“you Just got Covered”
115
Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage in Popular Music,” Plasketes notes,
“by the early 1990s, cover song momentum as a musical movement was well
established. Whether due to an overreaction to a fad, leftover excess from
the 1980s, artistic convenience, or the industry’s profit motivation, covers
proliferated creatively and commercially, transcending trend status into
a surging, re-sounding subgenre.” 12 Plasketes interestingly connects his
understanding of cover songs to processes of adaptation:
The process of covering a song is essentially an adaptation, in which
much of the value lies in the artists’ interpretation. A song travels a
slightly different course than a piece, which evolves from page to stage
to screen, whether silver or small. With music, the song undergoes a
recontextualization, remaining in the same medium, with the artists
translating the material into a particular style. 13
Plasketes’ statement that the song undergoes a recontextualization within
the same medium is not incorrect as a general observation, but it limits the
understanding of the cover song performance to elements specific to music.
Burns, Dubuc, and Lafrance’s 14 basic model of analyzing covers as adaptations
takes into consideration the visual elements of a cover song’s (music) video.
The authors acknowledge “the circulation of multiple versions and manipulations of a given popular song or video. Through the medium of the Internet,
music consumers are exposed to a seemingly endless stream of song and
video versions.” 15 This is particularly evident on YouTube, where the image
is undoubtedly an intrinsic part of covering processes by non-commercial
musicians and offers an interpretative challenge that Plasketes omits from his
basic comparison between covering processes and page-to-screen adaptation.
YouTube-based cover videos as a form of adaptation entail a twofold process.
The musical settings refer to an existing song, but the visual settings refer
to or borrow from a set of practices that are a combination of YouTube and
music video aesthetics. Both the musical and visual settings may consciously
or otherwise refer to or mimic the arrangement of other YouTube videos (not
exclusively amateur-made) covering the same song.
12 Plasketes, “Re-flections on the Cover Age” 146.
13 Ibid., 150.
14 Lori Burns, Tamar Dubuc and Marc Lafrance, “Cotextuality in Music Video: Covering and
Sampling in the Cover Art Video of “Umbrella.” In Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom:
Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube, ed. Nicole Biamonte (Lanham MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2010), 233–264.
15 Burns, Dubuc and Lafrance, “Cotextuality in Music Video,” 233.
115
Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage in Popular Music,” Plasketes notes,
“by the early 1990s, cover song momentum as a musical movement was well
established. Whether due to an overreaction to a fad, leftover excess from
the 1980s, artistic convenience, or the industry’s profit motivation, covers
proliferated creatively and commercially, transcending trend status into
a surging, re-sounding subgenre.” 12 Plasketes interestingly connects his
understanding of cover songs to processes of adaptation:
The process of covering a song is essentially an adaptation, in which
much of the value lies in the artists’ interpretation. A song travels a
slightly different course than a piece, which evolves from page to stage
to screen, whether silver or small. With music, the song undergoes a
recontextualization, remaining in the same medium, with the artists
translating the material into a particular style. 13
Plasketes’ statement that the song undergoes a recontextualization within
the same medium is not incorrect as a general observation, but it limits the
understanding of the cover song performance to elements specific to music.
Burns, Dubuc, and Lafrance’s 14 basic model of analyzing covers as adaptations
takes into consideration the visual elements of a cover song’s (music) video.
The authors acknowledge “the circulation of multiple versions and manipulations of a given popular song or video. Through the medium of the Internet,
music consumers are exposed to a seemingly endless stream of song and
video versions.” 15 This is particularly evident on YouTube, where the image
is undoubtedly an intrinsic part of covering processes by non-commercial
musicians and offers an interpretative challenge that Plasketes omits from his
basic comparison between covering processes and page-to-screen adaptation.
YouTube-based cover videos as a form of adaptation entail a twofold process.
The musical settings refer to an existing song, but the visual settings refer
to or borrow from a set of practices that are a combination of YouTube and
music video aesthetics. Both the musical and visual settings may consciously
or otherwise refer to or mimic the arrangement of other YouTube videos (not
exclusively amateur-made) covering the same song.
12 Plasketes, “Re-flections on the Cover Age” 146.
13 Ibid., 150.
14 Lori Burns, Tamar Dubuc and Marc Lafrance, “Cotextuality in Music Video: Covering and
Sampling in the Cover Art Video of “Umbrella.” In Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom:
Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube, ed. Nicole Biamonte (Lanham MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2010), 233–264.
15 Burns, Dubuc and Lafrance, “Cotextuality in Music Video,” 233.