Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives

The 30 Best Cher Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 10:00 am 1 Response »

Oct 182024

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2024 was announced, we polled our Patreon supporters and asked, Who should get the big Best Covers Ever countdown treatment: Foreigner, Tribe, Frampton, Kool (with Gang), Mary J., Cher, Dave (with Band), or Ozzy? And the winner… well, you can probably guess from the photo an inch above this paragraph. Cher!

(We also did different covers features on the other seven though—find them all here.)

There’s big, there’s Big, and then there’s Cher Big. At the time of her ‘70s run of smashes—already a decade after she first scored all-time-classic hits with Sonny & Cher—she was the female solo artist with the most number-one singles in US history. She is currently is the only solo artist to have a number-one single on a Billboard chart in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. Her most-covered song, “Believe,” came out a full 33 years into her professional career. That’s one hell of a run. What other pop star has released their biggest song in their 50s?

So today, we’re celebrating Cher with covers of all her hits, both with and without Sonny, and a few deep cuts. Though, let’s be honest, Cher is a hits machine, and not many artists cover her deep cuts. We easily could have done this whole 30-song list with just “Believe” covers (and, even paring them down, there’s still plenty of life after love here). Welcome to the Rock Hall, Cher!

In the Spotlight: Mary J. Blige

Posted by Hope Silverman at 4:00 pm No Responses »

Oct 172024

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Marrying the old school (Aretha, Chaka, Gladys and the soul of the ’80s, Anita Baker in particular) with the new school (hip hop), Mary J. Blige’s debut album, 1992’s What’s The 411, and her stone cold classic sophomore LP, 1994’s My Life, changed the sonic game in soul and pop forever. I was working in an HMV store in NYC when 411 was released, and I can tell you that the fever and excitement about the album back then was palpable as f*ck. Mary was from Yonkers. She grew up listening to the same radio stations as us all of us Gen X squirts at the store. She was tough, gorgeous, cool and vulnerable at the same time. It quickly got to the point where you didn’t even have to refer to her by her surname. When a customer came into the store and asked for the “new Mary album,” we all knew who they meant.

It’s hard to accurately express just what a big deal she was in the early ’90s and just how impactful her sound was and continues to be in the R&B and hip-hop universe. Mary’s magnificent, raw, coloring-over-the-edges, steamrolling voice has an air of believability and lived experience. Mary doesn’t pretend when she sings. She has been open and brutally honest about her childhood trauma, depression and substance abuse issues in multitudes of interviews. It’s all realness, all the time.

Like so many before her, Mary’s career was set into motion by singing a cover song. But her discovery story was gloriously human (a mall was involved) and completely fantastical ( “listen to my stepdaughter singing this song”). In 1988, she’d gone to the Galleria Mall in White Plains, NY and stepped into one of the fun-sized recording kiosks they had where you could tape yourself singing a popular song. The tune she chose was the then premier quiet storm queen Anita Baker’s “Caught Up In The Rapture.” She played the tape she’d recorded for her stepdad, who was so blown away he passed it to a friend he knew in the music biz. This seemingly whimsical moment at the mall resulted in her getting signed, for real, to Uptown Records. Years later she performed the song that launched her career with Baker herself, and couldn’t help but let the tears flow and remind everyone just how she got there (see here).

Here are a few of her finest covers from after she was discovered, not before.
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In the Spotlight: Peter Frampton

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:00 am 1 Response »

Oct 172024

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Peter Frampton has been everyone and everywhere at once, with that bloody thing in his mouth. He’s also been anonymous and relatively unknown. Neither pendulum peak has stopped this Brit having a career that’s lasted 50 years and counting. Me, I would say a (belated) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a spotlight well worth acknowledging, in anyone’s book and by anyone’s reckoning. So, let’s have a look at that career.
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Five Good Covers: “Crazy Train” (Ozzy Osbourne)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 1:30 pm 1 Response »

Oct 162024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

It’s hard to remember where 1980 Ozzy Osbourne was (even if you’re not Ozzy Osbourne). When he released his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, expectations could not have been much lower. His last few albums with Black Sabbath saw him flabby and uninspired, vocally and otherwise. He was drinking and drugging at a literally unbelievable rate (the discovery that he’s a genetic mutant was still years away), and Black Sabbath had just cause to fire him. But he still knew how to put together a band. And when he found a five-foot-seven, 105-pound genius of a guitarist in Randy Rhoads, he assured that his own star would shine for a few decades more.

“Crazy Train” features not one but two hall of fame riffs from Rhoads, and Osbourne singing lyrics that could have made him sound like a hippie in another context (“Maybe it’s not too late / To learn how to love and forget how to hate”). But ohhhhh, that context! Bob Daisley, who played bass and claims lyrical credit, said, “As a child, I remember the feeling of fear. I knew Ozzy would like that [concept] because he felt like that, too, having been through it himself. He was kind of frightened about the threat of World War III and how we, as young people, had inherited these troubles, influenced by the threat of nuclear holocaust throughout our lives.” Years later, Ozzy would elaborate: “To me the ultimate sin is nuclear weapons. This is the ultimate sin. I don’t know about Ozzy Osbourne being crazy. Don’t you think these lunatics are crazier, building these bombs to blow us all [up]?”
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In the Spotlight: Foreigner

Posted by Sara Stoudt at 10:00 am No Responses »

Oct 162024

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Summer 2023 saw the kick-off of Foreigner’s farewell tour, and it rolls on through the end of this year, with a bonus few summer 2025 shows on the books. The performers are not the original members, and Mick Jones, the only original member still involved with the band, is no longer able to perform on this tour due to his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, but the songs are still the ones we know and love.

Foreigner is one of the great bands of the arena rock era where everything was just big and in your face. If you think you don’t know any Foreigner songs, my guess is that by the end of this post you’ll have said “oh, I know that one” at least once. Their hits are myriad and ubiquitous, so much so that I couldn’t just pick a few to highlight in this post. In honor of the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, we present covers of the setlist of this farewell tour. This way we get to reminisce about hits across multiple albums and hear a fuller span of the band’s work.

These won’t be the only Foreigner covers to cross your path in the near future. During the induction ceremony itself, we’ll hear plenty more. The band is in luck getting Kelly Clarkson to be part of their induction. Clarkson is a whiz with covers and is sure to give us some new takes on the hits that will keep Foreigner in our heads in the weeks following the ceremony.

So without further ado, bring on the hits!

Cover Classics: Two A Tribe Called Quest Tributes

Posted by Ray Padgett at 3:00 pm No Responses »

Oct 152024

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

Not many people have covered A Tribe Called Quest. That’s not entirely surprising. You see that a lot in hip-hop—a genre where the coin of the realm is the remixes and sample more than the cover—and especially so in lyrically and musically dense acts like Tribe, without big crossover hits and giant pop hooks. The Tribe entries in the various cover-song database look pretty barren.

But the few artists that do cover Tribe go deep. There have been two full-length Tribe tribute albums, and both are excellent. True to the sampling spirit of the original group, they take the source material as fodder to build on, veering far afield from the originals in some cases. Continue reading »