MIKA the better one wrote:
I think what chad is putting across is that he feels there is more creativity found in originals music...... I would agree with him..... But as said there are guys who love covers........ When studying guitar for a while they made us play covers every week...... but they thing i struggled with was the songs were so bland when interpreted by us, Ile revert to my philosophy here....... Interpretation, means the original meaning is lost, and further the actually art is degraded in a sense (almost disrespected in some cases)...... (damn Derrida)
But I should probably be happy there are cover bands, it means less possibility of another Parlatones ?
Hmm... Derrida. >☹
I think you've made my point here. If a band can't carry a cover, they need to do a lot more work. This is not about creativity. It's about playing and performance. Cover bands have to have that to be popular. It allows them to operate in an environment where you can
separate your playing from the songs.
In other words, if you're playing all originals, it's very hard to tell whether it's your performance that sucks, or your songs that suck, or both - and vice versa. You may think you're writing decent songs, meanwhile people are just digging the show - despite tired, derivative song-writing. And there's really no shortage of that in South African rock bands.
They give you a sense of how to write songs that will move people. The Beatles and the Stones may have grown up in a different time, but maybe there's something lost when bands don't do that anymore. I get the impression that a lot of US bands still start off doing covers - at least when they're in high school.
None of this will, I think, change the fact that in SA, because of a very weak original rock music industry, that originals bands will see covers as a sign of selling out, and cover bands are often never going to take a shot at playing originals.
For me, the ideal is an original band that plays a good few covers. It raises their game, teaches them a bit of diversity, and tells me, as an audience member what they're about. I get a sense of their musicianship during the covers, and their performance ability, and it's also interesting to see whether the whole vibe lifts when they do a cover. I can think of one band I've seen a number of times where everything is dead boring except for the covers. It tells you a lot about their song-writing. Maybe if they'd started playing more covers, they would have learned some better song-writing chops.
