I Hate Beatles Covers Pt. 1

Last week, I was blessed enough to see two of my professors debate various aspects of Joni Mitchell’s song “Blue” (off of the album of the same name, obviously) as modern poetry (or something). The talk (or “smackdown,” as it was advertised) was about Joni Mitchell for about four seconds before they started positing their own little theories about modern poetry that sort of related to the song.

Anyway, one of the professors talked about pop music as being very different form reading poetry, because the performance of the songs—that unfixed, elastic factor—is completely separate from fixed factors of lyrics and chord progressions.

One thing to know about me is that I hate Beatles covers. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows this about me. I feel a suicide bomber-esque desire to protect the world from these abominations, and I feel an anti-abortionist-style need to express my hate of Beatles covers in any context that it might be even a little bit relevant (hence this post). I hate them so much. I don’t know how else to say it.

For a while, I didn’t know exactly why I hated all Beatles covers with such ferocity (even Daniel Johnston’s minimalist versions seem to fill me with strange, twisted disgust). Over the summer, when I had ample amounts of time to think about things that don’t matter) I realized that it was because I consider everything the Beatles touched (well, not literally) sacred. I guess you’d have to understand that I grew up with actually no religion in my household. When I was six, my mother sat down on my bed and asked, “Do you want to know why you have green eyes?” and before I could reply, she quickly drew a Punnett Square on a piece of paper nearby and explained the way that her alleles combined with my father’s made my eyes green. Apparently, it’s just as likely that I could have had brown eyes. Or something. Anyway, six years later, my mother sat down on the exact same spot on my bed and, with her (brown) eyes full of tears, told me that George Harrison was dead. What I’m trying to say is, in my house, we had biology, and where that failed, we had pop music. I didn’t step into a church until I was thirteen (I think).

So maybe it wouldn’t be so surprising now that I considered the Beatles catalog one of the few pure, sacred things in the world. Those songs are the Word of God, and their covers are blasphemy. Fiona Apple doing “Across the Universe” is sort of like Fiona Apple gazing across all of creation and saying, “Well, I like this a whole lot, and I think I can do it too.”

It sucks when people try to play God, and it also sucks when people can’t let a good thing rest. I understand that by covering these songs, artists want to pay tribute to what is probably the most influential band of all time. OK. I, too, have felt the pull to get up at an open mic and perform my version of “Norwegian Wood.” Except that this is ridiculous. It’s not as if I would be exposing a significant portion of the audience to new music—the majority of people in an open mic setting will have heard, if not imbibed this song already, years ago. It’s also not as if I could do the song justice. But it’s not just me—who do you think could make “Norwegian Wood” sound better than John Lennon?

But I digress. I guess those aren’t the only reasons someone would want to cover a song, and maybe the point is that the reasons aren’t what’s wrong with Beatles covers. From this talk about “Blue,” though, I realized that it has more to do with the performance of the song than with the actual song writing. As anyone who has ever listened to the radio for more than five minutes knows, the Beatles got started covering their favorite American R&B songs. One of my favorite songs recorded ever, actually, is “You Really Got a Hold On Me” done by the Beatles (originally by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles). Smokey Robinson is obviously a baller, but for some reason, I just like the Beatles version better. Also, have you heard their version of “Please Mr. Postman” (originally by the Marvelettes)? It sounds fucking timeless. It sounds credible, and while the original version is REALLY awesome, it sounds dated, it sounds kitschy.

So why are the Beatles performances just so much better than anyone else’s could possibly be? Who fucking knows. One of the professors discussing “Blue” was talking about the way that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe exactly what a song is doing to someone’s emotions; he talked about how he felt like he wants to hold an oscilloscope up to speakers playing a song and be able to point to marks on a paper and say “Look! Look there! That’s what’s going on in this song!” I know exactly what he means. There’s nothing I can say about why the Beatles performances are the ones that are sacred, and the others are not. Maybe someday I’ll figure it out, but I sort of hope that I don’t.