Okay, I want to subscribe to the RSS feed for No Depression, but when I add it to my feed reader, the feed I get is Lift Off News. What the fuck? I am virus free, supposedly. Is it me? Is it not working? What?
Anyway, Barry Mazor, who is perhaps the most brilliant writer ever to grace Nashville*, is writing about the ongoing trend of folks doing albums of covers. I, personally, love a good interpretation of a song. I like to hear what sounds have influenced artists and hear how they rework them. Let me hear with fresh ears the songs I love, I say.
It brings up Pierre Menard questions, though, doesn’t it? Does originality equal authenticity? Can a reproduction be faithful? How faithful? Is it more meaningful or less?
I don’t know. It’s fun to think about though, and I am a girl, and we all know that girls just want to have fun.
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*Or not. I have my opinion, but you’re welcome to yours. Of course, I’ll punch you if you disagree with me, but don’t let that stop you.
Filed under: Pop Culture
I was enchanted by an odd disco version of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” by the Scissor Sisters. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONr5fl-0liQ). Though through my ears, it appears the song is what moves, the singers are the tools through which it plays, rather than the singers modifying the song. This is probably because I don’t carry strong visual identification of singers, I can’t recognize them as readily as the song itself.
The only Pierre Menard I know of was an early fur trader in Kaskaskia whose papers I read once in the Illinois State Archives in Springfield. I’m guessing you’re not talking about him, huh?
Ah, no, sorry. I meant this Pierre Menard. Though I will admit to having been in the county named after Pierre Menard fur trader numerous times in my misspent youth, in an effort to gaze lasciviously on the bed Abraham Lincoln shared with Billy Greene.
Or, you know, on school field trips.
And I’ve saved big money at Menard’s.
Ha, okay, sorry.
1) Over at The Gods Are Bored, one of the commenters referenced, “Luther Wright and the Wrongs – their bluegrass version of The Wall (the whole album)”. Interesting.
2) No Windows user can ever be certain that they are virus-free. They can be pretty sure that they are not infected by a virus that their anti-virus software knows about, but those aren’t the same thing.
Yeah, I’ve saved big money at Menard’s too. I wonder if the grimacing older guy in glasses is still growling that in their commercials?
B, you have such exquisite and discriminating taste. But now you have me wondering whether Cyndi Lauper just wants to be Don Quixote, and why Borges never won a Nobel prize.
Why did Borges never win a Nobel prize? Are short stories not popular with the Swedes?
Hell if I know.
He visited Chile and was a public supporter of Pinochet. Members of the Nobel Committee (including friends of Chilean socialist poet Pablo Neruda and socialist writers who decried the brutality of Pinochet’s regime) sandbagged him thereafter.
Ah. Well, if they had to give the prize to only one supporter of fascist regimes, I wish they had skipped Hamsun and picked Borges instead. But that’s just a matter of my own personal taste.
I had the odd experience last night of being at a show that was basically a pretty good Conway Twitty impersonator (I mean he sounded and delivered a song effectively in the Twitty style, not that he looked like Conway — he looked more like an Everly Brother) surrounded by a not-particularly-convincing framing device. Ignoring the frame, which really wasn’t the point, I was struck by the way the audience, most of them clearly long-time Conway Twitty fans, reacted to the show. They yelled, cheered, gave a standing ovation — not, so far as I could tell, for the performance as a good imitation, a good piece of work by a talented impersonator, but for Twitty. For their memories of shows he actually gave, or wishes that they had seen him perform live, or for the sounds on their record collections. I may have been misreading them; the applause may have been for an impersonation well carried out. But it really seemed to me that these folks, who knew perfectly well that their hero has been dead well over a decade, were trying to have an experience as if he were still there. I wondered how much of the performance was necessary: what if the performer had lip-synched? what if there had been no performance, just a tape of old recordings playing?
Obviously, impersonation is very different from covering a song previously associated with another artist. But it gets to the question of what makes a reproduction faithful. (Which just reminded me that one of the earliest Netherlandish portraits, after a millennium of avoidance of the strictly representational, is entitled “Leal Sovvenir” — faithful remembrance. (You can see it here.)
Wow, nm, I wish I had a good response to your comment here, but I don’t. Clearly, there’s a line somewhere. I don’t think it’d be enough to have a tape recorder (but maybe it would if it were a live performance? Or what if it were a performance we’d never heard before?), but i don’t know.
To me, not having seen this myself, it sounds like a kind of mourning. I mean, it’s not one of the seven stages of grief, but joyful, celebratory remembrance sure is something we see frequently, with the artist as priest for sure.