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 Cover Me SoftlySeason 2, Episode 5Complete TranscriptBarry: When Lori Lieberman was 19 years old, a friend of hers wanted to go to a concert. It was at the beginning of the year in 1972 in LA and Don Mclean had a single that was climbing the charts...(American Pie playing)Barry: Lori hasn’t really heard of Don McLean so she didn't really care to go, but her friend convinced her. Laurie was a singer also she had just been selected by two famous LA songwriters, Norman Gimble and Charles Fox to sing their material on her own album. So there's Lorrie at the concert with her friend and Don McLean starts playing this song which was the original b-side to American Pie... (Empty Chairs playing)Lori: I didn't even know who he was Barry: This is Lori in 2015LL: He was singing a song that I'd never heard before, a song called empty chairs, and then the more I listened the more he caught me off guard, and the more I realized that he was singing about me, my life and what I was going through. (Empty Chairs continues)LL: As the song started to unfold I realized what an important and profound experience this was for me. I felt like I was completely alone in that room. After everyone filed out of the club after the show was over. I sat there still devastated and I wrote this experience on a poem on a napkin.Barry: Here’s music writer Ray PadgettRay: She takes this poem to her boyfriend who is the songwriter Norman Gimble, popular songwriter with his partner Charles Fox, and the two of them basically flesh this sort of cocktail napkin scribbles out into a song.Barry: Lori was one song short of a full album and this was to be the last one.RP: Which Laurie Lieberman then goes on to recordBarry: That poem and the lyrics that came from it are a pretty literal description of what happened that night (Lori singing Killing Me Softly)RP: The label doesn't promote it much you know it's not really a hit till a few years later when Roberta Flack covers…(Roberta Flack singing Killing Me Softly)RP: Cut to twenty years later and the Fugees making a huge hit a second time.(Lauryn Hill singing Killing Me Softly)Barry: When Lori Lieberman handed over her poem she didn't ask for songwriting credit, she figured it was her song on her album either she makes the song a hit or she doesn't. It never occurred to her young nineteen year old self to divorce songwriting, performance, and recording into distinct things to be credited and paid for. Lori has never received any royalties for any subsequent covers of Killing Me Softly.From Vassar College, this is Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. Today we're going to be looking at the stories behind the most iconic cover songs in popular music. The very concept of a cover song has a surprising origin going back to the early days of the music industry. Being a musician used to mean that all you did was cover, but somehow along the way, by the time Lori Lieberman was starting her career, it became hard for a musical artist to think of herself as anything other than a combination of singer, performer, and recording artist. This actually says something very important about changing conceptions of artistic and aesthetic value of music. I'm joined today by Ray pageant the author of a new book called Cover Me: the story behind the greatest cover songs of all time and also Nate Sloan of the Switched On Pop podcast, one of my favorite podcasts out there, is going to sit down with me to analyze Killing Me Softly. We turn all of that into the philosophy of music.RP: My name is Ray Padgett I run the blog Cover and I wrote the book Cover Me: the stories behind the greatest cover songs of all time. When the term cover came about it means sort of the opposite of what would mean it today. Today you would say a cover or at least a good one is somehow changing something, making it the artists own, but the cover actually came into its own as a term in the 1940s and the whole idea behind a cover was not to somehow make something one's own, but it was to copy something exactly. In those days a hit song, something on the radio, for the most part people wouldn't necessarily identify it with the performer. They would go to the record store to buy a single or the jukebox and say, “You know I want to listen to Stormy Weather.” This whole cottage industry came up where someone would have a genuine hit, within a month tons of other labels and artists would basically copycat that song. They would record it and release it as close to the one that's on the radio as possible and the term “cover” comes about because they literally wanted their version to cover up the hit version in the record store and be sold instead. A fun thing I learned we're all researching the book is that the department store Woolworths literally had its own in-house record label, whose sole purpose was essentially to copycat hit songs on the radio and then sell their versions to their customers to make more money. [Music]Barry: Early in the era of recorded music consumers of popular music’s still very much thought of it as we do classical music. What's important to listeners of classical music is the composer and the piece that they composed. When we judge classical music, we judge Bach's Prelude in C major or we judge Beethoven's Bagatelle in E minor. The performers of this music or recordings of it are secondary almost incidental they're just tools by which we come to listen to a particular piece that we like by a certain composer. Performers can be more or less skilled musicians, but the artistry lies with the composer of the piece itself in contrast painting as an art form doesn't work this way. Someone who gives a set of instructions on how some painter could create a beautiful image gets no artistic credit. Their instructions don't have any aesthetic quality to it. The actual painter who paints the image and the very image the painter paints are what matter to us in a painting. We know the painter matters because if someone were to duplicate the image exactly we wouldn't give this new person the same kind of artistic praise as we do the original artist. The way that people consumed popular music and treated cover songs in particular during the rise of rock and roll marked the transformation from thinking about this music in the classical way to thinking about it as we do paintings.RP: The cover came into its own in the dawn of rock and roll and the reason for that is twofold. When Elvis comes along, you don't want someone to sounds kind of like Elvis doing Hound Dog or doing Heartbreak Hotel you want Elvis. People knew who he was, people stopped just wanting the song, they started caring about who the performer was, and then the second part of it is with the Beatles and Bob Dylan then the singer-songwriter really becomes sort of a job title. Before singer and songwriter were two different job titles. Once there's a premium being placed on writing one's own songs, then all of a sudden if you're singing a song you yourself didn't write, and as a popular musician there has to be a good reason, you have to be bringing something to it.PD: I'm PD Magnus I'm a professor of philosophy at the University at AlbanyCM: I'm Cristyn Magnus I'm an independent artist and I teach computer science at the University of AlbanyBarry: Cristyn and PD Magnus are a wife and husband pair who co-wrote a philosophy paper on the aesthetics of cover songs along with their friend the philosopher Kirsty McGuire. The paper argues that in the mature era of rock music from the sixties onward, there are different categories that cover songs fall under. The first is the act of playing a song as close as possible to an original recording. Today this is still done, but not for the reasons it was done in the forties.PM: We call it a mimic cover if the cover is meant to sound like the originalCM: So a mimic is the kind of thing we see in like Guitar Hero or something, where they give you the line and if you deviate at all from perfectly singing it exactly the way they do, if you add your own interpretation at all you lose points. Barry: We also have cover bands and tribute bands who do mimic coversCM: We have a friend whose son does some sort of like rock and roll camp thing where they teach them to make perfect mimics, they don't let them take something and put it on their instrument if it's another instrument, they're like no you want to play the original enough almost a classically true way. PM: In an important way in a mimic cover you can't evaluate it as its own thing, because insofar as you're making an artistic evaluation of it, you're making an artistic evaluation of the original. All you can really do on its own terms is evaluated as a work of craft, you can say does it succeed in reproducing the sounds of the original or not? And insofar as it deviates from the original a mimic is a failure.Barry: Here's something else about mimic covers: We don't buy them, we don't put them on our playlists. Cover bands don't record their work and if they did no one would care. Only the smallest minority of music fans eagerly await the tour dates for their favorite cover band. This is even though the quality of the music and musicianship of the greatest cover bands are equal to that of the greatest bands they cover. This says a lot about we value when we value music in the rock tradition. It's never about the intrinsic quality of the compositions or musicianship or singing quality. If you take your favorite Beatles recording and placed it side by side with an impeccable mimic cover of that recording, only one has the status of art. We value music today almost completely like we value paintings something that's foreign to the classical music tradition in fact you can see this in the value that we place on the physical reel-to-reel tapes that contain a particular artists studio session. That tape is it going to sound any different from a digital duplicate but it's almost like a sacred artifact, and just like with great painters, in the rock era, the highest value is placed on an artist who is responsible for every part of the art. If you think about the most valued musical artists in popular music, they're people who write great songs are great live and record great singles and albums. Fail in any of these categories and you're judged accordingly. In this context performing or recording a cover song knocks you out of one of the categories for aesthetic evaluation, so in order to be good you better make up for it in one of these other categories.RP: Roberta Flack one day was flying on a flight across the country I think from LA to New York and she would always go through the in-flight magazines to see if her name was mentioned. She’d already had a bunch of hits even though it's relatively early in her career, she was already pretty famous.RF: The brochure that describes what music you can select and there's a song the whole brochure said Killing Me Softly With His Song and had a picture of this young girl and I said, “hmm,” and I put it down, and then I went, “hmm killing me softly with his song.” Well after about three or four times of checking this out you know I thought I have to listen to this, so I turned it on and I listened to it about five times before the plane landed.RP: Ah so she does, and she says, “You know this is an amazing song, but not an amazing production this is something I can do better.”Barry: Roberta Flack performed the song once in concert as her second encore, the song brings down the house and her producer Quincy Jones tells her not to perform the song again until they record it. Two weeks later she's in the recording studio, it becomes the title track of her next album, the song spends five weeks at number one in 1973 and gives Roberta Flack two Grammy Awards for best record and best female pop vocal performance. Charles Fox and Norman Gimble, but not Lori Lieberman received the Grammy for song of the year in 1973. Nate: I think she brought air into the song and let it breathe in a way that the original wasn't quite able to do.Barry: That's Nate Sloan of the Switched-on Pop podcast which he co-hosts with his friend Charlie Hardy. On each episode Nate and Charlie take a pop song and analyze it as only a musicologist and songwriter can do.NS: I have to say Barry because I was not aware Lori Lieberman version besides this is totally revelatory for me. It's kind of a testament to how the art of covering can really establish like a new provenance of the song. I associate the song with Roberta Flack so intimately it was just kind of stunning to discover that she hadn't written it. I think we can start by establishing that the song itself has certain features that are very beguiling within the song there is this constantly unsettled sense of where we are harmonically, that is where is the the home key. This is a tenet of the tonal music that we're familiar with that it establishes some kind of home key right we are in the key of G major and we understand the world of that song in relation to that key. But in this song, there's never a clear establishment of what the home key is, and especially what Lieberman and her co-writers are really good at is constantly oscillating from a major key to a minor key, so that if we listen to the very first line of the song it's kind of in major. Right after the word “song” we hear the establishment of our first kind of major tonality and we have sort of a feeling of, oh this is home right like and we're in this major place, but then she keeps going...and if we pause it right after the word “while” we see that word we've settled in a new place in this minor harmony very quickly just from the first line to the second line we've moved from major to minor.Barry: This is what the song would sound like if the melody of that line resolved on the original major chord that is if the song stayed consistently in a major key(Guitar playing)...Instead we have…(Guitar Playing)NS: and throughout the song it's just gonna go back and forth like that major minor major minor never really firmly settling on either one and finally at the very end of the verse and chorus arriving at an even sort of more beguiling harmony, which is this incredible moment that I think each of the versions deals with in a very unique way, so that would be if we fast forward even further this would be at the very end where she sings, “killing me softly with his song.” We've moved to a very surprising harmony that moment is one of extreme tension, because it's such a foreign chord from the harmonic landscape that we've been exposed to so far.Barry: The final chord of the chorus is neither the major nor the minor harmony that has been in use throughout the song, this is what the chorus would sound like if it resolved on the major key(guitar playing)...instead …(guitar playing)NS: That they're kind of using a chromatic secondary dominant chord that's very unexpected, this cord points us towards a whole other kind of harmonic world...so it's a very surprising and kind of mysterious chord to hear because it's at the very end of the song and suggests that we're gonna go somewhere completely different in both the Lieberman recording and the Roberta Flack recording that moment seems to be kind of a central place of innovation.Barry: It sounds like you're describing it as being mysteriously seductive.NS: Yeah absolutely because of the way we're conditioned to hear harmony as this relationship between a tonal home and then these other harmonic far out places and a constant return to the home. A song that never firmly establishes what that tonal home is is going to be very intriguing to us.Barry: Do you have any thoughts about what Roberta Flack what she did to the song and her cover that made it the big hit?NS: Roberta Flack’s version keeps all the lyrical intrigue and the harmonic unsettledness that we have from the original but it also gives us a groove, it gives us something to kind of nod our heads to and snap our fingers too and that makes the Baroque prose of the song more accessible for us.Barry: And I think that with the the words mysteriously seductive, the Roberta Flack version is a slow jam, right, it's a it's it's it's mysteriously seductive and then boom we're in the bedroom.NS: No no I totally agree and that's partially to do with the the textures we're hearing because when we look at the instrumental transformation from Lieberman to to Flack we leave this world of strummed acoustic guitars and enter one of electric Fender Rhodes piano, upright bass courtesy of one of the greatest jazz bassist of all time Ron Carter, this almost laid back somewhere in between a bossa nova and kind of a funk drum groove, so now we're experiencing a set of instrumentation that we've been conditioned to associate with the slow jam, whether it's from Marvin Gaye or Al Green. All of a sudden the the lyrics are now cast in this new slow jam light, which which really brings out another side to them…Barry: Just what is it that we're judging when we judge a work of music the philosopher of music Theodore Gracyk argued that the rock tradition was the first to consider the recording a fully finished production made in a studio as a focus of aesthetic judgment. A listener might like the studio version to the live version the acoustic version to the electric version, the producer might like take twelve rather than take one. In contrast, in classical music what is primarily evaluated is a composition something that can be written down and reproduced. In sheet music this not only differentiates classical from rock music in terms of the end product it also marks a difference in what consumers of the music judge when they evaluate the quality of music. In the rock tradition the finished production the ultimate recording made and released is considered the thing that goes into the canon, it's what gets the Grammy award and what gets anthologized. It's also, in many cases, what you cover.PM: It's clear that when a musician covers they're covering a song they're playing a version of the same song that appeared in some canonical recording, but I think also typically they're covering a particular canonical version. When somebody covers “Without You,” they might be thinking of the Mariah Carey version, and what they end up sounding like will be different if they're thinking of the Mariah Carey version as their canonical version as opposed to the Badfinger…Barry: Without you is another epic story and cover song history. The song never hit for Badfinger, the late sixties British rock band discovered by the Beatles and signed to their record label Apple Records. As Badfinger toured their business manager ripped off all of their earnings and ripped off their record label as well. Their record label in response pulled their final album from the stores and prevented the band from touring to earn a living. The lead singer and songwriter Keith Ham committed suicide in 1975. Still broke and unable to sustain themselves eight years later the band got into an argument over songwriting royalties for without you, Harry Nilsson recorded and released what became the canonical version of without you and hit big. Eventually it was covered by Heart and hundreds of other pop stars including Mariah Carey. It became the only possible source of income for the remaining members of the band the songs other songwriter Tom Evans still struggling over the suicide of his friend eight years prior and feeling pressure from his other bandmates and family over the status of royalties for “Without You” committed suicide in 1983. In 2005 Kelly Clarkson won the first season of American Idol by singing “Without You” and the song has been a staple on every reality singing competition show around the world.PM: So a rendition covering our vocabulary is a cover that is meant to sound different, so a band takes it and performs it and means for it to sound like their own song. A big mark the mix rendition different is that you can legitimately consider it as a separate work, you can evaluate artistically interpretive choices that are made in it on its own without reference to the original version.Barry: The fact that it's possible to create and cover a different version of the same song and rock shows it's significant departure from our conception of classical music. A version of a song can only be possible if there was something that covering itself could add creatively and aesthetically to an existing song. This is exactly how we think of Roberta Flack, she didn't just cover an existing song, she created a new version of the song. Mariah Carey did record Badfinger song “Without You,” but she covered Harry Nilsson's version. I think this shows that you can actually do two things in a rendition, you can play a song and cover a version, so you're actually covering two things, or you can play a song while creating your own version which itself becomes something that other people can cover. None of this would make sense on the classical model of music but makes perfect sense in the rock tradition. The number of ways you can play a song in the rock tradition is ontologically complex, it's how you can have a song by Bob Dylan...covered by Jimi Hendrix covered by Bob Dylan…Hey everyone a quick message Hi-Phi Nation is now a proud member of the Hub and Spoke audio collective, a Boston-based network of idea based podcasts. If you're looking for something else to listen to I recommend the lonely pallet podcast about art history hosted by Tamara Shari, Her latest episode is about dogs playing poker and Kitsch art in general it's great and really funny you can find the rest of Hub and Spoke shows by following a link on our website at .Barry: Where was Aretha Franklin in her career right before “Respect”?NS: Nowhere, she had she released a number of albums I had a half dozen or so albums on the Columbia label they were trying to pigeon her as some sort of sort of like a jazz singer, so she wasn't making full use of her pipes she wasn't making really any use of her gospel background. She was a hell of a piano player and she wasn't doing much with that she then switches over to Atlantic Records all of a sudden Atlantic Records says, “You know the hell with this jazz stuff you're a soul singer your rhythm and blues singer we want you belting we want you loud we want you on the piano, we want you really you know singing these sort of more sensual and robust and powerful songs.” One of the very first of which was her version of Otis Redding's “Respect.” And she and her sisters basically said, “This is a good song, but we want to change it a little bit.” They basically do like an all-night session rewriting lyrics and they add the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, perhaps most notably a reef a different funny quote work someone asked her about that once she just said, “Well I thought it needed to be spelled out!” Then they add these various other parts which you know had the function not only of giving Aretha or breakthrough massive hit, but also changed the song's meaning without...all the lyrics she added were these like little things are, I mean she's not changing like the core lines of the song, but in her delivery and then these little tweaks she's making it sort of ceases becoming just a man-woman relationship song and becomes an anthem on two different fronts no less it becomes a feminist anthem for the women's movement at the time and it becomes a civil rights anthem it takes the right song at the right time and with the right sort of production and delivery to finally you know make her the Aretha Franklin we think of now.Barry: Aretha Franklin's cover of Otis Redding's “Respect” is not just a rendition according to Cristyn and PD Magnus. In a rendition the story of the song, the message, the meaning, doesn't change sometimes the lyrics will change In a rendition. Frank Sinatra changes the pronouns from male to female in his cover of “Killing Me Softly.” Willie Nelson changes the name of the city from New York to Austin in his version of Paul Simon's “Graceland.” But in the case of “Respect” the claim is that we have a new category of covers.CM: It's a transformative coverage she makes it into something that's powerful and different when he sings the song the implication of the song is, “I'm a man I've been at work all day where's my food woman?” And when when she sings the song it's got a totally different valence it's been like, “No seriously I've been maintaining the house all day and you're coming home from work and you better respect me because I've been doing work all day too.” The gender politics is very different.PM: It's importantly a different so it means something different it's taking the sort of the basic materials of the song and building something with an importantly different message, and although you can argue about exactly what the boundaries of the identity of a song are, I think once it's got an importantly different message it's not the same song anymore.Barry: According to Cristyn and PD Magnus, a transformative cover becomes an entirely new song derived from the old, but a new song nonetheless. The distinction they're making is a philosophical one and not a legal one. Ray Padgett told me that technically in the law anyone can cover you just own nine cents on every dollar you earn from the cover to the credited songwriter. You also don't need permission to cover you just acquire something called a mechanical license and then you pay your royalties. But derivative songs which according to the law uses the original song to create a new work, those require permission. A songwriter can deny you mission and there's also no set rate on royalties its whatever can be argued in court. There are many lawsuits alleging plagiarism, making a claim that someone did an unpermitted derivative song. In the legal sense Aretha Franklin's “Respect” is a cover because they claimed it was, and took enough of the lyrics to count as one. But the Magnus's argue that philosophically it is a new song not just the new version of an old song, their criteria is that the change to the lyrics has changed the meaning of the song. Why do you think it's a significant difference in lyrical content rather than musical content that makes for a transformative cover?PM: The easiest way to change the semantic content of a song is to change the words because we ordinarily think of words as having straightforward semantic content it's harder to figure out how pitch and tempo and instrumentation have semantic content.Barry: Here I have to register my disagreement the idea that musical properties don't have semantic properties is just plain wrong, it may be impossible to accurately paraphrase the semantic properties of music precisely there might be no single thought or idea that resolving on a major chord expresses, that resolving on a minor chord doesn’t. For instance but this is true of a lot of lyrical content as well, metaphors tend to be difficult to paraphrase accurately but they have clear semantic properties they mean something. When I listen to “Killing Me Softly” by Lori Lieberman what the song is about is clear, it's about a night she went to hear a singer, who started singing the song that coincided with her life thoughts and her feelings when I listened to Roberta Flack’s version, I don't hear those events at all. Still less do I hear those events in the Fugees version.Barry:I just wanted to what run one more thing by you, a conversation that my wife and I had about this song. I told her the story the Lori Lieberman's story and one of the things that did for her is she always knew the song as the Roberta Flack song that The Fugees covered and the lyrics in that context had always meant something highly metaphorical to her. “I heard he had a good sound strumming my pain with his fingers” but then she heard, wait no actually this is a literal song right and it never you never get that reading of those lyrics with Roberta Flack and The Fugees. It's really hard to read a literal there is literally a man with a guitar in front of me, so lyrically the content went from literal to metaphorical and then stayed there.NS: Right right no that's that's such a great point Barry, I definitely have us have the same experience because I never pictured an actual guitar when I heard that line strumming my pain with his fingers, but of course once you know the origin of the song you realize, oh this is yeah this I can understand now where all these mysteriously evocative lyrics came from now, but by deracinated them through the reinterpretations of first Flack and then the Fugees and getting rid of that strumming sound and and recasting it in first, you know a seventies soul slow jam vein and then a mid 90's hip hop vein we in turn get further and further from the original meaning of the lyrics and are able to, I guess, put more of our own interpretation into them which probably makes the song more effective rather than the opposite…RP: They were a very hotly buzzed hip-hop group in the 90s but their debut album didn't really break out it was it wasn't the hit that their record label had hoped for so they're working on the second album and they've got a huge amount of pressure to have some sort of hit that's gonna you know get out beyond just the like really hardcore hip-hop heads of the world one thing in their arsenal that they hadn't used in the first album is that Lauryn Hill, in addition to being a capable rapper was a fantastic singer. I interviewed Pras and he was telling me that him and Lauryn Hill were driving to the studio and Roberta Flack’s version of “Killing Me Softly” comes on and you know of course they knew the song. In that moment they're thinking, “Well Lauryn would kill this song!” Second and final aha moment occurred a little while later at a concert The Fugees were giving, they at the time had sort of like a theme song that would play when they got onstage Pras’ was “Bonita Applebum” by the iconic hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest so Wyclef Jean's already on stage and he's you know introducing Pras so he says you know, “Please welcome Pras!” Bonita Applebum starts playing for this particular concert though for whatever reason Pras wasn't at the stage yet he was still backstage he was aways away so he hears you know, “Oh shoot my name's getting called I'm nowhere near.” So he starts sprinting while he's sprinting his his theme song which normally he would only hear you know ten seconds of his playing over and over and over again for three minutes and he starts singing the melody - killing me softly over it and all of a sudden by the time he gets to the stage he's like that's what we do we basically record Lauryn singing “Killing Me Softly” relatively straight her vocals sound like Roberta Flack’s but over this other hip-hop beat and he hit a funny line, he told me it was something like, “By the time I got to the stage you know Lauryn and ‘Clef were pissed off at me because I was super late but I said no no guys it's okay like I ever have our big hit.Barry: The Fugees clearly covered Roberta Flack’s version of the song right down to Lauryn Hill's reverb harmonies. Three years after the Fugees made the song a hit again in roberta flex version of killing me softly was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Things didn't turn out that well for the Fugees.RP: The song was a massive hit huge hit exactly what they in their record label wanted, the catch was if you're listening to it sounds like a Lauryn Hill song, I mean the rest of their vocal involvement is basically Wyclef yelling “one time two time” occasionally and all of a sudden it's a huge hit and everyone's just like, “Well this kind of just a Lauryn Hill song, so maybe she should go solo.” Which then she shortly after did the Fugees broke up she went on to have tons of success on her own, but you know it was their biggest hit it was also the hit that ended the group.Barry: I'm really surprised by the amount of tragedy that comes with covers, there's tragedies about the original performers there's tragedies about who actually wrote the song and then there's tragedies about the artists who cover them and so on, there's something about it it's there's so much involved.RP: There is yeah there is a lot of motion and I mean I think one of the reasons is purely sort of numerical, if you're a singer-songwriter and you write your own song and record your own song and release your own song, you know, you probably care a lot about it but there's only one stakeholder there. Whereas with the cover by definition there's at least two and often there's even more people multiple people wrote the song and these stakes can some in some cases be heightened for better or worse. In some cases you know it's a triumph for everyone there were person as the hit and the songwriter makes a bunch of money, but in some cases yeah there's more there's more ways than it can go wrong when there's you know more cooks in the kitchen as it were. Barry: Ray Padgett, the book is “Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time.” It's illustrated and contains original interviews with songwriters performers and producers you can also find the blog at . There's a link to it on our website...The amount of turmoil that arises from cover songs is directly related to the complexity of the metaphysics of music in the rock tradition. A songwriter can feel slighted by a bad cover, a rendition cover can supersede an original version making the original artists feel inadequate, a performer can mimic a version of a previous rendition and hit it big without anyone ever paying attention to the previous rendition. There's one last category of cover songs that Crystin and PD Magnus found, an obscure category with only a few examples. This is a category where you're directly insulting the previous artist by covering their song.PM: A referential cover, they change the song so as to be about the original version…Barry: The Marcus's favorite example of a referential cover is a cover of The Smiths “How Soon is Now” currently playing by punk band the Meat Men. The Meat Men had a song called “Morrissey Must Die” so we know how they feel about the lead singers of the Smiths. Here's the Meat Men's version of “How Soon is Now.”PM: When the Meat Men perform or sing “How Soon is Now” they're singing a song that's about “How Soon is Now” that's sung by Morrissey. When Morrissey sings “How Soon is Now” he's singing about being oppressively shy and how he deals with that, so the narrator of the song is that person when Tesco V of the Meat Men sings “How Soon is Now”, he's singing about Morrissey as someone who needs to die, that's just semantically, that self-reference makes it a different song.Barry: There are a couple more examples of referential covers in the paper. The Sex Pistols covered Frank Sinatra's “My Way” to talk about what a jerk Frank Sinatra was, the Screamers covered Sonny and Cher's “The Beat Goes On” to talk about schmaltzy sixties pop artists who sing silly songs sitting on chairs. Most of these songs are direct attempts to insulting individuals music by covering that music in a certain way, changing the meaning of that song to be about the original artist, but I also found other phenomena that appeared to be referential covers in reverse some artists make fun of themselves by covering iconic songs that are the opposite of themselves. The whitest white artists sometimes cover hip hop songs in a way to point out just how white their music sounds, so the cover song is in a way about their own whiteness.PM: The thing about evaluating a referential cover is that you can't evaluate it just on its own you can't just come across it listen to it and think, “oh what's this song about?” Because if you understand what the song is about it's about the original version, so unlike a rendition or a transformative cover where you can either evaluate it in relation to the original or evaluate it on its own merits, even understanding it by its own merits means looking back at the original, because part of what the song is about is the original canonical version, so understanding why Tesco V is singing the lyrics he's singing requires that you know about Morrissey and you know that the Meat Men dislike Morrissey and if you don't get that you've missed it you just don't understand the song.Barry: The upshot of Magnus, Magnus, and Mag Uidhir's study of cover songs is that some covers we can judge on the merits of their own intrinsic features and others we can't. What makes some covers great can be found internal to the recorded track we're listening to. Other covers we have to judge by their relational features, how does it sound and what does it say in relation to something else that's out there in the world? It's a long-standing distinction between the variety of ways that humans seem to make aesthetic judgments of art. These underlying aesthetic and metaphysical issues about music are important because of how we organize laws to make sure creative people get the money and esteem they deserve. When the law comes apart from what is true about who deserves credit for what you end up with tragically forgotten figures who are a big part of our musical history…. ................
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