Is Jim O'Rourke's "Get a Room" a deliberate homage(?) to "What I Am"?

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Please help with this all-important quandary. Love the song but I can't understand why he used those chords with that phrasing. A couple of reviews around the web (google "what I am" "get a room" "insignificance") claim it's /on purpose/, right, that he's making some sort of crap-ass point. So I desperately need to resolve why I love a song so much that might just be a cover of said Edie Brickell casingle factory keystone.

And a related question would be: if some lovable hipsters (The Earlies, The Mountain Goats, or Big & Rich) took a universally-hated / overwrought song's melody but made the song actually about something with interesting lyrics and song structure, is it OK to like? I'm thinking Mouse on Mars making a tune with a roller bass line mimicking "Stand" by REM and having their guy sing about KRS-One pissing himself in a police lineup. C/D?

― caspar (caspar), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:11 (twenty-one years ago)

"Stand"'s better than any MoM I recall pretty much

― Andrew Blood Thames (Andrew Thames), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:14 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh, this is slightly related to that Four Tet track that samples that Tori Amos song. Cognitive dissonance on many different levels.

― caspar (caspar), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:16 (twenty-one years ago)

O'Rourke's next project is, tentatively, a personal crusade upon music which has been labeled "bad" by the music world - an album of covers, as he puts it, of "songs that are generally not considered to be good songs." Songs like Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is."
"It's just to present that these are good songs. I'm not trying to be like, 'I'm the person who can show you that these songs are good,'" says the mild-mannered O'Rourke from New York's West Park Hotel. "[If they're sub-par, it's] through bad recording or arrangements or because of the time these songs were done."

He cites the Crash Test Dummies' "Superman's Song" ("the mmmm mmmm mmmm mmmm song") as another diamond in the rough. "Oh! That song is really fucking good. There's too much piano playing and there's some bad bass playing, oh man, the guy's like 'LOOK AT ME I CAN PUT SOME EXTRA NOTES IN HERE,' but for the most part, I think it's a really amazing song."

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:54 (twenty-one years ago)

(I think O'Rourke's abandoned that idea, though: that was written in 1997.)

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I've never noticed the similarity between "Get a Room" and "What I Am" before, although now that I'm listening to them, I do hear it (in the verse, mostly). I wouldn't necessarily have guessed it was deliberate, though.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 23 August 2004 12:57 (twenty-one years ago)

Anyway Mandolin Rain is miles better than The Way It Is...oops

― mzui, Monday, 23 August 2004 13:06 (twenty-one years ago)

How did "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" become "Superman's Song"? "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" is the title, no idea where Superman entered the mix ...

― Joseph McCombs, Monday, 23 August 2004 17:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, I think that's a mistake. I think "Superman's Song" was the second single off that album.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 23 August 2004 17:45 (twenty-one years ago)

Actually, haha, no, I think "Afternoons and Coffeespoons" was the second single! But "Superman's Song" is another Dummies tune.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 23 August 2004 17:46 (twenty-one years ago)

Funny, I've also often thought about the similarities between "Get a Room" and "What I am" but I also really like the latter so it's not too suprising that it's my fave off 'Insignificance'.

― Baaderoni (Fabfunk), Monday, 23 August 2004 20:14 (twenty-one years ago)

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