When Andre 3000 appeared on Questlove’s podcast, the host noted that he was on a tour bus when he heard the album Aquemini for the first time. As soon as he heard “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” he knew that Outkast had conquered another musical genre, and that marching bands across the country would soon be playing the tune. He was right.
Outkast are a great hip-hop band, and they helped define a whole genre of Southern hip-hop, which survives and thrives today. But they also provided some of the great crossover pop songs of the past 30 years. One way of looking at success is how many musicians want to pay tribute to your canon. Covers, of course, and there are many of these for Atlanta’s finest, and the site has covered some of the greatest ones from Outkast here and here.Continue reading »
That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters have a solid claim to shaping rock ‘n’ roll music; their song “Work With Me Annie” was a number one R&B hit in 1954. The bawdy lyrics (“Annie, please don’t cheat / Give me all my meat”) led to the song being banned on many radio stations, and a disgusted Dick Clark refused to play it on American Bandstand. But the people who heard it loved it so much that when one DJ joked that there was a sequel called “Annie Had a Baby,” orders poured in for it. The Midnighters obliged with a by-the-numbers song with that title, which went on to sell a million copies and spawned more answer records – “Annie Get Your Yo-Yo,” “Annie Pulled a Humbug” (“That’s not MY kid!”), and “Annie Kicked the Bucket,” to name just a few.
But that was 1954. By 1958, the hits had dried up, and Federal Records dropped the group. Ballard began shopping for a new label, using as bait a demo of a song he wrote called “The Twist.” There are multiple stories for what inspired it – teenagers dancing in Tampa, the Midnighters goofing around onstage. Whatever the inspiration, it led to Ballard writing it up in 20 minutes.
Ballard knew “The Twist” was a potential smash hit. When King Records (Federal Records’ parent company) exercised their option to pick the Midnighters up, Ballard tried to convince Syd Nathan, King’s president, to put it out as the A-side of a single. But Nathan disagreed, and stuck it on the B-side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” — written, in an unbelievable coincidence, by Henry Glover, King’s vice president. “Teardrops” did well enough, but an undeterred Ballard pushed “The Twist” in concert, getting a positive response throughout the South.
“We were doing the Twist for approximately two years before it caught on,” Ballard would say later. When the Midnighters played in Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, some of the kids who attended took it to TV. The Buddy Deane Show, later immortalized in the John Waters movie Hairspray, was a local teen dance program which was at one time the most popular local show in the United States. Deane, blown away by the zeal the kids had for the song, got in touch with his rival Dick Clark. “They’re dancin’ and not even touchin’!” he said.
Clark, remembering Ballard’s risqué songs of the past, wasn’t interested, but a persistent Deane sent Clark a copy. Clark listened to it, liked what he heard, but still thought it too suggestive. He needed a more wholesome artist to put it across to the masses, and he knew just who to ask… Philadelphia’s own Danny and the Juniors. But when the band that brought us “At the Hop” didn’t come up with anything, Clark had another idea. Continue reading »
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Some songs have an adaptive trait that allows it to survive out in the musical wild. Trends come and go, stylistic sea changes surge and retreat, and tech revolutions rise and fall; they cause other great songs to fall to the wayside, while the truly classic song only gains luster as time goes by. For me, “Time After Time” is one of those songs.
I grumble every year at this time about the wrong artists getting into the Rock Hall of Fame. (What I really mean is that my favorite performer has once again been overlooked.) But this year I’m glad for Cyndi Lauper getting inducted. When you write and record a song like “Time After Time,” a song covered by Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, and over 400 other artists, you are richly deserving of the honor. (It should have happened in 2023, when Lauper was first nominated, but we’ll let that go.)
“Time After Time” (co-written with Rob Hyman) is just one of Lauper’s many achievements. In fact, the song is not even her best-seller–that’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Nor is it the song of hers I like best–that would be “All Through the Night.” But it’s “Time After Time” that looms largest in her catalog, and that’s because it has entered the American Songbook.
Now that’s a true honor. Sales figures and popularity polls don’t get you into the American Songbook. There’s no selection committee involved. A song like “Time After Time” becomes a standard only gradually, after thousands of musicians decide individually it’s a song they want to play. Jazz singers, folk artists, pop stars, rockers, even bluegrass banjo pickers have added the song to their set lists, and to their albums. Pros and semi-pros have played it at countless wedding parties, and amateurs have played it at countless more open mics and karaoke nights.
For a song that was recorded almost as an afterthought (the label insisted the album was one track short), “Time After Time” has done pretty well for itself. It was nominated for, but did not win, the Grammy award for Song of the Year. The winner that year was Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and that was almost certainly the right call in 1985. But in all the decades since, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” has been covered only 40 times, compared to over 400 covers of “Time After Time.” Songs move through the culture in mysterious ways.
Here are five adaptations of Lauper’s signature song (or one of her signature songs). Each one is worth a second listen as we ponder what makes “Time After Time” impervious to time itself. Continue reading »
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 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. Continue reading »
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. Continue reading »
