Tag Archives: Remix Culture

Cee Lo Green, who covered the song "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses.

Recently, Cracked’s Robert Brockway wrote an article discussing cover songs that stole the show from the original. He concedes at the get-go that it’s a mission where the “rules are subjective and everybody hates each other by the time it’s over,” but the exercise is still a worthwhile one. As he describes it:

“The point is to think of a cover song that just completely stole the show from the original artist, not necessarily because of its quality, or arrangement, or performance, but because the cover has an intangible something that more fully embodies what the song should have been.”

There’s something I have always appreciated about cover songs. I grew up in a time where remixes were slowly becoming the well-populated domain of DIY DJ’s, and the internet featured a wealth of music and lyric repositories that made it easier than ever for people to put their own spin on a favorite song. The spirit of the aughts was to not only take the old and make it new again, but to make it personal.

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