I mustasaida
A note for note rehashing of a song is pretty much never interesting (see Great White's version of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" from Unplugged). Of course, that doesn't mean that a cover where the artist makes the song his/her own is a wonderful thing either. Sometimes it is like when Jane's Addiction did "Sympathy" or when Voi Vod did "Astronomy Domine," but other times it's a disaster. In the late 60s, Elvis covered the Beatles' "Yesterday." Now, I didn't have high hopes for this one anyway, but I also didn't expect it to devolve into something so pathetic it was comical. About 1:20 into his version, where Paul McCartney sang, "I said, 'Something wrong?' Now I long for yesterday," Elvis puts his indelible stamp on it by singing, "I mustasaida..." I mustasaida?!?!? What is that? What was he thinking? Linda suggested it was the bacon fat or the painkillers. Probably. I didn't even keep listening. I just rewound back and listened to that couple of seconds over and over...and over. Laughed like there was no tomorrow. I made an MP3 of those few seconds over and over for several minutes. I use it to bug my wife. I laugh some more. At that point, "Yesterday" was undeniably Elvis', but that certainly wasn't a good thing.
posted by bob_vinyl at 12:38 AM
1 Comments:
I just heard the worst cover of all time the other day. It was Fiona Apple's version of the Beatles' "Across the Universe". I think it's actually a recording of her being slowly tortured by ennui. (OK - that sentence is wirten pretty poorly, but you get the idea.) Not only did she sound like she'd rather be somewhere else, rearranging her sock drawer or something, she sounded pained. If you're going to cover a song, at least put a little effort and thought into it.
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