All Mixed Up: Bowie, Covers, Mash-ups, Remixes, and Borrowing

All Mixed Up: Bowie, Covers, Mash-ups, Remixes, and Borrowing

My blog includes a weekly feature, “Cover of the Week,” which, as the name suggests, highlights a cover of a Bowie song that I particularly enjoyed from the previous seven days. Occasionally, I also share mash-ups and remixes that strike me as especially clever, enjoyable or otherwise noteworthy. Just yesterday, I posted a remix of “Jump They Say” that samples Hannah Breschard’s iconic “space cadet” line from the 1975 documentary Cracked Actor (don’t miss my exclusive interview with Hannah this Saturday!) While that post has only received positive feedback so far, once in a while I get comments objecting to the principle of featuring reinterpretations of Bowie’s work.

At least, that’s what I think the objections are about. I can’t take issue with whether someone likes a song or not; musical taste is inherently subjective. I certainly hear plenty of songs I don’t like that others enjoy very much. In selecting a “Cover of the Week,” for instance, I go through plenty of covers that I don’t select because they don’t resonate with me. However, I think it would be unnecessary and mean-spirited to post a “Worst Cover of the Week.” Why would I do that? Someone took the time and effort to record a Bowie song and share it online for others to hear—why should that effort be met with derision? Perhaps if it were a big-name band trying to sell a cover, there might be more room for scrutiny, but especially when it’s an amateur’s project, I don’t see how the world is better off with me bashing it.

That said, the objections I receive aren’t always about whether the reinterpretation is “good” or “bad” in a personal sense. Instead, they often seem to stem from the idea that Bowie’s original version is perfect and that any attempt to reinterpret it is inherently inferior, even disrespectful. Others might see the use of Bowie’s work as exploitative—an attempt to capitalize on his legacy without adding anything meaningful. There’s also a sense among some fans that reinterpretations dilute the Bowie’s vision.

Ironically, many of these objections seem to disregard that Bowie himself embraced reinterpretation in many forms.

Let’s start with covers. Bowie recorded lots and lots of covers. Almost every Bowie album includes at least one cover; several include multiple covers, Tonight is almost all covers, and, of course, Pin Ups is 100% a cover album. Bowie covered big-name acts like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and less well-known artists like Biff Rose and, say, the Modern Lovers (I know both have plenty of fans, so no offense, guys). Sometimes he’d play around with the arrangement or even the lyrics, and sometimes his covers were fairly faithful to the source material. Going back to personal taste, I like most of Bowie’s covers but think that in some cases, the original artists’ versions were better. But clearly, Bowie did not have a problem with the concept.

Perhaps more surprising to casual fans is that Bowie also embraced mash-ups. “Rebel Never Gets Old” is a mash-up of two of his own songs: “Rebel Rebel” and “Never Get Old.” It was his last single, released in 2003, for a decade.

Bowie didn’t even do the mixing for that one himself. Here’s how the song’s Wikipedia entry describes it: “‘Rebel Never Gets Old’ is a mash-up of the songs ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Never Get Old,’ where the two songs are mixed into each other, produced by Mark Vidler…” But it doesn’t stop there. Again, drawing from Wikipedia: “As part of the advertising campaign, an online competition invited contestants to create their own mash-ups from select Bowie songs (some from Reality and some from his past repertoire); the winner mashed up ‘Shake It’ with ‘She’ll Drive the Big Car’ and won a new Audi as a result.”

Another Bowie single that was a mash-up was the Pet Shop Boys remix of “Hallo Spaceboy,” which contained pieces from “Space Oddity” sung not by Bowie but by Neil Tennant. The Pet Shop Boys remix was the song’s official release as a single, and that’s the version promoted in the official Bowie video (which also repurposed plenty of old video clips originally shot for totally unrelated reasons).

Now, I can imagine someone arguing that, in the case of “Rebel Never Gets Old,” Bowie was mashing up his own work, giving him more ownership over the material. And in the case of “Hallo Spaceboy,” Tennant added a new recording rather than simply remixing Bowie’s original songs.

But while I can imagine that type of response, I have a harder time understanding why any of that matters. Especially in the case of “Hallo Spaceboy,” work from two different artists was combined to create something new and different. What’s the principled problem with that? Bowie, of course, was involved with or sanctioned all kinds of wild remixes of his own songs. And, as the subject of my interview from last week, Nick Smart, wrote an entire book about (David Bowie: The Collector), Bowie borrowed and recast a variety of influences throughout his career— repurposing some of his own material along with that of many, many others.

The point here is that it’s fair enough to prefer one version over another, but there’s nothing sacred or untouchable about Bowie’s original work. Even if a reinterpretation doesn’t meet someone’s subjective standard, it can still be admired for its technical accomplishment. Don’t like “Young Love and Saturday Nights,” the country song by Chris Young that heavily borrowed from “Rebel Rebel”? Fine, but that doesn’t mean Young did a bad job singing it. Meanwhile, the skills involved in creating a mash-up or remix are recognized as a challenging and important aspect of music production, which is part of the reason there are Grammy awards for engineering.

Personally, I obviously value what Bowie left us. But I’m also happy that people more creative than me can take his work and use it like clay to mold something new. Whether these reinterpretations surpass the original or not, they breathe fresh life into music that might otherwise remain static. And I think Bowie, an artist who continually reinvented himself and borrowed from countless influences, would agree. Reinterpretations don’t diminish Bowie’s originals—they celebrate their vitality.