The Post-Rockist

Glenn Gould-”Liszt’s Piano Transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, First Movement”
(from The Art of Glenn Gould)

The Flaming Lips-”Can’t Get You Out of my Head”
(from The Fight Test EP)

In this segment of “Must a Post-Rockist Embrace Classical?” we look at the cover song through the lens of classical music.

The Rockist’s greatest pet peeve is the cover song. With such a great insistence on originality, the cover song can be to the snobbiest of music lovers nothing but uninspired and uncouth filler at best, cause for hatred and disrespect at worst. The only thing that can fill a true Rockist with more ire than a cover song is a cover band.

It is true that the cover song can act as filler in a live set, but a good cover can also produce a new kind of artistic expression of a well known piece of music. Please note my diction: “piece of music.” It’s the same way classical musicians describe the work of composers. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, in all its greatness, is a piece of music to the orchestra conductor, who guides his or her symphony in an interpretation of the piece. In my recent exploration of classical music, I was surprised to find that Beethoven’s 5th Symphony has been played thousands of different ways. One would think that there is only one way to play those first four notes, possibly the best known opening four notes in the history of music. But there are myriad ways to do so, some better than others.

Glenn Gould is known as one of the greatest and most eccentric pianists of the twentieth century. A great introduction to Gould the man and his philosophy of music can be found in the movie “Thirty-two Short Film on Glenn Gould.” The movie makes Gould out to be even more eccentric than he actually was, but there is much insight to be found there for any music lover.

Gould made his name with his interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a piece that was viewed by most classical musicians of the time as an unbeautiful exercise in technique and nothing more. Gould chose it as his first recording and, to this day, it is the best-selling classical album of all time. Gould was just as zealous for the modernist composers of the twentieth century as he was for Bach, but he hated Romantic composers for the most part and could not stand Mozart. Both his musical prejudices and insights helped him to formulate and record extremely unconventional interpretations of standard works of the repertoire. Sometimes these interpretations fell flat. Sometimes they revealed new layers and tonalities that no one had heard before.

I write about Gould because he was a performer of the most creative kind. He was not a composer, although he did compose some pieces of music. But his genius lay in those interpretations of others’ music. He, like all great classical musicians, are cover artists.

Pop music does not enter the world as sheet music. It is produced, recorded, mixed, finished, pressed, and sold. It may be produced as sheet music by Hal Leonard and other sheet music publishers, but it exists aurally in our minds and consciousnesses. However, pop music is still structured sound that can be altered in new and exciting ways by others without losing the essential qualities that make it whatever it is at its first entrance into the world.

Ergo, I give you The Flaming Lips’ cover of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Most Flaming Lips fans, even the only occasional fan, has heard this. You have no idea its a Kylie Minogue song until a minute in. But it is unquestionably “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” only it loses its glossy dance-y quality and becomes epic and almost spiritual. Yes, it is a bit of a lark in some ways, but take the interpretation not as a mockery of a well-known pop hit, but as new, vibrant watercolor added onto an older canvas. Or, in this case I suppose, as somber, muddy-textured oil over pristine pastels. J.M.W. Turner bleeding and blending rich, soaking paints over a Warhol monoprint.
–Posted by Scotter