A Critique of Michael Rings on Covers

Abstract

I once had a brainstorm about recorded covers in pop music: a cover, unlike other recorded remakes of earlier recordings, stands in a referential relationship to the recording it covers. I did not develop this semiotic angle, as it might be termed. But some such idea seems to be flourishing—in the nice article on the topic by Michael Rings, for instance—in the recent JAAC special issue devoted to song.1 The following remarks survey the central points of Michael Rings's discussion of covers in rock music. I offer potential counterexamples to his view and center on an interpretation of Rings's theory as providing us not with a conceptual analysis of the merely descriptive concept of rock covers but a view about what makes covers with certain features particularly interesting. Rings believes that the concept of a cover, although not exclusively applied in the context of rock music, is mainly found there. If he is right, then we should not expect to see the concept elaborated in jazz, and Rings says as much. Jazz performers of course play songs that have already been recorded but do not cover those recordings, except rarely. Rings notes a case that might qualify as a cover—Ella Fitzgerald's well known “Mack the Knife,” for instance, which presumably could have covered the Louis Armstrong recording. (But we should not forget Bobby Darrin, who recorded the song about a year before Ella did. And yes, Darrin did qualify as a jazz singer.) Others come to mind: a new release by John Scofield features a performance of “I Just Don't Want to Be Lonely,” an oldie recorded by the Stylistics. (During a National Public Radio [NPR] interview about the performance, Linda Wertheimer dubs it a “cover.”)2 Then, too, there is the much older album devoted to Thelonious Monk's music titled That's the Way I Feel Now (1991). This is not a mere set of jazz interpretations of Monk songs, if only because several of the tracks on the album are not by jazz musicians at all, but by, for example, Peter Frampton and Todd Rundgren. So, are these rock tracks covers, while the jazz tracks are not? I am not sure. In fact, my grip on the concept becomes more and more shaky as I think about the matter. For instance, in the jazz and pop swing era, when a record release sold well, it was often followed by other bands’ recorded versions of the song. Thus, Glenn Miller's recording of his warhorse “In the Mood” was followed by recordings of it made by other bands, including Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and even Duke Ellington. Were these remakes covers? One possible way to rule them out is to apply the principle that when there is either no expectation of or indifference about the intended audience's knowledge of the earlier recording, we do not have a cover but a mere remake.3 However, it would not be unusual for swing era consumers to have been aware of the primary version of the song when—for whatever reason—they chose a remake of it. (Think of choosing Pepsi over Coke.) So, a veil of ignorance and indifference cannot explain why the remakes of “In the Mood” were not covers. A better reason why these remakes are not covers is that they lack the semiotic dimensions of genuine covers, which Rings illustrates with the (presumed) cover by the Pet Shop Boys of the Elvis Presley recording of “Always on My Mind.” First, the Pet Shop Boys's cover alludes to the Elvis version. At first thought, it would seem ludicrous to describe swing era remakes as “alluding” to their originals. Allusion, however, is a challenging concept. What, exactly, is the difference between garden variety reference and allusion? A starting point would be that mere references—in a text, for instance—are not intended to be easily missed by competent readers. Allusions, on the other hand, place greater demands upon the reader—greater sensitivity, for instance, or even of imagination. But drawing a line here would be quite a project. In music, for instance, very different things termed “allusion” can make quite different kinds of demands on listeners. Catching the allusions to Polish folk music in Frédéric Chopin's works or to Johann Sebastian Bach's music in music by Alban Berg is one kind of thing. Catching the allusion in Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations to Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage requires little more than recognizing phrases from the Felix Mendelssohn piece when they turn up in the Elgar. So, does catching the allusion in the Pet Shop Boys's cover of the Elvis recording require anything beyond a listener's recognition in it of some basic features of the song that can be heard in the Elvis recording? But if allusion is no more challenging than this suggests, this question arises: given a typical swing era population of listeners, would various remakes of “In the Mood” not have alluded to the Miller recording? And, if so, were they not covers on Rings's account? We may be able to explain why they are not covers when we turn to a further point in Rings's exposition: a piece of music may allude to other music in bits and pieces but not throughout. Elgar's allusion to Mendelssohn does not run all through the Enigma Variations, for instance. To avoid including cases that are only transiently allusive, Rings appeals to Theodore Gracyk's concept of a saturated allusion, that is, an allusion made by a whole work and not just a passage in it.4 A listener to a recording functioning this way would treat all its aspects as connecting with the target recording “at parallel points in the performance.”5 If this is so, then a response to a saturated allusion depends on not merely noting musical similarities between the cover and the covered but in appreciating the role played by significant musical differences between the two. The importance of these differences is also evident when we turn to the second main feature of Rings's view, namely, that a cover connects with its target recording by resetting the song within another genre—in this case, transferring it from the category of “country pop” to that of “synth pop.”6 If Rings is right about his example, then something indeed is left to the listener who grasps the saturated, genre resetting allusiveness of the Pet Shop Boys's recording. So, remakes of recordings in the swing era are not covers since they lack the complex semiotic functionality that Rings describes. What, then, about a specific subcategory of recordings that thrived in that era, namely, musical parodies of the hits of the day by the likes of Spike Jones or Red Ingle? (Examples include “Cocktails for Two,” “Laura,” “Temptation,” and “Nature Boy.”) Like covers, as described by Rings, these recordings seem to have been about their originals in much the same way that Rings thinks covers are. If so, why are they not covers?7 Now maybe counterexamples from jazz and pre rock pop are, so to speak, cases that “prove” the rule—that is, cases that, given their exceptional nature, remind us of the generality that still holds. Sooner or later, though, we have to ask how Rings's theory fares when it is set alongside actual usage. Here are some recently collected samples: an NPR radio presenter recently termed certain AC/DC tribute performances “covers”; elsewhere, I heard the performances of a very good Elvis impersonator called “covers”; finally, when I was describing the swing era musicians’ habit of copying each other's hit record releases to a rock fan, he impatiently tried to finish my thought with, “Oh yes, covers.” If these examples count, then the concept of cover is in general usage applied pretty broadly when compared with the concept as Rings analyzes it. In search of less catholic results, I had a look at opinions on the Internet. However, what folks really wanted to weigh in on there seems to be the question of what makes a good cover. Opinions about that matter varied wildly, and none of them were any straightforward help about what it is to be a cover, good or bad.8 However, an assumption about the purely descriptive concept did seem to underlie all of them: a cover is a recording that we are invited to place in some kind of comparative evaluative relationship with an original recording of a given song. Does this get close to what it actually is to be a cover? Maybe so. I will not elaborate here in its defense. The result of such a theory, though, would be that almost any remake that we are invited to compare critically with an original would qualify as a cover—whether or not it is connected with a target recording in the manner Rings identifies. Perhaps, then, Rings's perspective provides an analysis not of covers in general but rather of a more specific concept, namely, saturatedly allusive, genre resetting covers. Whose usage reflects this concept? Presumably that of people who have learned to listen to certain recording remakes from within the perspective Rings details.9 But there is a more positive way to put the conclusion. Buried in the Internet opinions about good covers that I surveyed was one that seemed to have something going for it: a good cover should not “clone” the original but should provide a “twist” on it.10 Applied to Rings's theorizing, I suggest that what he provides of real importance is no mere analysis of a purely descriptive concept. What he has done is, rather, to identify a set of features that make some covers—in the broad descriptive sense of the term—especially interesting. He has told us about one main kind of feature that can make a cover a good cover. It should be added, however, that not just any twist on an original would work here. A specific twist could yield a bad cover of an original. Consider an offensive white parody of African American hip hop usage, for instance.11

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.