Add No Doubt's "It's My Life" to the list of horrendous cover versions of our time. The first offense committed with this so-called "interpretation" by Gwen and her backing band is the note-for-note rip off. This, I feel, is the number one cover version sin. Why bother covering if you're just xeroxing the original? What purpose can this serve? You're not putting your own personal stamp on it or bringing something new to the song. As a major label recording artist, all you're doing is high budget karaoke.

Then there's the video, which re-casts the defiance of the original as a War of the Roses drama queen overacting vehicle for glamour puss Gwen, who spends the entire four minutes dressing up in poor little rich girl revelry, pouting, complaining, flailing her body around like a rag doll, and generally over-magnifying her best impression of a crazy bitch post-breakup tantrum. Yuck. Watching her do this only draws attention to the whiny singing voice with mustard on top that she uses throughout the entire musical massacre.

It's been on the radio a lot and yet I can't really say I hate it, but that's because the original is so damned killer. There have been equally bad or worse cover versions lately. A good example of the "what's the point of doing a note-by-note autopilot treatment?" is Ride's "The Model", which appeared on an NME 40th anniversary collection about ten years ago. Shoegazers taking a run at Kraftwerk is an intruiging idea in principle, but their cheese-cake try at sounding precisely like the original comes off as perfunctory and soulless.

Then there's Sheryl Crow's attack on "Sweet Child O Mine", which turns the GnR rawk classic into a Sheryl Crow song. It rocks about as hard as Sting does these days, and her attempts to ape Axl's vocal inflections are pure unintentional comedy. Unlistenable.

X-tina, Pink, Mya, and L'il Kim deserve a special mention for covering "Lady Marmalade" about a year after All Saints did (and scored a hit). There should be a statute of limitations on these things, there should be a central register in pop music than regulates against a song being covered more than once in a seven year span. Two girl groups covering the same song one year apart is totally unnecessary. The sad thing is how the public fell for the same bait and turned the second version into a far bigger hit than the first.

A lot of people hate Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman", but I live in Canada so my sample groups are biased. Obviously a lot of people liked it in the US, where it was a hit and won a Grammy (if memory serves). It's not that bad a version, but anyone between the ages of 20 and 40 who grew up in Canada knows that it holds a pale candle to the Guess Who original, and therefore they react with the accordant disgust. The same is true of Madonna's "American Pie", it can't touch the original either, and anyone who truncates the lyrics to fashion a curt three minute song from a magnificent nine minute might as well be breaking the law.

But the worst, and I mean the worst absolutely horrible thing ever covered in our generation is "If You Could Read My Mind" by Stars on 54. The lyrics -- those tactfully poignant, stunningly gorgeous words -- run roughshod by chanting "never thought I could feel this way" as if it were an E-anthem (distorting the meaning of the lines in the most obtuse way possible), over a disco-by-numbers el-cheapo arrangement by a conglomeration of C-list musical stars, all as a tie-in to a truly horrible movie that nearly ruined my attraction to Salma Hayek and was little more than an excuse for Ryan Phillippe to run around for ninety minutes without a shirt. I can't find the proper words to describe how awful this version is. It must have come out during Lightfoot's recent downtime when he was sick and almost died. If he'd heard it playing on the radio every five minutes, he probably would have gotten sick and died that way, and thus his illness could be viewed as a silver lining.