Covers Are Usually a Mistake

The original sits in your head exactly where it belongs, and the new version has to fight for space in the same room. Usually it loses. Mark Ronson understood this and did it anyway—took Oh My God from Kaiser Chiefs, handed it to Lily Allen, and made something that sounds entirely like itself.

The Kaiser Chiefs’ version is all jagged nerves and British post-punk velocity. Allen’s take slows down, goes sideways, lands somewhere between casual and cutting. Ronson’s arrangement does what his best work does: expensive underneath, the vocalist cheap and precise on top. It works because she doesn’t try to match the urgency of the original—she sounds like she’s telling you something she already knew.

His 2007 album Version was built entirely on this logic. All covers, all transformed. You could argue about whether transformation equals interpretation, or whether it’s just production wearing the costume of taste. I’d probably argue both, depending on the hour.

The same week I found a track from VHS or Beta floating around—Louisville electronic rock, colder and stranger, the kind of band that sounds like it was named by someone who spent too much time in video rental stores at midnight. Some weeks you discover things sideways, through a link buried at the bottom of a post about something else entirely. The track does its work. You don’t question where it came from.