21 Hit Songs You Never Knew Were Actually Covers
Here are 21 songs you didn't know were actually covers:
"1985" by Bowling for Soup is a cover of the song by American pop-punk band SR-71, which was released just two months earlier in Japan before the manager believed it was a better fit for Bowling for Soup.
Although probably more well-known, the emotional song "Hurt" by Johnny Cash is a cover of the song performed by the rock band Nine Inch Nails.
"Respect" by Aretha Franklin is a cover of Otis Redding's 1965 song by the same name. Franklin really flipped the lyrics on their head to create an all-time classic.
"Renegades of Funk" by Rage Against the Machine is a cover of the Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force song of the same name.
The song "It's My Life" by No Doubt is a cover of the English band Talk Talk's original release in 1984.
The iconic "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston is a cover of the 1974 song by Dolly Parton, which was featured on her famous album "Jolene."
An absolute shocker to my '90s brain, but the 1997 hit song "Torn" by Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia is actually a cover originally sung by American rock band Ednaswap, which was released in 1995.
The popular song "Don't Cha" by The Pussycat Dolls is a cover of the original song by Tori Alamaze.
The popular '80s hit "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell is a cover of Gloria Jones's "Tainted Love," released in 1964.
The song "Superman" by R.E.M. is a cover of "Superman" by The Clique. A B-Side track on the album "White Tornado," it's an R.E.M. gem.
The mega summer hit from 1999 "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega is a sample of the original version by Cuban musician Dámaso Pérez Prado from 1950.
The 1992 song "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus is a cover of "Don't Tell My Heart," which was first recorded in 1991 by The Marcy Brothers.
The song "If I Were A Boy" by Beyoncé was performed initially by BC Jean in 2008.
The song "Black Magic Woman" by Santana is a cover of the song by Fleetwood Mac. Mind blown. In my defense, the Santana version has more views on YouTube than any other version by Fleetwood Mac.
"Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band might be the more popular version, but it was originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen.
The popular Joan Jett & the Blackhearts song "I Love Rock 'n Roll" is a cover of the British glam band Arrow's song "I Love Rock 'n 'Roll."
"Dancing in the Moonlight" by the English band Toploader is a cover of the song originally recorded by Sherman Kelly's band, Boffalongo, which first released it in 1970. Then, Kelly rereleased the song with his new band, King Harvest, in 1972. So, technically, Kelly covered his own song.
"Black Betty" by Ram Jam is a cover of a song credited to songwriter Huddie Ledbetter. The oldest recorded version was performed by James "Iron Head" Baker and a group of Texas prisoners in the 1930s.
"Take Me to the River" by American rock band Talking Heads is a cover of the 1974 soul song by Al Green.
The 1995 hit "Gangster's Paradise" by Coolio (ft. L.V.) is actually a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" from 1976.
Lastly, and mainly for the youngins, Post Malone's cover of the alternative rock song "Only Wanna Be With You," originally released by Hootie & the Blowfish, is now a pop song featured in the Pokémon 25 soundtrack, which has 18M views on YouTube.
Is there a song you were stunned to learn was a cover? Comment below (the song and artists)!
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Gizmodo
3 hours ago
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James Gunn's ‘Superman' Hall of Justice Murals are Filled With Deep-Cut DC History
If you saw the new Superman, chances are you caught that brief glimpse of the mural in the Hall of Justice honoring the 300 years of metahuman lore James Gunn's new DC is founded on. While there's been speculation about which characters were fleetingly depicted, Gunn has since shared the mural online for fans to pore over themselves and guess accordingly the who's who of this new DCU. As these are, indeed, some deep-cut characters, we've analyzed the data and are at least 75% sure we've identified each hero of yesteryear officially canonized. Here's our guesses and guide from left to right. You asked for it, you got it. Here's the full mural honoring the History of Metahumans in the DCU adorning the Hall of Justice in #Superman. — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) July 25, 2025If we haven't missed our guess, the first hero to exist in the DCU is Sister Symmetry, a relatively new creation introduced in the pages of Justice League Dark back in 2019. Technically an enchanted cloak with a revolving door of alternating hosts who wear it, the entity possessed the Tarot card-reading soothsayer, Madame Xanadu, which, as you can see in the mural above, the character is haloed by. Not a bad start for this brave new world with such people in it… Next up is Silent Knight, the occasional time-traveling medieval hero from sixth-century Britain introduced in the very first issue of The Brave and the Bold in 1955. Created by Robert Kanigher, the character is secretly Brian Kent, the son of a feudal lord killed in a jousting tournament. While the character has had adventures with King Arthur, Morgaine Le Fey, and the Knights of the Round Table, his namesake derives from his refusal to speak while wearing his red and white suit of armor so as not to betray his secret identity to anyone—even his lady love, Celia. An Amazon exiled from Themyscira for her poor behavior, Exoristos traveled the world for several years, becoming something of a legend for her numerous adventures—including one notable chapter in which she was turned into a vampire by Cain, the first murderer of the Bible, who also hosts his own horror anthology published by DC Comics. Happily, she would eventually find herself back in her fellow Amazons' good graces after participating in the American Revolution. Good for her! First appearing in Action Comics #23 in 1940, the hero known as Black Pirate was secretly Jon Valor, a privateer working under the King of England who fought against his arch nemesis, the wicked Don Carlos, sometime during the 16th century. Another occasional time traveler, Valor was once brought to the year 3786 by the wicked Epoch. His ghost would also become a notable supporting character in the pages of James Robinson's Starman during the 1990s. A Paul Revere-inspired hero from the American Revolution (presumably putting her in contact with Exoristos, above…), Bess 'Miss Liberty' Lynn would also be spirited away to the year 3786 by Epoch, where she would meet her colleague, Black Pirate. As you can see, a pattern begins to form… Though we're not 100% certain, the crouched character below Miss Liberty appears to be Max Mercury in his 'Whip Whirlwind' disguise. Perhaps he had to rebrand himself as a new hero after his secret identity was exposed by a sitting president? (See below…) The buffalo-masked Super-Chief was once the (Iroquois) warrior, Flying Stag, who was granted a powerful amulet by the (Algonquian) spirit, Manitou, after falling helplessly into a pit. Over the years, the amulet would fall into the hands of three other young men who'd take on the same mantle for opposing purposes. Essentially DC's answer to Zorro, the man who would become El Diablo was once the improbably named Lazarus Lane, a bank teller who was (also improbably) struck by lightning while escaping a band of thieves. Luckily, a Native American shaman named Wise Owl would nurse him to health, inspiring him to begin his campaign of revenge. After some debate and deliberation, we really can't agree on who this shirtless pugilist is meant to be. The quick-to-violence private detective, Slam Bradley, is a good bet, though he boasts no metahuman powers himself. As another Amazing-Man appears further along the mural, the character may also be the original Centaur Publications hero who slipped into the public domain and also didn't like to wear a shirt, ever. A soldier believed to have been killed in WWI, pilot Rip Graves became a masked crimefighter in WWII called the Ghost of Flanders, who operated in a subterranean base beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Naturally, his calling card is a red poppy to commemorate the Second Battle of Ypres at Flanders Fields. The Golden Age Sandman was, naturally, Wesley Dodds, a crime-fighting hero with no metahuman powers of his own but who wielded a gas-firing handgun that could put his enemies to sleep. Debuting in New York World's Fair Comics #1 in 1939, the Sandman would later enjoy his own series, Sandman Mystery Theatre, in the '90s. Olympian-turned-janitor Will Everett became Amazing-Man after a lab explosion granted him the power to mimic the properties of whatever substance he touched. Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover revealed his identity to the public sometime in the 1950s, forcing him to step down as a superhero, so he shifted his sights to furthering the Civil Rights Movement. Debuting in Action Comics #1 alongside Superman, the crime-fighting magician Giovanni Zatara could essentially manipulate reality in any way he pleased by speaking backwards. 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Atlantic
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About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor'easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show's cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town? This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark's Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman's mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case's bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she'd recorded them. But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: 'New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus' reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker 's Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month. From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves. As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today's critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise 'discovery,' they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we're missing. The listings were my lodestar. And that star's orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith. Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He'd gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation. Time Out 'was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,' Smith told me. 'Nobody said, 'Oh, that obscure thing that's happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that's too weird.' I was basically told, 'List what's interesting; list what people will want to know about.'' A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic's pick. 'I had the privilege,' he said, 'of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.' One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith. These listings weren't just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: 'Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.' In its heyday, the Voice 's newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance. Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile. The demise of listings is 'tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,' the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that 'the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out' to see a gig: 'The immediate danger is that artists play and people don't know about it.' Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it's harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great. The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward 'poptimism,' a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough! But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh's essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today 's hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down— 501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it's easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices. Indeed, much of today's cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people's contributions to the common good solely by 'the market value of the goods or services they sell.' In other words, covering what's popular doesn't just serve journalism's economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it's no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities. A reader might object: Aren't you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can't hack it in today's algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles' White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape music, no Rosalía's Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support. To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith's great gifts as an editor. 'He crafted listings,' Giovetti told me, 'in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.' You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire's founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and you've probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018. The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. 'On any given day,' Chinen told me, 'there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe's Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That's the garden. That's the plant mix that existed.' How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life? In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. 'The phone has stopped ringing,' he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it's important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too. Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context. Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues What's to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren't left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders. The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can't be readily calculated on a balance sheet. For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He's now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, 'I never really stopped.' Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.
