We hear them all the time. Sitting in a local coffee shop, strolling through Wal-mart, flipping through channels on the radio, in the office building, from tiny stages with shoddy equipment, at free concerts, between hip-hop verses, in operatic esteem at your mother's house, drumming into your brain over and over and over again the monotony of the one-hit, timelessly reproduceable and forever subpar Cover Song.
When bands cover songs, I guess they do them for one of three reasons:
First, and likely most common, the players are still learning the craft of their instruments and need something familiar to rehearse with.
Second, the players have not come up with enough original ideas to deviate from their rehearsal songs,
and
Third, the musician actually believes that his or her rendition of the song is better than the original version.
Surely there's more reasons than this, but I'm not here to do an anthropological study of Cover Songs. I'm not here to analyze the limitations that cover songs slather upon their musicians. I don't with to disclose any opinions about the matter either, about how independently reproducing a cover song or sample in order to make one's own sum of money from the original idea is a rook and rob and disrespect to the creator and what they deserve. I don't want to tell you how an industry of entertainment (cover songs/cover films/ cover shows/cover of cover of covers) is spinning itself into a whirlpool of banal, waxless candle wicks. I don't believe it's necessary to point out that 5 Harry Potter films is 4 unnecessary Harry Potter Films, or that an entire hip-hop generation is grounded in samples of songs that existed as classics before many of the creators, were even born, or that Brave New World and 1984 will never be read by future generations because there are too many slightly-more-relevant-but-exactly-the-same storylines littering the shelves of bookstore and movie theaters.
I don't want to do any hating on who I believe to be the true Haters: the copiers. Or better yet, the thieves. These dark robin hoods who have stolen something that once was beautiful and successful and copied and pasted it into a mish-mash, modernized, slapped-together mess.. a sculpture built from cheap ice cream. With new labels but unoriginal ideas, these candy-coated ideas will melt so quickly and everybody involved who only have a taste for sweet will fail early, while the rest of us continue to remember the truths of the past and build longevity and not suffer under the temporary sugars of an evaporating dreams.
But we all copy..don't we? yes. Every day we copy. Since we were babies. But as children we also learn that no two circumstances are exactly the same, no matter what science likes to tell us. No two people will have the same interests, no twins ever match. As children we learn to copy with grace, we steal words and attempt to use them when the circumstances are fit. Often we'll fail and have our hands slapped. As children we steal movements and show our friends..and eventually incorporate them into everyday life or toss them from our repertoires entirely. As children, we learn what others Love or find Beautiful and why, and wonder at what Love and Beauty is or if it even exists. We copy, as children. And the routine begins to get very complex...so that by the time we are young adults every impulse and action, stir of our legs is the culmination of billions of little reflexes of mimicry from times past. Our original intentions are lost in the myst of living, the first time you sipped alcohol, the first time you kissed your lover, the first time you heard a song that made tears come to your eyes and why that is. We lose sight of what we copied, and why it was ever important, and with integrated efficiency all those mimicked movements and subtleties have slopped together into the organic soup of a human soul - and we live through that soul's eyes every day of our lives.
But as children, we stole every one of those impulses from a place of total curiosity. We looked up to our elders as teachers, we looked to society as teachers, we looked to the television and the radio and the movie screens and the actors and the authors and friends and parents all as teachers, and we learned and tried and failed and got hurt, and got back up and tried again until we were tired.
Human entertainment, something I LOVE the idea of so much, is stuck in its tweens. It's copying and pasting ideas permanently, because the creators are so fickle and disorganized. There's little originality to look to for inspiration except the ideas of the generations past. Creators today have dwindled in their abilities to create New things, and instead only rehash old ideas again and again. It's like 35-year-old surfer who still dresses in baggy clothes and tilted hats - so heavily invested in good times of his specific youth that he forgot to look in the mirror and see who he was becoming all these years.
Social entertainment needs to look in the biggestest, brilliantest, most silverist Mirror of all Time. We're not 16 anymore, and we can't keep neglecting our run-down car or it'll finally burst its head gasket.
If there's anything new for us to make, let's look for it.
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