Wednesday, November 10
Covered With A Shroud
Right, another gripe I have with the music industry is what I am about to rant about today. It afflicates a large swathe of music in this day and age, and can either come out beautifully, or sound, quite literally, like a dog licking its bollocks.
Bad covers, my friends, bad covers.
I was reminded of this horrendous crime against sanity when, reading the soft-soft-softcore pron mag that is FHM, about some dumb blonde with huge tits called Lucie Silvas, and the following sentence preceeding the daft smut they call an interview:
"Fast forward to today, and a brand new album is in the bag (complete with a piano-and-strings version of Metallica's Nothing Else Matters, no less!)..."
I'm assuming by "no less", it means "it could be no less insulting to Metallica, its fans, and humanity in general". Piano and strings? Wasn't that a feature of the original? The fact that there was an orchestra playing along with it? A whole fucking orchestra?!? Kinda beats a piano and a harp.
But please, this is the song metallers get married to. It is a love metal by one of them great heavy metal bands! You do not insult it by daring a - clearly substandard - cover of it!
This was merely the catalyst of my aggrevation, however. It's been going on for years unpunished.
Take this example in case. These stupid muppets are All Saints. They took another of our good mellow songs, in this case "Under The Bridge" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, made it worse, and took it to Number One in the charts.
This was Antony Kieldis' (is that his surname? Corrections will be rewarded with castration by a spoon) personel summery of his nightmare with heroin, not just him warbling about nothing in particular. It takes a quartret of women who - lets be frank - probably got the gig through the mystic power of blowjob, to steal said highly personal song, mutilate it, to actually get some fame.
Its not just the mellow songs they're filching. I am one of very few people I know who actually likes the White Stripes. Yes, they're being very pretentious with the style and the means of recording (no recording equipment younger than about 50 years old, I think), yes the guitar lines are very simple, and the drum beats more so, but for all that, they're very good. I only didn't go to see them at Reading, because I was still buzzing from magic mushrooms, had just seen Roxy Saint, and was pleasently in shock, needing weed.
I'm thankful for the fact that I didn't, however, as a friend who did see them observed that they were playing a slow and boring version of their fastest and most exciting song "Fell In Love With A Girl". A version spawned by the - oh the suprise - blonde, large-chested idiot on the left.
A Ms Joss Stone, otherwise renowned for relativly tolerable soul singing, had reversed the gender of said song, taken all the goodness out of it, and (I think) made it into a single. For some reason, the Stripes felt this better than their own work, and adopted it. Not only has the song been copied and ruined, but the original has gone down with it. Dark times.
I was sure there were moretargets prats like this around, so I consulted my associates on the Chefelf forums for further guidence. Suprise suprise, the most useful gubbins came from long-time plagurised-by-me associate Heccubus.
For a long, long time, the bag of slag we call Britney Spears has been annoying me. Especially with a song much beloved of Little Brother, "I Love Rock And Roll". To me, this would be like George Bush putting on a can-can dancers outfit, appearing on Iraq TV, and singing a song called "I Like Peace, I Don't Want To Kill You All, Please Be My Friend". It's insulting, because its the most un-rocking song in the whole Universe, played by the biggest pop-whore penis-inhaler in the industry.
Even worse, when I find out it's a cover of Joan Jett And The Blackhearts. Having no accses to the original, I only have her official website to run off of. Which doesn't lead me to think her guitars are set on overdrive. However, the fact that anyones songs are being filched by the Speared Slag is offending ehough, by my books.
Lastly, the rare occurance of the other way round - a punk group taking a good pop song and mutilating it. I wouldn't have thought such a thing possible, until I was reminded that Kelly "I DIDN'T eat all the pies!" Osbourne covered Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach", said cover another favourite of the siblings.
I don't care what anyone says - the evil hag only got a record contact, because her father invented heavy metal. And appearences in "The Osbournes" didn't hurt. Have I mentioned that I hate that show with a loathing only matched by my loathing for Ms "I'm NOT a stroppy bitch! NOTNOTNOTNOT!" Osbourne herself? Is another story.
Haven't heard the orignial, don't want to. The cover sucks balls, and I will hear no arguement.
An idea I had a while back isn't so unfeasable - have an unbiased commitee judge every cover that gets put out, and if its bad, send ninjas to kill all those involved in making it.
Go Ninjas!
Bad covers, my friends, bad covers.
I was reminded of this horrendous crime against sanity when, reading the soft-soft-softcore pron mag that is FHM, about some dumb blonde with huge tits called Lucie Silvas, and the following sentence preceeding the daft smut they call an interview:
"Fast forward to today, and a brand new album is in the bag (complete with a piano-and-strings version of Metallica's Nothing Else Matters, no less!)..."
I'm assuming by "no less", it means "it could be no less insulting to Metallica, its fans, and humanity in general". Piano and strings? Wasn't that a feature of the original? The fact that there was an orchestra playing along with it? A whole fucking orchestra?!? Kinda beats a piano and a harp.
But please, this is the song metallers get married to. It is a love metal by one of them great heavy metal bands! You do not insult it by daring a - clearly substandard - cover of it!
This was merely the catalyst of my aggrevation, however. It's been going on for years unpunished.
Take this example in case. These stupid muppets are All Saints. They took another of our good mellow songs, in this case "Under The Bridge" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, made it worse, and took it to Number One in the charts.
This was Antony Kieldis' (is that his surname? Corrections will be rewarded with castration by a spoon) personel summery of his nightmare with heroin, not just him warbling about nothing in particular. It takes a quartret of women who - lets be frank - probably got the gig through the mystic power of blowjob, to steal said highly personal song, mutilate it, to actually get some fame.
Its not just the mellow songs they're filching. I am one of very few people I know who actually likes the White Stripes. Yes, they're being very pretentious with the style and the means of recording (no recording equipment younger than about 50 years old, I think), yes the guitar lines are very simple, and the drum beats more so, but for all that, they're very good. I only didn't go to see them at Reading, because I was still buzzing from magic mushrooms, had just seen Roxy Saint, and was pleasently in shock, needing weed.
I'm thankful for the fact that I didn't, however, as a friend who did see them observed that they were playing a slow and boring version of their fastest and most exciting song "Fell In Love With A Girl". A version spawned by the - oh the suprise - blonde, large-chested idiot on the left.
A Ms Joss Stone, otherwise renowned for relativly tolerable soul singing, had reversed the gender of said song, taken all the goodness out of it, and (I think) made it into a single. For some reason, the Stripes felt this better than their own work, and adopted it. Not only has the song been copied and ruined, but the original has gone down with it. Dark times.
I was sure there were more
For a long, long time, the bag of slag we call Britney Spears has been annoying me. Especially with a song much beloved of Little Brother, "I Love Rock And Roll". To me, this would be like George Bush putting on a can-can dancers outfit, appearing on Iraq TV, and singing a song called "I Like Peace, I Don't Want To Kill You All, Please Be My Friend". It's insulting, because its the most un-rocking song in the whole Universe, played by the biggest pop-whore penis-inhaler in the industry.
Even worse, when I find out it's a cover of Joan Jett And The Blackhearts. Having no accses to the original, I only have her official website to run off of. Which doesn't lead me to think her guitars are set on overdrive. However, the fact that anyones songs are being filched by the Speared Slag is offending ehough, by my books.
Lastly, the rare occurance of the other way round - a punk group taking a good pop song and mutilating it. I wouldn't have thought such a thing possible, until I was reminded that Kelly "I DIDN'T eat all the pies!" Osbourne covered Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach", said cover another favourite of the siblings.
I don't care what anyone says - the evil hag only got a record contact, because her father invented heavy metal. And appearences in "The Osbournes" didn't hurt. Have I mentioned that I hate that show with a loathing only matched by my loathing for Ms "I'm NOT a stroppy bitch! NOTNOTNOTNOT!" Osbourne herself? Is another story.
Haven't heard the orignial, don't want to. The cover sucks balls, and I will hear no arguement.
An idea I had a while back isn't so unfeasable - have an unbiased commitee judge every cover that gets put out, and if its bad, send ninjas to kill all those involved in making it.
Go Ninjas!
