I have used this track (from 22 seconds onwards) as my walk-on music for my show for the last 17 years:
This is more a sampling than a cover, but a weird story.
Therapy? is a band Iâve known about, but never listened to. However, they were subject of a video by one of my favorite music YouTubers Trash Theory. He primarily does retrospectives of careers of artists that had influence on bands that followed them. In the early 90s Therapy? had a giant hit called Screamager which featured the lyrics âScrew that, forget about that, I donât wanna know about anything like thatâ and despite literally never having listened to that song before, I swore I knew those lyrics. At first I thought that one of the bands I like had covered it but it bothered me and I needed to look it up where I knew those lyrics from.
MC Lars is an artist that Iâve been following since I got into Nerdcore Hip Hop in college almost 20 years ago. One thing he does is write hip-hop songs that retell classic works of literature. And his song âHey There Ophelia!â is a retelling of Shakespeareâs Hamlet which samples Screamager and uses those lyrics as its chorus.
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It may not be better but is my favorite version.
Iâve been digging through YT lately. Itâs actually a little ridiculous that over a year, this blackened, doomy Rebel Yell cover only has 208 views:
(OK, looking, thereâs a mirrored upload of this on a promotional channel with a whopping 2300 views - since 2021.)
So, it happened again.
Iâve recently been watching episodes of âOne-Hit Wonderlandâ, a series by Todd in the Shadows about one-hit wonders and what else happened in their careers and some of those stories are quite interesting. I watched most of the series before but now I am catching up on episodes I left out because I didnât know the song or for some other reason.
One of those episodes is on the 1995 song âI wishâ by rapper Skee-Lo. I am certain I have never heard that song before but I could swear I knew the chorus from somewhere. The song also struck me particularly as sounding ânerdcoreâ, considering the lyrics are about being not cool and not typical for a gangster rapper. Initially I thought that Nerdcore rapper Beefy had used a sample of the song somehwere and maybe thatâs where I knew it from.
No, it was MC Lars again. This morning I realized that the reason I knew the chorus was because MC Lars used an identical rhyme structure and the motif of âI wishâ on his 2008 song âWhite Kids arenât Hyphyâ about the hip-hop culture in San Francisco at that time and how he doesnât quite fit into it.
So again, not I direct cover, but itâs now twice in a span of a year that I rediscover the bases MC Lars takes to craft his songs from.
This remains one of my favorite covers of Jolene
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I was reminded this thread exists just in time for this fresh drop. I donât know if their Brooklyn show was used in this vid but can confirm it had this energy:
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This was really good and well performed.
Unfortunately it kind of misses one critical point that made the original We didnât Start the Fire such an impressive lyrical exercise: All the events referred to in it are in chronological order.
This is somewhat disappointing for a parody that is also about historical events (rather than most other parodies of the song that are rote lists of semi-related stuff, e.g. names of wrestlers), but I guess it would be rather difficult to hammer other lyrics into the same form and achieve the same outcome.
To be fair though, I guess most people wouldnât catch it as the middle ages arenât particularly well known these days, and I myself only caught it by paying close attention and had to look up a lot of references myself afterward. However, it is funny when a line like âGrunwald, Manzikertâ covers events that are 340 years apart and is going backwards in time.
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Is there a song you like more than any version of it? Mine is Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. The Shirelles version is obviously a classic but itâs still very much a pop song, not the ballad approach that makes the song truly shine like in Carole Kingâs version, but Kingâs version also doesnât have the orchestral excesses of Phil Spectorâs production, which I do really like for this song. My favorite version for a long time was the one by Bruce Springsteenâs short lived in 1971 band Dr Zoom and the Sonic Boom, a 10 minute torch song of a jam, primarily because it takes a descending bass line that is played in the background on cello in the Shirelles version and makes it a main facet of the song, but the noodling on saxophone and poor sound quality prevent it from being an actual classic. This is frustrating because the way that descending bass line breaks the rhythm of the song in this version gives the refrain room to breathe in a way that makes the titular question more potent, as if the moment of passion is broken for a moment, making room for the narrator to ask the love interest if theyâll still love them tomorrow, and now that Iâve heard it any version that doesnât emphasize that little riff is underwhelming. Iâve been settling for the Dusty Springfield version, which does a good job of incorporating orchestral excesses into a ballad approach for the song and uses a drum fill to provide some of the space that descending bass line provides, but it breaks my heart that Tammy Wynnette didnât record the song while she was working with Billy Sherrill because those two couldâve made the definitive version of it that I can hear in my head but cannot find recorded by any of the plethora of artists who have recorded it.
If youâve ever had a similar frustration with loving a song but not loving any version of it, Iâd love to commiserate.
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