The Transformative Potential of Cover Songs
The buzz around Miley Cyrus’s recent performances at the iHeart Radio Festival and on her MTV Unplugged special was largely due to her renditions of other artists’ hits of yesteryear. Cyrus is no stranger to the cover song, often letting her rock chops shine through her unique vocal interpretations.
But what makes a great cover song? Video essay channel Polyphonic tackled the question by taking three tracks—Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, Trent Reznor’s Hurt, and Otis Redding’s Respect—and looked at how the three artists that covered those songs (Jimmy Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Aretha Franklin, respectively) produced versions that are nearly universally acknowledged as superior to the originals. It looks at how the sociopolitical context, an artist’s legacy, or particular vocal delivery can change the entire thematic scope of a song given the right emissary.
Cyrus’s cover of Heart of Glass certainly fits the bill, as she takes Debbie Harry’s gossamer vocals and adds a heaping dose of country grit and punk intensity. But it was her rendition of Britney Spears’ Gimme More that blew me away. A club classic, Gimme More carries a quiet undercurrent of despair, as Spears puts on her trademark baby voice affecation to say “they want more / well, I’ll give ‘em more” in reference to the paparazzi’s insatiable addiction to (and relentless critique of) her personal life. Under the brilliance of Gimme More’s pulsing strobe lights there are omnipresent eyes capturing Spears’ every move, demanding her to perform every second of her life for their entertainment. It’s a subtle stab at the public mayhem that consumed her in the mid ‘00s and kept her the center of less-than-friendly attention.
“Cameras are flashing while we’re dirty dancing / they just keep watchin’ / feels like they’re probably saying gimme gimme more.”
Cyrus takes this thread and unravels the glittery facade Gimme More uses to shrug off this dark dimension of fame. Stripped back acoustics and raw, country-inflected vocals highlight the emotional vulnerability implicit in the song. Its all made juicer by the fact that Cyrus herself has had may experiences that mirror Spears’. Both former teen idols, they’ve both faced widespread fascination and condemnation in equal parts for their NSFD (not safe for Disney) antics.
The performances are an interesting inversion of a technique the Princess of Pop herself has previously employed: turning rock songs into pop covers. Spears first forayed into rock with her cover of the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, keeping the song’s spirit of rebellion while re-contextualizing it for her highly critiqued public persona. The lyrics “when I'm watchin' my TV and a man comes on and tells me / how white my shirts can be” become “when I'm watchin' my TV and that girl comes on and tells me / how tight my skirts should be,” turning it into a rage against the media machine’s barrage of slut-shaming.
The next year, Spears cheekily covered Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (which itself is a cover), injecting a campy pop sensibility into the rock classic. The music video is a fun riff on the conventions of a genre that ridicules “pre-fab” pop like hers, full of campy takes on their signature leather, hairography, air guitars, and motorcycles.
A pop classic turned dark ballad that preceded Miley’s Unplugged was Bree Runway’s cover of Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi for 4Music’s Fresh From Home series last month. An up and coming popstar (mark my words!), Runway infuses the song with a certain mystique via an excellent melodic interpretation, a satin-draped background, and a performance you can feel as she deepens the already reflective lyrics.
It’s a very deliberate choice, as Runway has spent her career fighting the restriction of being confined solely to historically Black musical classifications like rap and R&B. Her cover of Paparazzi showcases her range, as her voice practically floats above the chords with a melancholy yet bright sound, à la ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All. The performance exhibits a gentleness and delicacy of emotions that dark-skinned Black women in the music industry are often barred from expressing.
The history of American music is littered with cover songs, from jazz standards and the Great American Songbook to the proliferation of “super producers” like Max Martin who do everything but sing on the tracks. To truly grasp and emulate the spirit of someone else’s song is certainly not easy, but covers that strike me as innovative do not simply re-record the original song, they remake it. Transcendent covers honor the original while infusing the artists’ own lived experience into the music to tell a story of their own.
Another example of a cover slyly flipping a song on its head is Carlos Santana, India Arie, and Yo-Yo Ma’s interpretation of the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Like Runway’s Paparazzi, it deepens the lyrical quality of the original song by slamming the gas on the emotional quality. The original song is light and dreamy with a bombastic ending, but Santana et. al turn it into a sensual epic. Where the Beatles’ song was gentle, Santana’s was nothing short of alluring. More romantic drama, less emo reflection. An incredibly luxe soundscape, aided by Yo-Yo Ma’s sweeping cello, cushions India Arie’s R&B vocals and Santana’s elite Spanish guitar.
A prototype of this phenomenon can be found in Ike and Tina Turner’s cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary. Creedence’s version is a guitar-centric, bluesy rock song you vibe to while rolling down the highway on a summer day; The Turners transformed it into a funk opera. It starts achingly slow, with Tina promising that “we’re gonna take the beginning of this song and do it… easy / but then we’re gonna do the finish…rough.” The midsection kicks it into high gear, with blaring horns and a relentless drum beat kicking off Tina’s iconic vocal trills. This dynamic interpretation breathes life into the narrative of the lyrics, as the narrator recounts leaving their confining, monotonous life for a life of freedom and travel upon the Proud Mary riverboat. The structure of the song itself replicates the narrator’s emancipation, becoming unabashedly joyous once free of its languid opening tempo.
Fact: the majority of popular mainstream musicians do not write their own songs. Music doesn’t always have to have come out of your brain in order to mine something from your heart. A transformative cover song demonstrates this principle tenfold, as it takes a song with a pre-established place in the world and imbues it with new meaning. It takes but one thread from the original and weaves it into an entirely new tapestry. There’s something so personal and touching about a drastically different cover—it’s charged with letting us in to the coverer’s own relationship to art as they share their unique synthesis of the world.
Bonus track: this little boy’s cover of Anita Baker’s Sweet Love—objectively the best cover to ever exist.
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