GREAT RECORD!! (To be read like Paul Rudd playing John Lennon in “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) GREAT RECORD!!
“The man who sold the world” is my latest crack for the moment—I have certain songs that will hit me (sometimes more than once) and I cannot get rid of them until they have been listened to for days on end.
"Come on man... I need to hear that shit... I got these cheeseburgers..."
I have David Bowie’s original version and Kurt Cobain’s acoustic cover. Both are great. Both are wildly different in how I interpret them. David Bowie’s version feels… hmmm… I don’t really know… Ethereal? It’s hard to explain. Kurt Cobain’s version is darker and sad. Both are beautiful and I can’t bring myself to even remotely come close to “choose” between them.
I don’t really get that… I’ve seen a lot of internet discussion on whose version is “better.” It’s David Bowie’s song; but it belongs to all of us—in the sense that we all get to experience it in our own way.
Therefore, there’s certainly nothing wrong with Kurt Cobain’s cover or the fact that he did it and now gets love for his version. That being said, you can never take away a song from the person who wrote the work. No matter how good a cover is—it’s still a cover. Thus, it will never be a Nirvana song in the strictest sense… Yet somehow it is… Complicated…
I meant for it to be to illustrate a point. At BEST, they may be forever linked—but it’s simply impossible to say which is “better”. What you PREFER is irrelevant. Here endeth the lesson.
Sorry… I got caught up in seeing people “scream” at each other over which is better. It’s funny at first watching folk sling obscenities and conjecture at one another like so much confetti. I use confetti because obscenity, conjecture and confetti are damn similar—colorful, won’t fly far and fucking useless.
It's either this or online forums... Decisions...
Any-how’s-yer-doggy, “The man who sold the world” is a real testament to how songs can take on a life of their own. Amazing how that happens! Either way, Kurt Cobain or David Bowie—you choose your own flavor; but “the man who sold the world” is a damn fine song.
