|
I’ve always been fascinated with cover songs - the good and the bad - and I have long harboured a desire to examine several different covers of the same song to see if any insight can be gleaned into the song’s essential nature. Many covers change the melody, the lyrics, even the title of the original - so what makes them a cover? Why bother to produce a cover if so many changes are made? Is there some stripped-down, essential part to a song that’s still communicated when so many surface elements differ?
For my experiment, I decided to investigate one of the most covered songs of all time. According to secondhandsongs.com, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones has been covered 95 times, which means there are almost twice as many versions of this song than there are years since its release. I listened to over a dozen renderings, but have narrowed my discussion to only the most interesting, notable, and distinctive.
Let’s start with the original:
 Title: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Artist: The Rolling Stones
Album: Out of Our Heads
Year: 1965
Named in just about every “Greatest Rock Songs of All Time” list ever written, there’s probably no one on the planet who hasn’t heard it a hundred times over. The first verse, about listening to someone talking nonsense on the radio, expresses frustration with the status quo. The second verse, about watching an ad for bleach and remembering an ad for cigarettes, voices frustration with commercialism (specifically American commercialism, according to interviews with Jagger). The third verse, about trying to “make some girl” only to find out she’s “on a losing streak” (i.e. having her period), conveys frustration with sex. Overall, it is a fairly representative song of '60s youth culture, with a very memorable guitar riff. Most people probably identify with its rebellious nature at some point in their lives, which is perhaps the reason why there have been so many covers. Perhaps not.
 Title: “Satisfaction”
Artist: Otis Redding
Album: Otis Blue
Year: 1965
When you’re Otis Redding, you can get away with a lot of nonsense. Undoubtedly, only someone as talented as Redding could produce as messy a cover as this and still have the results be extremely entertaining. He sort of does the first chorus, then sort of does the first verse, then the rest of the song trails off into lyrics he apparently made up on the spot. When he sings, “We gotta have it satisfaction,” and, “Somebody to love me some reaction,” you might be thinking he’s inching his way back to the original song, but you’d be wrong, as most of it is more like “Gotta keep on groovin’, keep on groovin’, keep on groovin’ yeah!” It was a typical practice of the '60s to immediately cover any hit song in an attempt to capitalize on its success before it faded away, so it should be no surprise that Otis Blue came out only two months after Out of Our Heads. Redding said he’d never even heard the song before recording it. We can tell, Otis, but it’s still awesome.
 Title: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Artist: Devo
Album: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Year: 1978
I think Devo’s version is the only one I’ve heard that doesn’t really change the lyrics at all; instead, they change the entire melody. If you’ve never heard it, just imagine a Devo song you have heard, like “Whip It” or “Freedom of Choice,” then apply the lessons learned about their sound and style to the words of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and you’re most of the way there. Overall, it seems like more of an interesting rhythm experiment than a sincere attempt to convey any of the meaning or — dare I say — pathos of the original.
 Title: “Satisfaction”
Artist: Vanilla Ice
Album: Hooked
Year: 1989
It’s hard to believe that Vanilla Ice was ever popular when you listen to this song. You’d be hard-pressed to find a worse rapper on the face of the Earth — but I digress. As a symbol of commercialism himself, it would be hard for Mr. Ice to pull off the meaning behind the first two-thirds of the Stones song, so he doesn’t bother. In its place we get a rap song simply about sexual frustration, with entirely original verses about Vanilla going to clubs and being rejected, but retaining the “Satisfaction” chorus. I could write an entire article about the inadequacy of his songwriting, and maybe one day I will, but for now all you need to know is: “Girly at the bar; Lookin’ mighty fly; She looked so fly – at the time – I had to make up, you know, my mind.”
 Title: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Artist: Cat Power
Album: The Covers Record
Year: 2000
This cover is almost the complete opposite of Vanilla Ice’s attempt, in that Cat Power only sings the verses and never gets to the chorus. It’s the only song from The Covers Record that an everyday casual music fan would be familiar with, which is likely why it’s the first track. She leaves out the iconic guitar riff, and slowly strums her way through the words in the most somber way imaginable. While Mick couldn’t get any satisfaction and it kind of pissed him off, Cat Power sounds like she’s headed for the bathtub with a razor blade. She changes the “make some girl” lyric to “make some boy,” but it comes off as more of a half-hearted attempt to personalize an otherwise impersonal song than a legitimate sexual come-on. I’ve never understood why people bother to “fix” the gender-lyrics in cover songs anyway, unless it’s just straight-up homosexual panic.
Title: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Artist: Britney Spears
Album: Oops! … I Did It Again
Year: 2000
When I listen to a singer like Britney Spears, it feels like everything is calculated primarily to fire up a Jazzercise class and get “your body moving.” There’s no semblance of any genuine feeling here, with a lot of the characteristic vocal gymnastics and “uh! uh!” you’d expect. As a workout song, it’s inoffensive, but as a cover, the lyric change in the middle — “When I’m watching my TV, and that girl comes on and tells me, how tight my skirts should be, but she can’t tell me who to be, baby, I got my own identity”—is perhaps the most egregious crime committed against “Satisfaction” to date, and considering Vanilla Ice calls a woman’s ass an “onion” in his version, that’s no small feat.
So what are the results of this experiment? What’s the point of covering a song? It becomes clear as you listen to 90 minutes of the same thing, almost all radically different in their own absurd ways, that it’s the rare artist who’s doing it for love of the original. In the above examples, the performers were either trying to ride the coattails of the Stones’ well-earned success, or, at best, providing a familiar base against which to contrast their own unique style.
I don’t recommend others follow me on this path, unless you want to end up with a knitted-together Frankenstein’s monster of a song stuck in your head — a chorus from this one, a few words from that one, the try-tr-tr-tr-try-try-try from Devo’s version...
This experiment has, however, given me a greater appreciation for the covers that change the song in a meaningful way, while still managing to keep the essential nature of the original artist’s vision sacrosanct. Be grateful for these songs, for Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” for Feist’s “Inside & Out,” for The White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” and for any other great song not performed by Vanilla Ice or Britney Spears.
© 2008 Dante Kleinberg; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed