Song Reassignment Surgery; Bold Covers 7; An old Road gets new brick

 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John), 1973; Sara Bareilles (2013)

The brand of Sara Barielles is wringing out the kind soft rock pop you could imagine soundtracking the naps of sagging Millennials when their time comes. Her decorous mainstream-ness may be just the sort of nectar that was to attract the Grammy honeybees again and again – she’s been nominated eight times, won once; plus two Tony nominations. As a performer, her experience in theater (she wrote the hit musicals Waitress and SpongeBob SquarePants) and television must surely inform her seasoned and proficient performing skills. That musical theater wanders through the corridors of her voice comes as no surprise. VH1 gave her the 80th spot of their Top 100 Greatest Women in Music (2012).

What might not be expected from such institutional bonafides is an interpreter prepared to scorch the earth of the original and rebuild. Traditionally, Elton John’s work eludes easy covering – as if the maestro embedded his tunes with an unhackable code – his songs were always best left to the maestro himself. But Bareilles offers Road a significant repaving. Within a woman’s voice, the naïve protagonist’s first encountering the hard law of the jungle lofts the song’s purpose way beyond what was previously expected of the melody and chords. She births an entirely new character.

And all of this she does from her occupation in the middle-of-the-road. I’ve heard other work of hers and, based on her approach of her career’s deep cuts, this jewel is a ear-poking surprise.

Credit where it’s due.

Song Reassignment Surgery; Bold Covers 6

Rape Me (Nirvana), 1993: Tanya Tagaq (2016)

...voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead, they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth. 

Sam Cooke

Measure Tagaq as a truth genius. 

Listen to her TedTalk performance (below). Note the dervish intensity and human-to-animal sound spectrum ratio. If you can absorb her assault without your eyes guttering with tears, then your heart’s far sludgier than mine. Next, go to her version of Rape Me. 

Nirvana’s version – with Cobain’s lamentation on fame and as a victim of the zeitgeist – was the thesis; Tagaq writes the dissertation. 

In Tagaq’s mouth, Rape Me describes suffering

that’s less existential and far more literal: her whispers channel the agonies of ancestral generations and tortured contemporaries. And her whispers don’t just speak for the indigenous – as tragic and well-documented as their struggle has been – but for all women. Hear the heartbeat and the quiet restraint that imagines a victim’s solitude, soaked in toxic memories. Add to that whatever other tinglings you may get: patriarchy, parentage, class, duty, fear, etc. But there’s much more than rage at work here. Her registers, her guttural modulations, her sweetness and rage, the emotionality – her voice may be the chaotic psyche’s ultimate delivery system .

Tagaq says she didn’t begin throat singing herself until college. Though her indigenous culture had no history of throat singing, she’d re-engineer it to such a scale, it sounded like it was. And her record collection must be eclectic and edgy. Her approach ranges from uninhibited to feral. She’d first be introduced to a broader audience by another fellow warrior and vocal innovator, Björk. Tagaq would follow similar paths as her mentor’s but in an entirely different way. Both are aggressively elusive and hard reduce to something as simple as a category. Both sing with an intensity and commitment that is truly rare.

In the first video, see Björk and Tagaq join another aggressively elusive singer –
Mike Patton. 

In her TedTalk, Tagaq only sings. Her voice arrives from another plane entirely. Her throat astrally projects the spectrum of human emotional experience. Like a shaman from another dimension, she drops into a trance, channels voices, personalities, shadows, light, and other species. This is the kind of ecstatic performance Pentecostals dream of hacking but get nowhere near. She collects the essences of Yoko Ono, Shirley Temple, Diamanda Galas, Meredith Monk, Nina Hagen, the B-52s, throat and overtone singers, Asian traditions, Ornette Coleman's saxophone, animal and outer space noises. Her vocal palette, the colors and sounds at her disposal, are expansive enough to be seen from space. 

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.