CSS, "Pretend We're Dead"

A disappointment, but only because it sets itself up to be one. Covering the L7 hit, they get it so right in the beginning, when they (intentionally, I presume) use the same keyboard sound found on Elastica's "Connection," and then on the bridge they conjure a legitimate dance breakdown before going back into a version of the hook that utterly transforms the hard rock into synth-pop. It's brilliant, highlighting the thread that connects dour 90s indie to shiny 00s indie, the same one that turned riot grrl, the genre from which "Pretend We're Dead" originates, into Le Tigre's synth-prop, coaxing the part of grunge that danced alone in its bedroom into the light. It's really smart, and genuinely revelatory.

But what follows the two parts I've highlighted above obliterates all those new meanings, because then the guitar comes in, and the guitarist has decided to use the exact same distortion sound you'll find in the original version of the song. It runs over the more delicate synth bits and drowns them out, making the cover into karaoke, where it can't help but fail. Where once it was a reinvention, now it's merely a gesture. "Look! The 90s!"

Call it the oppression of the original. You see this all the time: bands do a cover and feel the need to be faithful, but that's only useful when you're introducing people to the original, and that's not really why any bands except for famous ones do covers. Everyone else does a cover to draw people into your show by giving the audience something recognizable, and so, the thinking goes, if you don't play a cover exactly like it was originally, no one will recognize it, and so there's no point. Bands often approach playing covers as a technical exercise, and while that can be productive--you figure out how to make your instrument sound like the one does in the original, and maybe you've never made it sound like that before; maybe you can make it sound like that on some of your own songs--technical exercises aren't really much fun to listen to. More than anything else, though, bands cover songs they like, and they think that changing the song would be disrespectful; it's OK to do that to cheesy 80s songs, but not, you know, Jawbreaker or some shit.

If I could figure out why this attitude persists (and it absolutely does--check out any tribute album you care to, and a minimum of 75% of the entries will be "respectful"), I would do a full post about it, but I can't, so I just have a catchy name for it. RIP Baudrillaud and all, but if we're going to accept that we're in an age of reproduction, surely the original shouldn't continue to have this much power. The oppression of the original persists because our assumptions about artistic production and the purity thereof persist. And yet they're breaking down. Artists own their own creations and should have a say over their use, and yet when they say that they'd rather their albums not be downloaded for free, this is counter-revolutionary. We live in the midst of an embarassment of digital riches and instead of harvesting from what's around us, we deem that inauthentic and coo over the handmade, as if hands on a metal needle really differs from hands on a plastic mouse. The cover is the place where this is most apparent, but arguably the original's hegemony is what accounts for a lot of the problems we see right now. Time to go!

Labels: css, pop, theory, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 12:02 AM