Meet Postmodern Jukebox: Everyone’s favorite music collective. Known for taking pop and rock tunes and turning them into everything from ragtime to bebop to soul covers. Recently the pianist-spearheaded group has decided to recreate the mournful and apocalyptic feeling of the Soundgarden tune “Black Hole Sun.”
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Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
“It doesn’t sound that great when I’m singing it myself. Why don’t we make it a duet?”
According to Ken Caillat, producer of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, when Christine McVie said that to Lindsey Buckingham, it proved to be the key to making “Don’t Stop” the song it is today. With the two of them exchanging vocals, compressed so much they almost sounded alike, and McVie playing a jaunty tack piano, they make the song so uplifting you’d never know it was about the end of Christine’s relationship with bassist John McVie. The Guardian called it one of the band’s five best songs, saying that “its cantering rhythm and chorus are so impossibly, infectiously buoyant, the song so flawless, that it cancels out the unhappiness that provoked it.”
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Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
Madonna was back in the news recently, as her latest release Madame X got the music press dishing out the full “return to form” treatment. No surprise, really – that’s the de rigueur clarion call to anyone of her vintage releasing, well, almost anything. To be fair, it has its moments, but nothing can beat The Immaculate Collection, the collection of Madge’s early singles that charts her journey from odd-voiced popstrel to soft-porn audio-provocateur. Continue reading »
“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty years.
The idea behind this new series is that the random-number generator will pull up one random Billboard Hot 100 number-one from 1958 through 2018, the chart’s 60th birthday. For whatever reason, though, so far said generator is only delivering me either super old hits – my last was 1963’s regrettable “Hey Paula” – or very current – a late-period Britney Spears hit. And the trend continues today when we look at covers of one of the most recent hits out there, 2017’s #1 hit “Despacito.”
And not just one of the most recent hits, but one of the biggest. Ever. Last year, “Despacito” last year tied Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” for the most weeks atop the Hot 100 in history. This wasn’t just a number-one hit. This is objectively one of the biggest hits of all time.
So there must be a million covers, right? Not really. Despite being so massive, “Despacito” never caught that wave of semi-ironic indie rock covers that so many pop smashes do. Continue reading »
Scott Bradlee deserves a victory lap. For five years as the founder and leader of Postmodern Jukebox, he’s taken the hits of today and given them the vintage sounds of yesteryear, with the assistance of many very talented friends. His live-in-the-living-room rearrangements have earned him more than half a billion views on YouTube, all without major label support or corporate sponsorship. You would think that The Essentials, a collection of greatest hits, would be an ideal capper to this remarkable achievement.
But there’s still the sense that Bradlee has something to prove – he’s looking to place this album high on the Billboard charts as he takes PMJ on its North American tour this month. “No more talk of Postmodern Jukebox as a ‘YouTube act,’ or ‘online viral sensation,'” he says. “This is real, we’re here to stay, and we’re ready to change the music industry.”
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Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
“Paper Planes” was the penultimate track on M.I.A.’s second album Kala; it took thirteen months from the album’s release for the song to peak at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Guaranteed no other paper planes have flown so high and so far for so long. Riding a sample from “Straight to Hell” by the Clash (who are rightfully credited) and a chorus borrowed from “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect (who aren’t), the song had as great an impact on 2008 as the gunfire in its chorus. Critics fell over themselves praising the record’s sound, somehow both chaotic and serene, and its message, a sort of “Money (That’s What I Want)” gone global for the 21st century.
Now that the dust “Paper Planes” stirred up has settled back down again, let’s take a look at some of the covers it inspired…
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