Take Cover!

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

The story of how Out of Your Mouth made it into the coveted video rotation at MuchMusic in 2004 is a long and ultimately troubling one. A good deal of it is classic indie-band drudgery: group convenes, wins a few battle-of-the-band contests, kindles major-label curiosity that leads nowhere, changes name, continues to gig, grouses about lack of attention, changes name again, rekindles major-label curiosity, encounters an endless procession of label reps, despairs about dreary future. Then, after seven years of inertia, band finally finds itself in auspicious circumstances (after Zomba Records got scooped up by BMG), records and presses debut album (Draghdad) and launches with a salvo engineered to meet the best possible reception: a cover tune.

The song the strident Calgary quartet chose to re-record was Madonna’s Music, a beguiling slice of sleazy neo-disco that the Material Girl rode to number 1 in most of the Western world in 2000. While Out of Your Mouth did little more than add slashing guitars and macho braying to Madonna’s inexorable sex beat, their metal treatment peaked at number 5 on the MuchMusic Countdown.

“Because we’ve had some struggles getting things rolling,” lead singer Jason Darr mooted to one reporter, “we just wanted to get in the market as easily as possible.” From a purely economic standpoint, it’s hard to fault his reasoning. Brand recognition is key to selling anything nowadays, and the song is surely one of the most identifiable club anthems in recent memory. And that’s precisely where the problem lies. Out of Your Mouth’s retread feels more like exploitation than adulation, and points up the troubling lack of sincerity in modern cover versions.

Britney Spears’ recent reworking of Bobby Brown’s hit My Prerogative offers further proof. Originally released in 1988, the song was Brown’s way of telling the media to butt out of his private affairs. Not content to dust off a forgotten gem, Spears uses the track to defend her own lascivious image in the court of public opinion. Evidently, the cover also provided ample justification for another wantonly sexual video.

In many cases, cover tunes are a low-risk strategy for bands looking to snare a new audience. Observe California’s The Ataris: while recording their fifth album, So Long, Astoria, in 2002, the band’s label, Sony, recommended they include a cover of Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, suggesting it could help them achieve that elusive breakout hit. Sony didn’t push them to release it as a single, but once the record began to circulate, radio programmers started playing The Boys of Summer, listeners eagerly requested it, and voila, The Ataris had unintentionally created a minor epidemic. Now, the band has to prove it has more to offer than just impeccable taste in covers.

Judging by the rest of Out of Your Mouth's Draghdad, it’s not unreasonable to predict that Out of Your Mouth will join the ranks of Orgy (who covered New Order’s Blue Monday), Alien Ant Farm (Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal) and 1,000 Mona Lisas (Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know) — groups that debuted with someone else’s song, only made chart noise with someone else’s song and will forever be known as a band whose capping triumph was rendering someone else’s song. Talk about a dubious career.

Some might argue that cover tunes have always been a disingenuous enterprise. In the early part of the century, phonograph labels would frequently hire singers to re-record songs that had fetched big profits for their competitors. The advent of rock ‘n’ roll revealed an even more vexing inclination, as white crooners like Pat Boone re-did songs by black artists, sublimating what they perceived as the rougher qualities of the originals to make them more palatable to white radio programmers. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were equally guilty of such cultural appropriation, but they were at least open about their sources. The fact that these shaggy Brits turned songs like Twist and Shout and Little Red Rooster into massive hits no doubt galled their black creators, but the material was handled with genuine reverence and respect.

Whether the original is a household melody or the secret knowledge of a coven of music critics, a cover tune is an opportunity for creative interpretation. The best covers, from Hendrix’s blazing interpretation of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower to They Might Be Giants’ Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (originally by the Four Lads) to Tricky’s Black Steel (Public Enemy), treat the original merely as an outline. Such radical makeovers only serve to demonstrate the timelessness of the composition.

Not all interpretations are serious. Novelty covers have a fertile history, from Felix Arndt’s ragtime parodies of classical and opera to Spike Jones’s slapstick treatment of pop favorites to the canon of Weird Al Yankovic. The novelty cover is the aural equivalent of a sight gag that relies on the juxtaposition of seemingly contrasting aesthetics, like Seu Jorge’s plaintive folk versions of David Bowie classics in the recent Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

These examples manage to be satirical without coming off as contemptuous, but many artists opt for a derisive tone that’s symptomatic of our irony-rich times. One of the most off-putting examples in recent years is Cake’s belittling of ’70s staple I Will Survive, in which the Sacramento band replaces the buoyant disco pulse with a halfhearted guitar jangle and Gloria Gaynor’s euphoric vocals with John McCrea’s postmodern hipster sing-speak. The treatment is insufferably glib and dismissive. The Flaming Lips, those critical sweethearts, committed a similar felony in re-recording Kylie Minogue’s (I Just) Can’t Get You Out of My Head for their Fight Test EP (2003). Thanks to symphonic overkill and Wayne Coyne’s woefully tremulous voice, they managed to turn a captivating come-on into a depressing dirge. As a listening experience, it’s positively punitive.

Let’s face it: musicians turn to covers when they feel the twinge of nostalgia or creative paralysis. A cover makes for a convenient stop-gap until inspiration strikes again. It’s only fair then that the borrower treat the song as a temporary pass, rather than a license for self-aggrandizement.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.