‘Mad World’ is actually a cover of a far rockier synth-pop tune.

On the other hand, artists can misjudge. Sometimes, they’ll record a cover that listeners feel undermines, misinterprets, or outright spits in the face of an essential part of the original – and in these cases, the results can be hideous. ‘Tainted Love’ and ‘Mad World’ may have become so beloved they eclipsed their parent tracks, but other covers have fallen decidedly short of these lofty heights. You’re probably not familiar, for example, with the Limp Bizkit rendition of George Michael’s ‘Faith.’ And believe me, that’s a good thing.

Music is, ultimately, subjective. But even so, there must be some sort of science – some rules or guidelines – that determine precisely what makes a cover good, and what makes it Fred Durst groaning brutishly warped George Michael lyrics over a jumble of record scratches in the greatest affront to popular music since Metallica lost the Grammy for ‘Best Metal Performance’ to a folk band.

To get a sense of these guidelines we ought to look at why the cover song emerged as a concept in the first place.

In the early days of radio, the music industry functioned a little differently. Nowadays, when we listen to a song, the artist is just about as important as the music itself. But it wasn’t always that way. During the thirties and forties, songs were of far more interest than whoever was playing the instruments, and though some musicians of the era did break out and achieve fame in their own right, this was far from common. Most radio performers wouldn’t even be credited, and even when some musicians finally started to gain a personal following, standard practice was still to conceal most of the band behind just one singer; naming conventions like ‘Freddie Bell and the Bellboys,’ or ‘Bill Haley & His Comets,’ would shine a spotlight on the frontman, but ensure revolving-door anonymity for everyone else.

The reason for this is that the music industry has always been about the merch. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the technology to fit a whole album on one piece of vinyl till the late fifties, and band t-shirts didn’t exist yet. So, the main product labels flogging were music sheets – instructions for radio audiences on how to play the songs they were listening to in their own homes.

And what if one particular song is proving popular, and you want to expand its appeal? Then you picked a new demographic you wanted to ‘cover,’ and tweaked the song to make it more accessible to that new audience.

The ugly truth is this was often motivated by racism – Black singers were less profitable than white ones – but they had wide-ranging uses. Elvis Presley’s cover of ‘Hound Dog’ was faster and more boisterous than the original, which gained the song a new fanbase of rock ‘n’ roll loving teens. The opposite happened  when Pat Boone covered Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti,’; his tidier vocal performance and cleaner production found appeal amongst more conservative listeners.

This might explain why covers tend to work best when they cross genre boundaries. After all, if the point of covering a song is to make it resonate with a new crowd, then you will have to change it significantly. 

We don’t have to look far to see examples of how this dynamic can work (or not). Metallica’s recent project, The Metallica Black List, is an album of over 50 tracks featuring artists covering Metallica songs – some, it’s fair to say, are better than others.

Sam Fender’s contribution takes the dark, gruelling, heavy metal anthem ‘Sad But True’ and transforms it into a sensitive piano ballad. The fundamental message (a warning on the destructive nature of alcoholism) remains intact but it does run through a very different prism. Where Metallica’s version snarls in disgust, Fenders’ simply sighs in despair. Simply put, it’s a good cover.

Weezer’s cover of ‘Enter Sandman’ is not so good because it mimics the original almost exactly. The riff is unchanged; the beat remains the same; the two versions are only 3 seconds apart in runtime. It begs the question, why bother? What was the point? The ‘demographic’ Weezer’s version is trying to reach has already been reached by the original. By changing virtually nothing except replacing James Hetfield’s vocals with Rivers Cuomo’s, the cover is sure to impress die-hard Weezer fans and quite possibly, no one else.

The genre-switch has been a reliable rule-of-thumb for cover songs for decades. Though it started life as an indie-electronica track by The Postal Service, Iron & Wine’s acoustic folk version of ‘Such Great Heights’ was pivotal to the song’s success, and Lagwagon’s D-beat infused punk cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is one of my favourite covers of all time. But does that mean that simply plucking a song from one genre and dunking it into another is a guarantee of greatness? Limp Bizkit’s nu-metal-mutilation of ‘Faith’ was brought up earlier in this very article; what separates this from other covers which hop genre boundaries?

The answer, I think, lies with the level of respect and understanding that a cover song shows to its antecedent. If the purpose of a cover is to introduce an old song to a new audience, then that means you have to work with the original – not just write a new song on top of it. If a cover doesn’t have any recognisable links to the original, then it can justly be called a failure.

How these links manifest can be varied – in music, there’s a lot of room to play around with – but they certainly need to be there. It’s a lot like a conversation; conversations don’t work if you just repeat back what you’ve just heard, and that’s why Weezer’s ‘Enter Sandman’ doesn’t have a lot going for it.

Keeping this train of thought moving – if you tweak just enough to keep it fresh but not too much so we’re left with a non-sequitur – then a solid, worthwhile cover song won’t be far away. Both Johnny Nash and Screeching Weasels’ versions of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ sound euphorically defiant, but the Weasels’ iteration uses frenetic punk rock tropes to get there, rather than Nashs’ soothing reggae vibes. Tori Amos’ cover of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ takes the lyrics, which sound extravagant and almost funny within their thrash metal origins, and places them in an altogether more harrowing context; with a darkly droning synth and horrible, harrowing vocals, Amos’ version elevates a song about demons massacring the Heavens from cheesy melodrama to something genuinely chilling. And while the Happy Mondays’ take on ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ is often criticised, I honestly can’t see the problem with it; it’s still that perfect blend of laid back-yet-electrifying, and in exactly the way you might expect if Shaun Ryder had had the idea before Thin Lizzy. If you don’t want singing that sounds like half-remembered karaoke at closing time, you probably just shouldn’t listen to Happy Mondays.

But conversations (and covers) don’t work if you ignore what’s been said and dive in with something embarrassingly unrelated instead. If an artist is talking over the original instead of to it, then a bad cover is almost guaranteed. It’s what happened when Dope, a band full of white dudes, covered ‘Fuck Tha Police,’ replacing Ice Cube’s line accusing the police of “thinking every n**** is selling narcotics” with “yeah, motherfucker, I’m selling narcotics.” It’s what happened when Hilary Duff turned ‘My Generation’ – the song that spearheaded the countercultural youth rebellion of the sixties – into a twinkling teenybopper tune fit for the Disney Channel (“I hope I don’t die before I get old!”). And yes, it’s what happened when ‘Faith’ – the cheeky, optimistic ‘Faith’ – was taken by Limp Bizkit and subjected to nihilistic cruelty beyond comprehension. Words can’t emphasise enough how misjudged that song was. Listen for yourself if you really must. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you…

credits

words — ed brown

design — sâde popoola