Record Store Day brings out the best and desperate. Just a few days after this review was cobbled together, we had David Byrne covering Paramore and Lou Reed’s work pulled apart by the likes of Keith Richards. Glorious and well-matched covers will stand up well years from now – unlike this cover of Subterranean Homesick Blues from The Ting Tings. Whatever the duo behind That’s Not My Name could add to one of the great protest songs of the United States’ lengthy history is lost immediately. They have sliced and diced this Dylan classic in a horror experience brought on by a pop duo too big for their boots. The UK music scene of the late 2000s bred this and we are to blame.
No apology forthcoming from the duo who decided electric glitch pop would be suitable for a timeless classic – The Ting Tings’ Record Store Day remix has been thankfully forgotten. By those who listened to it, by those who made it and hopefully by Dylan too. Whether it was on his radar in the first place is unknowable, though turning his placard music video masterclass into an eye-straining and janky electro-pop track befitting of a PlayStation 2 console menu screen is not the best way to honour a legacy. Barbaric is not the word for it. No, it is much worse than this. Take the legacy of Subterranean Homesick Blues and discard it entirely. In name alone does it share any relevance to the Dylan classic – even the lyrics are ripped through and discarded for an awkward electro-pop beat which was too good to waste but not strong enough to use on a Ting Tings original.
Rumours of an edit with the Dylan vocals over the top of this snappy and inarticulate mess of instrumental electrics exist. The video does not. God forbid it did. Katie White and Jules De Martino do not add anything to one of the finest writers of a musical generation because they never wrote anything of interest other than the repetitive pop effects of That’s Not My Name and Shut Up and Let Me Go. Neither sparked much fury beyond a stint at the top of the charts. A cover of Subterranean Homesick Blues feels like an attempt to conjure relevancy out of controversy. It worked, probably. But the fact it remains a Record Store Day exclusive and a barely-viewed YouTube video is cause for interest and concern.
Maybe Dylan should rattle this one out live on stage, the sudden and three-note effects of The Ting Tings come to a sudden end. No sense of start or finish just dive in deep, right into the middle of what becomes a fascinating car crash of a cover. Dylan may write like a poet, but his vocals and his words are best kept to genres which can articulate them effectively. A brief pop of some of the words featured on this timeless classic raked over and pillaged by The Ting Tings, is as far away from the point of covers as you can get. These are not words to half-heartedly lob into an electro-charged track but articulate thoughts to consider with the weight of the words appropriately intact. At least Harry Nilsson got it right with his punchy, electric cover.
