Number Ones: ‘You Don’t Own Me’, And The History Of The Cover Song On Australian Charts

Covers rarely get to #1 in Australia anymore – so what makes ‘You Don’t Own Me’ different? Bringing his popular column for The Vine to Junkee, Tim Byron takes a deeper look at the top song on the ARIA Singles Chart.

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There’s a new #1 on the Australian charts this week: ‘You Don’t Own Me’ by Brisbane singer Grace Sewell, featuring whiteboy American rapper G-Eazy. It’s a cover of a song that was originally a #4 single in Australia in 1964 for the recently-departed Lesley Gore. Kind of amazingly, both the Lesley Gore version and Grace’s cover were produced by Quincy Jones. Considering Quincy produced Michael Jackson’s Thriller — only the most popular album ever — this was quite a coup for an 18-year-old from Brisbane.

‘You Don’t Own Me’ is the first cover to get to #1 in Australia since Karise Eden’s live version of ‘Stay With Me Baby’, from The Voice in 2012. And if you ignore reality TV show winners like Eden, I believe the last cover of a previously popular song to get to #1 was Youth Group’s 2006 cover of Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, almost a decade ago.

The Death Of The Cover

While ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is unusual in 2015 — a cover! at the top of the charts! — it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the 1990s. The only year in the ’90s when a cover didn’t get to #1 was 1998. During the rest of the decade, everyone from Pearl Jam (‘Last Kiss’) to Faith No More (‘Easy’) to Wet Wet Wet (‘Love Is All Around’) and the Fugees (‘Killing Me Softly’) got in on the act. A well-placed cover was a career boost for numerous 1990s alternative rock bands, from the Lemonheads (‘Mrs Robinson’) to Limp Bizkit (‘Behind Blue Eyes’). And many a ‘90s dance floor was infested with cheap-sounding techno covers of old disco tunes — dare I remind you of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by N-Trance, or ‘Give It Up’ by Cut’n’Move?

So, what changed? One big difference between 2015 and 1995 is the rise of the talent quest reality TV show. Shows like Australian Idol or The Voice are almost entirely based around cover songs. Somewhere around the world right now, a mass audience is probably watching some dickhead cover some U2 song.

And all of this necessarily devalues the cover song. If pretty much anyone can sing a cover on TV and get famous — that Idol contestant William Hung actually still exists — the cover really isn’t that special. Other than reality TV show, the other place viewers would see covers on TV was the all-singing all-dancing Glee, which saw covers as kitsch. The dagginess of Glee was definitely part of its appeal but, well, dagginess is something of a commercial kiss of death for wannabe popstars.

The other big thing to blame for the commercial death of the cover is, of course, the internet. Covers might be a rarity at the top of the charts, but the internet is positively drowning in videos of amateur appropriations. I mean, half the people reading this have probably sung sweetly while plunking away on a ukulele and uploaded it to YouTube. And the likes of American duo Pomplamoose or Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox have made careers out of well-produced internet covers, without unduly troubling the charts.

The internet also means that a particular cover can never be the dominant version of the song. I was not even aware in 1994 that Cut’n’Move’s ‘Give It Up’ was a cover — there was no Wikipedia back then to tell me that it was originally by KC & The Sunshine Band. In 1994, a cover song could just be a song. And unless you were a big fan of KC & The Sunshine Band, your vague recollection of what the original ‘Give It Up’ sounded like probably didn’t have much effect on what you thought of the cover.

But these days, listening to Lesley Gore’s version is easy. And, as a result, it’s also pretty easy to figure out that Grace isn’t a patch on Lesley Gore. Grace is a talented young singer, but on ‘You Don’t Own Me’, she does sound fairly anonymous. Listening to her version, I wait patiently for her to pull out some clever vocal phrasing to illustrate the feelings in the song. I wait for her to do stuff like pausing before singing a big word, or letting her voice crack or slide up as she sings something emotional. But Grace sings the whole thing pretty damn straight, substituting sounding somewhere in between Adele and Amy Winehouse for emoting.

Compare that with Lesley Gore, whose vocal is a masterclass in 1960s teen pop. Her voice somehow simultaneously sounds both like she’s an inexperienced teenager, and like she’s handing down the ten commandments. She sounds like a child when she sings “I’m young and I love to be young”, and when she sings “Just let me be myself, that’s all I ask of you” she sounds resolute, defiant. Listen to the way she sings “please”, emphasising the explosiveness of the pl sound; the effect is more “bitch, please” rather than “if you please”. It’s calculated and artful, but you never question whether she means it. Researching this song for this article, I was surprised to find that Gore didn’t actually write the song – that’s how well she sings it.

Sounding anonymous isn’t necessarily a bad thing in pop music, mind you. Some singers deliberately cut back on mannerisms and vocal tricks precisely because their songs are really vessels for the audience to pour their own lives into. Perhaps the relative lack of personality in Grace’s version of the song was a deliberate move on Quincy Jones’s behalf, designed to let people lay their own feelings on top of it. But I’m not sure; in Grace’s version, the effect of the relative anonymity is to instead cause me to focus on other aspects of the song: the ornamental rapper, the hip-hop beats, the pulsating synth bass.

Still, it’s a powerful song.

It’s A Powerful Song

At the literal level, it’s all too easy to have a thing for someone who turns out to be a controlling dickhead. But while the song uses language about “other boys”, it’s really not a big leap for the “you” of the title to refer to society in general. In Gore’s version, recorded at a time when women were routinely treated as objects in pop music, this subtext is audible in the sound of her voice.

And the song’s defiance has meant that it has appealed to several different generations of listeners. Apart from Gore and Grace, it was recorded by Joan Jett in 1981, by the Blow Monkeys on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, and prominently sung by the main actresses in the 1996 film First Wives Club. And so, even if Grace’s performance might seem a bit anonymous to me, the song itself still has a resonance and power.

The sound of Grace’s ‘You Don’t Own Me’, however, does suggest that the producers had some doubts about the appeal of a 50-year-old song to a modern audience. Thus explains the inclusion of G-Eazy, who doesn’t really have anything interesting to say or a connection to the song’s topic matter. (In fact, when G-Eazy raps about “never asking for your help, independent woman“, it vaguely feels like mansplaining.) The same goes for the hip-hop beats, and the sound manipulation prominently heard at the start of the song (that’s the bit where you briefly wonder if your speakers are working properly).

All of this is meant to make the song sound modern, up-to-date — but the effect is to make Grace sound more disembodied and disconnected, rather than embodied, and powerful.

TV: The New Route To #1?

Despite the sops to The Youth, I suspect that the audience for Grace’s cover are a bit older than the average pop fan. Spotify listeners, who skew young, don’t seem terribly enthused about the song; it’s currently sitting at #17 on their daily charts. And of course, the song came to prominence via ads for the Channel 9 show Love Child, which follows young women dealing with the forced adoption policies of the late 1960s, where babies were taken from unmarried mothers – often against their will – and given up for adoption. It’s probably safe to say that a song associated with a primetime historical drama series on Channel 9 has an older average audience than the usual pop song. I actually suspect that a slightly more faithful version of the song – one more in the vein of Amy Winehouse, for example – might have gotten to #1 a couple of weeks sooner.

But maybe this version of the song — warts and all — is what actually works best as a Channel 9 promo. After all, the choice of a 1960s song says something about the milieu of the TV show, and the modern stuff in the song — the hip-hop beats and rapping — are indicative of the more modern attitudes of the people making the TV show. The modern stuff says in a fairly unsubtle way that, sure, we’re looking at the ’60s, but we’re doing it in 2015. The way that Grace sounds disconnected in her own song works for the Channel 9 promo; her vocal effectively becomes part of the dimly-remembered 1960s stuff that Love Child is examining.

And the thing about being on a Channel 9 promo is that opportunities for young musicians to make a name for themselves are fairly thin on the ground these days. People featured on TV talent show programs like The X-Factor largely get forgotten as soon as the show fades from memory. Outside of those shows, there’s no prime-time or even late-night TV shows where up-and-coming artists can strut their stuff. Oh for the days of Countdown, or even Hey Hey! It’s Saturday.

Australian commercial radio has particularly conservative playlists too; it’s almost impossible for a new act to get on high rotation unless they already have buzz elsewhere. So, if getting on a promo ad for a TV show was your best shot at making a name for yourself, at establishing the buzz needed to get on commercial radio — well, wouldn’t you put some annoying American rapper on your song too?

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Tim Byron completed a PhD in music psychology, plays in too many bands, and chronically overanalyses everything musical. He has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine.