Meredith Silverman

Some of my favorite iTunes tracks are cover songs. I love Fountains of Wayne’s version of the Britney Spears single, Hit Me Baby One More Time. I like the way they draw it out and make it richer and darker. At the same time, the pop song underneath hooks you and gets stuck in your head.

Perhaps just as importantly, Fountains of Wayne is implicitly lampooning Britney Spears (and poking fun at themselves) just by covering a song made popular by an artist so different from themselves. The idea of the song could almost be just as satisfying as the recording itself, if the track wasn’t so damned good.

Music keeps changing, all the time. Even with informal distribution systems and recommendation engines cropping up all over the internet, most of us will only hear a certain amount of the stuff that’s happening musically at any given time. But at the same time, information travels so fast that if a song gets huge in Latin America or Europe, it could be a hit in the States just a couple of months later.

I think music and musical performances are going to keep getting richer and more complex in meaning from here. Like the rest of the history of music (or art, or knowledge, or anything), the new stuff will keep referring to earlier styles and quote, or sample, or even cover earlier works.

I don’t know what the music of the future will sound like, or what types of instruments will create it. But I do know that style will keep changing, and new forms will emerge, and they will keep building on older styles.

Mark Katz talks about this process in How Technology Has Changed Music: “while recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this ‘loss’ begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.”

In Recycling Music, Answering Back: Toward an Oral Tradition of Electronic Music, Gideon D’Arcangelo talks about young initiates into an oral music tradition. There’s a certain freedom to “re-interpret, putting something of themselves into new performances as they extend the tradition…”

Sampling and referencing involve not just the artist, but also the listener, in a mental process of call and response. It’s exciting when you recognize and identify a beat or a sample from an earlier song. It’s especially exciting when that sample is completely unexpected: whether it’s Cinderella doing Joni Mitchell (Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone), P Diddy doing Sting (I’ll Be Missing/Watching You), or Fountains of Wayne doing Britney Spears.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under New Interfaces for Musical Expression.