Finding the Rhythm

When cover songs fail

July 6, 2007 at 7:29 pm 1 comment

One of the things I enjoy about the dance music genre is that it doesn’t seem to take itself all that seriously. Look no farther than the cover of Pure Imagination, essentially a jazz standard style of song from the original Willy Wonka movie that was covered by DJ Ford out of Atlanta in 2006. Not only does it demonstrate that you can turn about any song into a dance cut, it shows that it actually can be done with some level of finesse.

I was simultaneously excited and disappointed, however, when I received a promo of a cover of the old Dolly Parton song 9 to 5 as sung by Sally Jacks, and produced by New Emotion (in the UK), credited instead to Fabulous DJs in the USA. The original version was released to coincide with the movie 9 to 5 in which Parton starred, in case you’re unaware, and was a hit single at the time, and somewhat typical, I suppose, of pop songs from the era.

The New Emotion/Sally Jacks cover is faithful to the original—and in my view, is excessively so. Jacks doesn’t break any new ground, opting instead to emulate Parton end-to-end. And the arrangement and production offer little other than tacking a dance beat on to a synthetic redux of the original.

It’s pretty widely understood that many dance covers start life as a MIDI file of the original song. These things float pretty freely around the Internet, as they did on BBSs before that. Who creates them is anyone’s guess; I suppose there are some folks who have nothing better to do that sit down with a GM interface and a keyboard and replicate arrangements.

But what separates the wheat from the chaff in this area is just how much chopping you do, and to what extent you do instrument and patch remapping (as well as how well you do it). On one extreme, you end-up with Ford’s Pure Imagination, which is inventive, fresh and interesting. And on the other extreme, you end-up with New Emotion/Sally Jacks, which is so familiar as to be boring and tiresome after just a few plays. It’s really the difference between something that’s substantive, and something that’s possessive of little more than novelty value.

Cover songs are tricky, no doubt. You do, in fact, have to be loyal enough to the original to engage the listener. But you can’t simply run a beat under the same old, same old and expect successful results. It doesn’t work, and your audience will start yawning the second time they hear it.

With 9 to 5, that’s sort of unfortunate. Despite the fact that the original is pop pap in the extreme, in the hands of the right producer, the outcome could have been so much more.

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