The Carpenters' "Superstar,"
performed by Sonic Youth

There's certainly enough irony already implicit in The Carpenters' 1971 single "Superstar." Something about smiling, gap-toothed everygirl Karen Carpenter singing "But you're not really there. It's just the radio" begs for the song to be reverently left alone. It'd be easy to cover this song and fail, if not simply because of a mining of the obvious and a failure to let sleeping singers lie.

But it's easy to forget in this Brand New Era of "compassionate conservatism" and "moral fiber" that the '90s were the decade in which concepts like reverence and compassion took huge hits. Musically, the most defining moment of it all came with the Jesus and Mary Chain's 1993 single "Reverence," which brutally proclaimed:

I wanna die just like Jesus Christ
I wanna die on a bed of spikes
I wanna die just like JFK
I wanna die on a sunny day

With the paint on J&MC's pop culture graffiti still drying, Sonic Youth's walking all over Karen Carpenter's grave seemed a minor transgression. And while by some accounts, the group's hopelessly gloomy take that appeared on If I Were a Carpenter is a colossal, morbid failure, some of us rather like it.

The layers of guitar fuzz, analog keyboard buzz and incidental piano, not to mention Thurston Moore's deadpan, microphone-practically-in-my-mouth vocals transform a sentimental, syrupy pop song into an obsessed, quasi-insane, rocking-back-in-forth-in-front-of-the-stereo symphony of musical pathos.

Given the auspices under which it was produced — a Carpenters tribute album — "Superstar" is definitely the crying baby at the movie theater or the drunken uncle at gramma's wake. But on its merits, the song is a pearl.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)