Once upon a time, I mentioned to sister sledge that I had bought “Elv1s”, the collection of said chappie’s #1 hits¹. She recoiled in horror. “Oh, c’mon, don’t give me that,” said I. “They’re great, cheesy songs you just have to dance to.” In the course of explaining her aversion to the King of Cheese, she wrinkled her nose and said, “I mean, he didn’t even write any of his songs!”²

I keep on thinking about this myself, from time to time—the idea that an artist’s legitimacy is determined by his involvement in both writing and performing the music. I think about it when I am enjoying a cover, or when I find myself wrinkling my nose, like sister sledge, when I leaf through a Wired article about teen stars who are basically nothing but mouthpieces for gifted producers.

Now, it’s possible that this criterion only matters for indie street cred, but I would argue that that’s not true. While Hapa’s cover of “In the Name of Love” is excellent and even adds a wrinkle with its incorporation of Hawaiian genealogical chant, it is not the same as U2’s original recording of it. That tells you something about U2, whereas the cover tells you something about the music Hapa enjoys listening to and playing.

As I muse on this phenomenon, song-writing being more ‘valuable’ than ‘merely’ singing, I think that perhaps this is a uniquely modern development. In olden times, people wrote songs and passed them on. A wandering musician or clown would pick up tunes and words where he could and patch them together. People would buy “music” that was only lyrics, sometimes with a note “Sunge to thie strayne of Greene Slieves”, sometimes with no guide to the tune at all. Since there was no way to record music and no concept of intellectual property³, there was no question of “authenticity”. Even if you knew who wrote a song, you would never get to hear him sing. He was in Yorkshire and you were in Kent. Only with sound reproduction does music cease to be free, and the idea of the musician as auteur instead of entertainer appear…

¹And a remix. I bought the CD for the remix. A big gorgeous remix of “A Little Less Conversation”, which I first heard on Smallville. Clark discovers puberty is indeed a time of changes when suddenly has heat vision whenever he umm…thinks about girls. So he’s trying to learn to control it by setting up a scarecrow and thinking about Lana. And they play that song. THERE IS NO BAD HERE.

²Time for sister sledge to break out the Bob Dylan wisdom!

³I find this rather charming. It’s like Kender, without a sense of property at all. “Why shouldn’t I take this shiny? It was just sitting there in his coinpouch!” “Why shouldn’t I write my own ‘Hamlet’?”