Well, it started out at WOMAD. I was chatting with Songlines’ dear respected editor-in-chief, Simon Broughton, and we were both watching The Jolly Boys. Lovely, sunny mento music to dance away a balmy summer afternoon. Talking about the band, Simon mentioned that “they were veterans when I started” – and indeed, they’ve been going solidly for sixty years…not too shabby! It struck me as very odd, then, that they closed their set with a cover of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’. Their most recent bout of fame has come through their cover of this song on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong: they do a lovely version, it worked well within the set and the tune lent itself to mento better than I would have expected. But while it’s understandable that artists would play their most well-known piece at the end of their set, for a band with a history of more than 60 years’ worth of original Jamaican roots music, it seemed a bit of a shame that their ‘crowning achievement’ would be a cover of a British soul song that they recorded just a few years ago.
It got me thinking about the wider use of cover versions of popular Western songs within world music. When you set your mind to it, there are loads of them, from the popular to the obscure, and from the musically successful (such as Rachid Taha’s ‘Rock el Casbah’ and Fanfare Ciocărlia’s ‘Born to Be Wild’) to the frankly terrifying (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares’ ‘Oh Susannah’ – see above), but that’s the same across all music. When covers are done well (or at least, marketed well), they can really help their artists edge towards the mainstream, if not necessarily break into it, as can be seen in the case of Rachid Taha and even projects such as Rhythms del Mundo, which saw Western pop acts record their own songs backed by Cuban musicians, including some of Buena Vista Social Club.
It’s natural that listeners gravitate towards what they already know, and nowadays with YouTube related videos, Spotify recommendations and Pandora Radio (in the US and the antipodes), it’s so much easier for someone who would perhaps not be regarded as part of the ‘traditional’ world music target audience to latch onto something ‘the same but different’, rather than a song title in a different language from a place they’ve never heard of. The usual argument is that it helps to broaden people’s tastes, and while I’m sure that that is true to some extent, I must ask, how often does it really work? How many people only know Rachid Taha as ‘that guy who did the Arabic version of The Clash’? Rhythms del Mundo was a commercial success, but did any of the Cuban musicians gain any popular recognition as a result of it? There will be many more people who are familiar only with the cover versions than those who delved further into the other music of these artists, or even further into the traditions from which they arose.
The problem here is that these covers risk turning into ‘click-bait’ – banking on the bizarreness of a Romanian brass band playing hard rock to grab the attention of some more listeners. It’s as if the performers are being presented in the same way as a freak show – marvelling at unfamiliarity rather than substance. A telling quote comes from Kenny Young, the mastermind of Rhythms del Mundo: “the idea came to me like a bolt: musicians from Buena Vista Social Club with Western artists and good songs”. Evidently, Cuban songs weren’t good enough.
Questions need to be asked of the intent behind these tracks and whose choice it was to perform them. If the artist chooses to cover a piece because they enjoy it or think they could do something interesting with it, well that’s one thing, but if the main motivation is to gain widespread attention, isn’t that rather a sad state of affairs?
Artists from world music genres should be allowed to use the market in any way they see fit, but if this is the case, it shows the wider flaw in the way music is marketed, and effectively encapsulates the struggles that world music deals with in this market. Nor can we really say that artists shouldn’t be using their music in such a way – after all, Western artists perform covers too (although they are rarely used in the same novelty way as ‘world’ covers are) and non-Western artists playing them isn’t new either. When Western pop music started to become popular around the world, local cover bands became incredibly widespread, and were the vehicles for many world music superstars’ formative experience and exposure. If we dictate what music ‘world’ artists should play, we risk forcing the musicians into the cul-de-sac of exotic curiosity, only allowing them to play music that we in the West seem ‘appropriate’ for their cultural background, exposing an underlying neo-colonial attitude. It’s all very muddy.
I think that overall, we have to draw the same unsatisfying conclusion that we seem to come up against when approaching anything to do with world music (including the ever-lasting debate over the term itself): it’s not great, but it’s probably what we’re going to have to put up with for the moment. While playing covers of Western popular music is one of the only ways that world music acts can gain any sort of mainstream recognition in the West, the artists and their marketeers will exploit this, and it’s very hard to blame them. All that can be done, for the moment at least, is to enjoy these covers for what they are – usually good, often fun and sometimes completely bizarre pieces of music – while we come up with the magical solution to unconditionally offer our favourite musicians from around the world the attention they deserve.