Bowie cover of the Week: Duran Duran covers “Five Years” (sort of)

The one regularly scheduled recurring feature of this blog is the Monday “cover of the week.” What distinguishes what I post on Mondays from other covers is that the idea here is for me to choose among Bowie covers posted over the past week. Usually I choose among lesser known bands— sometimes just a guy in his basement. The idea is that Bowie’s music continues to live on in the form of interpretations by artists on all levels, from amateurs to superstars, and that while there cannot be truly new Bowie music, there appear to be an endless supply of new interpretations of his music (many of which are very good).

The one downside of this exercise is that a small number of songs continue to reappear as covers— “Heroes,” “Space Oddity,” “The Man Who Sold the World” and a few others. I like to look for covers of more obscure songs, but I’m looking for good covers of obscure songs. I don’t find something that meets both criteria that was posted over the past week, every week.

This week I’m posting something different— it’s a reaction video to Duran Duran’s 2021 cover of “Five Years.” I know nothing about the Wolf Hunterz, but this type of YouTube content is not unusual— a couple of content creators react to a video. The idea is at least as old as Beavis and Butt-Head, though these guys, while light-hearted, seem not to be doing their thing strictly for laughs. Cutting to the chase— they like the Duran Duran cover, and so do I.

I saw Duran Duran open for Bowie in 1987 in Toronto, during the Glass Spider Tour. Duran Duran performed an entire concert’s worth of music and I remember being surprised that I knew almost all the songs. They have covered Bowie before and never hid their admiration for Bowie, who they acknowledge as a major influence.

Though their video is interrupted by the commentators, you get to see the whole thing, which is worth seeing (and more importantly, hearing). So this is cheating a little in that the Duran Duran video is older, but the reaction is new. In my mind that beats yet another version of “Space Oddity” this week (though this blog is far from finished with “Space Oddity” covers!)