Song, by Toad

I admitted in a comment yesterday that I don’t really understand my general dislike of cover versions.  I don’t object to them at all, just the opposite in fact: generally I am really interested to hear them, and I like the fact that songs exist in that sort of malleable state, unfixed by any one ‘correct’ interpretation.  The problem is not in principle, just practise; I simply tend not to like them very much, and I don’t know why.

To make matters even less logical, I love people playing folk songs, and of course the whole folk tradition is one of repeating and reinterpreting songs and phrases, tunes and riffs which have gone before.  It’s one of the fundamental assumptions of the whole medium in fact: that each generation add their own layer to the existing ones, and in turn make their contribution to the richness of the art form.

In fact, if anything makes a mockery of the current abuse of copyright law by media corporations it is folk music.  The idea that you need to incentivise people to create is just laughable.  In fact the converse is true, as the art from every repressive regime in the world shows, no matter how much you discourage people from being creative you just can’t bloody stop them.  I’m not arguing against people making money from their art, but the copyright law at the moment is increasingly becoming a straitjacket to creativity, the need for which is proven a lie by folk, which is essentially a big long chain of mashups, samples, rehashing and reworking. Read the rest of this entry »