A Sassenach Soliloquy

Tuesday, September 14

More More More

The flat I'm temporarily staying in has cable TV. (I nearly put '..the rare luxury of...' in that last sentence, before realising that 300 channels of crap is not a luxury but something that wastes your time when it would be better employed sleeping.) So last night I found myself flicking through the various music channels and I discovered that the beautiful Rachel Stevens has realeased a cover of the disco classic More More More. (Don't you just love the way the lyric "How d'yer like it? How d'yer like it?" rolls off the tongue like a wheel down a hill? Fantastic.)

Now, we all know that covers are rubbish. Mostly they are little more than a direct copy, marketed to the auidience of the day: Atomic Kitten can rot in hell for, well, lots of reasons, but in this particular instance for taking advantage of the Bangles' class and popyfying (Is that a real word? How do you spell it?) Eternal Flame, amongst others.

I actually have more time for artists (Why do we have to use that word for these people? Most of them are nothing but glorified manekins.) that desicrate a track, for at least they've tried to do something new and, hopefully, original, even if they fail. In this respect The Kittens did a lot better with Tide Is High (they even got it right, turning it into bone-fide quality pop); it's a pity they lose all credit for that for basing their careers on pop-covers: sooner or later one of them had to come good. Paul Weller has just done a cover of Thinking Of You by Sister Sledge, and truly given the song new life; he's not tried to improve a classic baseline but instead has gone acoustic, slowed it down and, in his own words, "..tried to bring the song out a bit more". It works.

Back to Ms. Stevens. She's done something new with More x3, adding a pacier beat and making use of that layered technique so popular in dance music; a technique that probably has a technical name but which I'm too much of a musical philistine to know what that name is. You'll just have to make do with the pub definition: y'know-that-one-where-the-track-is-faded-and-muffled-like-at-a-club-and-then-suddenly-it-becomes-crisp-and-clear.

What do I think? It's ok, but, like most of today's pop, it looks bland when compared to its predecesor. But y'know what? I don't care. It still sounds like disco, and no doubt I'll find myself in some trashy bar over the next few weeks when it's played and I'll be first up there, pretending I'm listening to the original and dancing with my imagined disco girlfriend. Anything which teaches today's youth that disco is the purest and only true form of pop is good, and if just a few hear it and search out the original then that's good enough for me: More More More.

1 Comments:

  • I think the effect you mean is called 'flanging'. I think.

    Did you know that Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard it Through the Grapevine' was a cover? Originally a #2 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1967. Norralottapeopleknowthat.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 14 September 2004 at 10:00  

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