David Salter

David first began writing professionally at 17 as a weekly columnist for the local newspaper and later wrote Academic Decathlon study guides for DemiDec Resources. After college, David became a political op-ed writer for GayWired, an online subsidiary of Regent Media (The Advocate, Unzipped), and later became its main sports writer after a weekly sports column experiment became an unlikely smash hit. David has appeared as a panelist for BBC Radio's Oscar coverage, most recently on the program Up All Night, and is a critic for World of Stage, a new L.A.-based theater resource site. David earned his BA in History at USC (where he now works full-time) and an MA in English (Shakespeare Studies) from King's College London. His pop music blog, Vertigo Shtick, launched in December 2009.

Single Servings: Paolo Nutini, “Rehab”

 Posted by at 3:30 pm  1 Response »
Nov 172010
 

Single Servings digs out a cover worth revisiting.

One of the downsides to a song that is legitimately great, particularly when part of its greatness is thematically tied to the singer and/or songwriter, is that you can all but guarantee a gazillion lesser artists are going to cover it without worrying for a moment about how appropriate the song is to their style. This is how we get “Lust for Life” played over cruise ship commercials and Britney Spears using words like “prerogative.” While this occasionally turns out amusing, it’s usually a problem. See, it’s one thing for every Tom, Dick and Harry to rush off to cover a great, if generic, song like “Umbrella,” and quite another for a supposed high school glee club to tackle something like Amy Winehouse‘s great ironic ode to contentious stubbornness and substance abuse rationalization, “Rehab.” Continue reading »

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