Balarama Music

Originals Week: Feminist Movement’s Landmark Song

{May 31}

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So I thought I’d start a type of theme for this week to kind of spruce things up and make it interesting again. So I present:

Originals Week!

Ok, that doesn’t explain much so let me try to decipher it for you. You ever hear a cover of a song that is pretty good, maybe even better than the original, but it becomes so good that people forget that someone else did it…or don’t even know. A good example would be of Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.” A lot of people know that Creedence Clearwater Revival did it first, but hers has become far more well-known and recognizable so that a lot of people don’t even know that CCR did it first or did it at all. Shinedown’s version of “Simple Man” is another example of this especially since in the world of ignorant radio today, kids are going to grow up knowing nothing about the far superior original with its killer guitar.

But Originals Week will be showing you the original versions of most songs. The good thing about me being a music geek in this sense is that all seven songs I pick for the week are going to be songs that you didn’t even know about. They will be original versions of songs that you know so well and have never even thought of being a cover. It’s always interesting when people look at my iTunes, see a song, say something like “I love the original Guns N Roses version,” and then find out that Bob Dylan predates them by a decade or so. I will say that for a lot of these songs, I actually do think the cover and more famous version is better, but it’s always interesting to see the original and it gives you an even bigger respect for the artist responsible for the cover for being able to do it in a new and imaginative way. Let’s kick it off with something that’s going to shock everyone.

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