Last Saturday, Kristen and I were talking about the music history workshops we taught with some bad-ass GRCA alums for the Girls Now! conference. As you can imagine, it’s hard to pare down nearly a century’s worth of female contributions to popular music into a 75-minute PowerPoint presentation and have it be fun and interactive as well. Thus, we made sure to include many music videos and performance clips that hopefully engaged our girl attendees. One such clip was Christina Aguilera’s Grammy performance of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” apparently beloved by Patti Smith. Afterwards, Kristen mentioned that it was possible to do an entire section on cover songs and wished we had more time to highlight and discuss more interesting examples.
Too right, Kristen. In fact, I think I started this section of the blog to cull together noteworthy cover songs, as I think covers are fascinating. What does song selection and interpretation say about the artist? How do their personae, generic alignments, and identity markers give the source material new meaning? What does it mean for Solange Knowles — aka Ms. “Fuck the Industry (Signed Sincerely)” — to cover an indie rock song like Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move,” which was originally inspired by Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and includes a sample of “Bumpy’s Lament” in her version? What does it mean for Cat Power to adopt the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” as a signature song and create several arrangements of it ranging from stripped-down folk to soulful rave-up? How does Tori Amos blow apart Eminem’s misogynistic murder fantasy in ”’97 Bonnie and Clyde” by orienting herself as the dead wife in the trunk?
Tori Amos as Bonnie; image courtesy of hereinmyhead.com
(Note: For further insight into the last song mentioned, I recommend reading Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods’s “Authenticity, Appropriation, Signification: Tori Amos on Gender, Race, and Violence in Covers of Billie Holiday and Eminem.” Also, I might need to get around to unpacking the cover art for Amos’s Strange Little Girls at some point.)
Continuing why I hope to be an on-going discussion, tonight I selected two songs originally recorded by James Brown and Sam Cooke. ”It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” has always seemed to me to be an ode to chauvinism. ”A Change Is Gonna Come,” however, is an anthem for social change that came to define the Civil Rights Movement. But think about what additional meanings these songs may have when performed by Christina Aguilera and Sharon Jones.
