Bettye LaVette has made me reconsider the value of my rule. LaVette does magical things to other people's songs. She finds things in the originals that none of us knew were there, and she reinvents the songs based on her discoveries.
Music:
On the surface, this album is similar to LaVette's first release on Anti Records. On closer listen, though, it feels totally different. This album seems darker and more painful than I've Got My Own Hell to Raise. Almost as if LaVette raised her hell, and is now sitting in the aftermath, looking around at how different things have become.
The Scene of the Crime is unquestionably a soul record, but hints of rock and country flow through it. It might be because producer Patterson Hood and most of LaVette's session band are all members of alt-country heavyweights Drive-By Truckers, or it might be because LaVette understands all great music shares a common spirit that transcends categorization. Take a listen to Willie Nelson's "Somebody Pick Up My Pieces" and you'll hear how LaVette found the soul inside a great a country song.
And don't even get me started on her rendition of Elton John's "Talking Old Soldiers". This one gives me chills.
Packaging:
The liner notes follow the same basic theme as LaVette's last album: simple design, minimal use of color, a few stark photos, detailed credits, and an essay. The essay is well-written, and it gives me an appreciation for pretty much every person and place that was involved in the making of this record. On the downside, the photos -- mostly of the vintage studio gear from Muscle Shoals' Fame Studios -- are generic, and the striped back cover doesn't make any sense. I guess it's supposed to represent the stripes on a prison uniform, but it just looks like some kind of random, seizure-inducing optical illusion.
Listen if you like: Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Drive-By Truckers
If it were food, it'd be: a late-night shot of whiskey in a lonely Alabama dive bar
5: should be heard by all music fans; a "perfect" album
4: best of genre; sets a standard within its genre
3: just better than average; good for fans of the genre, and okay for everyone else
2: below average; listenable for fans of a genre, but only if there's nothing else to hear
1: poor, and whatever good qualities it has can't save it
0.5: no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
4 comments:
I think we do enjoy paintings where the artist has re-interpreted (copy?) other paintings. Van Gogh's painting of Millais' The Sower is one, I think, although I haven't checked it. This is without the issue of traditional themes (Madonna with child etc).
William Shakespeare (whoever he may have been) was not averse to borrowing plots and scenarios for his plays.
Modern film-makers have borrowed his stories (West Side Story, Romeo+Juliet).
So I don't have a problem with singers interpreting the works of others. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, The Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin come to mind.
Mind you, I rescind that permission in the case of Elvis Costello, who has done far too many covers with far too many accomplices and far too badly.
Drive-By Truckers and Tina Turner? Hrmmm
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P.S. To add onto what Professor Rosseforp said, there is an entire postmodern visual arts movement centered on the act of appropriation... Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Richard Pettibone, etc. Check out the Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum.
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