re: Worse cover- Luke Combs' "Fast Car" or Johnny Cash's "Hurt?"

There's money in writing great songs. It aint so easy to do though.

Wildest thread I’ve seen in a very long time.

His cover of I've been everywhere by Hank Snow was good.

Not gonna lie, I heard the Luke Combs one recently and thought it was pretty good. Johnny Cash "Hurt" is great.

The worst cover ever is Counting Crows doing Big Yellow Taxi.

I actually ran into Trent Reznor at Lakeside mall right after the Hurt cover hit radio airwaves and I asked him about it. He loved it and was beyond flattered.

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Comb's cover of "Fast Car" loses context (due to the demographic of the singer and the moments in time) and can't capture the subtle political statement of the original, which seemed to me to be " We've got to pull ourselves out of his hole". The trouble was, the intended audience of the original message, didn't listen to it much, and never will.
Comb's version will reach even less. 

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Chapman's song/context for a black impoverished urban audience dovetails nicely with Combs' rural white impoverished audience.

I don't care for Combs' version because it doesn't add/edit anything to the song, but it still resonates with the working poor who want out of their dead-end towns.

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considering the fact that the original "Fast Car" also sucked

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Damn this board has some horrible takes

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Dynamite Hack for example actually lost money because of the success of their cover of Boyz in Da Hood

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Directly? Maybe. But it was certainly a net gain for them as nobody would have ever heard of them if it weren't for that song. "Boyz in Da Hood" was one of the first songs I ever downloaded on Napster.

I had some mutual friends with the lead singer and hung out with him about 15 years ago. He was a super nice, down to earth guy.

i saw the Hurt Music Video for the first time the day Johnny Cash died.

it was the Hurt video and then a black and white photo of Johnny Cash 1932-2003.

Hurt is about drug addiction and shooting up dope. Cash was never addicted to opiates same as was not a Native American but he claimed that till his sister said that’s bs. He also copped an outlaw persona though he wasn’t, unlike Merle Haggard, who was actually in the prison when Cash sang “San Quinton i hate every inch of you”. So Cash faked a lot of stuff just to create sn image and sell records. He was a crappy singer and guitar player too

And of course Reznor is going to say it was great because he makes money on every copy sold.