A Nice Hard Slap – Punk Covers are Dumb.

Alien Ant Farm’s Smooth Criminal?
Automatic Hotel’s Brown-Eyed Girl?
The hundreds of other covers of hot songs by “punk” bands?

DUMB.

Forget that the punk movement is long dead. Forget that music shifts the definitions of music to keep people from stopping and realizing how shitty most of it is. Forget that a lot of the times, any cover is a bad idea. Typically it’s a shameless attempt to milk the popularity of a tune to attract attention to your band, and oftentimes the rest of a band’s catalog is in contract with the cover song, leaving the person bewildered as to why they made the effort.

The gimmick of doing a cover in a different genre very rarely works. Anthrax’s cover of Joe Jackson’s Got the Time being an example of when it works, but the list is incredible of when the idea fails. Even my favorite band that did covers, Faith No More, had a few stinkers in their arsenal.

Punk, or whatever it really should be called… just seems to be a repeat offender because it’s really easy to take a song and speed it up.

Regardless, it’s a fucking joke and it needs to stop.

The music industry is a huge joke and the percentage of stuff out there that is horrible is insane, it’s narrow-minded to focus on something as superficially innocuous as a punk cover but inevitably when I start to become less of a Scrooge I hear something that makes my stool harden and sharpen inside me. Today it was the Van Morrison cover. Tomorrow it’ll be that metal Sexyback cover or that song that samples the Chili Peppers’ Pretty Little Ditty.

Just dumb. Do me a favor. Don’t support this bullshit.


Nick Nunziata would rather fail with original music than succeed with a cover.

Before
I go, here’s the latest thing I’m adding to the blog. Each day I blog I’ll
have a song, a piece of artwork, a photo, a Mary Worth, or something to
further justify your click and to give the trolls a little more ammo. Today, a look at my workspace this afternoon: