03.03.2008
UNDER THE COVERS
COVERS, REVIVALS, AND TRIBUTE ALBUMS. LIKE 'EM A LOT -- OR NOT? ALDUS SANTOS CONTEMPLATES ON THE TREND THAT SEEMS TO BE TAKING OVER THE MUSIC SCENE.
When Plato suggested that art is purely mimetic, I’m sure he failed to predict tribute albums and cover versions of pop songs and such. The Greek thinker must have been totally unprepared for that likelihood: artists taking “Art is a copy” at face value. As such, therefore, covers are twice removed from reality. With the world as the primary object, and the art it inspires as once-removed copies, covers are—in theory, at least—relegated to artistic sloppy seconds. That could be helped, though. After all, popular music has come a long way from the Hal Willner-produced Amarcord Nino Rota (1981), which is often cited as the first modern tribute album. The said release focused on Rota’s film scores for auteur Federico Fellini, as interpreted by a wide array of artists ranging from Wynton Marsalis to Bill Frisell to everyone’s favorite blondie Deborah Harry. Willner’s record, suffice it to say, was far from being a mere Platonic collection of “copies,” and it served as a pro-active model for succeeding releases in that same turf. In 1981, there was no longer any Tin Pan Alley, and nobody no longer had to sound precisely like the object of mimesis.
Tin Pan Alley was borne out of a consumerist need (songs were sold like soap or roll-on deodorant), while modern pop and rock (thanks to that girlish man from Tupelo called Elvis) was about rockstars—their personalities, their neuroses, their idiosyncrasies. While modern tribute albums are, initially, exercises in canon-building, they are also stabs at self-pontification. Perhaps The New York Times’ Jon Pareles was able to say it best when he suggested, “Tribute albums have always been exercises in memory and continuity, mapping connections of sound and style. They trade on familiar songs or famous names, but what they promise is not an oldies experience (or for that matter, the experience provided by tribute bands that mimic name-brand acts). They aim for relevance, not nostalgia.” Two important qualities are warring here: loyalty versus innovation. Loyalty of course comes with humility, and innovation with pride, with the median of the two being the elusive ideal. Listening to A Perfect Circle’s discordant rethinking of John Lennon’s Utopian ditty “Imagine,” for instance, one is confused. What happened to the bright major-sevenths? Why “innovate” on an effective ingredient? The negative reception to Cracker’s cover of The Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays” from If I Were a Carpenter (1994), meanwhile, was totally illogical to me. David Lowery is no Karen, sure, but his Pavement-esque slacker delivery is right on the money: a rainy Monday is a rainy Monday; no sunshine, no sugar, all misery.
“I guess there are some songs that are meant to be covered as is, or have parts or elements that have to be re-emphasized by the artist covering them,” guitarist and music critic Jason Caballa offers, citing Faith No More’s cover of “War Pigs”—a live version appears on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath (1994), and a studio take appears on the band’s sophomore release The Real Thing (1989)—as one such example of a faithful rendition, pun absolutely intended. On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, Caballa cites Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which is an apple to Dylan’s orange. Musician Marco Harder has a different take, however, claiming that “Essentially, music is not composed of three elements—rhythm, harmony, and melody—but is the end result of these three elements happening at the same time.” Harder takes a hard-line stance on the idea of artistic intent, dismissing “emotional content” as purely subjective. “Don’t waste your energy on a musical point if you can’t remain true to it. For me, doing that is heretical in the same way as misquoting an academic text,” he adds further, interestingly citing the songwriting credits for Led Zeppelin’s rendition of “When the Levee Breaks”: Jimmy Page/Robert Plant/John Paul Jones/John Bonham/Memphis Minnie,” Minnie being the author of the original. The point being made here is Zep’s consciousness about “rewriting” as an artistic enterprise (some lyrics and melody were altered in “Levee”), something that is in real scarcity in modern tributes.
Etymologically, though, tributes are what they are, or, at least, what they aim to be—tributes. The Free Dictionary defines tribute as “a gift, payment, declaration, or other acknowledgment of gratitude, respect, or admiration,” or “evidence attesting to some praiseworthy quality or characteristic.” In short, as with anthologizing works of literature, making tribute albums is an exercise in canon-building. If you make the cut, you’re a “made” artist, to borrow from Mafiosi-speak. In more recent local memory, the smashing success of Ultraelectromagneticjam (2005)—the Eraserheads tribute—relegated the Diliman lads to canonical status. Even Ely Buendia, thankful as he was, was weirded out by the endeavor, alluding to the fact that all four of them (all under-forty strapping young-ish gentlemen) are still musically active. What Buendia was being modest about, of course, was the fact that the ‘Heads didn’t need to be octogenarians to deserve a volume or two in their honor. The tricky thing about covering the ‘Heads, if you really think about it, is not that they have difficult songs, but that their material reeked of their individualism—their aura, so to speak. What was triumphant about Ultraelectromagneticjam was its presentation of individual character (good or bad) of the cover artists involved in the project. Radioactive Sago Project’s awesome spoken-word retelling of the Raymund Marasigan original “Alkohol” (from Circus, 1994) was a clear testament of Sago’s “project” without having to veer very far from Marasigan’s thematic intent: disorientation through alcohol-intake. Cueshe’s take on “Hard to Believe,” the heart-wrenching Buendia number from Sticker Happy (1997), reeks of character, too. I’m not kidding. What specific character that is—alas—give me a ring and I’ll tell you.
Pareles, in the same New York Times article quoted earlier, says “The reasons for tributes are as varied as the performers, and they are rarely pure. Remaking someone else’s music can be a shortcut to surefire material, ancestor-worship, a collegial embrace, an endorsement, a way to rewrite history, a generational rivalry and an attempt at one-upmanship, all in the same song.” Patti Smith’s memorable redoing of “Gloria” (by Van Morrison’s Them), which appears in her seminal volume Horses (1975), drives Morrison and company’s point home through her bardic prosody. In the same manner, The Door’s version of the underground opera classic “Alabama (Whiskey Bar)”—from Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, set to music by Kurt Weill in 1927—is just so precise for the young Morrison (not related to Van, but you know that already) in its drunken, sexed-up portrayal of decadence. On the other hand, numbers like Johnny Cash’s interpretation of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage” (good) or Paul Anka’s take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (horrendous) are odd kind of shout-outs—they’re, I guess, genuine forays into deconstruction.
Whichever the case may be, covers and tributes seem to be one of two things: 1) reaffirming echoes, or 2) scavenger hunts in the manner of found art. In the former, the conundrum seems to be relevance, i.e., “Why else, when it is going to sound practically the same?” Not surprisingly, Rivermaya’s all-covers album Isang Ugat, Isang Dugo (2006) comes to mind. While people were generally excited about the band’s hyper-loyal approximations of the underground hits of their adolescence, others were disappointed, questioning the band’s intentions. After all, hasn’t Bobby Balingit and his gang kept their presence all these years, even working on new material? (The Wuds’ much-awaited new release may already be out by the time this gets out.) Rico Blanco—in one of his last print interviews with this author as the main-man of ‘Maya—said that the covers project started as a reaction to the present unavailability of the songs they loved as teenagers, mainly stuff from Dean’s December’s Chemical Wedding. Blanco and company had more ambition in this collection, therefore, to merely be criticized for the loyalty (or disloyalty, whichever side you’re on) of their renditions: Rivermaya were acting as meticulous curators.
Now, is Regine Velasquez also acting as a curator in her countless “revivals”? Are songs really being “revived” when remade? In that case, what kind of life-force is breathed back into these songs (and does it stink)? As for sampling, are some songs really only as good as their choruses? Is “The Apl Song” a cover of Asin’s “Balita,” for real? Passing by billboard-crazy Guadalupe one morning, I saw an ad announcing Faith Sings Sinatra, and I found myself asking, “Who is she and why is she doing this?” What life-altering repercussions will this have on pop music in general?
Truly, these are dark, dark days.
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Sources consulted:
Pareles, Jon (2007). “The New Tributes, and an Old Triangle.” The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2008, fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/arts/music/27pare.html
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Huhn, Mary and Shen, Maxine (2007). “They’ve Got it Covered: The 100 Best Cover Songs of All Time.”
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07182007/entertainment/music/
they_ve_got_it_covered_music_mary_huhn_and_maxine_shen.htm?page=0
