The Thursday! Newsletter 2-20: Deliver Coolness
Volume 2, Issue 20
I'm not sure how to gracefully begin this week's newsletter, so let me be blunt.
Covers. We're doing them wrong.
You know covers? Someone makes a song and someone else makes their version of it? In the movie and television world we call it a reboot. In the book world we call it a homage. Sometimes a cover isn't a cover, but a remix (two covers all mashed together -- a mash-up!) or a pastiche or...you get the idea.
A couple of days go I heard a cover of the Beatles' song "Rain". It is one of my favorite songs, largely because of Ringo Starr's amazing drum work that carries the song from beginning to end. I once read that Ringo thought the song represented his best work. He'd never done better. The cover I heard was quite good (and, I found out, made for a children's show) -- solid vocals and harmonies with a steady, tight groove and even a little bit of added synth in the back ground to keep the whole thing from sounding too thin. As covers go, it was better than most I've heard .
But, no Ringo.
That got me thinking about the many, many covers and remakes and whatnot I've read and watched and heard over the years, most of which got little more than a shrug from me. You know what was missing in all of them?
Coolness.
Let me slide over to a cover I love, by a group whose music I've loved since I heard them for the first time. They're called Leonid & Friends and, mostly, they cover songs by the group Chicago. Now, the coolest thing about a Chicago song is, obviously, the horn section. Chicago's horns have a sound like none other, and L&F have, somehow, nailed that sound. Recently, they covered "You're the Inspiration", a song from one of their 80s albums that was long on ballads and very, very short on cool horn work. In fact, the original version of the song doesn't have any horns in it at all. What did L&F do?
They added horns. Cool horns. Chicago horns.
Oh, baby.
You know what makes a cover great? Coolness. The person doing the cover found something really cool in the original and tried to deliver that coolness in their own way. Without that coolness, a cover is just another "blah" song -- a kind-of, sort-of copy. I don't want to cast aspersions on everyone who hadn't made a good cover, but too many of them are simple, easy attempts by a band or (way more often) a record company to cash in on someone else's coolness without the work of delivering any coolness themselves. That is, from where I sit, where we get it wrong. We take the easy path of emulation without bringing out the things that makes the original work cool to us. We get inspired by art for a reason. It doesn't strike us out of thin air when we read a book or stand in a museum. We see something that calls to us, that plucks the secret strings of our heart, that whispers our name even when we're not looking. It's that little bass riff that makes us smile before we even think to and the turn of a line in a poem that leaves us breathless for just a half-second. That is coolness and if we're not bringing it out whenever we can, why are we even making our art?
Delivering coolness, though, takes more than just the ability to copy something in your own handwriting. It takes a chunk of you -- your heart or your "realness" or whatever you have that matters to you -- plus the thing you saw that you recognized as cool. I'm sorry if I'm not explaining that well. Let me try to show you what I mean in a poem.
One of my favorite poems is "i thank You God for most this amazing" by E. E. Cummings. The second stanza of the poem is stunning, mostly because of a single word that Cummings snatches from relative obscurity and drops into a description of God. It is simple and breathtaking and it inspired me to write a poem of my own featuring that word. That was the coolness I found and wanted to deliver. Though what I did isn't a cover by any stretch, it is a tribute and I tried very hard to borrow as much of the poem's style as I could without diluting my own. Here it is:
Illimitably
(for e e cummings)
Watch the poet conjure a word,
Pull heavy everything from nothing.
Only the right thing, the ever only
Thing that will fill the empty space.
Maybe the word existed before now
Probably, though, it does not
Or did not, and now it does
All at once, like it always had,
Illimitably.
See the coolness? I pulled it out and put a light on it. Sang it a song. Gave it three cheers in public so you could see just how cool it is. I didn't make a copy of his style or the poems cadence or even its subject matter. I delivered coolness.
You can, too. In fact, I will go so far as to say that no matter what else you do with your art, you should deliver coolness. That is your task. If you don't, who else will? Who else can do what you do in the way you do it? Who else will see the cool things of the world in the ways you see them and who else can translate them with your hands or your voice? Find the Ringo. Add the horns. Deliver coolness.
Short one this week. I hope that's okay! I did leave you with a couple extra little morsels to read in the next section, which I hope will make up for any shortcomings here. Cool? Cool.
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What I Wrote Last Week
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One Last Thing
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