Artist	Song
The Bad Plus	Immigrant Song
Wax Audio	Imagine This (feat. John Lennon v. George W. Bush)
The Futureheads	Hounds of Love
Kate Bush	Sexual Healing
Ben Folds	Bitches Ain't Shit
Elbow	One Thing
William Shatner	Common People
Ted Leo	Since U Been Gone
Nina Gordon	Straight Out of Compton
Ruth Brown	I Believe I Can Fly
Biz Markie	Bennie and the Jets (feat. Beastie Boys)
Nelly v. Lynyrd Skynyrd	Sweet Home Country Grammar
Jamie Cullum	High and Dry
Richard Cheese	Baby Got Back
Caetano Veloso	Come As You Are
UB40	I Got You Babe (feat. Chrissie Hynde)
Don Ho	Shock the Monkey
Paul Anka	Smells Like Teen Spirit
The Postal Service	Against All Odds
	(silence)
Shelby Lynne	Track 12

Comment:

Produced this over New Year's weekend, as return fire in a years' long game of can-you-top-this between a friend and I. The gimmick? Mixed tapes based on covers -- and the worse and more bombastic the covers, the better.

Now, before you taunt me -- "what, you hate that Futureheads cover?!" -- I've found that you can't just pile a bunch of bad covers together. The mix flat-out flops if you do that, and I'd rather not put my friends through a form of torture that might be worthy of Gitmo. So I leaven the mix with tracks that rank as (a) stunningly good, or (b) wilfully nuts -- which casts the so-bad-it-hurts covers in even sharper relief.

For the record, the Futureheads track rocks. Call it the best cover of a Kate Bush track since Maxwell recorded "This Woman's Work." But as for Kate Bush herself singing "Sexual Healing" — um, that well and truly sucks.

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