Covers and Arrangements

Last night I was getting ready for the start of my night shifts by staying up late.
As part of my regimented routine I was surfing the net for hours with the TV on in the background. I ended up at YouTube where I thought I'd have a nosey through some music bootlegs.

I decided to look up some Beatles stuff (because no one's ever looked for that before!) and put "Little Help From My Friends" as the search term. From that I stumbled on to a version of "With a Little Help from My Friends" by Bon Jovi. Notably, this was a cover of Joe Cocker's arrangement of the song (as performed at Woodstock and on the TV theme to the Wonder Years). What really astoundeed me though was the number of idiots that post comments on YouTube about artists music vids - particularly when they start ranting about how the "beatles were better" or "Bon Jovi kick Beatles ass". OH PLEASE, SHUT UP ALREADY! whining fools... grrr

To say one thing is better than another implies that similarities exist to make them comparable. The Beatles and Bon Jovi are from completely different musical genres. Also, if one iconic band perform a version of another iconic bands' work then surely it is seen that the former band are doffing their hat to the latter???

People need to learn the different between a band performing a cover version of someone else's work and an arrangement of someone else's work: -
A "cover" is a performance of a song that preserves the musical elements found in the original even if the style of the covering band is different in sound to that of the original.
An "arrangement" is where an artist has taken the some or all of the lyrics and provided an original interpretation that is markedly different to the original.

Some expamples of covers: -
No Doubt's cover of Talk Talk's "It's My Life"
Guns N' Roses cover of Wings "Live and Let Die"

Some expamples of arrangements: -
Joe Cocker's arrangement of the Beatles "With A Little Help From My Friends"
Michael Andrews & Gary Jules arrangement of Tears for Fears' "Mad World"