Jesse Malin Hates the Pogues

I hate to waste my time complaining about all the things I don't like, rather than spreading the word about all the things I do like, but this afternoon, I got a promo of a new Jesse Malin record. I took out the record, a full-art version, and flipped it over looking to see which ridiculous, posed photos of himself he decided to include this time around (I wasn't disappointed, by the way -- there's one of him at a record store wearing a silly hat, looking sad and holding a record by Louis Prima and Keeley Smith), and I noticed that one of the tracks, #2, was "Me and Julio Down by the School Yard." Then I noticed "Walk on the Wild Side." And "Lady from Baltimore." And "You Can Make Him Like You."  A covers record, apparently, from a dude who, admittedly, has always had decent enough taste in records, but who's spent far too much time trying to be as cool as all of his favorite artists, always knowing deep down, I suspect and hope, that the difference between him and all the people he idolizes is that none of them had to try quite so hard.

Anyway, he also does "Fairytale of New York," by the Pogues, and it's driving me insane. Aside from his irritating delivery, where he switches between all sorts of different put-on voices, and his crazy pronunciation of the letter B, which -- I don't even know how to explain it -- sort of sounds like a noise one would make in hopes of getting an infant to laugh, and his insistence upon veering from the melody not quite enough to qualify as a complete re-working, but just enough so that his version could never possibly be enjoyed by anyone who likes the original (read: everyone), he also commits one of the cardinal sins of cover songs: Unless you're changing them to make a point (which is also ill-advised for the most part), do not fuck up the lyrics. 

A list of the lines Malin botches here:

"The rare old mountains do." 

Now, it's possible that I'm giving him even less credit than he deserves here by not capitalizing properly and by assuming a misunderstanding of context, but if you don't know that it's "mountain" -- singular, not plural -- then can I really assume you know that "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" is the name of a traditional Irish folk song? 

"This year's for you and me."

No, Jesse, it's not. It's for "me and you."

"Lying there almost dead on that drip in the bed."

This one doesn't seem like a big deal -- the correct line is "lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed" -- but it's indicative of Malin's intense inability to understand the natural rhythm of things, the subtlety language. "That drip in the bed," in addition to simply not sounding good, almost makes you think he's talking about a bed that had sprung a leak or something, and not about a person lying in bed on an IV. 

There's one other thing, too, which isn't strictly a botched lyric, but it's still infuriating. The Kristy MacColl parts are done by NYC songwriter Bree Sharp, who by and large does a pretty good job. But when she gets to the "You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap, lousy faggot" line, she giggles right before she says the word "faggot," as if she's worried people might think she actually hates gay people, rather than trusting her audience to understand that she's playing the part of a character who used a hurtful, loaded word to express sheer disgust with another character -- not as a harmless, ironic joke between two people, which is how Sharp's giggle makes me think she wants it to come off. She completely misses the point. 

If Malin thought the rest of the vocal take was good enough to justify leaving in all these mistakes, he was very, very wrong.