Hanne Hukkelberg "Break My Body"

Yeah, that “Break My Body.” As I’ve blathered on about several times on this site [ 1 | 2 | 3 ], although cover versions are inanely popular on blogs for a variety of reasons, most of them tend to suck, because they don’t do anything new with the original song other than play it again, and, well, there’s much more to the word “interpretation” than singing the song dudes. Whether it relocates the original in a completely new ideological context (Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Devo’s “Satisfaction”), or just points out things that would never have been noticed otherwise (Casey Dienel’s “Cut Your Hair,” Yo La Tengo’s “You Can Have it All”), a good cover version takes something noticeable from the coverer and works it out through the song, and they’re sometimes better than the original (I don’t know why some think the original has to always be better). So on to Hukkelberg’s cover of “Break My Body” (mp3). Once I started paying attention to Pixies lyrics (which came long after I started listening to the band, for whatever reason), I developed an appreciation for how Frank Black (especially pre-Bossanova) perceived and performed the body, and how he seemed to take pleasure in writing about imaginary eccentrics who took pleasure in pain, or at least taking the risk of putting their bodies in peril. Like the vampires in “I Bleed,” or the masochists in “I’ve Been Tired” and “Levitate Me” and “Bone Machine” and that crazy line in “Broken Face”: “There was this man who snapped his brain in little pieces/And then he drove holes, and then he put ‘em back in there.” What Hukkelberg does with “Body” is to downplay the screeching looniness of the original and highlight the delusional nature of the song’s bizarre Surrealist sentiment. Pixies songs are always going to be infinitely great cover material (execution sometimes lacks) though, because they’re dense enough to be pulled apart in so many different ways. And Hukkelberg succeeds on all counts here—treating delicately the unbalanced passion that Black tore to shreds, dropping in accordions and chimes to increase the original’s inherent tendency toward curio, and essentially, well, improving the original song.

The only place I can find Rykestraße 68 for purchase is here. She’s on Propeller. Hanne’s Myspace.

ELSEWHERE: Hopefully, people are starting to recognize Matthew from Fluxblog as one of the keenest pop-textual critics currently writing. If not, dig what he wrote about Beyonce Knowles today, and have your mind changed.