round 2

(7) Devo, “Satisfaction”
rose above
(2) Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Higher Ground”
247-113
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/16/22.

ben erwin on red hot chili peppers’ “higher ground”

As ubiquitous as cover songs have become, there’s always risk in recreating someone else’s work. Reimagining a track that’s already connected with audiences is tricky enough, but updating a veritable classic always feels like an imminent recipe for unmitigated disaster. 
I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of covers. The notion of taking an existing composition and turning it into something wildly different—or transposing a tune in an otherwise seemingly antithetical new genre—can reveal aspects of the original while creating something that feels fresh, even if listeners know they’re simply hearing a new rendition of an existing tune. The best cover songs simultaneously accomplish a number of things: 

• Provide new musical perspectives and soundscapes

• Update a tune for a new time or audience

• Celebrate the original artist while managing to create something interesting or innovative through the process of exploring a preexisting piece of music.

And while the music industry has historically released multiple versions of the same track on countless occasions, or promoted bowdlerized versions of underground hits, modern covers are now more likely used to raise a younger artist’s profile than solely pay homage to a classic. 
In fact, one of the surest signs of musical success is other artists covering your catalog. And when discussing the most-frequently covered musicians—and the musicians whose music is most worthy of covering—Stevie Wonder ranks near the top. Wonder’s oeuvre has been recreated and reimagined by everyone from Aretha Franklin and Stevie Ray Vaughn to Patti Smith and Rihanna. But perhaps the best interpretation of Wonder’s music is the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1989 recording of “Higher Ground” on Mother’s Milk. 
It might seem to some like musical sacrilege to contend that the Chili Peppers’ rendition is better than the original, per se, but the tune is equal parts tribute and modern update that simultaneously introduced RHCP to mainstream audiences while further proving the timelessness of Wonder’s original. 
In much the same way that Wonder’s Innervisions breathed fresh life into pop music in 1973, Mother’s Milk felt like an innovative anomaly during a period when much of popular music felt stagnant and sterile. The Peppers’ early career was built on cross-pollinating disparate genres and defying typical genre conventions of the time; before the stadium tours, platinum albums, and an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “Higher Ground” helped the group establish itself as pioneers and modern rock progenitors. The song’s themes of reincarnation, reinvention, and personal revelations are just as germane now as they were in 1973 and 1989, and the Chili Peppers were the perfect group to update this soul classic right on the cusp of an immense cultural transition in pop music. 

World keeps on turning, ‘cause it won’t be too long

Innervisions was released in the midst of what is now referred to as Wonder’s “classic period,” and “Higher Ground” is a remarkable track on an album full of some of the multi-talented musician’s best work. By 23, Wonder had already released more than a dozen records, but Innervisions signaled a sea change in his career. The jazzy doo-wop of “Too High” fits perfectly alongside the stellar storytelling of “Living for the City” and the simplicity (at least for Stevie) of “All is Fair.” But the real standout is still “Higher Ground”—even all these decades later. From its lyrical themes to Wonder’s vocal tone and instrumentation, the song is synonymous with ‘70s funk and soul; and while it’s easy to compare “Higher Ground” to Wonder’s other clavinet-driven classic, “Superstition,” the song’s 12/8 time signature gives the track a bouncier, sauntering swing. More than that, however, Wonder’s vocal delivery propels the song, particularly as the chorus swells. 
Much has been made of the fact that the track was recorded in a mere three hours, with Wonder playing each instrument and supplying all the vocals. This immensely impressive feat cannot be discounted, but it’s the aforementioned clavinet that dominates and drives the song. Consisting of three separate tracks, clavinet played through an envelope filter can be heard isolated on both the left and the right in the mix, and the instrument propels “Higher Ground.” Beautiful in its simplicity, Wonder interweaves subtle harmonies throughout that, coupled with the unique time signature, give the song such a velvety feel. Verses and choruses highlight both major and minor harmonic characteristics, and those contrasting melodic elements further lend to the track’s intensity. 
Music-nerd musings aside, “Higher Ground” is an encapsulation of everything that makes ‘70s funk and soul resonate on a cellular level. Isolating any individual track would still raise the hairs on the back of listeners’ necks, and the song is a perfect example of something that is—and please pardon the cliché—greater than the sum of its parts. If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that the tune is undeniably dated; that is, it’s instantly identifiable as an early ‘70s Stevie Wonder composition. And, popularity aside, the track could just as easily appear on any of Wonder’s early ‘70s releases. As much as the lyrical themes are universal, the music itself is very clearly of a particular time and place in music history. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and many a musician would love to be able to capture Wonder’s tone and style here, but it’s this dated quality that also makes the Chili Peppers’ subsequent cover sound so much more modern and progressive. 

I’m so darn glad he let me try it again

I have to admit at this point that I am generally not a fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never lived in California, or the fact that I could never pull off a nothing-but-a-tube-sock ensemble, but the band’s music never captured my imagination. But I’ve always loved their take on “Higher Ground.”
First off, that bassline. That big, beautiful rattle-your-organs bassline. Flea’s slap bass bludgeons just as much as it grooves, and it’s the perfect propulsive start to the track. While Wonder’s original builds a slow, swinging rhythm to complement his vocals, there’s zero pretense or climb in the cover version. Instead, that iconic bassline is simply built upon, as Chad Smith’s opening drum fill signals John Frusciante’s jagged guitar riff. Before the vocals even begin, Frusciante layers in wah-inflected guitar until power chords that echo Wonder’s original chord progression signal the start of the first verse. Where Wonder’s vocals are rich and silky, Anthony Kiedis sounds as though he’s issuing declarative commands regarding the state of the world.
A song that sounds like a plea for contemplation and compromise in the hands of Stevie Wonder is suddenly a call to action. By the time the chorus kicks in, it’s clear the Chili Peppers have rightfully opted for a more-is-more aesthetic, with a plethora of voices all gleefully chanting along. Sure, the lyrics get lost in the raucous, singalong chorus, but the pathos remains. What the cover occasionally lacks in precision it more than makes up for with visceral impact that builds and builds until the song crescendos with the tempo escalating to punk rock ferocity. 
As beautiful as the original “Higher Ground” is—and it is quite beautiful—I’ll happily take this modern reimagining every time. Wonder’s version fits perfectly into the soulful elegance of its day, but the instrumentation and recording techniques can’t help but conjure the impression of some dusty relic. What’s clear upon listening to Wonder’s track now is that they definitely don’t make them like that anymore. Conversely, the Chili Peppers version—though recorded more than 30 years ago—still feels fresh; and in the context of its initial release, it’s difficult to listen to the song without thinking about how Mother’s Milk would help usher in a wave of alternative rock that would typify the decade to come. Instead of hearing the song and being reminded of a musical era that no longer exists, the Chili Peppers’ rendition points toward music that has yet to be made. 

God is gonna’ show you the highest ground

In both versions of “Higher Ground,” listeners are afforded a window into two sides of the same spiritual coin: repentance, forgiveness, redemption, rebirth, and growth. The themes of the song are particularly fitting, given both artists’ penchant for reinvention. It’s also no surprise that RHCP included “Higher Ground” in their Hall of Fame induction performance, as the song encapsulates the band’s greatest musical strengths. 
The best cover songs offer up new twists on an original while updating a track for a new era and audience. Moreover, any truly great cover should offer something interesting and innovative while celebrating the original artist. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ rendition of “Higher Ground” epitomizes these characteristics, and I’m hard- pressed to think of another cover that so adequately stands up against its classic counterpart. 

Ben Erwin is a writing instructor and former music journalist from the Midwest. He hopes to one day fulfill his dream of punching Thom Yorke in the face.

ERIN BELIEU ON DEVO’S “SATISFACTION”

It’s October 14th, 1978, Omaha, Nebraska, and I’ve been a teenager just shy of three weeks.
It’s the year I begin creeping down to the TV room once my parents are in bed, sitting in my dad’s surpassingly ugly recliner, smoking the leftover ends of the four cigarettes that framed his after-supper ritual: four Larks, four Triscuits, each topped with a sweaty square of Colby cheese, and four Manhattans.
By 10pm, I knew he and my mom (with her own best time in this nightly liquid marathon) couldn’t clock an oom-pah band marching through the house. I’ve come down this evening to watch Saturday Night Live. For a girl living in the Brigadoon-like mists of Nebraska, my weekly illicit viewings of SNL are proof of life.
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that being thirteen sucks. Or it should be. I still recall the intensity of how terrible it feels to be that age. The enraging in-betweenness of it—too young for the older kids to bother with, but a galaxy beyond the babies you’re stuck “watching” at the card table end of Thanksgiving.
I’ll make the further case that being thirteen in 1978 was above average terrible: economy tanked, oil prices stratospheric, the Cold War still slouching on, a machine whose reason or purpose no one seemed to remember; Son of Sam’s trial on the nightly news, and that terrible picture on the cover of Time magazine, countless bodies splayed where they’d dropped after drinking the purple Kool Aid.
1978 also wins for peak divorce rate in America. Whatever spackle held the grown-ups together had rotted away over the course of the decade, as more and more of my friends were contractually obligated to spend weekends sleeping at their fathers’ divorce-sad one-bedroom apartments. Moms now had boyfriends, sketchy guys with receding hairlines named Denny and Cliff. Two of the kids in my neighborhood had uncles living in their basements, soldiers come home but not quite returned from Vietnam.
And the music. Uff. It was bleak from my position—that is, as a white girl from a suburban family barely clinging to the middle class, raised in an aggressively segregated midwestern city. I caught flashes on the periphery (from American Bandstand and Soul Train on Saturday mornings) that something musically vital was happening somewhere, but it wasn’t music to which I had real access back in the informational Before Times.
I had the soporifically wholesome stylings of “the Ol’ Redhead” Don Cole on KFAB AM radio announcing the treacly ballads that defined that year in pop music, a slough of already overplayed rock “classics,” the Gibb brothers’ Hydra-headed disco juggernaut, and the “Desperado” singer-songwriters whose stale “You know I gotta ramble, girl” machismo hit me as up its own ass even at that tender age. A perfume capturing the mainstream musical essence of 1978 in America would contain notes of ditch weed, Velveeta casserole, and polyester slacks (worn commando).
So I’m sitting in my dad’s chair smoking butts and regretting my nascent life when SNL’s host Fred Willard announces that week’s musical guest, some unknown band called Devo that in the next couple minutes will permanently alter how I perceive…well, everything.
As is true of any wildly original art that kicks the door open for much of what follows, the event of Devo’s appearance that night (back when we had three channels to choose from, and maybe PBS if you got the TV antenna pointed just right), this happening live on nationwide TV—it’s hard to capture the super-size audacity of their performance in our present time when you can experience everything anywhere always.
The danger-yellow biohazard suits, the evil-toy choreography—they looked like animatronic aliens who’d landed their spaceship in the uncanny valley. With unfashionably lean and punchy drums (especially compared to the era’s prog rock behemoths) and rhythm guitars laying out a tweaky, industrial through line, the song’s opening bars have more in common with Antheil’s score for Ballet Mécanique than anything the American public identified as a pop music at that point in history.
It’s not until Mark Mothersbaugh rips into his sugar-cereal amped version of the iconic hook of “Satisfaction” that you recognize this controlled demolition as a cover of one of the world’s most famous songs. The glitching robot vocals (Mothersbaugh spitting his famous “babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby” line like a possessed gumball machine), Gerald Casale’s boingy, Looney Tunes bass putting the party in the proceedings—they were the exact musical definition of “WTF??”; a weirdo bolt of lightning that shook the audience to their boogie (oogie oogie) shoes. It took Devo a little over two ferociously tight and catchy minutes that night to plant their harpoon in the bloated, boring, and twee nonsense clogging the airwaves at the time.

While our subject is cover songs, I’ll admit I have a hard time calling Devo’s version of “Satisfaction” a cover. That’s a toothless word for the Derridean surgery they perform on The Stones’ charismatic, seductive but ultimately backward-facing original. As T.S. Eliot said—who knew from demolishing traditions—“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
By this standard, Devo’s futuristic deconstruction of “Satisfaction” works as a crime-of-the-decade heist, hijacking the Stones’ song into something indelibly and completely their own. Respect to Mick Jagger for approving their use of the song, but what Devo does to “Satisfaction” has no basis in homage. The bluesy, roadhouse sex appeal that defines the Stones’ music is ruptured unto death by Devo’s mordantly playful amalgamation of Dadaism, Nihilistic philosophy, postmodern satire, and sci-fi kitsch, pressurized into the ear wiggy-ness of the corporate jingle structures they origamied into scathingly political pop music. And beneath the performance art drag, Devo had the added virtue of looking completely ordinary to their audience, genetic “spuds” as they called themselves—nothing like the sex panthers, renaissance fair troubadours and Valhalla cosplayers folks were used to. For all their obvious smarts and art house surreality, Devo was appealingly DIY for the kids who discovered them that night, both musically and visually; non-descript dudes indistinguishable from the college guys sacking groceries at my local Hinky Dinky. 
Of course, I didn’t have any of this language or context at 13, only a freshly minted teenager’s heat seeking radar for music so fresh and exciting—SO FUCKING NEW—that it left me slightly alarmed, disturbingly aroused and usefully confused. And I wasn’t alone.
Soon after their appearance on SNL, some of the certifiably coolest boys at the neighborhood high school covered Devo’s “Satisfaction” at the annual talent show causing a joyous riot that became immediate legend every kid in town heard about. A friend of mine, a well-known novelist (name redacted for the sake of personal dignity), told me after seeing their SNL performance he immediately dismantled his shower curtain and wore it around his tiny, conservative hometown to feel “Devo-esque,” despite the serious abuse he took from the normie kids (and proving once again being in the vanguard isn’t for the weak). My response was to start regularly pedaling my bike the 4 miles (uphill! Without permission!) to the closest record store, using my chore money to raid the bins for music I learned was called “New Wave”: Elvis Costello, B-52s, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, Blondie (and bless you, Chrissie & Debbie, for showing me women were damn well included too).
Seemingly overnight, it was a glorious time to be thirteen.
It’s a mystery to me and no small shame that on a recent stroll through the Internet I found surprisingly few “10 Greatest Covers of All-Time” lists that include Devo’s “Satisfaction.” I don’t even understand how that’s possible.
For many music nerds and budding musicians, Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” was a seminal moment in their early lives, a Schedule 1 introduction leading directly to the dive clubs and rumpus rooms of punk and new wave that would quickly infiltrate and reshape music worldwide.
Maybe Devo is considered more “performance art” than music to your more parochial sorts? Too equally committed to the satiric videos (MTV soon made ubiquitous) for the crankier purists to approve? Perhaps some simply take a pass on their music’s avant-garde complexities and experimentation?
Or maybe Devo is ultimately too Cassandra-like for some list makers with their upsettingly unsentimental “Jocko Homo” critique of post human devolution, zombie consumerism, and cannibalistic capitalism? I mean, nobody’s gonna vote Devo’s music most likely to get you laid.
I suppose this last reason makes the most sense to me. Little more than a year after Devo’s performance of “Satisfaction” on SNL, Ronald Reagan (*shudder*) won the presidency, ejaculating a backlash of fifties nostalgia porn as cultural “corrective” to the “dangerous” ideas unleashed by the Civil Rights, LGBTQIA+ and Women’s Liberation movements. During Reagan’s first administration, it remains in memory the only time I ever openly swore at my father—a public school administrator—paradoxically dedicated to working in lower income schools for 40 years—who ended up voting for Reagan not once, but twice. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD, DAD? IT’D BE A LOT QUICKER.”
So the great and greedy sleep of white America recommenced in the 80s with a revenant’s vengeance. In his second term, Ol’ Purplehead openly trolled the nation, using Bruce Springsteen’s obviously and indisputably brutal “Born In The USA” as his feel good campaign song while Alex P. Keaton clones were more than satisfied to dance along mindlessly in their whale print turtlenecks and Topsiders.
It’s hard not to think the human devolution Devo informed us of starting in the late 70s is all but complete in the apocalypse-adjacent aftermath of another racist, bigoted, and corrupt D-List actor’s presidency. That night on SNL, Devo delivered a message to the nation—a musical harbinger of the future soon to come--but hasn’t this always been America’s most singularly defining feature—not hearing what we don’t want to hear?
(“Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.”)

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021's Come-Hither Honeycomb. Recent work has appeared in the New York Times, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, and Kenyon Review. Belieu lives in Houston where she teaches for the University of Houston's MFA/Ph.D. program in Creative Writing.