Rap Re-imaginings

When songs go through the wringer and come out the other side still great

A little while back I did a piece on song covers that are surprisingly good. This is a short one about something allied, but different — when an artist takes an already good song and strongly re-imagines it.

The best three examples I can think of come from the genre of rap…

Stan — Eminem

Had to start with this, really — a song so resonant, gut-punching and powerful that it’s inspired a slang word in common parlance: also a classic illustration of a song that manages to encompass a whole short story’s worth of emotion in a few minutes.

Eminem took Dido’s pleasant but slightly anodyne original, which starts so well but then drifts off into aimless warbling halfway through…

And turned it into something remarkable.

Gangsta’s Paradise — Coolio

Of course Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise is already great. But honestly, since hearing Coolio’s reframe, hasn’t the original felt like something was missing?

Comfortably Numb — Body Count

Easily the most recent of the three, released just this year. Ice T is kind of a remarkable figure. A mainstay of the hip hop scene since the early 80s, he managed to sidestep most of the gaping life chasms that plagued many of its other practitioners — and in fact laid them out early on in cold, wise detail, in the excellent You Played Yourself — segued into an acting career including a long-standing role in SVU: Special Victims Unit, and now helms the respected outfit Body Count, leaning hard into the incisive social and political commentary that the best rap is capable of.

T decided he wanted to use Comfortably Numb, and approached Floyd for permission to mess with their classic without a great deal of hope. Possibly surprisingly, their reaction was enthusiastic — to the point where it appears to be the only thing that the mutually-loathing Waters and Gilmour have agreed on in many, many years.

Gilmour’s solo in this song is widely revered as one of the greatest ever examples of lead guitar: check out a gold standard live rendition from Pompeii in 2016:

And so what you might have expected is that Ice T would wind up merely being able to rap over a previous recording, or sampling a short section and playing it over and over. But no. Gilmour was SO down with the idea of T doing a number over the song that he recorded an entirely new version, soloing most of the way through… and the combination of that and T’s words is pretty stunning.

So — got any other examples, whether in rap or not, where a band has taken a classic song and not merely covered it, but re-birthed into something very different and yet still good?