I stumbled across a YouTube of Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and liked it. I liked her interpretation, and the use of banjo (Steve Earle?) as one of the instrumental elements of the arrangement. I was amazed at how heated the comments were, that were posted beneath the “video”…Brutalities about whether Patti had butchered a sacred cow or not, whether or not Cobain’s music is a sacred cow or not, followed by arguments about whether Kurt Cobain was an a good, bad, ugly artist, followed by more specific interpersonal attacks between strangers followed by blah blah blah bleh. Glad I was never in the midst of that…though it was oddly tempting—and by writing this little fast-becoming-essay-diatribe of my own, I gather I am joining the fray, or at least the edges of the skirmish. For shame on me! What will Santa think? I digress.

Did you know that on average, about 30-60 covers and home videos for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” are posted every day? 30-60 EVERY DAY. And the guy has been dead for…how many years now? Fourteen? Amazing to me how worked-up people get. It’s amazing to me how worked-up I got about their getting worked-up. Violence is contagious. Anyway, it got me all mental.

Here are the relevant meanderings:

“Why do a cover?” I think that would paraphrase the underbelly of the conflict, after combing through all the matted ego-weirdness, bloodied scar tissue, and social posturing (that I’ve seen in the comments of that site and others)…

Why do a cover of a song you didn’t make famous and/or didn’t write? Why sing a song you didn’t write yourself? Why remake a movie? Why produce Shakespeare’s…well, anything—all his plays have been acted out before, why do it again? Come to think of it, hasn’t everything been done? After all, there is nothing new under the sun… So why say anything. Why change anything. Why try to contribute anything. Why talk read sing speak dance write listen live…? Somebody probably did it way better than you ever could, way before you were born.

Except…maybe, if nobody ever kept producing Shakespeare’s plays, nobody would even know who he is at this point (it has been over 400 years since he died).

Maybe, from an artists perspective, if you like somebody’s song, you think the way you sing it does at least three things: expresses how the song makes you feel, expresses something about how you think the song made its creator feel, and maybe makes the listener feel something too.

Maybe that feeling is love, or anger, or insight, or less alone, or just plain old better-on-a-lousy-day.

I listen to covers. I read literary commentaries. I see Warholian influences every time I open the effects options in iPhoto or Photoshop—and so does anybody else using those programs because the authors of the program paid tribute to Warhol in creating that effect option. We all influence each other. We are all way past living “original” lives; our lives and those of future generations are all a perpetual commentary of what has gone before. There isn’t anything that I can absorb into my senses that doesn’t remind me of other times, artists, wars, stories, cultures, music, history—nothing I experience that doesn’t lend some new insight into “now” and “tomorrow”—and that is a good thing. It isn’t about better or worse to me. It is about “difference,” and what I can learn from the changes that I perceive.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t listen to Cobain (or others that have “moved on”). It means, that I’m still alive, and I still want to try to think about a song or story or work of art in ways I didn’t before; I can only understand so far, and then I need to see through somebody else’s perspective. The cacophony of comments continues to ebb and swell…in words of another: “Oh well, whatever, nevermind…”

Update: If you have access to iTunes, there is an "iTunes Originals: Patti Smith" that includes her discussing "Twelve" etc. It is audio worth seeking out--if you have any interest in Smith's work at all (Smith also mentions Dylan as one of her influences).