http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoveredUp

Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.

David Bowie, on performing " note While it may seem like hes dissing Nirvana in this quote, he was (reportedly) actually quite flattered upon hearing the cover of the song. , on performing " The Man Who Sold the World "Kids [...] come up afterwards and say, 'It's cool you're doing a Nirvana song.' And I think, 'Fuck you, you little tosser!'"

A specific form of Older Than They Think, in which the Cover Version of a song becomes so iconic that people forget it was a cover at all. The cover becomes the definitive version of the song, while the original fades into obscurity to the point where the cover artist may be incorrectly credited for writing it. To a certain extent, this is generational — if you hear a song before the cover is even recorded, you're less likely to be confused. (It doesn't count if the new version is in a different language.)

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This can become a Fandom-Enraging Misconception for fans of the original artist.

Nowadays, "covers" are used to describe any band performing a not-originally-written song. However, when bands writing all their own songs was a less common practice, covering referred specifically to doing a version of a song in a style similar to that of another artist.

The "Weird Al" Effect is this taken Up to Eleven, in which an entirely revised and rewritten version of a song by a different artist becomes more prominent than the original. Somewhat related is Breakaway Pop Hit, where an iconic song (or cover) composed specifically for a film overshadows its film. Compare Sampled Up and Eclipsed by the Remix, and contrast with First and Foremost. See also Revival by Commercialization and Misattributed Song.

If you were thinking of the other meaning of "covers," you might be looking for Modesty Bedsheet. Also not related to any Cover Tropes, nor to Revealing Cover Up.

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Examples:

note

When adding examples, please keep in mind that Alice simply having covered Bob's song isn't this trope. Examples should be added to the main list sorted by song name, but for ease of reference, there are also two lists sorted by musician name. If Alice has covered a lot of songs, add examples of this to the "by covering musician" list. If Bob has been covered a lot, add examples to the "by covered musician" list. Finally, make sure the song isn't already on the list somewhere.

And one final note: Fan Myopia runs quite high when it comes to music, so please avoid the "quick, what band do you think of when you hear X?" cockiness, because chances are not everyone will have the same answer as you.

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"32 Flavors" is usually associated with One-Hit Wonder Alana Davis. It's actually a cover of a song originally by Ani DiFranco.

"1985" is probably Bowling for Soup's greatest hit, but it is in fact, a cover of a song by SR-71, featuring slightly different lyrics.

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Five of the songs on the Queen of the Damned soundtrack were written and recorded by Jonathan Davis of Korn. Due to contract troubles, all five songs were covered for the official soundtrack, by the likes of Wayne Static, David Draiman, Marilyn Manson, Chester Bennington and Jay Gordon. Unless you've seen the movie (especially the music videos included as extras), most people think that the covers are in fact the original versions of the songs. And considering how hard it is to get a hold of the original versions, since they were never officially released, this doesn't look like it will change any time soon.

In the days of early rock and roll, R&B songs by black performers were not played on mainstream pop stations unless they were covered by white artists. However, this all changed in 1957, when a New York City disc jockey named Alan Freed invented a new type of music format called Top 40, which played all types and genres of music, as long as it was selling well. Pat Boone was the most notorious of the "white cover" artists. Back in the day, his covers outsold the original versions by black musicians, but today the originals are seen as the definitive versions while Boone's versions are ridiculed.

Thanks to the proliferation of remixes and vocal arranges of the awesome library of Touhou music, numerous themes tend to get covered up from a fan's perspective. For example, "UN Owen Was Her?!", Flandre Scarlet's theme, is often covered up by both hits like COOL&CREATE's version... or even the Ronald remix known also as the McRoll. Even worse, another remix of the theme was uploaded under the name "John Stump - Death Waltz", became popular, and now you have people thinking that "U.N. Owen Was Her?" is a remix of Death Waltz, even though the real Death Waltz by John Stump is actually garbled nonsense. A more recent example would be "Bad Apple!!" - odds to evens you were thinking more of the Alstroemeria Records remix.

This trope has a life of its own in Asia. Many Mando-pop artists will take a hit foreign song (like Britney Spears's "Everytime," or Wild Cherry's "Play that Funky Music"), give it Mandarin lyrics and put it out.

A high percentage of hits by Dominican "Merengue-hip-hop" bands from early to mid 90s (like Proyecto Uno, Ilegales, and Sandy y Papo) were in fact covers from hip-hop Anglo artists. This was made worse because many of the songs they covered were One Hit Wonders or specialists' hits in English, but those groups made these songs extremely popular and mainstream.

There was an all-covers album called "Punk Goes Crunk," which featured various alternative music artists doing their own takes on various hip-hop and R songs. All Time Low did a cover version of Rihanna's "Umbrella." Now, it's debateable whether All Time Low's or Rihanna's version is better known, though there are a sizable number of people who seem to think All Time Low's version was the original.

This has occasionally happened in the trance genre. Ayla's "Liebe" and "Singularity" were remakes of Cosmic Baby's "Liebe" and Brainchild's "Symmetry", respectively. Kay Cee's "Escape" was based on 4 Voices' "Eternal Spirit". Except for older ex-USSR inhabitants and Soviet cinema buffs, few people know that the core of "Resurrection" by trance duo PPK is actually a theme from Siberiade, composed by Eduard Artemyev. The film came out in 1979, thus predating trance music as such.

Kandystand's "Empty Rooms" and "Black Pearl", originally by Gary Moore and Sonny Charles & The Checkmates, respectively.

A*Teens and B3 were groups covering ABBA and The Bee Gees respectively. Their versions were marketed at teenagers who, of course, didn't know squat about the original artists and believed that these highly successful versions were the originals. See also "How Deep Is Your Love" by Take That.

The Simpsons provides an instrumental example with the leitmotif for Sideshow Bob. Although Bob did not have any theme music in his first few appearances, the episode "Cape Feare" provided him with a slightly altered version of the main theme of Cape Fear as part of the episode's parody of the iconic film. The show continued to use the music in most of Bob's subsequent appearances. Over time, as The Simpsons continued to stay in the spotlight while Cape Fear faded into obscurity, many younger fans would know the song only as "Sideshow Bob's theme", not realizing that it was a homage to an older piece.

The 1978 album Dr. Heckle & Mr. Jive by England Dan & John Ford Coley is notable for containing a Covered Up song (their version of "Love Is The Answer", originally written by Todd Rundgren and recorded by his band Utopia, was a Top 10 hit in the US) and two songs that went on to be Covered Up by other artists ("Broken-Hearted Me" by Anne Murray, "What's Forever For?" by Michael Martin Murphey).

The evocative theme of the 1972 Solaris film is not composed by Eduard Artemyev, even though he performed it. It's a performance of a Bach piece, BWV 639.

When people unfamiliar with Japanese culture hear the song Inu no Omawari-san (the policeman dog), they tend to call it the opening theme of Frogger. Said song has actually been around longer than the game, being a traditional Japanese nursery rhyme.

In-Universe in "10 FAMOUS SONGS You Didnt Know Were COVERS!" by Matthew Santoro, where Matthew talks about famous songs that, unbeknownst to most people, are actually cover songs.

Something like unintentional covering up often happened in the 19th century. Romanticism was fashionable then, and lots of composers relied on folk tunes for inspiration - which unfortunately meant that whenever the author of the melody could not be established immediately, it was deemed to be folk tune. To their credit, the composers generally acknowledged the borrowing as soon as they learnt the identity of the true author, but by that time the tunes they used had been firmly covered up - to the point that the names of the original composers themselves are rather obscure nowadays. Examples include Sebastián Yradier, who wrote habanera "El Arreglito" later covered by Georges Bizet in Carmen; Béla Kéler, who wrote a csárdás covered by Johannes Brahms as "Hungarian Dance No. 5"; Luigi Denza, whose "Funiculì, Funiculà" managed to be mistaken for a folk song at least twice - by Richard Strauss (whom Denza subsequently successfully sued) and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov alike (though by now the original song is probably more well-known - if not its author).

Perhaps the most zigzagged example ever is "Hard Times", a song by a group called The Jetzons that dates back to 1981, but was an unreleased track until 2009. After the band broke up, however, their keyboardist, Brad Buxer, collaborated with a number of big-name artists, most frequently Michael Jackson—including on that long-rumored but at-the-time unconfirmed uncredited contribution to the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 soundtrack, which features what is unmistakably an instrumental version of "Hard Times" as the theme for the Ice Cap Zone. (Asked about this, Buxer said that Jackson asked to be uncredited because he didn't want his name associated with the low quality of music that the Genesis could produce. Buxer was also credited on "Stranger In Moscow", the then-unreleased Jackson track that served as the game's credits theme. So to summarize, the most recognizable version of the song is an instrumental version in a 16-bit video game, essentially still by the original artist, 13 years after the song was originally written but 15 years before the original was ever released.

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is an interesting case which could arguably be considered this. The collection of 12th century poems, songs, and stories which Orff arranged as a symphonic cantata had little in the way of musical notation, and the notation which was used was so old that modern musical scholars aren't certain just how they would have been performed. As a result, Orff was free to arrange the music however he liked, and while he did make some attempt to work out the original arrangements, for the most part the 1936 work was an entirely original score.

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