Friday, September 4, 2009

Blatant Butchering - Redo of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"

Record Club: Songs Of Leonard Cohen "Suzanne" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

"Suzanne" is perhaps one of Leonard Cohen's most famous and most beautiful tracks ever recorded. Hence why we are conflicted about this video: on one hand, this is a blatant butchering of an amazing song -- this thing gets pretty rough during certain parts, so much so you just want to turn the fucking thing off. But then again, look at who is involved here -- Beck, MGMT, Wolfmother, Banhart... So yes, we are conflicted. Judge for yourself and please weigh in! We say, this is garbage. So be it.

7 comments:

  1. For what's it's worth, I also this is deplorable.

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  2. This cover is a fascinating mess. It seems about one step away from a drunken sing-along, but you keep thinking they're going to pull it off somehow.

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  3. It would be surprising if anybody could do it better than Leonard himself.

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  4. Okay, I tried. I really did.

    "It's fucking COHEN," I thought, "You have to listen; you have to respect that someone's dusting this song off again."

    But no.

    Thank god, G-d, WHOEVER for the pause button in the middle of the video display.

    I tried.

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  5. I'm torn myself; when I first watched it I thought it was an unholy piece of crap, but I have to confess it is kind of growing on me. And the first Record Club had some good moments, after all...
    It's hard not to have impossibly high hopes for these artists performing such classic material, but wasn't their intention to do something informal, with no rehearsals and so on? I say, let's see what they do with the rest of the album.

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