Here's my hot take about covering songs: if you're going to play somebody else's music, you need to find something worth saying about the original song. Standards can vary: sometimes a band covers a song because they really goddamn love that song, and the message is just how much love they goddamn have, and that can be alright! Other times, somebody can see something in a song and pull it out, the way John Cale covered Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and created the version of the song that other people cover. (Jeff Buckley didn't cover Leonard Cohen, he covered Cale covering Cohen. And I never felt like he added all that much, but then, I love the Cale version so much that it's hard for me to see other versions seriously.)
My two favorite covers are favorites for similarly lofty reasons. One is Frank Zappa's cover of Stairway to Heaven, which plays a series of musical pratfalls on Led Zeppelin in a way that only Zappa could manage. (Leave aside the fact that it's a reggae cover: the real gem is Zappa noodling solos all across the bulk of the song, then completely refusing to touch the famous solo itself, leaving it all to an incredibly tight brass section.) But Zappa's cover is more-or-less a footnote in a storied and strange career; Zappa is a huge influence on modern music, but often in offbeat, tangential ways: he was brilliant in idiosyncratic ways, and his followers typically don't replicate his precise methods. The other cover—Devo's stunning "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"—still sounds like the future came early, and somehow manages to feel more prescient with every passing year.
I'll start out with a necessary disclaimer: I can't find it in me to like the Rolling Stones, so my perspective here is biased. I had a phase where I listened to Let It Bleed pretty nonstop, and "Gimme Shelter" still hits me like a cannon blast, but they're one of the big Sixties bands that just rolls off me, up there with the Doors. I can appreciate what they did for music, and I can respect their technique, but it leaves me cold. And what's so interesting about the Devo cover of "Satisfaction" is that it feels, in part, like an explanation of why that is.
You can listen to the studio recording if you want, but there's something fascinating about their performance on SNL. There's a palpable confusion in the audience—their applause is hesitant, confused. I've got to imagine some people went apeshit, but anyone who was expecting anything resembling the original Stones version was left nonplussed: the original, one of the iconic expressions of sexuality and alienation, is disassembled and replaced with something that feels like a factory assembly line. The famous hook barely appears at all. (In the SNL version, it's played—loosely—at the start and end, but on the studio recording it only pops up at the tail end.)
There's something scuttling and insect-like about it, staccato and pointy and alien. The unison twitchings of the band members only reinforce that sense of some kind of hive. Mick Jagger is your prototypical young man trying to break out of a society he doesn't fit in with—a classic rock trope, borderline identical with Bruce Springsteen trying to flee his hometown in Born To Run. (To add to my polite musical sacrilege, Springsteen's another one I can't really handle, and for similar reasons to the Stones.) Mark Mothersbaugh, meanwhile, is barely human, let alone "a man". At most, he's an impulse, a neuron of possible humanity firing through a near-unalive body.
This isn't a particularly tricky read of the song. Devo's name, after all, came from their theory that humankind was devolving, turning into something unrecognizably human. Their debut album, which featured "Satisfaction", was titled Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! No subtext: it's all surface. And, of course, keeping it all surface reflects their theme, and their emphasis on becoming glossy, polished, artificial, consumable. If you want the same sentiment in less deconstructed form, just listen to the fantastic "Everything is AWESOME!!!" from the equally fantastic Lego Movie, written by none other than Devo's Motherbaugh; in the film, "Everything is AWESOME!!!" serves as an Orwellian group chant, Orwell's fear and paranoia replaced with blithe Instagramesque positivity, Devo's vision writ large upon society. (It's perhaps telling that Mothersbaugh, an accomplished film composer, is known also for his sensitive, stirring collaborations with Wes Anderson, whose films portray deeply wounded individuals who don't know how to let their emotions out.)
Devo's philosophy isn't as facile as it seems. It's an attempt to reconcile something hard-to-reconcile: the tricky idea of mass-produced individuality, and the question of how you can possibly tell the difference between "universal truth" and "lowest common denominator". What does it mean when relatability becomes brand, and resonance becomes product? If music strikes a chord with millions of dissatisfied youths, is that music "speaking" to them or "selling" itself to them? What's the difference between an anthem and a sales pitch?
Leave aside the profound complexities in how music proliferates, because the Rolling Stones were not a band unaware of marketing. Let's pretend that every song reaches precisely the audience that it deserves. Does the profound popularity of the original "Satisfaction" prove that Mick Jagger is, de facto, more authentically dissatisfied than any other singer? More sincere? Are his emotions more valid, more worthy than anybody else's? Are the chords of "Satisfaction", is the guitar tone, somehow closer to what it's like to be dissatisfied?
The lyrics critique consumerism. Yet the lyrics are themselves a product, intended for consumption, designed to be memorable, viral, transmissible. Mick Jagger is purportedly worth half a billion dollars, and that's just one member of the band. The Stones are businessmen. That's not to dismiss anything they say, or to cast suspicion on any heart they touch. But it's unavoidable. Jagger sings about a man selling crisp white shirts, a man who "can't be a man" because he smokes the wrong brand of cigarettes. These are lyrics about sexual anxiety—about sex as product, gender as measured by sexual worth, and ultimately self-identification as defined by consumption. Sex sells—and sex sells "Satisfaction", a song that itself stirs up the kinds of dissatisfaction that marketing does, and sells itself as "liberation" from that dissatisfaction, as an anthem for the dissatisfied to unite under. "Satisfaction" is about itself.
This is the thing I struggle with, where the Rolling Stones are concerned. I don't intend this as a critique of the band, or of people who enjoy the band. Personally, however, I find certain kinds of counter-culture and sexuality difficult to tolerate in pop music, particularly when that music is itself such a sleek corporate product. I can't escape the skin-crawling feeling of being sold to. The message, I feel, is that I should feel free to let a sixty-year-old marketing achievement tell me who I am as an individual. I shouldn't let my sexuality be defined by some laundry detergent commercial. I should let it be defined by the Stones.
To put it another way, the original "Satisfaction" is a song about anxiety that's written and performed as if it's the solution to that anxiety. By contrast, Devo's "Satisfaction" is a song about anxiety that's written and performed as if it exists to fulfill a need within the system that's produced that anxiety. It doesn't pretend to be an alternative to itself. It's an open acknowledgement that it is the thing it's about. Devo's "Satisfaction" is a song about being obsessed with consumability that is openly obsessed with its own consumability. It's the equivalent of opening a photo in an image editor, then upping the contrast so intensely that the picture gets all spiky, nuance and subtlety drained away, everything jagged and interlocked. Each piece is locked into a jittery, inescapable loop: the mechanical drum line kicks in first, followed by that scuttling guitar, followed by a bass line that's the closest thing the song gets to conventionally sexy, but played out in caricature, a Tom-and-Jerry chase of a sexy bass line. The guitar riff over the top is savage and primitive and frantic. The singer is desperate, but is the desperation his own, or is it merely a desperation to lock himself into the mosaic? What's his anxiety? Is it the one the song is expressing? Or is it an anxiety to correctly take part in the product that is the song? And isn't the latter the anxiety which "Satisfaction" purportedly critiqued all along?
Devo bridged the end of punk and the start of new wave. In a sense, their "Satisfaction" cover itself serves as that bridge. Rock, of course, was the original youthful expression of authentic individuality; when rock got to be too corporate, punk evolved to take its place, by being rawer and authentic-er. But punk sold out too, arguably at approximately the moment punk was born, and while new wave came forth to be the standard-bearer of music that tried to give a shit, it abandoned the idea that guitars and raw vocals were the markers of "authentic" music. It leaned into disco—itself an often-revolutionary genre that was frequently and ironically dismissed by influential voices in the music industry for being too slick or glib or "insincere"—and it leaned into synthesizers, and it generally let itself be as raw or as slick as it wanted to be.
Over time, electronic music became a new hotspot for youth movements, its endless beats a new way of finding and/or losing one's self. Hip-hop's samples became the backdrop for a new kind of musical authenticity, which of course in turn went corporate. And "poptimism" insisted that pop music was as deserving of critical attention as any other genre, and that Taylor Swift and Rihanna deserved as much analysis as "serious" musicians do. On some level, that's the sort of facile argument that "Everything is AWESOME!!!" was written to parody. On another, though, are Taylor Swift or Rihanna any less calculated, any less a blend of individual expression and calculated marketing, than the Rolling Stones were? Our ideas of what qualifies as sincere or authentic are as much formed by branding as anything else—it's hubris to believe that there's some aspect of human nature free from the trappings of, well, human nature.
Here's where you can throw up your hands and say that all things are valid, or that any song can be potentially life-changing or revolutionary. Take that too seriously, though, and you risk becoming nihilistic, declaring that nothing means anything. Or you can circle all the way around to claiming that the marketplace is the only determinant of meaning: if any song might mean something to somebody, then clearly the songs that cause the most impact are without fail the ones that are most listened to. Suddenly, there's no such thing as being able to express yourself, no such thing as having something to say. You can barely claim that substance is real: all that matters is the ability to craft a product, no more and no less. You watch the final scene in Mad Men and go: "That man has finally become the greatest artist of all time."
It's not that easy. And it's not that interesting that it's not that easy. Art, after all, takes place in the ambiguous space between creator and audience: it's equal parts "what the former says" and "what the latter hears". Each influences the other—audiences evolve around what they encounter, and creators evolve around what audiences have become, and the amount of self-awareness on either end fluctuates too. Art that's too facile or too pandering risks being too generic to draw attention, and often fades from memory even when it does catch on. Art that's too "much" struggles to latch onto anybody—though the most receptive people to strange, unusual expressions are often artists themselves, which is how obscure artists wind up influential fifty years later, and society perhaps shifts to the point where what was impossible to understand abruptly seems entirely normal. What seems powerfully individual one day will seem hackneyed and corporate; what gets dismissed as inauthentic trash might one day be revived and hailed as better than anybody ever gave it credit for. The Sex Pistols suddenly get sneered at for being too generic a product, Tears For Fears suddenly get called savvy and sensitive songwriters, the Velvet Underground go from 500 listeners to a radio staple, and some band with a string of Billboard hits fades away to the point where I wouldn't recognize the name if you told it to me.
But the very idea that it's not so simple can itself be a kind of salve. Where does that anxiety come from if not the sense that there's a proper way to be, and that you're somehow not "being yourself" correctly? Individualism doesn't help with this: suddenly, everybody can be evaluated for how successful they are at being individuals, and a contest emerges to self-actualize the most loudly and effectively. Anti-consumerism becomes a consumable good. The idea that some art is iconic and some isn't, that there are "correct" things to respond to, itself generates a kind of societal pressure, and a corresponding anxiety.
It would be too-simple, and gross and wrong besides, to insist that Devo's cover of the Rolling Stones' song is objectively more interesting, or more important, or more profound, than the original. Perhaps the most you can say "objectively" is that it is an unusual cover, both in terms of its sound and its approach to the original. But even there you run into trouble, because of course the Residents put out their own nightmarish take of "Satisfaction" the same year as Devo's cover was reproduced by Brian Eno and released as a single. (We're not even going to touch how Eno, who produced Devo and their new-wave compatriots Talking Heads, went on to produce such huge stadium acts as U2 and Coldplay while also pioneering his own damn genre of music, because Brian Eno is a whole-ass "What does art even mean?" subject header in and of himself.)
In a way, the reason it's hard to talk about any one given song, or any one work of art, or any one artistic movement, with any degree of accuracy is that everything is contingent on everything else. You can't understand one piece without understanding all the other pieces. You can't understand Devo without understanding the Rolling Stones, just as you can't understand Cardiacs, the band I revere more than any other, without understanding Devo's influence on them. (A song like Tarred and Featured can be overwhelming in isolation; watch and listen to it right after Devo's "Satisfaction", though, and you can hear the anxious loops, watch the band's twitching, and see that they're pulling a similar trapped-in-the-machine gimmick to Devo's. Though you couldn't explain all of Cardiacs that way—as it happens, you'd also need to listen to quite a lot of Frank Zappa.)
That contingency is what makes cover songs so interesting. What happens when one band takes something from another? What are they saying? How do they respond to it? How does it change the way audiences remember a song, the way people think of Mad World as a melancholy piano whine rather than a uniquely danceable song about pain? What about when a bunch of white British twenty-year-olds take a song written by two black musicians and successfully use it to brand themselves as the voice of a new generation? How about when an arrogant smarter-than-thou composer responds to those guys by, say, covering their most iconic song as, I dunno, reggae?
At its best, art shatters our idea of what we believe the world to be. A wall that we didn't realize was a wall abruptly crumbles, and we stare in stupefied awe at a larger plane than we thought could possibly exist. But what half-world are we locked into? What puts those walls up all around us? As culture shifts, so too does the nature of the prison that we're stuck in, and so does the nature of the rebellion that would free us from its walls—a rebellion whose form, by definition, we can't conceive of until after it happens. The truth strikes at us from tangents, glancing off us from directions that we never thought to look. But which is truer, anyway: that which we've internalized so thoroughly that we've forgotten how to speak it, or that which lifts us out of everything we thought we knew?
Maybe this, more than anything, is what defines being human. We are a spark of consciousness within a sparkling shower of fireworks: a shower that glimmers and shifts, defined in part by us but not only by us, so that we impress ourselves upon those who impress themselves upon us. The greater consciousness that we belong to, the consciousness of society at large, is lumbering and forgetful and half-asleep: we each pull away from it in directions that generate their own gravity, pulling future generations to them until they are pushed to break free of what we once believed would liberate us. There is no solution to this problem, because this problem only exists in the wake of prior solutions. Yet we cannot rest easily with this knowledge. Resting easy is not an escape. There is no escape from something this all-encompassing, this capable of taking every liberating impulse and transforming it into something oppressive, authenticity turned corporate, cure turned poison. We cannot escape it, no matter how desperately we dream of escape, no matter how revelatory every new open door feels the first time we glimpse down the corridors beyond. There is no way out, not for humans, not of being humans. Yet we try
