Their Ways: Theorizing Reinterpretation in Popular Music
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I propose an analytical approach cover song analysis. Although song repurposing is a pervasive and an important practice in contemporary Euro-American popular music, it is the object of little scholarly literature. What scholarship there is, tends to be analyses of discreet original-cover pairs, leaving unaddressed the broader process of what it means to cover. “Cover song” has thus remained an undefined term that conceals many different interpretive subject positions. I therefore propose to analyze the practice of covering as a series of decisions, made by the cover artist, to be similar to or different from a base song. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s theories of creativity, I describe the base song as a “strategy,” an organizing force to which the cover artist responds with “tactics,” changes they make to repurpose the song for their particular expressive intentions. Depending on their number and extent, tactics either pull the new interpretation away from the original, or emulate it. These tendencies can be conceived of as continuum, stretching toward isomorphism (likeness) on one end, or metamorphism (dissimilarity). A third category arises when a song is repurposed by setting entirely new lyrics to an earlier song’s music. This is no longer a cover but a “derivative,” a new song that does not depend on the original for its meanings. Using the above framework, I bring multiple analytical lenses from music theory, and related disciplines to bear on several case studies. I draw these from the family of songs related to Frank Sinatra’s hit “My Way,” including its French source, Claude François’s “Comme d’habitude,” Sid Vicious’s violent metamorphic cover, and Canadian lounge act, Johnny Vegas, isomorphic homage to both Sinatra and Elvis Presley to help both broaden and focus the scholarly conversation on this important musical practice. This dissertation is the first of two, the second being my symphony for chamber orchestra, “The Quietest of Whispers.” In this work, I explore my own recovery from childhood sexual abuse in the hopes that it comforts other survivors of all walks, and initiates a broader conversation about sexual abuse recovery, particularly for boys.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it