Today I came across a review at Good Reads of my book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs. It ends with this satisfying sentence:
Some of the examples and situations Magnus draws on from the history of popular music are pretty interesting and actually managed to start a few debates about these things among friends.
The YouTube show Blind Covers is back!
I blogged about the show years ago, before their long hiatus. Since that post, I wrote a whole book about cover songs in which I elaborate my principled refusal to define cover. But I totally understand if you want to say that new music for old lyrics isn’t a cover per se.
On his blog, Brad Skow discusses Theodore Gracyk’s account of cover songs. He gives a fair summary of Gracyk’s view, according to which a version is only a cover if reference to the canonical version is part of its artistic content. So (on this view) you can only appreciate a cover by taking into account the canonical version. In contrast with common usage, Gracyk holds that any version which lacks this referential structure is a remake instead of a cover.1
With all that in place, Skow notes that Taylor Swift’s remakes of her own work seem designed to efface the originals rather than refer to them. So he suggests we might call them anti-covers.2
The problem is that one familiar function of so-called covers has been to crowd another recorded version out of the market. This is often given as an explanation for why the word cover was used in the first place: They were meant to cover over or cover up the originals.3
Continue reading “Cover shift”I’ve posted two draft papers,written with different collaborators, addressing different issues in the philosophy of music.
I’m sorting through some old documents, and I came across an unused draft for the Epilogue of my book A Philosophy of Cover Songs.1 This draft was a bit ponderous, but I still like the last line.
Continue reading “How it might have ended”In the journal Popular Music, Andrew Davis reviews my book A Philosophy of Cover Songs. He says some positive things: The book provides “a perfectly reasonable argument.” It has “quite a few moments of useful insight.”
Continue reading “😐”Regarding A Philosophy of Cover Songs:
The book is philosophically rich, engaging, and loaded with illuminating examples. It is worthy of sustained scholarly attention, but also accessible enough for a general audience. It would be an excellent book to adopt in any undergraduate course (at any level) on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, or in any introductory philosophy course with units on those topics— and not only because students can read it for free.
Brandon Polite
This is from Brandon’s review at the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. As far as I know, this is the first published review of the book.
Continue reading “The heart of a lion and the wings of a bat”Limozeen’s so-called cover of “We Don’t Really Even Care About You” takes disaffected, lo-fi ‘90s indie rock and belts it out in the style of an ‘80s hair metal band—as if Poison were to cover Pavement.
at Aesthetics for Birds
My book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs, was published by Open Book Publishers. They are, as their website says, “a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality and prize-winning research available to all, and… the hub of choice for a rapidly increasing international network of scholars who believe that it is time for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible.” They were my first-choice publisher for the book, and my experience with them has been great.
Continue reading “Why I love my publisher”