Taylor Swift is a hugely successful businesswoman. She’s also an artist. A large part of her “Taylor’s Versions” project is (or was) the replication of her first six albums by painstakingly re-recording them. With very few exceptions, the new versions are, as Swift intended, aurally indistinguishable from the originals to all but the most dedicated Swifties. The project is not puzzling from a business perspective: Swift wanted the re-recordings to be widely adopted in place of the originals so that she owned the masters of the recordings of those songs that would be listened to and licensed. (Between drafting this post and publishing it, I had to shift the previous sentence from the present tense to the past!) But the project is highly puzzling from an artistic point of view: when a musician covers a song by another artist, or even their own previous work, they typically reinterpret the song to create a recording that shows the song in an interesting new light. A cover that hews too closely to the original is dismissed as derivative.
No philosophical problem here, you might think: “Taylor’s Versions” is a business project, not an artistic one. We might appreciate the replicated tracks as consummate works of craft, just as we might admire a highly accurate hand-painted copy of a great painting. We might sort of appreciate the tracks in the way we appreciate the originals, but any artistic merits or flaws they have will really be attributable to the originals that Taylor’s Versions imitate. This is roughly the view recently defended by Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock (“the 4Ms” for short!). They argue that there are two basic kinds of covers: mimic covers aim at the sonic replication of an existing track, while rendition covers aim at a new version of a song that’s been previously recorded. A mimic cover is appropriately evaluated simply in terms of how closely it comes to perfect sonic replication of its target, while rendition covers can be appropriately evaluated both as tracks in their own right and in comparison with their target originals.
As it happens, I am more convinced by Alex King’s arguments that (to put it in the 4Ms’ terms) “Taylor’s Versions” are rendition covers. Swift does aim at sonic replication of her target tracks, but many aspects of the context of the new tracks’ creation affect the meanings of those sounds so that the new tracks can be properly appreciated—on their own terms, and in comparison with the originals—for content that is absent from the originals. In this way, as Sherri Irvin has argued, “Taylor’s Versions” are akin to conceptual art. But I would like to step back from “Taylor’s Versions,” and think about the mimic–rendition distinction more generally. I am skeptical that it is a useful tool for thinking about covers in an art-philosophical context. For one thing, if the appropriate way to evaluate a mimic is solely in terms of the accuracy of its replication, then it seems that mimics could be evaluated mechanically (e.g., by a computer program that compares their sonic profiles), surely a sign that their proper mode of evaluation is not an artistic one.
But is accuracy of replication the only proper mode of evaluation for mimic covers? That might be true of the “mere technical exercises” that three of the 4Ms give as examples of mimics in an earlier paper. However, as that language suggests, such exercises are not artworks. It’s not clear that a track that aims at replication of another track but is also intended to be an artwork in its own right is properly evaluated solely in terms of the accuracy of its replication. In his book on covers, P. D. Magnus gives the example of the “Top of the Pops” cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The whole point of “Top of the Pops” as a commercial enterprise was to produce cheap replicas of hit recordings. The covering band’s job was to produce something as close to the original track as possible under severe constraints in time and budget. We might wonder whether these constraints are enough to suggest that this is not a mimic cover after all. The covering musicians are undeniably highly talented, and know that they cannot hope to perfectly replicate Wonder’s track given their practical constraints. It might thus be argued that they could not have intended (in the relevant sense of “intend”) to perfectly replicate the track.
But putting that worry aside, it seems implausible that the sole proper mode of appreciating the result is in terms of the accuracy of its sonic replication. The cover is easily aurally distinguished from the original, in part because of its different instrumentation. Simplifying somewhat, let’s say that where Wonder’s original is funky, the cover rocks. It seems obvious that positively appreciating the cover’s rockingness would be appropriate. But this is not an appreciation of how accurately the cover replicates the original. Indeed, it seems that we could (properly) appreciate the rockingness of the cover both in its own right and in comparison to the funkiness of the original. But that is precisely the way in which rendition covers are appropriately appreciated, according to the 4Ms. And if it walks like a rendition and quacks like a rendition, we should seriously consider the view that it is a rendition.
Now suppose (counterfactually) that the Top of the Pops musicians had succeeded perfectly in replicating the sound of Wonder’s original track. In this case, the cover would be funky. But, again, it seems that this funkiness could be appreciated in its own right (where it counts as an artistic merit) or in comparison with the original (where it counts as derivative, and thus an artistic flaw). So, again, this putative mimic cover looks like it is a rendition cover after all.
Returning to “Taylor’s Versions”: If the arguments above are sound, then even if we reject King’s contextualist arguments that the new tracks have different meanings from their targets, even if Swift intends solely to replicate the sound of her target tracks, and even if she perfectly succeeds, the new tracks can be appreciated both in comparison to their targets and for their own aesthetic qualities. It looks like all covers are rendition covers, and there is thus no work for the concept of a “mimic cover” to do.
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