Nick Cave has spent the last thirty years exploring how us emotional retards get to enjoy life too and there are few songs better at it in my strange-o book than the Bad Seeds' 'Loverman'. That is a fucking horny song. It's one of my favourite songs, definitely. The lyrics go from very silly ("I am what I am what I am what I am") to fucking gold ("With a trembling heart, he's coming through your door with his straining sex in his jumping paw; there's a devil crawling along your floor") without ever sounding inconsistent - a general feature of Nick Cave's lyrics I find irresistable. It's a gem of a song and I love it. I can't really comprehend a reality in which I wouldn't love it.
And yet I've always promised myself that I'll studiously avoid listening to the Metallica cover. The idea makes me want to retch. There are emotional areas of my brains I'm happy to have prodded at in Nick Cave's voice where James Hetfield's voice has no place, even if it's dressed up in Nick Cave's words. Frankly, eww. The guy from Depeche Mode covered it too and that sounds about as appealing. More eww.
Another awfully horny song, in my book, is "Use Me", from Bill Withers. I've gone on about him before, so I won't repeat myself too much. When his songs are good, they're wonders of lyrical and melodic seemingly simple perfection, and he was only ruined by all of those damnable keyboards and synthesizers. And the voice! It's a lovely voice. A proper man's voice. A sexy, comfy duvet of a voice. "Use Me" is a marvellous example of his marvellousness and playing it is the easiest way to explain and understand fun and nasty love, and that voice is singing to its best effect in it; as far as I'm concerned only Bill Withers could pull off that mumbling at the end and still make it count when he sings "it ain't too bad the way you're using me because I sure am using you to do the things you do."
And another cover I'll studiously avoid is Mick Jagger's 1993 cover of "Use Me". Don't get me wrong. Mick Jagger was horny once upon a time too, and "Let's Spend the Night Together" has got me wet played over the loudspeakers in charity shops. But his is not the voice I want to hear singing "Use Me" to me. A fucking middle class limey knight? Don't we have better things to use?
4 commenti:
Indeed, The Cover is a very serious art, not to be practiced by the barbands that make their bread and butter on the stuff.
I have a very large soapbox that I crawl atop in rare moods and from which I willy-nilly pontificate my own pseudophilosphy regarding this topic, an accretion of opinion which has accumulated over eons.
In a nutshell, the true "cover" must be a RE-IMAGINING. My most oft-cited examples are contentious in some corners (but what isn't):
e.g., Husker Du doing The Byrds 'Eight Miles High', Sebadoh's take on Nick Drake's 'Pink Moon', The Cardigans' supersweet vamp of Black Sabbath's 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, The Butthole Surfers' gnarled vision of The Guess Who's 'American Woman', the Dirty Projectors' blissful ode to Black Flag's 'Rise Above' -- and perhaps the pinnacle of this particular school of sonic deconstruction -- Pussy Galore's eternally sublime cover of the Einsturzende Neubauten opus 'Yu-Gung'.
I'll stop now. But yea, verily, one should not fuck with the tunage of another lightly.
And you're quite right. In fact I'm willing to so far as to venture that I like The Scissor Sisters unrecognizable version of "Comfortably Numb" better than the orginal. I'm no slave to good taste and I'm not enough of a wop to believe Pink Floyd is the Bible.
But I have to admit there's a sick part of me that almost wants to listen to Metallica cut "Loverman"'s balls off. A sick, sadistic part I successfully ignore.
Paul Young had a deal about not covering songs when he considered the original to be the 'perfect version' of the song. Yet, still he covers "Love will Tear us apart". Stupidass.
Funny, I just heard that Scissor Sisters cover for the first time last week and it totally made my list. It was perfect.
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