I did it my way: Rock and the logic of covers

When rock musicians play and record new versions of old songs - when they cover those songs - particularly other musicians' songs, they are doing something fundamental to rock as a musical culture. Covering is not simply the production of new iterations of old songs, but a versioning practice that came into being in the 1950s or 1960s in rock, and that is definitive of the genre. Covers show ideas about rock songs and recordings as texts that gain layers of authorship as they are worked and re-worked over time. Having originated in rock, the specific ideas about the original-copy relationship in the making of cover versions have come to have currency in other musical genres, showing the broad impact of rock aesthetics on Western music in the post-1960s world.