{"id":1838,"date":"2008-12-03T09:19:54","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T14:19:54","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-17T21:57:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T21:57:15","slug":"preferring-the-bastardized-version-to-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/preferring-the-bastardized-version-to-th\/","title":{"rendered":"Preferring the Bastardized Version to the Original Source Material"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XqU9RZqvFKY?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nTo this day, although I&#8217;ve come a long way in digging reggae music, I prefer hearing <strong>The Clash<\/strong> do their version of reggae than almost any real reggae artist. Give me &#8220;Police and Thieves&#8221; with those crunchy guitars and awkward bass over the <strong>Junior Murvin<\/strong> original version any day, even though the original version is pretty great. If you put a gun to my head I may even admit that I prefer the bastardized reggae of <strong>The Police<\/strong> and <strong>Joe Jackson<\/strong> to most of the real thing. Not cool, but true.<\/p>\n<p>I feel the same way about most Brian Jones-era Stones covers of slightly earlier R&amp;B\/early rock songs, like The Stones&#8217; version of &#8220;Around and Around&#8221; over Chuck Berry&#8217;s original or their cover of The Valentinos&#8217; &#8220;It&#8217;s All Over Now.&#8221; <em>Mad props<\/em> to the source material, but I&#8217;ll take the Stones!<\/p>\n<p>Give me Paul Simon and Talking Heads doing whatever they&#8217;ve done with South African and South American music over most of what I hear by the people who inspired them. Not cool at all, I know, but I&#8217;ve never found <strong>King Sunny Ade<\/strong>&#8216;s music, for instance, half as interesting as the best of Simon and Byrne. For starters, it&#8217;s nice to know what&#8217;s being sung. How do I know King Sunny&#8217;s not singing his culture&#8217;s equivalent of &#8220;Working for the Weekend?&#8221; I do, however, prefer the real Brazilian stuff that Byrne&#8217;s label has released to Byrne&#8217;s solo works in that same vein.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of my favorite &#8220;country&#8221; songs are Elvis Costello&#8217;s pastiches of real country songs, songs like &#8220;Motel Matches.&#8221; One of the best things about Costello&#8217;s &#8220;country&#8221; originals is that the rhythm section gets to do cool fills. Real country rhythm sections usually sound to me like they&#8217;ve got the freedom of a lamb.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t say the same for newer takes on <em>Da Blooz<\/em>, not even <em>Da Blooz<\/em> of <strong>Jeff Healy<\/strong> and <strong>Stevie Ray Vaughn<\/strong>. This is proof that more than Rockism is at play, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To this day, although I&#8217;ve come a long way in digging reggae music, I prefer hearing The Clash do their version of reggae than almost any real reggae artist. Give me &#8220;Police and Thieves&#8221; with those crunchy guitars and awkward bass over the Junior Murvin original version any day, even though the original version is <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/preferring-the-bastardized-version-to-th\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[105,10,1011,37,36],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}