Some artists are practically uncoverable, by virtue of wild technique, extreme virtuosity or uncompromising personality… but that never stops other artists from trying. Sometimes you just have to watch and shake your head as you watch trainwreck after trainwreck. Sometimes you weep and gnash your teeth. Sometimes it helps if you come in from the middle.
Aside from just being a great band, T. Rex had a larger-than-life personality, sprinkled with glitter and sex. Every T. Rex song was imbued with this personality, sonically represented by shake-your-ass beats and Marc Bolan’s suggestive vocals. Nobody has ever had quite the same sparkle and stomp.
Though if you want to talk bands with comparably unmistakable and inimitable personalities, there’s always the Violent Femmes. This is where I came into this song stream. Like many of my generation, the Femmes permeated my adolescence, for good or for ill, making me simultaneously queasy and excited. To this day, I still have unhealthy and confusing feelings about Gordon Gano (preacher’s kids will have that effect on people). On their album The Blind and the Naked, the Femmes had the gall to cover T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution”. Well, maybe not so much covered as kidnapped and beat it until it was so broken and bruised that it barely resembled it’s original state (which is always the right way to do a cover, if you ask me).
There have been other attempts at covering “Children of the Revolution”, and most of them have ranged from forgettable to laughable (there is something so wrong and so right on about Bono singing “I drive a Rolls Royce because it’s good for my voice” on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack), but the cover from Neon Indian, while not everyone’s cuppa, feels faithful to the original cosmic sex shimmer of Bolan and his boys.
