Another Least Favorite

I've got another one to add to the Least Favorites lists I posted last week. The new category is Least Favorite Cover Version Of A Song I Really Liked.

The winner in this category is hot off the presses... a current song by a current artist that I actually like well enough to have bought one of their albums... But I have to say that Sugar Ray's cover of Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him" is just plain awful. As you can hear in the audio clips on Amazon (WMP Real), the lyrical answer "Where?!" to the call "Look over there!" has been gratuitously replaced by sound-effects. That's the first clue that this cover bites the big one, but that's not all! The angst that lurks subtly behind the pop sound of the original has been sucked out of the song and left on the floor. It's just not there. It's wrong. Just plain wrong.

This beats what would have been my previous choice for the worst cover version, hands down. That would have been Ugly Kid Joe's cover of Harry Chapin's "Cat's Cradle". That cover is actually almost very good, but they blew it, They blew it with one word in the third chorus. The third chorus differs in one word from the first two. Well, it's supposed to, but the problem is that they didn't do it. They sing the third chorus exactly like the first two. The first time I heard the cover, I thought I noticed that the word was wrong, but I couldn't believe it. I had to hear it several more times before I could be sure that I wasn't just mis-hearing them. It's supposed to change from "When you coming home, dad?" to "When you coming home, son?", but they don't make the change. That one word encapsulates all the irony of the entire song, and they blew it. But it's still a far better cover than Sugar Ray's.