Random Thoughts about Random Covers

Flying around the world is an excellent excuse to plunk down $10-20 on new music. For the last couple of months, however, I've managed to avoid the airport. I still accrue new music, just slowly and haphazardly (mostly off of music blogs -- very addicting).

A couple days ago, I found myself listening a live version of the Futureheads' cover of Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" (I'd link it if I could only remember where ... hey, here it is!) and I realized that I have a great fondness for covers, the more random the better.

For example, here is Dynamite Hack covering N.W.A.'s "Boyz-n-the-Hood" (I think the link has a better quality video than the embedded youtube video below):



It's no George Washington, but what is?

And here is William Shatner with Joe Jackson and Ben Folds doing Pulp's "Common People" live (the song is on the Shatner's Has Been album where it's less sloppy):



Getting back to the Futureheads' cover of Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love," here's the video for the version on their album.



I love how the drummer (in addition to reminding me of a certain astrophysicist -- feel free to guess which one) looks out-of-place in the video, like he showed up to deliver a pizza and they gave him a drum and told him to stand in the woods and now he's thinking 'okay, I'll just play along and maybe I can score some of that pizza when it's over.' Do drummers always look out of place? Is that a thing? I thought maybe I could discern a trend (the astrophysicists rulebook says that I need just 3 to make a trend). The only thing I thought of, however, was the video for Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger:"



All the guys are dressed in jeans and leather jackets trying to look (hee!) menacing, except for the one guy with glasses wearing a white sport coat and loafers (is that right? it's a blurry video and my memory is fuzzy). As it turns out, he's well below even the drummer on the rock band totem pole: he plays the keyboard.