Me, Myself & I
De La Soul
sampled from
(Not Just) Knee Deep
George Clinton & Parliament
Let's start with "Not Just Knee Deep". No matter what incarnation of Parliament and/or Funkadelic the band may be playing under you can't deny they made a bigger impact on modern music than the dinosaur-ending Chicxulub comet ever could. Okay, a slight hyperbole never hurt anyone but I personally feel as though Parliament/Funkadelic are often overlooked as important and inspirational key players throughout the 70's. They were funk, rock, soul, jazz and their live shows were scarier than anything Black Sabbath could muster up.
Now, you could argue there's very little difference in sound between the De La Soul version however, the song is a hip-hop classic, which is why I've classified this as a 'good cover'. Sure it's just the sampled intro from "Not Just Knee Deep" but when a song manages to split from it's shackles of sampling and becomes an iconic song on it's own terms, that's when you have a classic.
BAD COVER
Fantasy
Mariah Carey
stolen from
Genius of Love
Tom Tom Club
I'm running the risk of sounding prejudiced here, as a small portion of the original has been sampled in the same way as De La Soul did. In fact a lot more has been added in terms of extra melodies, 90's era hip-hop monophonic glides and generally more sparkly but I guess that's why I'm lumping this under 'Bad Cover'. It's almost as if they tried their best to disguise and cover up any traces back to the original song unlike De La Soul who fearlessly sampled their inspiration without shame.
Granted, the original "Genius of Love" isn't the greatest song ever, in fact as songwriting goes it's rather poor but that's it's charm. Tom Tom Club was of course a side project for the husband/wife members of Talking Heads, so naturally being Byrne-less it trips up in it's charismatic failings though it's immediately propped back up onto it's feet again by it's phenomenal groove-laden instrumentation. There is a fine balance of 'bad songs with tonnes of charm', and all too often people try to over-exemplify this 'charm' by killing it with saturated production.
I will probably admit that Mariah Carey has made a better song out of it but that's not the point here. Imagine if Misfits recorded "Die Die Die My Darling" in a proper studio and not (what sounds like) their mum's kitchen? It'd be a different song altogether. I'm talking about stealing charm, bastardising innocence etc. On another note, imagine what "Genius of Love" would sound like if David Byrne had sung it...
...oh my.
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