(Short submission to the online creative nonfiction journal I’m putting together with my friends and 501 students next semester.)

Interesting things happen when different genres clash, as Z-Trip and Danger Mouse might be able to tell you. Much of our culture is driven by such clashes. Even cover songs, which until recently seemed to be the benign domain of genres in close proximity to each other (blues-rock artist covers blues standard, new R&B artist covers old R&B song), have gained increased notice in recent years as they’ve taken a turn for the extreme. People react to this trend strongly: consider the well-traveled anecdote about the teenager who asked her mom why the old men on the radio were ruining Britney Spears’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” For those of us who know the truth, that story just about turns our stomach. But why?

When a song is covered, there are a few basic things going on: someone else is singing the lyrics, different people are playing the music, the song is produced in a different way, and so on. But much more is going on, both on the part of the musical artist and on the part of the audience. There are reasons why some covers work better than others, and why we get upset when certain songs are covered or when certain types of artists cover them. We consider covers to be a tribute to the original author, or an insult, or something in between. We talk about whether a song is “close” to the original—sometimes this is good, sometimes it isn’t. But again, why? Our reasons often depend on what we know about both artists.

I find this question fascinating, like a 21st-century version of the literary question of authorial intentionality, and you’ll probably see me writing about it here later.

But for now, I’d like to focus on a very small subset of cover songs: rap and hip-hop songs covered by white women. There are a few of these floating around in cyberspace (more than you think, really), enough to warrant consideration. Race is an obvious consideration: anytime a suburban white rock band attempts to cover a rap song, they’re making a particular rhetorical move whether they want to or not. Usually it’s a failed move, as the band fails to capture the energy of the original—they just can’t “sell it” quite as convincingly.

But try layering gender on top of all this. Tori Amos’ cover of Eminem’s “‘97 Bonnie and Clyde,” (like most of the songs from her 2000 cover album Strange Little Girls) makes a statement just by existing. By changing the speaker from an aggressive male to a whispering female, she’s simply trying to get people to gain a new perspective the song’s misogynistic lyrics. The effect works—it’s pretty creepy. But I don’t think it’s a simple argument that Eminem is wrong. It’s not an obvious parody or mockery, just a re-singing. What should we make of it, then?

Even more disorienting is ex-Veruca Salt pop singer Nina Gordon’s folksy cover of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” Gordon has a disarming “catch” in her voice that strips all of the aggression out of anything she sings. It makes her sound absolutely earnest. When she applies it to a song that is nothing but male bravado, her statement (if she has one) is hard to read. The song is so not her that it seemingly couldn’t be anything but parody. But it sounds like a straight-up cover, like an intentional tribute to the song. It confuses the audience’s sense of logic.

My AK-47 is a tool
Don’t make me act a motherfuckin’ fool…

Thankfully, someone went and layered her version over NWA’s video. This seems to be make it more of an overt parody, which is comforting. It leaves the audience with fewer questions.

Or does it? We might ask ourselves why and how the video changes the song, or if it actually does. Why does the sight of Gordon’s voice coming from Eazy-E’s mouth make interpretation seem easier?

More later.