News
Cee Lo Green probably couldn't have begun to “Imagine” the controversy he would create on Jan. 1, 2012.
The burly singer (who, you will recall, shot to superstardom the year before on the basis of a song the very title of which had to be changed in order to be played on radio!) elicited an online firestorm by modifying the lyrics to John Lennon's classic utopian song during a performance on NBC.
In case you happened to spend the first week of this year in a remote corner of the Amazon Basin or somewhere else where molehills are not routinely converted into mountains by the media's relentless Moloch machine, Green's great sin was to convert the line, “Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too,” to: “Nothing to kill or die for/And all religion is true.”
Fervid Lennon fans were outraged. With their metaphorical pitchforks bristling, they demanded: How dare this singer subvert the meaning of their sacred text?
One blogger, apparently feeling magnanimous, wrote, “I don't have a problem in principle with him subverting ‘Imagine,' if he does so on his own private time, or at an event he organizes himself, for the specific purpose of promoting his own religious beliefs to his own fans or to a religious audience... But I do have a problem with him doing this at a public event.... If he felt unable to sing the song as written at such a public event, he should have declined to sing it.”
Really? So much for a tradition that has been practiced for decades — possibly even since the advent of the American music industry in the 19th century! For as long as there has been pop music, there have been cover songs that changed (or even reversed) the meaning of the original version.
Take Cyndi Lauper's cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which made her a household name in 1984, but which significantly altered the nature of the song. Robert Hazard's somewhat dour and disapproving original version was transformed into a bop-happy feminist ditty by the big-voiced Lauper.
Likewise, the always clever Jonathan Coulton utterly mutated Alanis Morissette's “You Oughta Know” without changing a word. And Alanis herself performed the same sleight of secondhand when she covered the Black Eyed Peas' “My Humps” in her own earnest, fermented style.
Both of those examples managed to transmogrify their original sources without changing any of the lyrics, but there have been many other instances of artists rewriting musical history when covering famous songs. Hilary Duff alienated fans of the Who eight years ago when she changed the most famous line of “My Generation” from Pete Townsend's original, “I hope I die before I get old,” to “I hope I don't die before I get old.” (That there was not as big a fuss made over that change as Cee Lo Green's more recent reworking of Lennon might be because many of the Who's fans who sang along with the original “My Generation” back in 1965 got their wish.)
So we are left with the realization that pop singers like to mess with the songs they sing. “Imagine” that!
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Notes is supported by the Gay and Lesbian Fund, committed to building a better future for all of Colorado by supporting programs that keep kids in school.
The burly singer (who, you will recall, shot to superstardom the year before on the basis of a song the very title of which had to be changed in order to be played on radio!) elicited an online firestorm by modifying the lyrics to John Lennon's classic utopian song during a performance on NBC.
In case you happened to spend the first week of this year in a remote corner of the Amazon Basin or somewhere else where molehills are not routinely converted into mountains by the media's relentless Moloch machine, Green's great sin was to convert the line, “Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too,” to: “Nothing to kill or die for/And all religion is true.”
Fervid Lennon fans were outraged. With their metaphorical pitchforks bristling, they demanded: How dare this singer subvert the meaning of their sacred text?
One blogger, apparently feeling magnanimous, wrote, “I don't have a problem in principle with him subverting ‘Imagine,' if he does so on his own private time, or at an event he organizes himself, for the specific purpose of promoting his own religious beliefs to his own fans or to a religious audience... But I do have a problem with him doing this at a public event.... If he felt unable to sing the song as written at such a public event, he should have declined to sing it.”
Really? So much for a tradition that has been practiced for decades — possibly even since the advent of the American music industry in the 19th century! For as long as there has been pop music, there have been cover songs that changed (or even reversed) the meaning of the original version.
Take Cyndi Lauper's cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which made her a household name in 1984, but which significantly altered the nature of the song. Robert Hazard's somewhat dour and disapproving original version was transformed into a bop-happy feminist ditty by the big-voiced Lauper.
Likewise, the always clever Jonathan Coulton utterly mutated Alanis Morissette's “You Oughta Know” without changing a word. And Alanis herself performed the same sleight of secondhand when she covered the Black Eyed Peas' “My Humps” in her own earnest, fermented style.
Both of those examples managed to transmogrify their original sources without changing any of the lyrics, but there have been many other instances of artists rewriting musical history when covering famous songs. Hilary Duff alienated fans of the Who eight years ago when she changed the most famous line of “My Generation” from Pete Townsend's original, “I hope I die before I get old,” to “I hope I don't die before I get old.” (That there was not as big a fuss made over that change as Cee Lo Green's more recent reworking of Lennon might be because many of the Who's fans who sang along with the original “My Generation” back in 1965 got their wish.)
So we are left with the realization that pop singers like to mess with the songs they sing. “Imagine” that!
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Notes is supported by the Gay and Lesbian Fund, committed to building a better future for all of Colorado by supporting programs that keep kids in school.
