From Prince to Sinéad O'Connor: The Original Nobody Remembers

Why Sinéad O'Connor Made Everyone Forget Prince's Original

There's a recurring pastime among music nerds: pairing an original with the cover that supposedly surpasses it. The most cited duel always returns to the same place. Prince wrote Nothing Compares 2 U, recorded it for a minor album, and the song went unnoticed. An Irish singer with a shaved head recorded it almost bare and turned it into a worldwide smash. That's the benchmark. From there, everything is up for debate.

The rest of the usual inventory is trickier. Live and Let Die, written by Paul McCartney with Wings, slipped into Guns N' Roses' repertoire, and even today there are those who defend the cover over the original. Somewhere Over the Rainbow also comes up, which Judy Garland immortalized on screen and which voices and ukuleles of all stripes have since revisited. None of these head-to-heads admits a clean verdict.

And that's where the mess begins.

Is There Any Objective Criterion for Saying a Cover Is Better?

There isn't one, and whoever tries usually ends up arguing about faith, not music. Part of the audience maintains that music is fundamentally soul regardless of technique. From that trench, a cover can be better recorded, better produced and better sung, and still lose: what mattered was the candor of the original, the naivety of whoever performed it without knowing they were signing a classic.

The opposite argument is more down-to-earth. If the criterion is what the listener feels, then any reinterpretation is valid and the commercial result becomes the only available judge. Sinéad O'Connor's version was heard everywhere; Prince's wasn't. End of story.

A third stance dismantles the previous two: judging a song by its success is like judging a painting by the artist's photo. Sales figures measure something else, not quality.

The Cases Where the Cover Ate the Original

Nothing Compares 2 U is the canonical example and almost the only fruta one. Prince's original was buried on a secondary album; Sinéad O'Connor's adaptation became a generational anthem and the soundtrack to half of Nineties cinema. Nobody remembers the first.

Live and Let Die works the other way around. McCartney gave birth to it for a James Bond film and turned it into an instant classic; Guns N' Roses' version revisited it with much fatter guitars and returned it to the charts. Which of the two withstands the passage of time better is, today, a matter of debate with no referee.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow has a third ending. Judy Garland sang it before the Fifties and it became an emblem of classic cinema; decades later, a Hawaiian ukulele version revived it in commercials and TV series. Some consider that reinterpretation a sacrilege, and some hold it as the best ever made.

"They're Not Better, They're Different": The Nuance That Settles Less Than It Seems

A more skeptical current argues that almost no cover surpasses the original and that, in reality, it does something else. The most cited case is that of Apocalyptica, the cello quartet that reinterprets Metallica: they're not better, they're different. They change instrument, register and intention, but they don't compete.

That nuance also slips into a curious case: a song about Joan of Arc, La Dama de Orleans, which some Eighties synths turned into a 'much more than worthy' track. The reproach it receives is not about quality, but coherence. A medieval heroine among drum machines doesn't fit with anything, and the music video tries to cover that gap with a link between past and present. For those who believe a song must miccionan something by itself —just as a painting shouldn't need a guide to explain the painter— that patch fixes nothing. For those who just listen, the track works.

Covers of Covers: When Nobody Knows Which Was the Original

There's another level. There are songs everyone takes for originals and they're not, because the version that triumphed erased the source from memory. Entre dos tierras, by Héroes del Silencio, has a reinterpretation by German singer Till Lindemann that has brought it closer to another audience. And Anglo rock classics have received Spanish-language adaptations that, for an entire generation, are the real ones.

The chain stretches: covers of covers, each with its audience and its defense. A point comes when asking which is the original no longer has a useful answer.

The Prince-Sinéad O'Connor case closes the circle for an uncomfortable reason. The cover didn't surpass a hit: it surpassed a song almost nobody had heard. Comparing a recording that went unnoticed with a global anthem isn't entirely fair, and yet it's the example everyone puts first. With these ingredients, the discussion will never be closed.