Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.
A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.
There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.
I don’t mind a cover changing the meaning of a song, but stuff where the cover is just the song again is…lazy as fuck?
Like Fast Car by (country music guy) is fantastic, but it’s the same as the original, which is also fantastic. Feels cheap or something, I don’t know. Like the whole Weezer cover album was boring as fuck. The songs are technically great, but why listen to that over the originals? Rivers said his goal was to try and reproduce the original sound, which seems like an interesting exercise for the band, but not for the listener. So that wraps back around to respecting the band.
Anyways, I have a lot of strong feelings about covers. Make it your own, even if you don’t change it that much.
Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.
A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.
There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.
I think Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ is probably the gold standard of a cover exceeding the origional
I don’t mind a cover changing the meaning of a song, but stuff where the cover is just the song again is…lazy as fuck?
Like Fast Car by (country music guy) is fantastic, but it’s the same as the original, which is also fantastic. Feels cheap or something, I don’t know. Like the whole Weezer cover album was boring as fuck. The songs are technically great, but why listen to that over the originals? Rivers said his goal was to try and reproduce the original sound, which seems like an interesting exercise for the band, but not for the listener. So that wraps back around to respecting the band.
Anyways, I have a lot of strong feelings about covers. Make it your own, even if you don’t change it that much.