Dut dut duh-duh dut dut duh-duh…
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[4.44]
Edward Okulicz: “Tom’s Diner” started as a voice-only piece. Then it became famous through a remix so clever that you’d never believe that it wasn’t the original, which is not something you can say about this cover. The overly imposing throbs of Moroder’s reboot are just too much, suffocating the words so that they’re not observational and natural, instead, they sound like Britney is singing off a teleprompter.
[5]
Will Adams: I can’t help it, I’m a sucker, so my mind responded exactly the way the powers that be wanted my mind to respond to the concept of “Britney singing the ‘Tom’s Diner’ riff.” After picking up my exploded brain from the floor, though, this mostly holds up. It’s a great use of Britney, processed and vocoded into a melancholic robot and works much better than the ill-fitting brashness of “Pretty Girls.” And apart from some hiccups (that dumb spoken bridge) Giorgio’s production adds an extra layer of nacho cheese that you know is bad for you but you can’t help indulging in for just one more chip.
[7]
Ramzi Awn: “Tom’s Diner” finds Britney Spears staring pensively into her coffee, confessions and betrayals looking back at her. The synths drenching the tune make it clear that this is no ordinary remake: iconoclastic though it may be, Britney Spears’ rendition of Vega’s classic does no disservice to it. Reflective and sad has always been one of Ms. Spears’ best looks, and “Tom’s Diner” is no exception.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Why shouldn’t it work? The original depends on Suzanne Vega’s sandpapery timbre to note how events of garden variety banality may fuck with her equilibrium. Because Britney has collaborated in shaping songs that tests the limits of her and our equilibrium, the extent to which the gadgets reduced her to a tone as ignorable as the toaster in the diner shocked me. Nobody is trying.
[2]
Thomas Inskeep: Never underestimate the ability of Britney to turn anything vapid; the original DNA mix of “Tom’s Diner” is a classic, whether you think it should be or not, and this most definitely will not be. Has ever a singer done so much with so little? And as for Moroder, he should know better.
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: Giorgio’s become kind of a hack, huh? These ridiculous strings, this undanceable groove: this is the kind of self-seriousness that undermines the classic to make it about GIORGIO and his egomania, no doubt helped by his 20 minutes of self-obsessed prattling on the Daft Punk album to celebrate himself for making like five songs of value in the era of coke-saturation. Giorgio is not doing his legacy any favors by constantly throwing on costumes too big for his brittle bones to catch, but at least his deteriorating skeleton matches the texture of auto-tuned Brit.
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: I keep a MediaWiki database of every CD I own, year of release, year of purchase, notable labels, anything I can think to categorize. So I can definitively tell you that one of the first albums I bought when I was old enough to use my own money was Suzanne Vega’s Retrospective. (I even remember where; it was a Borders near the Greensboro mall, where I also bought The Kick Inside and — FULL DISCLOSURE, NO REVISED HISTORY — Dido’s No Angel. I admired the shrink wrap [lolz] in the cafe.) I think I was sick of not being able to find more than two tracks from 99.9F° on LimeWire, though endless mistagged “Tom’s Diner”s abounded. Vega, it turns out, has released things other than “Tom’s Diner,” including last year’s Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles, which despite sampling 50 Cent and anticipating the trendy Tarot revival got scant coverage. Even I didn’t know it came out. Meanwhile, “Tom’s Diner” has now been prominently re-recorded twice: in partial, for Fall Out Boy’s martial bro roars, and now in full. Britney Spears has always been the subject of endless musical what-if fanfiction by critics — even I’m not immune — many of whom rewrite her not as a woman who grew up in Louisiana liking Sheryl Crow but a contextless, self-less ghost in their pontification machine. This “Tom’s Diner” makes things defictional, and while the cover choice makes a certain amount of sense — see: Crow — it’s not only awful but old-fashioned awful, with every element of a Legendarily Bad Cover as told by the rockist press represented. Tick them off: “dance remix” with pointless added overblown synth riffs, auto-tune, porno guitars, a vocodered guy interrupting about alcohol and drugs and neverending fun, a small song blown up to the scale of “We Built This City” until the anti-aliasing shows. No one is invested; note how Moroder conducts himself like a band well into arena hubris phase, compare Vega’s little vocal skip on “funnies” to Britney’s monotone delivery of the same. But you could make the same arguments of the DNA remix, down to its fully overtaking the original. And I like legendarily bad covers — the rockist press is no friend of mine, my onetime favorite artist does tons of these covers, I was recently on a panel defending them! — so I want to like it. And I was almost swayed by Alex Macpherson’s comments: “Vega’s laconic and slightly bored voice => Spears’ robotic blankness, of course. It fits right into the Britney mythology: ‘I open up the paper / there’s a story of an actor / who had died while he was drinking / it was no one I had heard of.'” But there’s no purpose for this, no improvement upon the original, and not only that it actively makes me angry. Vega, like most female folk singer-songwriters of the past several decades who didn’t get canonized like Kate or Joni, is good enough to be ransacked for crap and profit, but not good enough for anyone to give a damn about the artist’s ongoing career. No one you’d have heard of.
[1]
Anthony Easton: Suzanne Vega doesn’t mean shit here. Any other cover of a song about urban isolation would have worked (and some would have worked even better — imagine them doing “Being Boring”), and recent criticism about her as faceless are kind of compounded here. The vocoder at the end of this helps. That the song sounds so of its time and the earnestness of Vega helps slightly more. It is really weird, but weird Brit has value beyond other artists, and Moroder kind of understands that.
[8]
Jessica Doyle: So Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly. “Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way and cast Audrey,” he said later. “Audrey is an old friend and one of my favorite people, but she was just wrong for that part.” (Quoting from Gerald Clarke’s biography of Capote, which you should all read.) And if you watch and then read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you’ll see he’s right: the Lulamae-turned-Holly of the book, funny and vulgar, doesn’t fit Hepburn at all. Blake Edwards (or somebody) solved the problem by producing a movie that is a completely different beast than the book, which is simultaneously icier and less glamorous. I am holding this “Tom’s Diner” like someone who has read the book Breakfast at Tiffany’s a thousand times and seen the movie once; I can acknowledge that this is a move in a different direction but I’m in no position to evaluate it on its own terms. This is not to imply, by the way, that Britney Spears is George Peppard.
[5]