Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. It’s interesting because, maybe, they were less good when they were covering artists whom they really, really respected and loved. The closer they got to that, the harder it was for them to get distance on them. It’s interesting, for instance, that they covered very little, if any — now that I think about it — Elvis Presley songs. Of course, there were huge Elvis Presley’s songs. I think they found it harder with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly — who were their formative influences — harder to take a step back and say, “Well, how can we do this differently?” Ended up producing these slightly weaker — I mean, they’re still great in my mind — but slightly weaker imitative versions. That’s a good point. Noam Dworman and I agree that either Paul McCartney or Wings covers of Beatles songs are almost uniformly mediocre. They’re faithful, they’re well executed, but I never want to hear them. I can’t think of a case where they improved on anything or gave it much of a new slant. Do you agree with that? Or is there a really good Macca or Wings cover of a Beatles song? I think some of the performances on Wings Over America are pretty good, but I generally agree, and it leads my mind to this larger point, which is that part of the reason they were so incredibly innovative in the first place was that they were British and therefore had this distance from American music. They were not organically part of the American traditions of blues and jazz and gospel that fed into rock and roll. This music was an alien language to them. It connected to some of the music from home, but it was, in other senses, wildly different, and that enabled them to see things about it and to perhaps be a little bit more analytical about it because they had this distance on it. To say, “Why can’t this go with that? Why can’t we mix up this style with that style? Why can’t we change this chord structure so it’s not like the normal one?” In a way that perhaps native American artists at the time were not able to do with the same facility. I think that sense of distance from it is actually what creates the innovation.…

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