For whatever reason, I wanted to find a bossa nova version of "New Year's Day" by U2 for, you know, today. There is a YouTube video identifying itself as such, but it was really odd. I just couldn't pick up anything particularly bossa nova about it. It was a fairly faithful cover with maybe a little extra percussion. There was a prominent acoustic guitar sound in the mix, but again it didn't sound remotely bossa nova. The vocals sounded like Bono with a faint Brazilian accent.
This caused me to follow a bunch of links to bossa nova covers (at least ostensibly) of other pop songs. I tended to like them a lot ("Sympathy for the Devil" and "Sweet Child of Mine" particularly) but I still wasn't hearing anything particularly bossa nova about them. One song, I forget which, had a remarkable Astrud Gilberto impersonator (or maybe it was really her), but otherwise I just wasn't hearing the resemblance.
Of course I'm no expert; as I've remarked before, I never liked bossa nova until my last bout looking for bossa covers as a joke, which eventually got to be less of a joke. Maybe that strumming the acoustic guitar on the offbeats thing has gone out of fashion. Or maybe I just don't know anything about bossa nova. Or maybe Brazilian musicians just call whatever they're doing bossa nova to keep a toehold in the international market. Anyway, if anyone is curious about this, it's an easy Google videos search. You might skip "New Year's Day," but "Sympathy for the Devil" really is pretty cool.
PS: Happy new year!
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