Somewhere in the mid-1990s I ended up with free tickets to a Cake show for calling in and answering some radio question incorrectly. This was in the era of Cake's one-hit single, "Rock n Roll Lifestyle," which was possibly their worst song ever, but made it onto playlists at "new rock" stations all over the country.

The audience at the show consisted of about 28 actual Cake fans, me and my friend Brent, and two drunk fraternity boys (and likely New Rock listeners--probably the sort of people who thought Candlebox was awesome) who shouted "Rock n Roll Lifestyle!" at the top of their lungs between every song, even the songs that came after the band played "Rock n Roll Lifestyle." This was, I suppose, one version of that lifestyle.

In any case: what completely blew me away was the band's as-yet-unreleased cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." I'm not great at describing music, but I remember just feeling completely astonished by Cake's version of the song, which opened up an old favorite into a completely new, much darker iteration of itself.

I've always liked good cover songs for that reason, and have always especially liked covers that find some darker, grimier material in an original pop song. Sonic Youth's remake of "Superstar" from the If I Were a Carpenter album, Richard Thompson's version of Britney's "Oops I Did it Again" (on 1000 Years of Popular Music), and Goldfinger's "99 Luftballoons" are classics of the genre.

The startling success of Cake's "I Will Survive" seemed to spawn a rash of punk covers of 70s and 80s pop songs, including some pretty neat ones (The Ataris' of "Smooth Criminal") and then just a bunch of songs that sounded like the original songs but louder or faster--a trend Me First and the Gimme Gimmes rode through at least two albums, each song more mediocre than the next one. Along the way people started remaking hip-hop songs; I liked very much Dynamite Hack's sweet, nostalgic remake of Eazy-E's "Boyz-N-the-Hood," and Richard Cheese (the brains behind Lounge Against the Machine) has some nice covers, though some of them tend to be gimmicky (my favorite Richard Cheese moment: in his cover of Blink 182's "What's My Age Again?" he turns "What the hell is A.D.D.?" into "What the hell is add?").

Covers seem to be a relatively recent phenomenon--or at least a sense of the "remake" or new arrangement as a particular genre of music feels new, quite different from either the classical tradition of rewriting scores for new (groups of) instruments, the blues tradition of remixing and remaking the same songs with new lyrics (or the same lyrics with new songs--you can follow lines from Skip James into other blues artists, but also in one verse of the Greatful Dead's "I Know You Rider" and some song by the Bassholes), or the jazz standards tradition, in which the balance between "original" and "remake" is such that there's very little to separate them (I maintain that you can tell a lot about a person depending on whose version of "Lullaby of Birdland" they prefer, Ella Fitzgerald's or Sarah Vaughan's). In covers the sense of originality is strong enough to make the cover feel very much like a reading or a translation, one for which the original version exists always as a powerful shadow presence against which the cover defines itself.

It's that strange relation, with the cover revealing something that the original never knew about itself, undoing the original while doing homage to it, that I like so much, partly because it resembles my preferred politics of literary translation (in a word: undomesticating).

With some hope that you will like the same thing, dear reader, I enclose, while apologizing for the clumsy guitar strumming (to paraphrase everyone's favorite snaggle-toothed Alaskan), with this entry a copy of my cover of a recently popular pop song. Happy listening.