10 Genre-Bending Cover Songs We Enjoy

Water is vital. Water is good. Water is boring. So, attached to this water bottle’s screw-off cap, there’s an infuser. You put some chopped-up fruit into the vented funnel thing and it mingles with your water to make it less boring. And less boring water will make it easier to resist the impulse to grab a La Croix or a Snapple. Aside from the chopping, this bottle makes infusing fruit flavors into your water effortless.

Hmm… infusing a new flavor into something familiar… like, maybe, this?:

Dwight Yoakam - Purple Rain

Hey, Meh writer @JasonToon here with another weekend playlist. On the one hand, what Dwight Yoakam is doing with “Purple Rain” is an obvious crowd-pleasing trick. Dressing up a well-known song in a new style makes you look clever and your audience feel smart for figuring it out, while still giving them something familiar to hum along to. That’s why every crappy pop-punk, ska, and nu-metal band since 1995 has had at least one sped-up '80s cover in their repertoire.

But, in more thoughtful and talented hands (like Dwight’s), a genre-bending cover can crack open both the song and the genre, casting new light on the inner workings of both. In doing away with the corniest excesses of the '70s schmaltzer “Angel of the Morning” and underpinning it with a crack reggae rhythm, Joya Landis’s cover shows that even the cheesiest song can be rescued by a propulsive beat and a strong melody:

Ryan Adams got a lot of attention and praise for his enjoyable country version of Taylor Swift’s entire 1989 album. But John Wesley Harding did something similar 25 years ago with this acoustic cover of the reigning pop princess of the day. His version of “Like a Prayer” isn’t smirky or ironic - it takes the spiritual yearning in the lyrics seriously and renders it as seriously as a, well, you know:

The Raincoats don’t just reassign the genre of the Kinks’ “Lola” into shouty, discordant post-punk. They also twist the gender of the singer of this already gender-bending song, with Gina Birch and Ana da Silva singing “I’m not the world’s most passionate guy” and “I"m glad I’m a man”:

A language change can also radically shift the frame of a well-known song. The Tijuana horns on Johnny Cash’s original “Ring of Fire” hinted at Tex-Mex flavor. Mingo Saldivar takes it further, replaces the horns with accordion and singing in Spanish on “Rueda de Fuego”:

Punk rockers have long taken reggae songs and turned them into punk anthems. Here Jimmy Cliff returns the favor with a reggae version of Rancid’s “Ruby Soho”, produced by that band’s Tim Armstrong. Personally, I vastly prefer this to the original:

The Beatles were no strangers to country music, covering Buck Owens on Help! Nashville artists of the time, always looking for hits, did what they could to bring Lennon/McCartney songs to country audiences. Penny DeHaven’s version of “I Feel Fine” might not be the most successful, or the best, but it’s gotta be among the most fun:

The Oyster Band reach back much further for material. The English folk song “Hal-An-Tow” is old enough that it’s referred to in Shakespeare, and that nobody remembers what the title means. The Oyster Band turn it into pulsating new wave:

Liberating a song from its time, from its now-dated trappings, is also what Sturgill Simpson does with his cover of “The Promise” by When in Rome. The original is catchy, but sounds every bit like 1988; Simpson digs out the song’s heart and lifts it into timelessness:

And then sometimes a bunch of jokers do the obvious thing and you know exactly what they’re doing and it’s still irresistible. I’m a big enough man to admit I am amused by Alien Ant Farm’s “Smooth Criminal”:

Obviously, this list is just a smattering of my favorite genre-bending covers. Feel free to infuse the forum discussion with your favorites. Pure water is the building block of life, and pure musical styles are the building blocks of music. But we all need our palates roused by an unexpected flavor sometimes.

Yo dog we heard you liked playlists so we infused some playlists into this playlist:

• Pop Will Repeat Itself: The Theory of Repetitive Song Titles
• The Thirsty Sound of Desert Rock
• Sweat Bands: The '80s Gym Rock Challenge
• Turn On Country Style: Psychedelic Country Nuggets
• Library Music: Overdue for Recognition
• Gated Reverb: Boom and Bust