Bowie Cover of the Week: Terzacorsia (?) performs “Ziggy Stardust:

One of the points of the “cover of the week” post is to highlight how Bowie’s music not only lives on but provides inspiration to contemporary artists, whether they be armatures or professionals. The exercise of finding a “cover of the week” has led me to find videos made by bands from all over the world. In this case, it’s an Italian band that’s covering “Ziggy Stardust.” In many ways the performance is fairly straightforward — there’s nothing especially innovative about the arrangement, but it’s well done. What I find endearing, though, is that the lead singer sounds like he might be articulating the words based on a phonetic memorization of the sounds, rather than an understanding of English. There’s a few points where lines sound kind of like the actual lyrics, but more like rough approximations of the way the actual lyrics sound. In other words— gibberish. But in a nice way. Hey, I couldn’t sing a song in Italian.

I should note that there are at least two instances I know of where Bowie did sing in Italian— he did an Italian cover of “Space Oddity” and did a tongue-in-cheek cover of “Volare” for the Absolute Beginners soundtrack.

Terzacorsia has its own website, all in Italian, which you can link to here. Based on a limited use of Google translate, I’m not exactly sure if Terzacorsia is actually the name of a band, or a club, a center for the arts or some other sort of organization. The word itself means, “third lane.” If it is an organization and not a band, then I can’t tell you much about who is actually performing here.

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You may have noticed that “Cover of the Week” comes a day early this week. Tomorrow is Bowie’s birthday, and I have a special post lined up. Although I surely like this video, it’s entirely possible that I’ll end up missing a “better” cover that is released between the time of this writing and Monday, January 8th. Also, I didn’t really get to review as many newly posted covers as I usually do. That said, this video has better-than-typical production and sound quality and I like the end result for the reasons articulated above, so I’m pretty comfortable with this week’s selection.