I’ll see that and raise you the same song played with duelling theremins.
A great song, and what a cover should be, a reinterpretation of the original into something new. Of course, if your really want abominable you can go back and listen to New Order’s version. I believe the liner notes for that album contain a treatise on how to choose the proper hairspray.
We used to live in another city, and often ate at a family-run Vietnamese restaurant. The teenaged daughters made sure dad always had Vietnamese pop CDs to play in the sound system, and frequently the songs were cover versions of songs we could recognize.
“Yellow River” was particularly amusing.
“Me So Horny” was just astoundingly bad :eek:
A friend and I actually heard a muzak version of Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy. We just stopped and goggled. Muzak about a frightfully disturbed killer? Just… wrong.
On my one and only trip to France, I heard a French-language version of The 59th Street Bridge Song. They had changed “feelin’ groovy” to “c’est bon la vie”. It pained me.
Of course, I can never top the abominations one of my friends manages to dredge up. He likes to inflict them on people just to see the reaction. The worst was a Korean hip-hop cover of Hotel California in very thickly-accented English. :eek:
The example I’m thinking of transcends “wrong” music-- it’s just… very unusual.
“Psalm” by Roxy Music, from their album Stranded, is one of the most bizarre tracks ever recorded, but the notable thing is, it’s done without any bizarreness.
The music is country gospel. The lyrics are basic Christian devotional. The song is written and played entirely straight, with plenty of verve and feeling, and not a trace of irony.
The strange thing about it is Bryan Ferry’s voice. Bryan Ferry the man in real life is heterosexual. But “Bryan Ferry” is a singer he plays onstage who croons in a fruity 1930s voice and uses outrageously queer mannerisms. The extreme artificiality he uses in his voice, his affectation of a flamboyantly queer style not usually associated with straights, is weirdly incongruous with the down-home Christian music of “Psalm” that so strongly invokes a church in rural Georgia.
Even though Roxy Music was an ultra-sophisto British art rock band, and as different culturally from a song like “Psalm” as any two English-speaking peoples can be, they avoided irony and performed “Psalm” with transparent sincerity. They didn’t play up the weirdness inherent in their arrangement, but let it stand on its own without commentary. Let the listeners make up their own minds what they’re hearing. This is my take on it.