Why Cover Music?

A lot of life and living is about fear. A significant part of this is the fear of death, the ultimate undisputable. A significant portion of human activity is a rebellion against death. Propagating the bloodline is ensuring that a part of you lives on. Art is often the only achievable means of immortality for a lot of us. Wanting to leave your stamp on this Life, then, is a fairly natural concern. Some of us choose to do that by creating. Some of us choose to do it by recreating. How different, then, is covering an older song from having children?

Money for Nothing

In popular music, a cover version, is a new performance by someone other than the original performer of the song. As a concept, remaking exists in almost all other primary forms of entertainment we receive. Films are often remade. A remake tells the same story as the original but uses a different cast and maybe even a different theme or setting. A re-imagining is when they stray past the boundaries of familiarity. TV series are “rebooted” but rarely remade1. Books are never remade or “covered” in that sense though fan fiction is arguably an exercise in remaking. Video games are often “remastered,” updated to reflect improvements to hardware.

The origins of covering music are, of course, tied to money2. Record companies released a “cover” of a commercially successful tune to cash in on its success. However, as public taste moved from specific songs to specific artists, the average customer started asking for different versions of tunes.

SAD-FACED WOMAN: Do you have the Soggy Bottom Boys performing ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’?

CLERK: No, ma’am, we had a new shipment in yesterday but we just can’t keep it on the shelves.

Covers were the record companies trying to appeal to a newer demographic. So, you had a lot of white artists “covering” songs by black artists without proper compensation or acknowledgment. Singer-songwriter Don McLean called the cover version a “racist tool”3. So, in some ways, the cover version exists because it made it easier for people to accept the rapid pace of societal change.

It isn’t just new artists who cover old songs. Weezer scored a hit recently with their version of “Africa” by Toto4. Trading on nostalgia to score an easy hit works. Streaming undoubtedly makes it more attractive to release covers of existing songs because it is so much easier to discover a cover than a brand new song. Thanks to the way streaming music pays artists, the Virgin single track is set to be more important than the Chad album5.

Prince’s cover of Radiohead’s Creep, simply by virtue of not existing on YouTube, has attained mythic status. Imagine if that ever got out?

What is It Good for?

Attempting to define what makes a good cover brings us back to a subjective lens. From being viewed as an economic necessity to being looked down upon as “inauthentic”, covers are back to being viewed as a market need. Sampling and remixes have taken some of the space occupied by covers thanks to copyright laws. The creation of YouTube has led to a glut of amateur covers while prestige television is peppered with professional covers6.

Covers present a window into myriad worlds when they traverse genres and eras. If you’ve played Bioshock Infinite, you might be familiar with the alt-universe music used in it7. Covers can also reveal something new about the originals just by virtue of a new performer’s perspective. It is hard for us to believe that the songs we heard performed by our heroes could be performed by other artists and sometimes they were originally performed by other artists.

Covers keep the conversation going, between the past and the present. The ubiquity of social media and reality TV has answered some of these questions for us. Modern artists, themselves, are more important than their creations and the economic unit being sold is the “personality” and not the content. You could argue that has always been the case but the success of an “Old Town Road” is considerably linked to the networks distributing the music. Covers reflect taste and they also reflect what audience you might wish to connect to8. Like Miley Cyrus covering “Jolene” to establish credentials or Harry Styles “covering” Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty’s “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” along with Stevie Nicks herself.

“Well, I’ve been afraid of changin’ / ‘Cause I’ve built my life around you / But time makes you bolder”

The Chain

Saying that a cover is not good just because it came after the original is pointless. Just because something is old doesn’t make it good. Countless things considered “good” are discarded or despised now. As society changes, the definition of what it finds acceptable also changes and new covers allow for reclamation of art9.

The other important thing to note here is that originality’s current prestige might be a function of abundance. Originality or authenticity is a laughable concern because they are extremely hard to pin down and because reproduction, literally and metaphorically, is so close to everything we do. There is legitimate pleasure to be gained from listening to a reinterpretation of a song by an artist I like or discovering a new voice singing old words or hearing an old voice singing new words10. There is nothing wrong with using the Trojan Horse of familiarity to find your way past the fear that constrains audience.

All thanks to a viral TikTok, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” forty-four years after its release, entered the Billboard Top 10 streaming songs chart last year. And that’s what covers can do: share the promise of immortality. The old lending substance to the young, the young lending life to the old, disregarding last rites performed decades prior.



  1. Are TV series ever remade? Battlestar Galactica is technically a remake. There are several attempts at cloning British shows for American viewers. This process is often disastrous leading to a long list of aberrations such as Utopia. The Office is a rare example that lived way longer than the original iteration. Now that film-making resembles an ouroboros, I imagine TV show being remakes becoming more commonplace. Standup comedy specials are selling individual point-of-views so they will never be remade. However, how much of comedy is “original” is debatable. ↩

  2. A long and better history of the cover song in American can be found here and you should probably just read that instead. ↩

  3. “Back in the days of black radio stations and white radio stations (i.e. segregation), if a black act had a hot record the white kids would find out and want to hear it on ‘their’ radio station. This would prompt the record company to bring a white act into the recording studio and cut an exact, but white, version of the song to give to the white radio stations to play and thus keep the black act where it belonged, on black radio. A ‘cover’ version of a song is a racist tool.” Don McLean on August 26th, 2004. ↩

  4. Weezer famously decided to cover “Africa” based on a tweet. I haven’t listened to the cover so I can’t comment on quality but it seems to be popular. Weezer posted its first Rock Airplay No. 1, thirty-eight years after the original topped the Billboard Hot 100. ↩

  5. A quick search on Spotify will throw up a lot of covers of popular songs. Some of them are just attempts at mimicry. I’m sure few of them get accidental clicks by less discerning users. We are all guilty of wanting to please our heroes but only a few get a chance? ↩

  6. Ramin Djawadi and Westworld, I am looking at you. ↩

  7. The game features several anachronistic covers though I think “God Only Knows” cover by barbershop quartet is the first one encountered. The relevance of this song and the reason for the version you encounter becomes clear later in the game. The game introduced me to the original and that is reason enough for it to be Game of the Year, folks. ↩

  8. That said, it is a big risk for a new musician to take up an old standard. Covers don’t always work for every single person who hears them and the struggle against the propaganda of nostalgia can be uphill. You can just end up looking like a grave robber. ↩

  9. Every time Morrissey says something dumb, I listen to Sara Lov’s covers of The Smiths. ↩

  10. I discovered the very good Lake Street Dive through their covers of old songs like Lola. I heard Peter Gabriel’s cover of “My Body is a Cage” before I heard the original by Arcade Fire. I love both now. Lissie’s cover of Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” is an excellent example of a reinterpretation. This version was later sampled by Schoolboy Q in a rap song. ↩

Written on August 29, 2021