Rhonda's Blog

Rhonda's Blog

Wed, 04 May 2011

Different Interpretations

Mostly everything in life boils down to the same troublesome issue: people are reading different things into what they read, and interpret them regularly in a way it wasn't meant to. It seems that in certain areas a culture of interpreting things in a bad way instead of good or asking how they were actually meant has established the rules of (not) working together but rather against each other and around each other. At times I would like to account it to language barriers, or cultural differences, but it happens with people from all areas so that reasoning would be too easy.

Even artists manage to do that, and in that certain area it creates something extremely creative and thoughtful. This blog entry thus contains three songs—and six videos: Two different interpretations of the same lyrics. Maybe this is able to stir some thinking process whether the interpretation that one found for a given situation might be biased or even just looking from the wrong angle.

Imagine (John Lennon vs. A Perfect Circle): It gives me the shivers when thinking about what a different tune and might turn the same lyrics into. The various videos going with this interpretation make me even cry, and since the official video might be blocked in your country I linked one of the private made ones.
Mad World (Tears For Fears vs. Gary Jules): You might not have known the original (Tears For Fears is well known for other songs actually) but only the cover, which was in the soundtrack of Donnie Darko.
Drive (R.E.M. vs. R.E.M.): You read correctly: a band covering itself is rare but it happens. And yes, when I heard the live version back in the years it was a quite enlightening situation.

Enjoy!

One thing I'd like to mention, and that is two cross references to former blog entries. For the first song, James Iha played as guitarist in The Smashing Pumpkins before he joined A Perfect Circle. The second cross reference is with respect to my former blog entry about the Wise Guys: They did also cover Mad World, in the Gary Jules' interpretation but of course in a capella.

/music | permanent link | Comments: 6

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Jon wrote at 2011-05-04 08:50:

I don't know if chip tunes are your thing, but there was a recent re-interpretation of "Mad World" as part of a boing boing video games movie: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/25/classic-arcade-game-1.html (MP3 link below video)

David Schmitt wrote at 2011-05-04 08:52:

Not to forget "Männer sind Schweine" from "Die Ärzte", where the video twists the words of the lyrics into a very different meaning.

Sean Finney wrote at 2011-05-04 12:08:

Teardrop (Jos̈́e Gonzalez vs. Massive Attack), just to throw another one out there :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B-h1EEsKDA

Chris Irwin wrote at 2011-05-04 15:06:

I think one song of particular note is "Hurt", originally by Nine Inch Nails, then covered by Johnny Cash. Cash's version (and associated video) were very potent.

Mind Booster Noori wrote at 2011-05-05 17:35:

Or Sweet Dreams, Eurythmics vs. Marilyn Manson... and the list could go on and on ;-)
Nice post, thanks.

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote at 2011-05-07 23:36:

Clearly I really like your taste for music :)
Keep on with this blog post Rhonda!

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