A Philosophy of Cover Songs
Brandon Polite · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2022
Anyone interested in the philosophy of music, especially popular music, should be familiar with Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir’s contemporary classic “Judging Covers” [Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71(4) (2013), pp. 361–370)]. In the terrific A Philosophy of Cover Songs, an open-access book freely available to read online and download, P.D. Magnus strikes out on his own to expand on, revise, and refine the ideas he developed with his coauthors in that article. The book is philosophically rich, engaging, and loaded with illuminating examples. It is worthy of sustained scholarly attention, but also accessible enough for a general audience. It would be an excellent book to adopt in any undergraduate course (at any level) on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, or in any introductory philosophy course with units on those topics—and not only because students can read it for free. The book is divided into three parts of two chapters each with brief interludes in between. The first part is on how we should think about covers.