Al Green – Take me to the River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGD8aQ2GKr0
Talking Heads – Take me to the River (cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ar2VHW1i2w
The original was fantastic, a soul-cleansing bad love masterpiece. I believe the talking heads’ cover is a great song in its own right, successful as a cover because it takes the song in a different direction – a firmer, more defined groove, funk-inspired synths – without being sacrilegious with respect to the original.
I grew up with the Talking Heads version. In fact, I didn’t know it was a cover until today. I’ve always loved the song and have to confess I prefer the cover to the original. As I was listening to the Al Green version for the first time, I scrolled down to look at the comments, and right at the top was user “Jerell Allen” with the following:
“So many white people in my life telling me that the TH version is better than this. But they don’t know they don’t know what it felt like growing up with this one.”
For me, this is a perfect example of an idea that Stoever is trying to express during the introduction to The Sonic Color Line:
Rearticulating music as a culturally and historically conditioned form of sound in political relation to (and flowing from, and toward) other sounds— none of which exist, as Gustavus Stadler reminds us, “outside of [their] perception by specifically marked subjects and bodies within history”— offers a deeper understanding of how and why music means, and to whom.
Being that Jerell Allen and I are different specifically marked subjects and bodies within history, the two most prominent versions of “Take me to the River” have distinctly separate meanings to us. In both cases, we prefer the version of the song that was a part of our acoustic environment at home, as kids. Jerell is exactly right when he says white people who prefer the TH version don’t know what it was like to grow up hearing Al Green ask you to take him to the river instead of David Byrne. Jerell also doesn’t know what it was like to listen to the Talking Heads version at full volume with my father and my brother – in the car, in the living room, anywhere there was a speaker. This is what Stoever is talking about. This is how music means different things to different people.
This only becomes an issue when we make the mistake of thinking our personal histories as bodies receiving vibrations can in any way inform objective value judgements.It is not fair to say that the Talking Heads’ cover is “better” than Al Green’s original, or vice-versa. Let’s agree to revel in the joy of getting dropped in the water, whoever the river belongs to.
