Was it a cover or a remake?

At the bottom of the lyrics to Charlotte Leslie's ‘Les filles, c’est fait pour faire l’amour’ (‘Girls are made to make love’), her song was described as a "daring fuzzed-up cover of the The Capitols song, 'We Got A Thing That's In The Groove'". I immediately went to YouTube and looked up the original Capitols song because today when we hear of covers, they are in popular music a new performance or recording of a previously recorded, commercially released song by someone other than the original artist or composer[1]. So I of course thought she was just remaking a song already written, not making a new or different version[2]. Au contraire! ‘Les filles, c’est fait pour faire l’amour’ is actually a French version of the Capitol’s hit where Charlotte Leslie is sampling the original Capitols song by taking the sound recording and reusing it as the sound recording for her piece[3]. The Capitols were a Detroit based soul trio widely known in the late 1960s, during which there was a very popular dance craze called the “jerk”. It consisted of holding the arms out in different positions and making thrusting motions with the hips. This dance was very controversial for lewdness at the time much like Charlotte Leslie’s remake of the song was in France. Aside from their similarities in beat, when reviewing both sets of lyrics I unfortunately did not see many similarities in the message. I was hoping for some parallel in descriptions of relationships from the male vs. the female perspective, but instead just found that Leslie shows the breakdown of a female from putting success before love while the Capitols are singing about ‘a feeling you can’t explain’. I really want to add more meaning to the Capitol lyrics and say that the “feeling” they are describing is love or something very similar to it, but the song when paired with the “jerk” pelvic thrust dance move, just makes me think of another song about sex. Maybe the comparison is that Leslie is talking about the fact that all men think women are good for is love, which is her critique on the Capitols song where they are describing the “thing in the groove” they know this girl is feeling. But, who knows, maybe someone else can compare the lyrics and find more meaning than I did?

---

[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Cover version," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_version (accessed April 7, 2015)

[2] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. "remake."

[3] Wikipedia contributors, "Sampling (music)," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music) (accessed April 7, 2015)