This has been a subject which has annoyed me for some time now. Originality is not considered for mainstream success so the media machine has moved onto covering old songs very badly yet it still manages to reach a tidy profit. Now cover songs can go two ways, either very good or very bad, and the common denominator of this is whether it’s in homage, or for sheer money making.

Paying Tribute to a good song

Many bands throughout time have covered songs before and you can tell when the song pays homage to the original record, the band/artist actually has a sense of feeling about it. Take Alien Ant Farm’s cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”. That had their own edge of a classic song and they pulled it off really well. You can tell by the plethora of references to MJ in the AAF video. Metallica’s double album Garage Inc. back in 1998 was another example as all the songs they covered were songs that inspired them to become a band in the first place. Another example which is practically satirical in its delivery is punk covers of song. Bands like Me First and The Gimme Gimmes do covers of songs in a So-Cal punk fashion that gives the song a different spin to it (plus I loved Goldfinger’s cover of Nena’s “99 Red Balloons”).

Murdering for Money

Nonsensical shows like X-Factor have almost spawned a repertoire of killing decent songs by putting talentless oiks onstage and have them ritually sacrifice them for ratings. Quite possibly the worst one I ever heard was recent winner Joe McElderberry’s cacophonous rendition of Journey’s classic “Don’t Stop Believin'” Now the problem I have with this is the fact the kid couldn’t sing, and the fact that nobody and truly do justice to a song which was sung by Steve Perry. The bassline was knocked down so many semitones that it was borderline distortion which only a band like KoRn could get away with, not to mention it sounded crap. It was like watching your oldest friend slowly being beaten to death with his own slippers in slow motion. The fact that the little scrunt wanted to release it just made it worse. Thank god for Rage Against The Machine.

Then for some unknown reason American TV show Glee tried to actually make it worse…and did. Their rendition of Journey was so cringeworthy and yet HMV keep trying to sell their ghastly CD on adverts and the snippets of the song just make me more angry every time I hear it. But the annoyance with Glee is that they didn’t just stop there. They successfully murdered songs by Bon Jovi, Heart and even Van Halen! That’s as bad and tasteless as erecting a Hot Dog stand outside a synagogue, and then playing MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This”.  And I thought it could only get as bad as monkey boys McFly vomiting all over Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”. I’m not quite sure what invoked a program like Glee to cause a mass genocide of decent songs, perhaps its like when toddlers destroy family heirlooms by wielding brooms and other assorted long-handled cleaning apparatus in order to acquire the necessary attention.

Rise Against showed how to do a decent Journey cover when they had “Any Way You Want It” on their Revolutions Per Minute album. Plus everyone didn’t think that they actually wrote the song.