Mood Music XIII

The other day, Feministing had a post on an example of one of my favorite musical things (I don't know quite what to call it - subset? subgenre? sub-subgenre?) - male artists covering songs by girl groups.  The analysis of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" gave an interesting read on the role of tone and arrangement in communicating the song's message - the Grizzly Bear cover is hauntingly sad in a way that the Crystals original simply is not. 

I thought I'd share a couple of my favorites of these covers - 

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - I love this arrangement of the song.  Also, in my opinion, Valli's vocal comes across way needier than those of the Shirelle's version, or Carole King's from Tapestry, which I kind of love.

"Remember Walking in the Sand" by Aerosmith - To me, this emphasizes the kind of not-always-obvious influence that girl group music had on musical acts that followed in the later years of rock and roll.  In Walk This Way, Steven Tyler rhapsodizes somewhat at length about his crush on the Shangri-Las' Mary Weiss, who gets honored by this gloriously heavy cover.

If I knew more about looking at music from an academic standpoint, I would totally write about girl group music.  It's easy to write the songs off as fluffy, but many of the men who are credited as rock's greatest singers and songwriters cite them as influences and idolize their singers.  Heck, Please Please Me has three girl group covers.  At the very least, there's the potential for a probing analysis of the gender issues at hand, as is evidenced by Feministing's look at just the one song.

On a semi-related note, they should totally do a Carole King week on American Idol (including her songs written with Gerry Goffin). Between the pop fabulosity of the early songs and the singer-songwriter-y goodness of her seventies work, it would be awesome.