Song Reassignment Surgery: Bold Covers 3

Diamond Dogs (David Bowie), 1974: Beck (2001)

Vivienne Westwood does “diamond” dogs

Enter the name of any song on YouTube and you’ll likely find covers aplenty. Most will be pale recreations of the original source material. Even fewer will add anything new or insightful along the way. Instead, what you’ll find are fans playing songs they love: affectionate but, as an artistic endeavor, pointless.

The best covers will offer something new. They’ll add something to the song’s language, changing it’s tone and personality, even it’s face and body—hence the “reassignment surgery.” Doing it well is a tall order and that’s why the good ones are such a rarity. As I said here, a good cover will even make you hear the lyrics in a new way—adding more subtext to the original.

Some Cover Champions of Note: 

• Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah
• Janis Joplin, Me and Bobby Magee
• David Bowie, Wild Is the Wind
• Johnny Cash, Hurt
• Earth, Wind, and Fire, Got to Get You Into My Life
• Talking Heads, Take Me to the River
• Bryan Ferry, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
• Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower
• Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You, especially this, and just about anything else she’s done
• And this: two Dutch teens wring depths of emotion from Creep you never knew was there, while betraying the emotion with grinning faces

And Cover Losers: Mostly everyone and everything else.

Another add for the Champion List: This diamond from the Moulin Rouge! movie soundtrack.