Letter from the Guest Editor

The term “cover version” is used in popular music to describe songs performed or recorded by artists other than those credited with the original recording. Typically regarded as derivative, the status of a cover version is not usually regarded as commensurate with that of an original recording. This assumption is potentially limiting, however. As the contributors to this special issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (JAPPC) will variously demonstrate, this common characterization does not begin to account for an extraordinarily fertile field of creative possibilities that exists between the impossibly antipodean extremities of original and copy. Once we begin to look a little more closely at this realm, we soon see that clear distinctions between “original” and “copy” never hold as an outright antithesis. And, once we begin to translate the notion of the cover version to a diverse range of artistic media and disciplinary...