Covers

Weird thought of while I was watching an episode of Dancing With the Stars with Alicia yesterday, but just didn't make it on here until now, but there are certain songs in my mind that I only hear as the cover version of it, not the actual version.

What does this mean?

It means that there are some songs out there that sort of sucked the first go around, but when someone else tackled the same song, they did the job right and made it worth remembering. A few examples -

versus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKG5BFLqnEY

Don't know why that one won't imbed, but whatever, we'll move on.

Marvin Gaye, great guy, amazing singer, does some solid stuff. . . . but let's compare this. . .

to

I'm sorry Marvin, but Aaliyah is just what sticks in my mind when I think about this song, I blame most likely the fact that I heard her version first so it's what I thought the song just sounds like. But the weirdest one to disturb the Marvin Gaye classics (because even if they get covered all over the place, a lot of his stuff is just down right awesome so it takes a lot of work to better it) is one of the weirdest samples/covers of a song that I've ever heard.

This classic of just soul baby making music -

There's no fighting it, this is some baby making music. You play this song at the right time, and bonus points if you sing a bit of the words to your significant other, and you've got some good times ahead of you. But I can't hear this without thinking about the slightly irreverant cover that was slightly joking, but just has one of the biggest head banging moments in hardcore that I've heard in a long moment -
https://soundcloud.com/djgammer/gammer-x-marvin-gaye-lets-get

Stick with this song, make it past the introduction, and make it to the end, and that beat with Marvin Gaye's original just sticks with you.

Either way, the rule of thumb when it comes to covers in my world is that if you're brave enough to try to cover a famous song by a professional artist, you better bring something to the table that they didn't. If you're just going to try to sound like them, it's never going to work, but if you bring something more to it and make it something interesting, THEN you're working with something that just might be better than the original. I like to take this idea and say it works for literature as well. Sure, you can take ideas off of other people and be inspired by them, and even flat out steal stories from other authors, but you have to bring your own twist to the classic otherwise there's no way that you're going to do anything of value.