Cover Meme

I've been tagged with the cover meme. The bad covers I have selected here are so cringingly horrible that I'm going to present them first.

To begin with, Marilyn Manson is a douchebag. He built his career on destroying wonderful songs by turning them into febrile little coals to warm his own ego and being the ugliest drag queen/self-injuring attention diva in the business. The bastard ruined one of my favorite songs, "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics.

Compounding the douchebaggery, Universal Music Group promoted this shit actively, and has disabled embedded. You can watch 50 unnecessary costume changes and a desperate plea for attention here instead.

Secondly, Coal Chamber. Now, Coal Chamber is not an intelligent band, nor are they talented. This was evident when they released a song simply entitled "Big Truck". It's about big trucks. But then they had to go and compound their inanity by recruiting one of the most annoying voices in rock and roll, Ozzy Osbourne, to ruin a perfectly good Peter Gabriel song, "Shock the Monkey".

This was entirely unnecessary and the world would be a happier place with it. This is a band that not only shouldn't have a comeback, but should have simply never been.

And now that we're done with bad covers and you've all cleaned the vomit off of the walls, let us turn to amazing covers that stun me with their brilliance.

First, a cover of Public Enemy's* "Black Steel in a Time of Chaos" (original here). This song, in its original context, was powerful enough. But then Tricky, originally a member of Massive Attack, covered it. Embedding has been disabled by request, so the video is here.

Secondly, I'm generally impressed when someone pulls off a cover from one instrumentation to another, completely different, instrument set. For example, if someone covered a Missy Elliott (e.g., Gossip Folks) song with a trombone and xylophone, I'd be impressed enough to listen. As such, I find this excellently done cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" by Rasputina to be epic beautiful.


*For any that don't know Public Enemy, they also did "Fight the Power" which you might probably know.