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[BeoPuppy]

[doombilly]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Bowie fan. But most of this should have never been done.

[thedevilissix]

Any time someone covers a song and changes the gender of who they're addressing. Annoying in general, because fuck it, can't you just be gay this one song? But more annoying in examples where the lyrics have to get clunkily changed. Someone covered 'Big Yellow Taxi' and changed 'old man' to 'girlfriend' which doesn't even approach rhyming with the original fucking lyric.

Largely I agree with this. You're referring to that well rammy (Cheshire-speak for 'nasty') cover the Counting Crows did, right? Where Vanessa Carlton got a guest credit for singing backup?

For me also, the Smashing Pumpkins cover of 'Soul Power'. The sound embodiment of Billy Corgan and his ego missing the point.

[sitnspin]

Any time someone covers a song and changes the gender of who they're addressing. Annoying in general, because fuck it, can't you just be gay this one song? But more annoying in examples where the lyrics have to get clunkily changed. Someone covered 'Big Yellow Taxi' and changed 'old man' to 'girlfriend' which doesn't even approach rhyming with the original fucking lyric.

I do this, but for the opposite reason. I'm a gay lady, the number of songs written for us and from our perspective is extremely limited. I see no problem tweaking a song slightly to better reflect your own perspective or who you are addressing the song to.

Edit - Although, I more often change the gender of the narrator than the addressee as I'm more likely to cover songs written by men given my personal style and vocal range.

[Tova]

Any time someone covers a song and changes the gender of who they're addressing. Annoying in general, because fuck it, can't you just be gay this one song? But more annoying in examples where the lyrics have to get clunkily changed. Someone covered 'Big Yellow Taxi' and changed 'old man' to 'girlfriend' which doesn't even approach rhyming with the original fucking lyric.

I do this, but for the opposite reason. I'm a gay lady, the number of songs written for us and from our perspective is extremely limited. I see no problem tweaking a song slightly to better reflect your own perspective or who you are addressing the song to.

Edit - Although, I more often change the gender of the narrator than the addressee as I'm more likely to cover songs written by men given my personal style and vocal range.

Not sure who wrote the OP here. But I agree with sitnspin. If the change is clunky, then it's annoying just like any clunky change would be annoying. But if it works, then I don't see why not. In fact, the more closely you can personally relate to the lyrics, the more convincing the performance is likely to be.

[Thrillho]

I wrote the original (two years ago I might add  ).

I have no issue with changing the gender of the narrator, because that is a part of inhabiting the song. Changing the gender of the person you're singing to though? I have an issue with that.

There are artistic reasons why you can get away with it. Due to the differing gender roles in our society you can really change the tone of something by swapping the gender of someone in the song.

Sometimes the gender is the point of the song. Like 'West Texas' by PWR BTTM is about an ex boyfriend who ends up with a girl, swapping anyone's gender in that without swapping EVERYONE'S gender in that would kinda take the crux of the lyric out.

I think part of this is because, while I absolutely believe in raw honesty in art, my songwriting upbringing was mostly your Bob Dylans, your Nick Caves, guys who create a character for a song and then inhabit that character, feel what they would feel in that moment, not feel what they, in real life, are feeling in that moment. Obviously both guys actually do shitloads of both and in my own songwriting I do the same. However both have flirted with homoeroticism before now also, especially Nick Cave, whose 'Easy Money' is as far as I can tell some sort of gay prostitution anthem (although I've not studied the lyrics in years).

It just irritates me, because it's so accepted that in visual media people can play a character and it is so much less accepted in music. A lot of people face controversy for their lyrics, when the lyrics may not be (in my case I can explicitly tell you that my narrators do not speak for me) a representation of how the singer actually feels, and it's because of that that I generally get annoyed when people gender swap a song. Is it you singing, or is it the character the song was built around?

This was a bit a jumbled so I hope it made some iota of sense. All in all, I completely understand there being occasions when swapping the gender of the narrator or the person being sung to is fine, but I think that the occasions on which it is are limited severely.

[Welu]

I once heard a female trio singing Fuck You by Cee Lo Green and they changed some of the genders but not all. I'm assuming out of lack of attention.

The way they sang the first verse was like:
I see you driving 'round town with the boy I love
...
I'm like,
"FUCK YOU!
And fuck her too."

"Boy" was a changed word, "her" was not changed from the original.

I'm guessing they didn't realise that specific Fuck You is aimed at the new partner, not the ex, hence the follow up of "and her too" at the ex. The way they did it made it so they were talking to the new partner, then suddenly to the ex, then back to the new partner.

Writing it out overcomplicates it, but I found it really clunky and distracting at the time because I couldn't keep track of who the narrator was addressing. That usually wouldn't be an issue but it catches attention when you know the original lyrics.

Edit:
HA! I already told this exact story in this exact thread in the first discussion.

I once heard a female group singing a cover of Cee Lo Green's Fuck Forget You and they did some gender switching but not for every part of the song which was really distracting.

[thedevilissix]

It's funny, this thread came to mind whilst listening to "I Wanna Be Your Lover" by Prince (RIP beautiful purple one ) just now.
If you were a lady (and this I'm aware might be staying on predominantly hetero/cis lines, more possibilities are obv. available  ) and to change his lyric of "I wanna be your lover/I wanna be your mother and your sister too" to "father and brother too", it'd pretty well change the entire dynamic and underlying message of the lyrics. Thank gender stereotyping for that one.

[A_S00]

The coffee shop I work at has been playing this version of White Winter Hymnal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOm0oRDx4h0

As audio-only, I found it cloying and a little irritating, but not the worst thing I'd ever heard.  The video is, like, viscerally offensive to me.  They have choreographed, synchronized bedroom eyes and I don't know what to do.

[mustang6172]

Can we include sampling with covers?  Kid Rock took two songs I used to love and ruined both of them forever.

[thedevilissix]

Yeah I reckon so. They aren't great treatments of the source material by aaany stretch.
 I remembered another cover I really dislike - Birdy's old cover of "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver. Don't get me wrong, she was about 14 then and has had some years to grow musically and expressively, and it's cool she had the awareness of the song, but for me it's just too sweet. There's no way someone that young can know the all-encompassing heart-rending hurricane of having your heart broken on the same level a songwriter like Justin Vernon can. Life experience I think counts for a lot.