All Along the Watchtower, covered by Hendrix. To me, that still sets the bar...
 
But out there, when a cover is hot, every one and their brother will have their shot at it. There is essentially very little difference between the established artists and karaoke night in terms of originality or repertoire.
 
Bottom feeders from top to bottom...
 
 
 
 

Heh... well I was a punk for many years. And not the fancy, froo froo, pretty kind.
 
But alas I must be a little more zen these days. All that recreational angst was starting to mess with the ticker and I certainly have enough to get my blood boiling without seeking out extra infuriations.
 
Still though... as a musician and a lover of quality classics I'd say watching the craft being bastardized and eroded for no good reason other than ego and money is worth a little bit of fever pitched grumbling.

Maybe there's an opportunity here....   a cover version contest maybe?
 
Or maybe just a poll to find the most obscure song that's not known to have been covered but should (or could) be...

Sharke, do you think all these overly melismatic pop singers are calling attention to themselves, rather than the song?
 
I really started disliking that style when Mariah Carey was popular. And don't get me started about Michael Bolton; no matter how good the song, he would be warbling by the 2nd line. It left him nowhere to go at the end of the song (I thought of it as vocal premature ejaculation).
 
 
Bert

Karyn
 
Or maybe just a poll to find the most obscure song that's not known to have been covered but should (or could) be...

That's like trying to find a band name - if you can google it, there's 99,999999999% chances that someone's thought of it before. 
 
I've given up hope of coming up with a cover that no one else has done. I do my own thing. Once I'm done with the basics, I check out what's been done, and cross my finger that nothing is in the same ball park as my version, and make my decision to go on or archive the cover based on that.
 
But maybe the difference is in that simple reflex of trying to find out- when I tried to come up with name for my projects, I'd google that name in as many variations as possible. One of them I was pretty sure was clear, and it worked perfectly with one of my projects.
 
I registered using that name on most social medias at the time, created profiles, uploaded music, pics and all. From then on, a simple Google search immediately made it obvious that there was somebody very actively making music under that name, along with media and all.
 
A couple of years later, for whatever reason, I googled my project's name and realized that a kid had started making some (very crappy I must say, even objectively) music under the same name.
 
Obviously, that fellow either didn't bother to Google the name before he used it - or, more likely, simply didn't care.
 
In fact, a lot of "artists" nowadays seem to think that it's essential to benefit from the traffic generated by search for known artists, so they'll use obvious ones like Rocky or Hulk. Every time you do a search for those established brand names, the parasites are dragged along....
 
And there's a bunch of "upcoming artists" in a couple of very specific genre who obviously have no notion of intellectual property and are absolutely clueless about names that have been used by rock bands.
 
I mean, it's one thing to be clueless about pop music of the previous decades if you're not into rock, but to call your project by the name of a well known and established rock band that's still making music? 
 
It's no longer a shame to suck up and sell out.

Karyn
Maybe there's an opportunity here....   a cover version contest maybe?
 
Or maybe just a poll to find the most obscure song that's not known to have been covered but should (or could) be...

Hey, I know!  How about doing covers of all the songs from a Jethro Tull album??? 

It's probably being driven by the [insert country of choice] Idol phenomena which is creating blandness and conformity in the music business.
 
Of course thinking a cover is original is nothing new. Lots of the blues rock of the late 60's and early 70's were covers of classic blues tracks but widely thought to be originals. But you can't say that Led Zeppelin and others did not add their own style and character to those songs.
 
I think live cover bands are a different issue. There are some very talented Filipino cover bands working here in Dubai. I really enjoy going to see them but I would not buy a record except as a token of appreciation for the live entertainment.
 
And one further thought. There is the concept of a Jazz Standard, songs regularly preformed by jazz singers. We are in the age of the rock standard. Its hard to find a rock cover band that does not have "Hotel California", "Sweet Child 'o mine", "All Right Now", "Wonder Wall" and "Another Brick in the Wall" as part of their repertoire.

Bert Guy
I think that if you are going to the trouble of recording a cover, you should live with the song and internalize it. So that when you perform it, it becomes your song. Totally re-imagine it, if you can

Absolutely.
 
So, for possibly the 100th time, here's my favourite cover;
 

 
 

There's a version of Billy Jean by Jose Feliciano, solo, not a full band, that's quite old. I've never found it on Youtube, it seems quite obscure, even though Jose Feliciano isn't and Billy Jean is as famous as a pop song can be. His rendition is simply stunning, the way he plays with the timing and moves the phrasing around, even throws in a Beatle's bridge, it's great. I don't understand why it's not so available.
 
 

It's the new genre of elevator-music, is it??  Propably very inexpensive to the client (?). On my working trip to Greece in november they played in many hotel restaurants the same set of songs all the time. The songs were of a wide variety, from country classics to Guns'n'Roses, but even the hardest rock songs were arranged for acoustic guitar or piano and performed by a female in a laid-back "lounge lizard" manner.