The Beatles covered Buddy Holly's Words of Love and Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven, while 3,000 entertainers covered the Beatles' song, Yesterday. Peter, Paul and Mary covered Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind and Soft Cell covered Gloria Jones' Tainted Love.
I uncover extended meanings in our lexicon with the fervor of a recovering undercover journalist covering cover-ups for a cover story and have discovered that in the popular-music world, another sense of cover, noun and verb, ranges over much of what we hear.
"A cover is an artist doing a version of another artist's original song," says Joe Levy, an editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
In olden times -- three generations ago -- the singer who first popularized the song was often resentful of a younger or more famous singer who revived it. For example, at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933, Ethel Waters became identified with Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's Stormy Weather and was not happy when the young Lena Horne revisited it in a movie with that title a decade later and seemed to make it her own.
SINGER-SONGWRITERS
Such discomfort largely ebbed in the 1960s, when artists began writing their own songs.
"Dylan and the Beatles inspired people to write and sing their own songs," Levy recalls. "Nobody expected Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra to write a good song. Cover came along in the early `60s with the singer-songwriter."
Most were pleased with other singers' cover versions -- recordings of their works, now clipped to covers. At the start, the covers were often bowdlerized; Georgia Gibbs [Her nibs, Miss Gibbs] changed Hank Ballard's Work With Me, Annie and Etta James's retort, The Wallflower, to Dance With Me, Henry.
Now a singer frequently covers a song twice removed from the writer, a technique Lena Horne pioneered. Dionne Warwick first recorded Wishin' and Hopin', but it was Dusty Springfield's subsequent cover version of the song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that became the big hit.
"Cover version still hasn't quite transcended its purloinious [is that a word?] roots," says Rob Hoerburger, a former music critic at Rolling Stone. [Rob, who has since risen to chief copy editor at the New York Times Magazine, has saved me from countless embarrassments, and you can blame him for any mistakes in today's column. And his "purloinious" coinage will not soon replace "larcenous."]
"Rock critics, who usually champion the writer's aesthetic, still use the term with mild derision, though I'm sure songwriters like Dylan and Carole King -- whose You've Got a Friend was a hit for James Taylor -- are only too happy to have the royalties that the cover versions have accrued for them," he said.
CRITIC
As artists reinterpret original works, they risk derision that is not always mild. A Michigan critic sent me this excerpt from his review: "He covers these songs in much the same way as a stud horse is said to `cover' a brood mare."
The singer Bono was described by Glenn Gamboa in Newsday as a "lover and fighter, gadfly and peacemaker, politician and preacher and, oh, yeah, front man for the best rock band around today."
One sense of front has a sinister connotation: A Communist front was a cover, in its nonmusical usage, for subversive activities. But as far back as 1936, American Speech quarterly defined front man as "the leader of the band." Today that term -- along with front woman -- means "main attraction of the group."
"Back in the `30s and `40s," writes a reader, John Strother, "it often had a pejorative connotation, such as when Bob Crosby `fronted' his band but had no involvement with the orchestrations, arrangements or musical operation of `his' orchestra. He may have waved a baton symbolically once in a while."
Others called front men were leaders in a personality sense, like Kay Kyser and Paul Whiteman.
Today, "the front man has to be a member of the band," said Sasha Frere-Jones, pop critic for the New Yorker. "Mick Jagger is the front man of the Rolling Stones." [That's the group, not the magazine; both have gathered no moss.]
"Some bands have had a compere, an Old World term for a `hype man,' onstage to exhort the crowd when the singer is out of breath, but that's not a front man. I can't imagine a front man who isn't the lead singer," she added.
(Compere, French for `godfather,' is used in Britain to mean `master of ceremonies.')
HOOK
"Listeners are treated to more than just Rowland on the hook of the song," writes Michael McGrath, 17, about Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child in the Houston Chronicle. "She is featured on the bridge, as well."
I turn again to Joe Levy of Rolling Stone to get hooked up to musicalingo: "The hook is the sweet spot, the easily remembered melody or rhythm figure. Beatles songs are packed with hooks. A hook is similar to a riff, which is instrumental, while a hook can be played or sung."
"It's the chorus of a rap song," said Serena Kim of Vibe magazine.
Back in 1982, the rock critic Lester Bangs defined the hook, which he first noted in a 1969 review of a Shocking Blue album, as "that one irresistible little melodic or rhythmic twist that'll keep you just coming back and back and back to buy and buy and buy."
It's frequently used in a sample, an interpolation of one bit of an artist's digitized recording into another's longer work. If you're a geezer trying to establish communication with a grandchild jiggling along to an iPod download, you might idly observe that sometimes a sample can be made into a hook.?
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS