Blog 3A - Cover Songs

       The song I've chosen to do is Monkey Man originally recorded by Toots and the Maytals in 1969 and covered by Melt-Banana in 2002. The reason I chose this song and cover is because The Maytals and Melt-Banana are not only separated by over thirty years of time, but they are also two bands that play very different styles of music from very different parts of the world, with The Maytals being a Jamaican ska/rocksteady band and Melt-Banana a Japanese noise rock band.

        The lyrics in both versions are the almost the same, though there are some slight differences such as an added verse that Melt-Banana took from another cover of Monkey Man by The Specials, and the thick Japanese heavy accent makes some lines sound slightly different. For the most part, the melody is also very similar, and is carried by the vocals and the guitar, but, as one would probably expect, that is where the similarities end. One major difference is in the speed of the two versions. Melt-Banana plays the song almost twice as fast as The Maytals giving their cover a very frantic feel, as oppose to the relaxed feel of the original. The timbre of almost everything is also completely different. The guitar and bass in the original version are very clean while in the cover the guitar makes use of a variety of effect pedals, and the bass is slightly overdriven. The drums also have a different tone to them in the cover version as this during one of the times where Melt-Banana was using a drum machine in studio rather than a human drummer. Overall, the pitch in the Melt-Banana cover is higher than that in the Maytals version, but it still keeps the low end with the bass line like in the original. The difference in pitch is most evident in the vocals as they are far higher pitched in the Melt-Banana cover due the fact they have a female vocalist with a much higher voice.

        I personally really like both the original version and the Melt-Banana cover, but my favorite version of Monkey Man is definitely the Melt-Banana one. One of the main reasons why I like it better is the tone of the guitar. Ichirou Agata of Melt-Banana is one of my favorite guitarists because he has a masterful control of effects, and I love the sounds he gets out of his guitar using all the effect pedals he does. Noise rock is also one of my favorite musical genres and I find it to be a very good combination with ska though there are very few examples of such a combination with Melt-Banana's cover of Monkey Man being on of the only ones. They were able to take a song from a very different genre from what they normally play and adapt it into their own style making it a unique song of their own while still keeping many aspects of the style of the original song.

Toots & The Maytals (original)

Melt-Banana (cover)