Last week, the long-awaited 70 track reissue of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ was released. Among those 70 tracks, there is, however, only one that’s “new”. Aptly named ‘Forgotten Tune’, it feels as though it was forgotten for a reason. It is literally nothing more than a rehearsal practice. When Krist Novoselic et al are wracking their brains to remember what exactly the track is and when it was recorded (sometime around 1988 is the rough estimation), unable to even give it a name, you know they are really scraping the barrel. ‘In Utero’ is a great album, no doubt, but why dig so deep as a rehearsal in hopes of enticing a few more fans to buy it?
Nirvana are not the only ones to have their bins rooted through in such undignified fashion, however. In 1995, 25 years after The Beatles broke up, the surviving members unearthed a home recording made by John Lennon in 1977, ‘Free As A Bird’. The rest of the band decided to release it with their own contributions added to it. It felt to many like a publicity gimmick, and it was. Released alongside a documentary about the band, ‘The Beatles Anthology’, it was the Fab Four’s first “new” single since 1970’s ‘The Long And Winding Road’. It was also a bit crap, meaning The Beatles ended not with a bang, but with a whimper set to an old, unreleased recording of John Lennon.
Re-recording half-done tracks is something of a recurring theme with posthumous releases.
Sometimes, this can be a good thing — ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’, for instance, was released a month after Otis Redding’s death, with the signature whistling refrain which Redding had intended to replace with vocals at a later date. And we don’t want to imagine ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’ without the whistling. Other times, we have Drake getting his beastly paws all over an unreleased Aaliyah track, recorded before she died in 2001, and vomiting out his only contribution of an occasional “yo, what’s up” and a rap about Mario Balotelli. ‘Enough Said’, released last year, is not terrible — the Aaliyah parts prove exactly why she was coined the “Princess of R&B”, and Noah ’40′ Shebib’s production is hazy and minimal. But then everyone’s favourite Degrassi star-turned-rapper (that list isn’t very long) decides to throw his own verse on top, which feels like he has chucked barbeque sauce all over a meticulously prepared chocolate dessert.
The same thing happened when meathead rapper 50 Cent – who was supposed to have quit music when he lost a bet to Kanye West – hopped into the studio in 2010 to record a verse on an unreleased Michael Jackson song. The result was ‘Monster’ which, unlike ‘Enough Said’, was not great in the first place… and only went downhill from there.
Of course, capitalising on an artist’s success occurs while they’re still alive. Decca Records have a lot to answer for with their decision to re-release David Bowie’s ‘The Laughing Gnome’ not once, but twice. This truly awful song was released as a novelty track in 1967 where it was panned by nearly everyone as the heavy-handed, cockney irritant it was. To get some idea of how astonishingly bad this song is, you’ll have to imagine Crazy Frog going onto carve himself a career as the most influential pop star of the early 21st century.
Luckily, this was before Bowie started making it big and we could class it as a little misstep on the way to greatness. Yet, in 1973, after Bowie had made his name, Decca re-released it and, somehow, it became certified silver in the UK. The only explanation I can think of for this tragic moment in music history is that the government were stockpiling copies to use as instruments of torture. Then in 1982, tragedy struck again with a re-release designed to commemorate the track’s third decade of existence (and shore up Decca’s own flagging sales). Luckily, this time it flopped in the charts as people tried to scrub the idea that Bowie could be awful from their minds. Little did they know that Tin Machine lay just around the corner.
Nick Drake was not especially given to releasing singles, which was probably for the best given how many people paid attention to his career during his tragically cut-short lifetime. In 2004, he managed the nifty trick of releasing his first single some 30 years after his death, when ‘Magic’ was used to promote the ‘Made To Love Magic’ compilation. The track — which is a long way from being the best or worst thing he recorded, to be honest — was originally left off ‘Five Leaves Left’ recordings until it was exhumed to satisfy a burgeoning public appetite for unreleased Drake material which, in truth, was pretty thin on the ground. By the time another comp rolled around in the shape of 2007’s ‘Family Tree’, even Drake’s mum was being pressed into service in the hope of shoring up a few more quid.
In short: it’s nice to hear unreleased stuff from your favourite artists; whether it’s listening to John Coltrane mess about in the studio or hearing a rough cut of one of your favourite tracks to see how it has developed. You could even argue that, with the Aaliyah track, Drake was trying to bring her music to a generation that might not be aware of who she is, and that is commendable. But, really, if it was utter tripe or could become utter tripe with further messing about, just don’t bother. Burn it. Bury it. Throw it on a landfill in New Mexico. Leave it where you found it. Just don’t tarnish the reputation of artists we love for the sake of a quick buck!
