Attention 80’s junkies: Enough with the covers and remakes!

There are two songs on the radio these days that annoy the piss out of me: Sugar Ray’s cover of Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out With Him? and The Ataris’ cover of the Don Henley classic Boys of Summer. These are two songs that A) should never have been covered, and B) should never have been covered so badly. These covers are soul-less, bland, color-by-numbers crap and they’re just WRONG.

I think I’m annoyed by them because they’re so empty. Boys of Summer always takes me back to my short stint living in Reno, NV in ’85 or so, when hearing it on the radio would make me painfully homesick and remind me of the girl I left behind in L.A., and Is She Really Going Out With Him brings back memories of a warm summer night in Canyon Country a few years later, driving home with the sunroof open from dropping off the much-too-young-for-me girl I was dating at the time. Both songs serve as emotional landmarks for me, both are infused with meaning.

But the covers… They’re just … dead. Sugar Ray’s is overproduced to within an inch of its life, with echoes and goofy modem-connecting sound effects trying to make up for his thin, reedy voice, and The Ataris seem to think that speeding the tempo and hitting all the beats with their psuedo driving electric guitar makes up for the by-the-numbersness of their embarrassment of a performance. Neither song comes even close to matching the heart of the original.

The same thing is happening in movies; they’re remaking movies that can’t possibly be as good as — let alone better — than the original: Rollerball. The In-Laws. Planet of the Apes. And this is where my real fear is. I can deal with lame artists doing lame covers of songs they shouldn’t be allowed to listen to, let alone play, but remaking classic movies has to stop.

There’s a whole crop of 80’s movies that are ripe for the remaking that I hope are left alone, especially the John Hughes library: Breakfast Club. Pretty in Pink. Sixteen Candles. Those movies defined the 80’s, they should be left unsullied — but probably won’t be. I see an inevitable trauma on the horizon, a remake of the sine qua non of 80’s cinema, and when it happens I promise you I’ll crawl under the covers and moan for a week. Two words:

Ferris Bueller.

Starring Frankie Muniz, no doubt.

Please, God, no.