In another thread the question of “Least favorite Dylan song” came up, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” immediately came to mind-an insipid tribute to his recent conversion to Christianity. It so annoyed John Lennon that he wrote a vitriolic response to it, “Serve Yourself”. In fact, he made 12 different home recordings, but my favorite(and hardest hitting) can be found on the John Lennon Anthology album.
Anyone else have examples of “Non-tribute” tribute songs about other songs?
Once more with feeling: John Lennon’s How Do You Sleep At Night was directed at Paul McCartney, regarding what John thought were personal insults on Paul’s Ram album.
The song Eve of Destruction (written by P.F. Sloan in 1964, but famously recorded by Barry McGuire in 1965) struck a nerve and solicited a lot of response, including at least three songs offering a dissenting point of view:
Yankee Doodle, sung by the Redcoats to ridicule the uncultured bumpkins revolting against King George III, became its own diss song when the Yankees began singing it back to taunt the Redcoats after the resounding American victory in the Battle of Saratoga.
How about this? ** Led Zep’s Black Dog**'s famous riff and off-time groove was designed by the Zepper’s to demonstrate that they were a level above other slogging 4/4 heavy rock bands.
I have read an interview of JPJ where he says that’s a myth, but I could swear I heard an interview with Jimmy Page where he supported it.
Matthew Fisher’s “Going for a Song” is an extended diss of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Fisher was in the original Procul Harum and evidently grew tired of playing it. (Though that didn’t discourage him from claiming a songwriting credit years later.)
NWA had an interlude in their second (and final) album Niggaz4Life titled “Message to B.A.” about their former member Ice Cube, who had left the group over a dispute with Eazy-E and Jerry Heller, who he accused of holding out on him (“B.A.” standing for “Benedict Arnold”).
Cube responded with “No Vaseline” which was mostly about Eazy and Heller, but the other members of NWA were not spared either.
Dr. Dre would later respond with the hit “Fuck wit Dre Day (and Everybody’s Celebratin’)” dissing Eazy, Heller, and Cube.
Eazy would respond to that with “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s.”
Hank Thompson wrote “The Wild Side of Life” about a faithless wife who left her man. In the (frankly whiney) chorus, he sings “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels. I might have known you’d never make a wife.” Kitty Wells responded with* “It Wasn’t God who Made Honky Tonk Angels” including the line “too many times married men think they’re still single and caused many a good girl to go wrong.”