Once upon a time when I was in high school, a bunch of my friends were goofing off outdoors during lunch and singing along with one of those outsize boombox radios that you saw everywhere in that era, when the choir teacher walked by. He was a cute little red-faced guy -- what I’ve since heard referred to as stereotypically gay, which was a little odd at a high school that was as unrelentingly Christian as the one I attended. (Not in its teachings or in its board of directors, mind you; it was a public school. Just a public school in the Somewhat Sheltered South, where Teens for Christ was the largest extracurricular group and the club photo spanned a full two pages in the yearbook, and the second largest group was the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.)
Anyway, he heard one of my friends singing along to Etta James’ “At Last” and went lemonface. He actually came over to where we all were and turned down the boombox to address us.
“Ugh,” he said. “Foolish little white girls who know nothing about soul should not sing Etta. Or at least, they should not try to sing LIKE Etta. Sing it if you must, but if you don’t want to embarrass yourself, sing it the way YOU sing. Or at least try to do it in the style of someone you’re more akin to. Even if you sing someone's song pretending to sing like someone else, that will help you immensely. But make it your era, your paradigm. Debbie Gibson. [ed. note: Ouch, my age is showing.] If you’re feeling brave, go a little more classical and try Judy Garland – But that song? Absolutely, NOT! ETTA! ”
It was an interesting lesson. We’d all grown up singing along with the radio, lip synching at best, horribly off key and louder than the performer at worst, and I think unconsciously we all tried to sound as close to the original recording as possible. It wasn’t until after that little speech that I started to realize the best covers of songs are the ones where the cover artist has diverged from the original and made it into a completely different song. Sheryl Crow doesn’t try to sound like Rod Stewart who doesn’t try to sound like Cat Stevens on The First Cut Is the Deepest. John Lennon is nowhere near Chuck Berry on the Beatles version of Rock and Roll Music. Conversely, Jeffrey Gaines trying to channel Peter Gabriel to do Gabriel’s In Your Eyes is offputting; the vocals are too similar, but the cover is just different enough to be disorienting. Now, if Gaines had just done a guitar instrumental and kept his mouth shut … well.
I am thinking about all this because of an incident regarding the YP. See, we got his kindergarten assessment in the mail while we were gone, and I opened it Monday. And it said, “Your child, YOUNG PRINCE , has scored 74 of a possible 75 points on his assessment test.” It went on to include a checklist of “things you and your child should work on before school starts” but none of the items were checked.
That’s good, right? And my first reaction was, “Hey! That's good!”
But hard on the heels of that was, “So … what was that one point taken off for?”
And I heard my mother’s voice. “Oh! Six A’s! But why a B in algebra?”
Arrrrrrgh. No, no, no. I remember HATING that. I remember feeling like I’d always be thisclosebutnocloser and neveractuallyattainingthestatusof good. And also feeling vaguely guilty that if I’d just maybe studied four extra hours I might not have committed the careless error of dropping that one stupid variable on that one test and I’d have the seven A’s.
In my defense, this 74 of 75 wasn’t broken down anywhere and that was more where my thoughts were going. It really was more curiosity of what they were basing these numbers on and what they were actually assessing than it was “Oh, we must teach the YP how to tie his shoes so he will have PERFECT SCORES!”
But see, I know – and I knew at the time – that my mom wasn’t actually saying I should have studied four extra hours for algebra, she was asking the question from the perspective of, “But you got A’s in all this other stuff … is something going WRONG here or are you just bad at math like the rest of us?”
I talked to NYAB about all this and said, ‘You know, if he gets a B in math, I won’t be surprised. But if he gets a B in history … I’m gonna have some questions.”
NYAB said, “I can tell you right now why he’ll get a B in history. ‘Excuse me, Teacher? Yeah, according to William Manchester, that’s not really the way that particular event went down…’ and then the teacher will tell him he is wrong.”
Well, we shall see.
I talked to my mom about all this last night, and she just laughed and laughed.
She also pointed out the obvious – that school report cards are rather like annual employee evaluations and you generally know what the thing will say well in advance of being handed the actual piece of paper. So hopefully I won’t have to ask too many questions about “Hey, kid, what’s the story with this 99.8 in calculus?? I mean, that's great! You only screwed up once!!”
In any case, I’ve got a few years to work on my cover song, and figure out a way to make it in my own voice – which hopefully won’t sound so much like my mom’s that I hear her voice every time I open my mouth. Having been made aware of the embarrassment, I’d hate to do any injustice to Etta James ... or anyone else of her caliber in any arena. Hee. Sorry, Mom.
