Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Jimi Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower" ::
[WARNING: The following contains embedded video from that YouTube thingy. This may take sometime to load. Also, I cannot guarantee that the videos will always work since they are remotely hosted. Sorry, but that's how it is.]
Last week I wrote about some of the swell things regarding cover songs and how folks should give cover versions a chance and so forth (as seen HERE). As I was thinking about cover songs, it brought up an aspect of them which wasn't necessarily on topic with that post, so I'm bringing it up here.
Sometimes, a person who covers a song will change some words around. Generally speaking, I am okay with this... to a point. A fine example is the song "Boys of Summer." In the original Don Henley version, he sings "out on the road today I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac," whereas in the Ataris cover version, they sing "I saw a BLACK FLAG sticker on a Cadillac." Other than what was on the sticker, the rest of the song was loyal to the original. I am okay with an alteration like that. Also, sometimes when singing a love song, the singer will change the gender of the person they are singing about to suit them better, such as a song originally intended for a woman singing about a man, if a male singer were to sing it, they often change it so that they are singing about a woman (this doesn't ALWAYS happen, but it is probably the most commonly made lyrical change when covering a song). Minor word tweaks like that, I am fine with it. When a "cover version" of a song comes out with practically ALL NEW LYRICS, can you even regard it as a cover?
Is this when we get into "homage" territory? Or can we call it "stealing"? When we have, for example, an original song "Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's song "Wildside." Most would say that Marky Mark sampled Lou Reed. Can you really call it "sampling" if you use all of the music, the chorus, and lyric structure? To me, "sampling" means more along the lines of taking a quick snippet from something else (such as a drum track) and remixing it into other material. This song seems like it did much more than that. The guitar, the bass line, the do-do-dos, the saxophone, the string section: it's all lifted from Lou Reed's ONE song, then given a hip-hop beat and words in nearly exactly the same lyrical presentation. I'm not saying that this, or other songs in this same situation, don't have ANY merit to them (heck, "Wildside"'s references to true crime events and their injustices are actually pretty decent), I simply have no idea what you call them.
Which brings us to this conundrum. The most enigmatic of them all. Bear with me here as I make the following presentation. Watch these three videos and tell me what the HELL just happened.
Did you do it? Watch all three? Coz if you've never heard all three of these songs then you're going to be missing out. ON A BRAIN HEMORRHAGE! I know that many other people have probably pointed this oddity out, but my mind thinking about cover songs last week brought me onto this path unwittingly. So, in the FIRST video we have Stevie Wonder's classic soul song "Pastime Paradise" from the 1976 record Songs in the Key of Life. I imagine when Coolio and friends made "Gangsta's Paradise," it was out of respect for Wonder. I imagine since Coolio was a young man in the 1970s, that he may grown up listening to Stevie Wonder albums and what better way for a musician to pay tribute than by taking a song about the plight of people back THEN and making it about the plight of the people NOW?
While Wonder's song is about society's struggles but with hope for the future, Coolio's is about the violence and futility in the youth "gangsta" lifestyle. This brings us to "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Amish Paradise," a song about a man enjoying his simple Amish life and looking forward to the rewards of the afterlife. While "Gangsta's Paradise" is eerily similar to "Pastime Paradise," it is obvious that Yankovic is singling out Coolio's version, since he made deliberate lyrical similarities, such as the opening line "As I walk through the valley..." This would make Yankovic's version a parody of an homage of a classic? Wait... what?
When is a cover song not a cover song? How much change is allowed for it to still be called by its original name and when does it become something else? A cover, a sample, an homage, or a parody? Where is the line and how do I know what side of it certain things are on? And does it matter?
William the Bloody (covered in confusion)
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