The distinction between mimic covers and rendition covers is central to the work my collaborators and I have done on cover songs. Recently at the APA blog, Andrew Kania argues that the distinction is unfounded.
The primary motivation for the distinction, which I think Kania misses, is that it makes sense of an otherwise puzzling feature of discourse about covers. It is common to say that covers are uncreative and lame, but also common to love them. Trying to treat this as a substantive disagreement ends in confusion. In that face of confusion, the philosophers’ move is to introduce a distinction. People denouncing covers as uncreative typically have mimic covers in mind, and the love is usually directed at rendition covers.1
A central feature of mimic covers, I have argued, is that appreciating them is always in relation to the original recording. The standard for a mimic cover is perfect compliance: sounding just like the original.
Kania argues against this by reflecting on the example of the Top of the Pops cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” He writes:
Simplifying somewhat, let’s say that where Wonder’s original is funky, the cover rocks. It seems obvious that positively appreciating the cover’s rockingness would be appropriate. But this is not an appreciation of how accurately the cover replicates the original.
Crucially, Top of the Pops was a record series of knock-off recordings. As Kania writes, its goal as “a commercial enterprise was to produce cheap replicas of hit recordings.” So the musicians tried to make new recordings that sounded as much as possible like the original hits. Where it replaces aesthetic properties of the original with other properties, that is a sign that the musicians failed at their task. They aimed to make a replica, and they fell short in that respect. That is the logic of replicas, and so too of mimic covers.
In principle, a sculptor making a replica might unwittingly correct what you experience as defects in the original or introduce new features that you find charming. And so you might prefer to view or display the replica rather than the original. The differences would, nevertheless, make it worse qua replica. By the same token, in principle, you might prefer to listen to a bad mimic cover rather than listen to the original.
The qualifier “in principle” in that paragraph is doing a lot of work, though. The Top of the Pops cover does not rock in any compelling way. Contrast Jeff Beck’s version of “Superstition”, recorded as part of the supergroup Beck, Bogert & Appice. It genuinely does rock. Beck and company are not trying to sound like Stevie Wonder, so the track is a rendition cover.
Personally, I think that Stevie Wonder’s original is the best of the three tracks. If someone said that they preferred Beck’s cover, then we could reasonably disagree. If someone said that they preferred the Top of the Pops cover, though, I would think that they were trolling me.
Kania goes on to imagine a mimic cover which was a better replica. He writes:
Now suppose (counterfactually) that the Top of the Pops musicians had succeeded perfectly in replicating the sound of Wonder’s original track. In this case, the cover would be funky. But, again, it seems that this funkiness could be appreciated in its own right (where it counts as an artistic merit) or in comparison with the original (where it counts as derivative, and thus an artistic flaw). So, again, this putative mimic cover looks like it is a rendition cover after all.
In this case, we would compliment the craft involved in recording the cover. The funkiness is manifest in the cover, of course, but it is the same funkiness present in the original. It’s “the same” in just the way that the melody in the cover is the same as the melody in the original. So what we would hear when listening to the perfect mimic cover is the funkiness of the original.
A rendition cover, by contrast, is not meant to sound like the original. Even if a rendition cover retains the funkiness of the original, that aesthetic feature is curated by an artistic choice not to change it.
To return to the analogy with sculpture, I think there is an important theoretical and appreciative difference between seeing a work (on the one hand) as a study or replica of a famous original and (on the other hand) seeing it as an homage or a novel work after the fashion of that original. That difference, transposed into music, is the difference between a mimic cover and a rendition cover.
Since I work on cover songs, the concept replica isn’t as central in my philsophical web of commitments as the concept mimic cover. But if Kania succeeds in showing that “there is… no work for the concept of a ‘mimic cover’ to do”, then it seems to follow that there is no work for the concept of “replica” to do in thinking about sculpture.
- In the book, I discuss the former as the dim view of covers.