I was going to suggest a bad cover song, but you’ve kind of wasted the competition with that one. OMG, that’s awful.
I’ve never been a great Bon Jovi fan, mainly because I never got “living on a prayer”. With lyrics all about sadness and misery, somehow the boomba-boomba bass and the happy chant chorus just didn’t fit. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the song was written as a ballad and then got produced into a hit by the Canadian chartbuster Bruce Fairbairn (AC/DC, Aerosmith, etc.). So essentially they covered their own song and definitely not in the spirit it was written.
The Italian ska band Giuliano Palma & The Bluebeaters did a cover of “Don’t Bring Me Down” (ELO) that totally breaks with the spirit of the original. It’s still lots of fun though and it revealed to me that ELO songs may be slightly overrated to begin with. 
iswydt
The problem with this cover is that Toad the Wet Sprocket does not “rock”. Neither at night nor part of every day.
These two posts make clear that often, the meaning of a song is in the ear of the belistener. But I will make the important argument here: the “spirit of the original” is ALWAYS the spirit with which it is imbued by the original artist. In the case of this song, that was actually Wayne Cochran, who wrote it, and recorded it, and got no where with it. You can listen to his original version here. As you can hear, this is almost identical to the version done by J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers. Since they essentially popularized the song (I doubt much of anyone recalls the attempt by Cochran to get people to listen to it), and sang essentially the same spirit to the song, we can, I think, consider it the “spirit of the original”.
And it is quite clear that, for whatever reason (popularity of that type of music, most likely), the original spirit of the song is upbeat, NOT downbeat. Pearl Jam’s version may make more “sense” to some, but it totally misses the “spirit of the original”. As shown by the quotes above, that may be good or bad; ymmv.
The original “Sounds of Silence” is not a song of “outrage”. If you think so, I suggest re-listening to the lyrics. It’s a song about futility, a resigned confession to the darkness that no one is “listening”, that the masses are just led by whatever bright, shiny thing catches their eye at the moment. There’s no “outrage”. And whatever “creepy” vibe it has, that vibe is not in any way helped by the fact that Disturbed take the third verse, kick it up an octave, and start screaming their way through the song, as if in some deft counter-point to the whole concept of the “sound of silence”.
As I said, their cover is eminently listenable; I have it on my iTunes and it gets played fairly often by choice. But it totally misses the point, the “spirit” of the original.
“Ol’ Man River” is probably the most iconic song of the burden of black slaves at the hands of white owners. That is, until Bing Crosby came up with his jazzy, upbeat version.
Sometimes life can surprise you. A while back at a party on the host’s mix tape the Flying Lizards’ version of Money (That’s What I Want) came up.[sup]1[/sup] The host, about ten years younger than I, indicated he thought it was original with them. “You gotta be kidding me!” I said.[sup]2[/sup] "The Beatles did it like fifty years ago."
When I got home I went to YouTube to send him a link to what the “original” sounded like, only to discover the Fab Four’s version was itself a cover of R&B artist, Barrett Strong’s version.
Knowing the Beatles’ early history I should have known. I confessed my ignorance in the email I sent the host.
[sup]1[/sup]Not that it’s grist for this thread; I kind of like it.
[sup]2[/sup]I mean, he’s a Deadhead for crying out loud.
The Carpenters covered ‘Ticket to Ride’( Beatles) in a slow ballad-y version. It is bad. It seems they got good reviews though. They did a bunch of covers.
Harry Nilsson did a whole album of standards. Some were pretty good.
It seems pretty clear to me that the cover is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Heck, even Gene Simmons had good things to say about it:
Cite.
I’ve never heard that cover before, but, yes, it fits the OP very well, but it’s also a pretty good cover.
How about Nils Lofgren’s cover of For Your Love? It was so sleepy it knocked the entire Cry Tough album down from an A to about a B-.
How about Nils Lofgren’s cover of For Your Love? It was so sleepy it knocked the entire Cry Tough album down from a solid A to about a B-.
Which is also what dooms Britany Spear’s version of “I Love Rock and Roll”
Hilary Duff covering “My Generation.”
She changes a crucial line: “Hope I don’t die before I get old.”
I actually love the soul version, “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” because I think it draws a perfect parallel between Bowie’s mental states at each time. I’m not sure that was necessarily his intention but I think the artistry in the second version is how much it seems a perversion of the original. It’s coked out, plastic, bloated, goes on and on and on, etc.
There’s a BBC documentary called Cracked Actor about Bowie’s move to Hollywood and his change in direction from glam rock to plastic soul, a term that he quoted to describe his music during this period, so I don’t think he was completely ignorant about the impression it put out there. The documentary ends with his live performance of “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” and a stoic voiceover proclaiming something like “So, he finally became a soul singer” with aerial footage of the Hollywood Bowl.
But the original, unaired cut that the BBC (probably wisely) decided to edit showed Bowie being filmed (without his knowledge) through a crack in his dressing room door as he chugs milk, sniffs from an enormous bag of coke and slumps down in a chair, staring at himself in the mirror, all soundtracked to “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)”. When he realizes he’s being filmed, he jumps up, pulls a girl into the room with him, leans out and says something to the cameraman with a somewhat threatening, cartoonish grin before slamming the door in his face.
As a huge Bowie fan, I always loved that juxtaposition and felt it was so perfectly resonant of his fractured mental state at the time. So, I totally agree with you, it missed the point of the original. But I actually think it was artistically, though most likely unintentionally, brilliant.
Any version of “Angel of the morning”.
All the versions you’ve heard, including Juice Newton, play the song as an adult women. So the implication is that it’s a one night stand, or it’s a doomed relationship for some other reason.
But in 1967, Billie Davis, then only 21~22, sang it as a teenager in love with an alder man. As she had been at 17. There’s an underlying background of naive innocence and trust and hope that just doesn’t exist in the later well known versions.
That was nice. I had never heard of this singer.
I didn’t know Aretha had a big sister. I like that version better than Janis. I also preferred the original version of Cry Baby by Garnet Mimms.
I know this is heresy coming from a child of the 60s, but I always thought Janis sounded rather like she was being burned alive.
I thought she was a working girl actually ………
I am sad that I am only now learning of this version. It is lovely, and does read 100% “been there, felt that” authentic.