The Change Of A Voice

Hold hard, traveller. For the night is dark, and full of 80s. I give you a warning that below this fold, there be writing about gender and culture and media, and also, 1980s songs. Turn back, turn back while yet you can! Or perhaps you are of sterner stuff.

The internet’s a wonderful space because it lets you sweep up culture in big open arms and sift through it at your leisure, pretending for a moment that you aren’t a misshapen ghoul reared on dreadful Pat Boone style knockoffs of songs that are, hypothetically, good, or, at least better than Pat Boone’s versions of them. One thing that I found at some point was a lot of songs I listened to as a teenager, in my ‘rebel’ phase (don’t ask), were covers of some variety, because Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake are total dorks. Going back into youtube to dig through that history, to hear the originals, I made a few discoveries that have been kicking around in my head quite a bit.

Specifically, some songs I think of as classics are covers. And they’re covers that, in the first case at least, really improved on the original, like Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Cyndi Lauper - Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Official Video)

I’ve remarked on the weird relationship I had with pop music (as I, no lies, at one point identified this song as a ‘heavy metal’ song) borne out of a small media bubble, but Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was such a light-hearted friendly bopalong that it showed up in amongst other things, Swap Shop, an awful little sketch show (no, not the British one). This song was generally seen as pretty harmless by common culture. It’s fun! It’s happy! It is, even now, kinda empowering, where it talks about a girl responding to parents about how her enjoyment is not really that much of their business.

Except the original of this song is a bit more…

Robert Hazard - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Now I don’t want the video to be too large an influence here, so please ignore Robert Hazard’s still photograph staring out of the screen at you with the slightly disquieting, washed-out atmosphere of a Dick Tracy villain with a name like say, The Lick. The point is not to look at his face and the way that influences the way this song sounds (though for me it totally, totally does), the point is to consider that we’re talking about a song that is no longer a girl making excuses for herself, as a girl, wanting to have fun, but is instead about a dude making excuses to his family as to why he’s out all night.

At its nicest, this is a dude bragging about booty calls to his mum? Try to imagine the sort of human who has that kind of conversation.

Now that isn’t to say that the songs are inherently always made worse by this transformation. Check this out.

Aretha Franklin - Respect [1967] (Aretha's Original Version)

This song, now this song was not allowed because of the ‘Urban Rhythm’ and the ‘Jungle Music’ and holy shit my childhood was full of some coded fucking racism, wasn’t it? But R E S P E C T is iconic mum music in that it was music people my mum’s age’s empowerment anthem and it was, well, really, pretty harmless! Like it isn’t a song like Goodbye Earl or The Thunder Rolls, which were, I will note, somehow okay despite the fact that they both include murder. No, this song was about a woman – a working woman no less! – who supported her husband, and she was good to him and all she wanted was for him to show her respect.

Great, great song too, I just love that opening. I’m not a music expert (as my earlier confession about Heavy Metal Guitarist Cyndi Lauper will suggest to you), but I’ve heard a lot of versions of this song, multiples by Ms Franklin, and I really like it.

It’s also a cover.

I heard the Otis Redding song (two years older than the Franklin version) well after the first, but I didn’t realise they were the same song. Particularly, this song doesn’t sound like a working woman telling her husband she’s supporting him, and complaining about him going out and having fun – because hey, dudes are expected to.

This song seriously sounded to me like a travelling musician telling his girlfriend that he was okay with her boning other dudes while he was travelling – but if you don’t mind, when I am home, can you perhaps lay it off? It’s weird, especially given the way it doesn’t have the aggrieved, legitimately censured style of the Aretha Franklin song, either. It just seems like a fairly free-love based relationship.

That, or he’s under her heel, in which case, he, works for them.

This is not to sell short all the other elements of composition. The tone and style of music really transforms these songs as well, and it’s not just that it’s a classically male voice opposed to a classically female voice. There’s obviously a lot going on in all these pieces.

It’s hard to argue though, that power dynamics and culture don’t reflect in songs. Two mostly identical songs are transformed just by the singer being a different kind of person, within a shared social structure.