ROGUE STATES | Bodega Pop on WFMU

This Wednesday, March 19

Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio 
presents:

Rogue States

Music from Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria + Zimbabwe

Pop, funk, folk, rap, disco and "Dear God, what was that?!?" from the Axis of Evil, Beyond the Axis of Evil and the Outposts of Tyranny.

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Cover Me | 2 Dozen Super Awesome Covers

Listen to Melt-Banana's mash-up/deconstruction of the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA" and "You're Welcome"

Hear Crowd Lu fearlessly scale the upper registers of Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You"

Dig Anthony Wong's Lou Reedy take on Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind"

Let your jaw drop in utter disbelief as Kahimi Karie reconceives Jimmy Cliff's "Harder They Come" for the 21st Century

Thrill to Mika Nakashima's dead-pan run-through of Sid Vicious's version of "My Way" (Note how "fucking" passes the censor several times, but not a reference to killing her cat, which gets bleeped out)

Sweat and fret as O.N.T.J detonate The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb"

Grab it all in one big glop, here.

According to George Plasketes’ Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, there are an estimated 40,000 songs floating around out there with at least one recorded cover version. This strikes me as an incredibly conservative estimate.

Whatever the real number might be, there are degrees of covering, and not all acts of covering mean or resonate in the same way. There’s a significant difference, for instance, between a Cambodian pop musician of the 70s swiping guitar licks from Santana or Creedence Clearwater Revival and a contemporary Latino group in Los Angeles basing a whole career covering songs from The Smiths catalog.

Neither act is better or worse, neither more nor less interesting than the other. But they are, in terms of their meaning, different enough to note.

Likewise, and more recently, Gwyneth Paltrow’s covering Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You” (the clean version of “Fuck You”) on an episode of “Glee” exists on a whole other meaning-plane from that of Gnarls Barkley’s cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” despite the common denominator of Cee Lo.

Speaking of which, what is UP with Gnarls Barkley’s “Gone Daddy Gone”? First, take a look at this official video. (Sorry, you'll have to click the link; embedding has been disabled.)

The song was a huge hit in the 1980s for the Violent Femmes, who were, if memory serves me, THE voice of the geeky white ectomorph. Every song seemed, regardless of the lyrics, to be about the experience of being extremely uncomfortable in one’s distressingly reedy, pasty body. So, what could a rather larger-than-normal black guy possibly be wringing out of this song?

As it turns out: Everything. The video, which pictures Cee Lo as a plump fly, his band mates as other insects, emphasizes and expands on the discomfort of the original, even as the actual musicianship slickens and pop-readies the song up from the much more spastic original. Cee Lo’s and Gordon Gano’s meaning are not exactly trans-racial equivalents, but there are interesting echoes going on. In the context of Cee Lo’s later smash-hit “Fuck/Forget You,” the “Gone Daddy Gone” cover makes even more sense: both recordings pitch Cee Lo as heroic outsider, marginalized underdog. But Ceelo doesn’t feel uncomfortable in his body; it’s more about him wondering what your problem is with it.

So, getting to the mix at hand. While listening to one song after the next might make it all sound entirely random, there are reasons for each inclusion—though there was no one single criterion that covered everything. First, and at bare minimum, I only included a cover if, in transit, some significant border was crossed: ethnicity, gender, nationality, race. Beyond that, I chose sublime examples of reconfiguration, amped-upness and unlikely verisimilitude.

Silvio Rodriguez | Mujeres

Ten years ago today the first prisoners were locked up at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. To mark this inauspicious date, here's a CD by Cuba's most famous protest singer, Silvio Rodriguez, one of the giants of "Nueva Trova" ("New Song").

I found this gem--the third of Rodriguez's albums, originally released on vinyl in 1978--at a sort of street fair thingy in a huge parking lot near Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

I don't know what the fuck we are doing still holding hundreds of people there indefinitely without charging them of anything. I'm sorry, but ... what happened to the president I voted for who said he was going to shut it down?


Listen to the title song

Get the album here.

Tito Rodriguez | Mama Guela

Get it all here.

My first job in New York, summer of 1997, was secretary to the head of the history department at Columbia University. It was an easy gig. The pay was negligible. Our union went on strike about a month after I took the job, making my first months here a living financial hell.

But I got a lot done. A year and a half into the job, I started Readme, one of the first large-scale online magazines of poetics. (It was mostly interviews and essays; I wasn't yet convinced that the Web was such a great place to publish poetry.)

And, at some point while I was there, I remember walking along Amsterdam Avenue above 110th Street and seeing a single line of CDs over the head of a cashier in a tiny bodega with a single aisle. I went in. I saw the cover above, asked how much it was--I think $7 or $8--and bought it.

Tito Rodriguez was one of the most popular Puerto Rican bandleaders of all time. (That said, his father was Dominican, his mother Cuban, and he did most of his recording here in New York City.) I had no idea who he was at the time, but when I popped this thing into my ghetto blaster at home, I was determined to find out. Sadly, the music in this collection--recorded in NYC from 1949-51--may well be the best material he ever recorded. Certainly it is the tightest I've heard by him and, believe me, I've picked up everything else I've managed to find.

More than a decade after finding it, it remains my all-time favorite Latin music CD.