Excerpts from recent postcards:
> Why do people love for country or alt.country bands or so-called
alt.country bands to do covers of godawful cheesy rock songs? Why do people
respond to these
more than they do to the, OK, I'm going to say it, "real" songs?
>Two reasons I think.
1. If you do like the twang--then these covers arrive as an incongruous
SURPRISE. You get a response.
2. For those at these alt.country shows who DON'T actually like twang but
only the tiniest rock and roll allusions to it (and they're always afoot),
it gives them something they actually relate to.
>And bonus 3:
It is a passing peculiarity of the late 90s that it passes for ultrahip to
celebrate the most addlebrained and plain dull pop pablum of years gone by,
at the deliberate expense of what somebody's older brother with taste
liked....
Slonedog says: Or perhaps it's because the artists actually like the songs.
I for one love "Dancing Queen", "Jet" and "I Will Survive". They're not
"guilty pleasures", they're just fun songs. One of my favorite bands, the
late, lamented Jellyfish used to do a great cover of "Jet". And U2 has been
known to cover "Dancing Queen". By the way, speaking of covers, the Del
McCoury Band did a great cover of Tom Petty's "Love Is A Long Road" on
Sessions at West 54th. Cake's version of "I Will Survive" was lame though.
More excerpts:
> And watch this lil hipster wannabees: in 15 years someone will announce
that Son Volt, Nirvana, and say...Beck..were pretentious 90s shits, and
the embarrassing lunkheads of that time never saw the genius of Shania
Twain..<
Slonedog says: Nirvana were pretentious 90s shits but I guess they were
better than Shania.
