Chapter 1

Food for Thought: On Sid Vicious’s Cannibalization of “My Way”

Evan Ware

“As an indicator of difference, as a way of dominating, stigmatizing and dehumanizing the other, food—or what is designated “food”—has served as a powerful political tool. In fact, the degree to which one feels superior to another people might be gauged by the degree of one’s repugnance to their diet. Like all such imprisoned fictions, this one gave rise to a reality (i.e., haute cuisine), and to an abiding cultural principle: “Tell me what thou eatest, and I will tell thee what thou art.”

Sherod Santos1 “Speculating irreverently on the qualities he would acquire after eating “a little bit of Elvis,” Bangs, while punk’s fire still glowed in 1980, has the chaos of Sid Vicious supplant the malaise of Presley: ‘…At least Sid Vicious got to walk onstage with “GIMME A FIX” written in blood on his chest and bash people in the first row over the head with his bass if he didn’t approve of the brand of beer can they were throwing at him. Sid got to have all the fun.’”

Neil Nehring quoting Lester Bangs2

I. Aperitif

We live in a world suffused with cover songs. This is not just the case of the playlists on

Top 40 radio, but also in karaoke bars, and on nightly television where we witness strings of

newly deemed pop classics sung by reality show contestants, all oozing sincerity, all keeping an

eye on the prize. In what George Plasketes has called the “cover age,” it is an understandable

mistake to think of cover songs as necessarily paying tribute to their forebears, since this would

seem to be the dominant paradigm; it may be just as accurate to say we live in an age of hom-

age.3 But, although many cover songs are indeed reverent of their originals in some ways, others

have more complex inter relations, and these—to say nothing of the enterprise of studying cover

songs in general—have received surprisingly scant scholarly attention.4

Philosopher Kurt Mosser has suggested that one of the problems current scholarship faces

is a lack of vocabulary for accurately discussing cover songs. If we speak only of imitation, and

do not pause to consider the difference between the kinds of imitation that are vehicled—servile

2 Chapter 1 tributes or radical departures—then we are collapsing the meaning of “covering” completely. To

rectify this, Mosser has proposed a typology along an axis of decreasing veneration toward the

original so that the reduplicative cover gives way to minor, and then major interpretations, send-

ups, and finally parodies. He considers parodies to be the antipodes of reduplications or tributes,

that they have only a minimal connection to the original.5

But what about covers that are aggressive toward their originals? It’s not clear where in

his typology these would fit in. Are they major interpretations? What if an aggressive cover con-

tains elements of parody? What specific aspects of the song need to be changed and how exten-

sively for the interpretation to qualify as “major”? Also, Mosser’s categories belie an important

conceptual inconsistency: terms like “minor/major interpretation” speak to a quantity of change,

while labels such as “comic” or “parodic” speak to a quality of change. Though I think his terms

are a useful beginning, their ambiguities make them too problematic to use exclusively. Moreo-

ver, given that musical performance is a dynamic reality that exists in time, I am reticent to as-

cribe labels that fix the process in a kind of categorical amber. In my experience boundaries are

more fluid so it might be more productive to speak of processes of covering rather than types of

cover, and to examine the specific musical and performative ways these processes are enacted.

This would have the advantage of considering both the quantity and quality of changes in de-

scribing how a song’s interpretation unfolds.

In this chapter, I will examine how Sid Vicious’s cover of Frank Sinatra’s classic “My

Way,” as performed in Julien Temple’s film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1980), embodies an

aggressive covering process.6 Punk is clearly not a genre in which praise is a strong element, and

Sinatra’s original, with its suave sophistication, it’s classy and urbane manner, was in many ways

anathema to the blue-collar punk aesthetic of raw emotion and “authentic”—that is to say anti-

Food for Thought: On Sid Vicious’s Cannibalization of “My Way” 3

virtuosic—musical performance. Yet Vicious sinks his teeth into “My Way” so deeply that it is

not an exaggeration to say that he doesn’t just cover it, he cannibalizes it. Explaining how Vi-

cious devours Sinatra and therefore creates what could be called a hyper-aggressive cover, there-

fore, is the main course I am tempting you with here. Before that, I will be serving a soup to

whet your palates, a way of framing and understanding the changes from one song to the next. I

will do so by proposing that both songs are considered simultaneously and that one is considered

the standard to which the other responds. I will then serve up an extensive platter of appetizers,

analyzing how the qualities of changes from one song to the next manifest through quantities of

such changes in the lyrics, physical gestures, vocal performance, music, and form. Then the can-

nibalism and after it’s all over, there will be a digestif to cap off the meal.

And now, shall we begin? Perhaps you would like to look at a wine list? I’d recommend

the house red…

II. Soupe du Jour — Stereophonically Listening to Strategies and Tactics

Michel de Certeau’s “theory of practice,” a view of the way consumers act in society,

sees somewhat antagonistic forces called strategies and tactics attempting to each establish a

way of being in the world. Strategies represent institutional or organizing forces that create spac-

es in which they relate to exterior agents, while tactics are the responses of these external agents,

found in their decisions and, most specifically in their small-scale subversions of the institutional

strategies.7 Likewise, this frame can be applied to an analysis of cover songs in which the origi-

nal is ostensibly the strategy and the cover a collection of tactics applied to create—to some ex-

tent—a new song. Seeing Sinatra’s recording of “My Way” as a strategy is not a problem. It can

be easily considered the most influential version of the song in existence. Immediately subsumed