various and sundry covers

[cheyinka]

So dive and I were listening to Radiohead - Street Spirit (Fade Out)^[1], and (as one does) I looked it up on Wikipedia, only to learn that Peter Gabriel had covered^[2] it.

It was spectacularly terrible. So, of course, I looked up said cover on Wikipedia, only to learn that Peter Gabriel had also covered David Bowie - Heroes^[3]!

Naturally, we listened to that cover^[4], too... and discovered that while Youtube is a marvelous resource for finding music quickly, it is also a marvelous resource for finding ghastly horrors...

[23:27] <cheyinka> oh, wow. I have just heard a song so terrible that I was *literally* rolling on the floor laughing.
[23:28] <cheyinka> I'm not even using "literally" as emphasis; I really truly honestly was lying on the floor laughing and rolling from side to side with how hard I was laughing
[23:47] <azurelunatic> cheyinka, what song?
[23:47] <cheyinka> David Bowie's "Heroes"
[23:47] <cheyinka> do not, I implore you, listen to Peter Gabriel's cover
[23:47] * azurelunatic makes a note of this
[23:47] <dive> unless you want to contemplate suicide, listen to the woman
[23:47] <cheyinka> the original's great! the cover is soul-piercingly ghastly
[23:48] <dive> i seriously asked her to go load a gun for me
[23:48] <dive> :p
[23:48] <jeshyr> Is this the "heroes live forever" one?
[23:48] <dive> spoken word and david bowie covers.... just do not mix.
[23:49] <cheyinka> jeshyr: it's the one that runs "We can be heroes, just for one day"
[23:49] <azurelunatic> Oh, that's David Bowie?
[23:49] <dive> cheyinka: in the covers you can actually understand, yes, it says that :p
[23:49] <dive> yea
[23:49] * azurelunatic did not know that
[23:49] <dive> old bowie, new cover by people who should be slapped
[23:50] <cheyinka> dive: in the covers one can actually tolerate for more than fifteen seconds of horrified laughter, you mean
[23:50] <dive> i'm all for freedom of expression but if you fail up one of my favorite songs like that i want to slap you
[23:50] * azurelunatic suggests a post to http://tinyurl.com/earwormhole
[23:51] <dive> cheyinka: i think people that have just abruptly lost their mind laugh a lot too sometimes

[1] Radiohead - Street Spirit (Fade Out)
[2] Peter Gabriel - Street Spirit (strongly nonrecommended)
[3] David Bowie - Heroes
[4] Peter Gabriel - Heroes (I cannot too strongly unrecommend this)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

*makes a note to do some recreational listening when on the other computer*

[kareila]

Peter Gabriel just released an entire CD of covers including the two you mentioned here. They are all pretty much in the same vein. Normally I love everything PG does, but these are... well, they serve to recommend the originals, I suppose would be a charitable way to put it?

I have heard good covers of Heroes - the one by the Wallflowers comes to mind.

[cheyinka]

I agree, that cover's not bad, and neither is the Oasis cover - they're both recognizable as the original song and as coming from the bands who made them. So it's not that the song is uncoverable, it's just that the two covers I heard last night were.... what they were. :D