Frankly I think too much anti-white guy pressure is put on indie-rockers when they cover black music. Plenty of hip-hop producers use prominent samples of white musicians without drawing similar scrutiny. Not all indie kids are elitist pricks. Some artists have actually taken pop music and/or black music and made it their own without mockery. Here's three of my favourites;

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy does a funny, but sincere cover of R. Kelly's song from the Ali soundtrack; The World's Greatest. While gently ribbing Kelly's pronunciation, he also translates the beauty of the song into a form that hipsters will appreciate.

Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear does a great cover of JoJo's Too Little Too Late, and as an added bonus you can read his bandmate's ultrasnobby appraisal of the cover and the original pop hit on his blog. He seems like a bit of a douche, but the cover is very good.

I'll throw in one more interesting cover, though it's not exactly indie-rock: Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer did a version of Bob Marley's Redemption Song where they opted to leave in place the improper english of the original. It would make for an interesting debate to see what people think of that decision. Is it respectful? Or does it just sound strange coming from the mouths of two white guys?

First, I would have reconsidered the use of the word "improper" to describe Marley's English. I'm not sure that one can describe the language of an entire culture as improper.

But as for Cash, he is the King of Covers, in my book. Of course he did a wonderful job on "Hurt", the song means more with Cash doing it than Resner could ever have hoped it to. "Let it Blow", "Sunday Morning Coming Down"...Cash has been so good at covers that it's a wonder that anybody else has the balls to do a cover in any way but toungue-in-cheek, lest they find their cover compared with the sorts that Johnny did.

Well, let's call it "non standard english." But I think that this really gets to the center that the article was circling about; how do artists from a higher socio-economic class cover artists whose fanbase is in a lower socio-economic class, without being unintentionally disrespectful?

Changing the focus a bit: covers used to be much more common (the first 2 Beatles albums had 6 covers each, and tons of artists didn't even write their own songs) in american music, so maybe as the cover has become rarer, it's also become much more of a statement, and thus subject to more scrutiny?

diggyG:

But I think that this really gets to the center that the article was circling about; how do artists from a higher socio-economic class cover artists whose fanbase is in a lower socio-economic class, without being unintentionally disrespectful?

But the center of that concept is that there is not necessarily any implied statement whatsoever in covering a song. That "statement" is something largely (if not totally) in the mind of the writer.

Granted, there are some of the obvious "disses" wherein the cover artist is playing the song for the sole purpose of making fun of it. But these are by far in the minority as far as cross genre cover songs are concerned.

The writer said Travis' cover of a Britney song means that "the so-called frivolous pop song has value but that this value is only revealed and affirmed in an "authentic," rock-based iteration."

How much do you want to bet that the guys in Travis just thought that it was, at its heart, a good song that they could do something cool with.

The only place he was right on in this article was when he mentioned the use of cross genre covers to demonstrate the musician's breadth of taste, rather than as a serious artistic statement. Taylor Swift covering "Lose Yourself?" I can believe that she loves the song, but I bet it sounds like a joke coming out of her mouth.

diggyG:

how do artists from a higher socio-economic class cover artists whose fanbase is in a lower socio-economic class, without being unintentionally disrespectful?

I'd hazard a guess that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant came from slightly "higher socio-economic classes" than, say, Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf. Page and Plant flat-out plagiarized those gents, lyrically if not always melodically, and profited mightily thereby. Now that's disrespectful.

Seems like it'd be hard for almost anyone who owns a guitar of their own to avoid being in a higher socio-economic class than, say, Robert Johnson. Should no-one but destitute black musicians ever play the blues? And should those destitute black musicians who move up a tax bracket after sales of their first album thenceforth give up the blues and switch to jazz?

But it's an interesting point. Nobody'd think twice about a young street-corner rapper making rhymes about 24" wheels on his Escalade, buckets of bling, fistfuls of Franklins and a harem of high-priced women, but somebody born in Bel Air who tries to sing about doing hard time at Folsom or losing his wife to the foreman at the sawmill... well, that guy just comes off as a poseur and a dope.