Covers and (Mere?) Remakes: A Reply to Lee B. Brown

Abstract

I would like to thank Lee B. Brown for his insightful and thought provoking commentary on my work. It has challenged me to be more articulate about my views on covers that, while animating the article in question, may not have been made entirely explicit in it. I agree with Brown's characterization of my project on many points. My article is, in the end, about a particular category of cover version—namely, the kind that utilizes the musical device of genre resetting—and how, thanks to that device, covers in this category are often successful in providing certain kinds of aesthetic interest. However, as Brown's closing remarks suggest, we should be careful not to overestimate the power of genre resetting as a contributor of aesthetic value; not just any generic “twist” on an old song is guaranteed to produce a good work. I think we can characterize the kinds of interest provided by resetting (that is, manipulation of musical expectations, intertextuality) as, at best, pro tanto aesthetic values that may be offset by other deficiencies in the work. Several of the examples I offered in my article stand as evidence of this (for instance, Limp Bizkit's unfortunate cover of George Michael's “Faith”). Rather than discuss further the aesthetic potential of genre reset covers, I will focus here on the matter that most occupies Brown in his commentary—the general category of the rock cover version and the question of its definition. In particular, I seek to address two specific sub issues that emerge from his discussion: whether making an allusion to an earlier recording is a necessary condition for being a cover and whether there are non rock covers. Although I do not see my article's principal project as being a conceptual analysis of the cover version, I do offer a general definition of it as a step in my more specific inquiry, one I will attempt to clarify in hopes of clearing up any confusion and addressing some of the questions Brown raises. I define cover version in my article as “a rock recording that captures a performance of a song that has already been recorded and released … by another artist and, as such, functions as a remake of the original recording, in a manner somewhat analogous to how remakes of films function in cinema.”1 Contrary to Brown's characterization of my account, I do not include here the necessary condition that a cover must allude (or otherwise refer) to some previous recording. I only claim that allusiveness is a feature that has become increasingly common over time and so might be classified as a characteristic feature of more recent covers. I also do not cite genre resetting as a necessary condition for “cover” status. So, Brown correctly observes that the “saturatedly allusive, genre resetting covers” I focus on in my article constitute only a specific subcategory of cover. It follows from this that my answer to Brown's question of “whose usage reflects this concept?” is “no one's”: there is no distinct pattern of usage of the word that picks out this particular subcategory of cover version. It is simply one subcategory among many that receives that label from rock listeners and musicians, one I found particularly interesting and worthy of philosophical scrutiny. Correctly observing that my general account does not countenance covers outside of rock music, Brown challenges this boundary with a range of jazz examples that might seem to lay claim to cover status. I will focus mostly on his example of “In the Mood” and the recorded versions of it (such as Tommy Dorsey's) that were released in the wake of Glenn Miller's hit version. Were the former recordings covers of the latter? As a first consideration of how one might answer “no,” Brown invokes a condition from a recent article from Theodore Gracyk: if, on the part of the covering artist, “there is either no expectation of, or indifference about, the intended audience's knowledge of the earlier recording,” then we do not have a cover.2 Brown argues that the post Miller “In the Mood” versions fail to be disqualified by this condition because “it would not be unusual for swing era consumers to have been aware of the primary version of the song.” However, Brown's point only dispenses with one disjunct of Gracyk's condition. Even if Dorsey, and others, could reasonably expect their listeners to be familiar with Miller's recording, they may have nevertheless been indifferent to this fact when recording their own versions. But what would this “indifference” amount to? This becomes clear when we note that Gracyk's condition is presented in the course of his defense for an account of covers that does, unlike mine, treat reference to a previous recording as a necessary condition.3 The audience ignorance and artist indifference cited above are then conditions that would preclude such a reference. On this account, to classify Dorsey's “In the Mood” as a cover we need more than an expectation of his target audience's familiarity with Miller's version; it would require that Dorsey choose to exploit that familiarity, creating a version of the song that he intends audiences to appreciate in light of Miller's popular recording. It would require, in other words, that he intend to make an allusion to that recording. Of course, whether or not Dorsey's version alludes to Miller's is a moot question in light of the definition of cover I present above. What distinguishes Dorsey's recording from a rock cover, such as the Pet Shop Boys's “Always on My Mind,” is not that the latter is allusive while the former is not; the distinction rests on the fact that the appreciation conditions of the latter are analogous in a key respect to those of film remakes, while those of the former are not. Both Brown and Gracyk refer to the “mere remake,” seemingly using the term in a fairly minimal sense (that is, a recording of a previously recorded and released song) that contrasts it with the cover version.4 However, this minimal use does not acknowledge an important appreciation condition for remakes in film (even though this medium, not music, is the one that features the term ‘remake’ most prevalently in its discourse). I follow Andrew Kania here in drawing the analogy between covers and film remakes.5 Kania's point is that covers are appreciated in a way analogous to how film remakes are: that is, in direct comparison with the originals that precede them. In contrast, two performances of, say, the same Beethoven symphony are appreciated in terms of some third entity—that is, the work that each performance instantiates—rather than in terms of each other. The key point I would like to highlight here is that, in the former case, there is something intrinsically comparative about how both film remakes and rock covers are appreciated—versus the latter (non rock, non cover) case, in which the comparison of the two performances would only be incidental to their appreciation. The very concept of a remake, after all, implies the existence of a previous version, and in a context of appreciation this constitutes an invitation to place these versions in comparison with one another. So I propose that, when appreciating a rock recording qua cover (or a film qua remake), it is simply a necessary condition of appreciation to do so in comparison to, or otherwise in light of, a previous version (usually the “original” or “definitive” one). This condition applies even to covers, such as Tiffany's “I Think We're Alone Now,” that make no discernible allusion to earlier versions, just as an analogous convention prescribes that one appreciate a nonallusive film remake (for example, Tom Shadyac's 1996 The Nutty Professor) in comparison to its original (Jerry Lewis's 1963 version).6 Filmmakers may of course choose to exploit this comparative convention and add a further, more pointed intertextual dimension to their remakes by alluding to the original (for example, via a cameo appearance by the original's star), but this is not relevant to their films’ status as remakes nor to the general invitation they make to viewers to appreciate them in light of the earlier films. In a similar fashion, covering artists in rock may choose to add an intertextual dimension by making their cover versions allusive in some fashion (for example, most of the genre reset covers I discuss in my article).7 This commonality between rock and film practice may be attributed, at least in part, to an ontological commonality. If we accept the recording centric ontological picture of rock defended by several authors, rock and film emerge as similar insofar as their respective primary objects of appreciation are both ontologically “thick” entities, identified with the rich audio and visual information captured in a recording medium (be it a master tape, celluloid reel, or digital file).8 As such, it should not be surprising if the critical conventions of both art forms include prescriptions to appreciate these recorded works comparatively in terms of one another, especially when they share content (for example, a common plotline or a common song). Jazz, however, does not share rock's “phonocentric” nature; as Gracyk has argued, the recording in jazz is relatively marginal, generally functioning as a transparent medium for something more central—that is, a performance that often treats the piece in question as a springboard for improvisational artistry.9 The case of the multiple “In the Mood” recordings therefore seems more analogous to the classical example of the Beethoven symphony above, where the performances are considered in terms of a third entity—that is, the composition they feature—rather than in terms of each other. Any comparison of the various versions to one another would be incidental to the act of simply appreciating one more performance of a standard. This account of covers has, at least, a couple of advantages over one like Gracyk's that makes allusion a necessary condition for cover status. First, it avoids a difficulty arising from the detection of allusion in rock recordings. On the account of allusion both Gracyk and I (and others) endorse, allusion is an indirect reference that an artist intends to make, within her artwork, to another text.10 Detecting an allusion in a piece of music then involves more than simply recognizing shared musical features (contra Brown's proposal); it requires the more demanding project of interpreting the given performance in light of intentions one might justifiably attribute to its author.11 In many instances, this may require drawing on relevant contextual knowledge: in the case of the Pet Shop Boys's “Always on My Mind,” the fact that they created their version for a 1987 tribute to Elvis is obviously crucial in illuminating their intention to allude to Presley's recording over, say, Willie Nelson's 1982 version. From this, it follows that cover status on an allusion dependent account will hinge on factors that Gracyk admits are “relatively subtle” and potentially difficult to detect, to the point of sometimes demanding what William Irwin calls “the precision of a science.”12 But how could a concept that seems to enjoy such broad usage within rock discourse, by expert and nonexpert listeners alike, at the same time demand such extensive background knowledge and fine powers of interpretation for its legitimate application? My account avoids this problem of saddling the competent usage of this common concept with such an onerous requirement. A remake based account also tracks a wider swath of the usage of the term ‘cover’ than an allusion based account, which excludes a large set of nonallusive works (the aforementioned Tiffany track among them) that seem to make a rather uncontroversial claim to the title. However, like Gracyk, I do not claim to capture every instance of the use of the word ‘cover’ with my account, and I allow that there may be more than one sense of it circulating in various discourses, including more general senses (for example, one roughly synonymous with “performance of a piece performed previously by another artist”) that may be applied in non rock contexts, including jazz. I am inclined to guess that such a sense may be attributed to some of the speakers Brown quotes in his usage examples (his rock fan friend, for example, and NPR's Linda Wertheimer). One might speculate that the spread of this originally rock specific term to other musical spheres has something to do with the dominant place that rock music has within contemporary popular culture, such that we might expect some terms of its critical discourse, being common coin with many listeners, to spread to non rock contexts. That said, some of Brown's examples (for example, the Monk tribute album that includes performances by rock musicians) remain puzzling, positioned as they seem to be somewhere at the intersection of jazz and rock. But since cover status, on my account, relies on a context shaped by rock conventions (of both reception and production), it should not be surprising if tough cases emerge where the question of context is a vexed one. The account of covers I defend above does justice to the observation Brown makes in his survey of Internet discourse: “A cover is a recording we are invited to place in some kind of comparative evaluative relationship with an original recording of a given song.” While the possibility Brown first considers—that all covers possess a “semiotic dimension” in the reference they make to an original—might explain this evaluative relationship (as in the explanation offered by Gracyk's account), it is a proposal about which Brown seems increasingly dubious throughout his commentary. My account offers an alternative explanation, one which attributes the “invitation” described above to appreciation conditions that arise from both the cover's status as a remake and the phonocentric nature of rock's creative and critical practices.

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