Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It's time for the 'Five O'Clock Shadow', where we play a cover tune, followed by the same tune performed by the original band, and you write a two-page paper comparing and contrasting the two ... Just kidding, you just sit back and enjoy."

The song today is "Street Fighting Man" (originally by The Rolling Stones; I didn't catch the name of the cover band). Since I'm a lazy blogger Since I should really be doing other things, I'll make it a two-paragraph paper...

The cover struck me as something a bunch of historical re-enactors might perform a couple of centuries from now based on sheet music and descriptions and some general knowledge of the musical techniques and styles of the era but without having heard the original. There was inflection that indicated understanding of the lyrics, but a certain softness to the performance, more Monkees-crossed-with-Simon&Garfunkel than Rolling Stones. It lacked ... "edge". (Not that a cover should be a duplicate of the original, mind you (uh, unless you're Todd Rundgren showing off), but since I started listening with "compare and contrast" in mind, this was the impression I had.)

But then the original came on, and I was startled to notice that that recording is itself much "softer" than the mental impression of it that I'd been comparing the cover to a moment earlier! It's still a little harder, somewhat crisper, a little bit angrier-sounding than the cover, certainly more forceful vocally, but by nowhere near as large a margin as I was thinking as I mentally composed the previous paragraph. In retrospect, I was actually comparing the cover to my own imagined "personal cover", my own reinterpretation of the song which had incorporated stylistic influences from punk rock into it, not to a faithful recollection of the Stones' recording.

This tells me that a) I should form a band to record my interpretations of my favourite songs, and b) I'm not listening to my LPs often enough.