Cover me

On "Jolene" and the others

Jolene is dead. The Blackbird is flattened in the sun. The spirit of Shiva is loose in black music and she makes herself known in the limbo between self-sabotage and revenge-seeking, hoping to upstage both pitfalls. A reporter asks Miles Davis after a live set, what did you feel when you were playing “Time after Time?” I play it differently every performance, he assures, keeping what he was feeling private and untraceable except as the sound it made by way of his trumpet in the moment. Cover Me, by Bjork is a song I’ve always loved for its layering of neoteny and wisdom. A woman about to embark on an arduous adventure alone insists upon cover, in the brisk cadence of a fable, from a non-specific source, from God, but she doesn’t ask for company. She doesn’t sing  join me, or come with me— I’m going hunting, cover me, she commands. I’m going to prove the impossible really exists, cover me, she repeats. Her solitude is an element of the shield she’s seeking. I think singers should hear her sing these words in some omniscient inner-voice before they go to cover a song on the record.

The song you record a cover of should invite you to cover it, it should need your interpretation to endure. The Fugees sample Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” so well it becomes a version of covering and resurrection, other songs are sampled so deftly they disappear in the cannibal’s mouth, and many coexist and vie for dominance within the space of one nonlinear refashioned double quintet’s transient anthem. Hear J Dilla’s “Can’t you See” turning Diana Ross and the Supremes into men pleading for recognition from a distracted lover instead of women, rescuing them from predictable desperation. Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You,” is triumphant and devastating; you forget the more upbeat version to learn it as pure 90s-gothic ballad. Everyone covers Joni Michell’s  “A Case of You,” which we must forgive because she conceives herself as a black man on the record, on more than one occasion. Black men are constantly at the mercy of appropriation. James Blake does “...Case of You'' best or with the most unobtrusive pathos. Occasionally, you simply hear a song covered that didn’t need to be rehashed in that way, and the new version is not just superfluous, it’s a distraction from the pitch-perfect personality of  the original, it steals the song from itself. It fails to make the song one’s own and offers no convincing incentive for attempting the cover other than hubris or pride’s didactic nameless guardian. It’s music, so when the trade winds struggle we forgive this but we should not encourage our best singers to duplicate songs we’ve already heard with less urgency than they possess in their first form. 

Beyoncé’s cover of “Jolene” is perfectly decent, but it dismembers the harrowingly pathetic nature of Dolly Parton’s version of the plaintiff hymnal ocassion to turn it into a series of redundant threats. And maybe we’re bored with women denigrating one another to appease or keep men who don’t respect them in fundamental ways, even in fantasy or myth. You could never turn a pleading song about a woman who is convinced her soul mate might be tempted by a succubus into a self-aggrandizing my man-my man-my man rant, unless you were operating under the principle that a man is the ultimate symbol of togetherness and success. Because this arrives the same week that the vast syndicates of the industry producing it are collapsing under accusations of sex-trafficking of minors, it’s even harder to suspend disbelief. The archetype being praised in these soliloquies to the hyper-modern Jolene, is simultaneously being interrogated by homeland security for perhaps ruining the lives of countless women and children who just wanted to cover and write songs. They wanted to sing convincingly, I’m going hunting, cover me. When Bjork reaches, this is really dangerous, they wanted to abandon the mission but it was too late. Cover them.

Who cares if Jolene steals one of those men from whom no one receives meaningful cover, or lures him into yet another honey trap, it is finished, foreclosed. What I’m sensing is a disheveled diva, divaism in shambles, Jolene’s perfect foil, angry, vehemently so, at the circumstances she’s been dragged into and forced to cover for as muse or anti-muse. She threatens herself, between harlot and empress, to choose or be dismissed. She’s no longer naive enough about her own nature to be disarmingly innocent. The rodeo becoming a bloodbath is not unlikely but this time there’s less thrill in it, less pulp and less fiction, we cannot wait for it to end, the spectacle is at last the kind of party you’re glad to be leaving at its peak— you don’t want the rest of the sordid story and neither does the singer. The song is purposed, yet again, like an alibi. The feud the cover describes is not new and it’s eternally inconclusive. What’s missing that renders it somewhat disorienting, is humility, humility that is ashamed of itself but impervious the hubris opposite it. This is flagrant egoism covering up a wound to that ego, the delusion that if your lover falls in love with another, a fight will be enough to temper those emotions. By the end it’s clear no one loves anyone in this scenario, it’s all about images, that trap married couples fall into when all they can offer one another is the idea of a happily-ever-after they project to the public together. They promise to not embarrass one another. Inevitably, seeking real intimacy elsewhere and desperately, they do. 

Even with all this working against it, (everything that’s working against true love as a principal in great music sidling breathlessly through one country standard mastered by one bard), the beautiful continuity of Americana is achieved here. With kitsch seriousness, Beyoncé manages to be both the one asking for cover and the one covering for everything. Her ability to wield spectacle, to make albums that are both cinematic and useful in the everyday, is harrowing, even if it means she can’t let us catch her worrying or lamenting, that she needs access to as much chauvinism as the men that make the song necessary. I cannot believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that, Nina Simone begrudges, gorgeously, interrupting her now very famous performance at Montreux during a cover of “Feelings.” Beyoncé’s Jolene is a record of those conditions and the lyrics they demand, an extension of Nina Simone’s “Feelings” cover. I cannot believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a star like her. Whether we wish her a sweeter romantic outlook or not, this is what those conditions produced, vengeance is hers—ours.