The Boondocks on Dr. King
From The Boondocks‘ episode “Return of the King”, in which the main character, Huey Freeman, tells of an alternate universe where instead of being assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in a coma for 32 years and awakens on October 27, 2000. The full episode has lots of biting commentary, but the following clip is the climax of the episode and the one I feel is worth your time today. It should serve as a reminder that Dr. King’s work is far from over and he died for more than a three-day weekend.
I’ll wrap up this week with a slew of covers by one group. To quote 
As the week winds down, I’m just going to go for all out kitsch value. It’s impossible to beat Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It’s too seminal a song. It’s emblematic of so much: the 90s, the grunge genre, and the song Nirvana and Kurt Cobain will always be remembered for despite having an entire catalog of fantastic music (I almost want to upload their covers of “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” and “Lake of Fire” from their Unplugged in New York album but I only have so much online file storage space and I already have another week-long music series planned for February and that’s in addition to just one-off days where I’ll keep trying to prove that I’m not completely tone-deaf when it comes to music).
“Hurt” - Johnny Cash beats Nine Inch Nails
Political journalism is, in a word, wretched. Oh, there are so many other words we could use to describe it, but what’s the point? The mainstream media has turned what should be our most important of traditions into an event that looks like it should be on ESPN. How often will you hear the words about a “slugfest” or “the gloves are off” or anything beyond a glimpse of a side of a persona when it comes to discussing a candidate? If the idea isn’t simple enough to fit on a headline, then it’s not worth the time. No, don’t hire writers who can surmise large ideas in a single sentence. Simply make sure the story will fit a pre-written script and force the candidates to either play their part or lose the free airtime and fade into obscurity. Just ask Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd. “Sorry, guys. Hillary started running back in 2000 and Obama started back in 2004 and we just can’t seem to get rid of John Edwards no matter how hard we try to marginalize him as an angry kook. Didn’t you get the memo?”
Now we come to it where the cover completely eclipses the original. It’s the point where some people can be surprised that the one who covered the song wasn’t its original artist. Such is the case with today’s song.
The covers that will finish out the week are all songs that top the original, but it’s a matter of degrees. It’s never so much the case that the original song is bad (after all, it had to be worth covering in the first place), but these artist have such a distinct voice that they’re able to transform the original in to something fresh and make it all their own.
Sometimes a cover doesn’t have to exceed the original. Sometimes different is more than good enough as in…
I am struck to do this week-long series on cover songs for two reasons:
