I always maintain that if you are going to cover a song, especially one by a well-known artist, that you should do something new with it, take it places, re-imagine it, give it a new lease of life, find aspects and elements that were buried in the original, and accentuate them.
Usually, when people do that, at best, they take the song in question into new sonic realms, reframe it in a new style, chronologically moving with the times. What is refreshing about Zohara’s take on Björk’s 1997 “Jóga” is that she not only takes it into a whole new genre, but also takes it to a totally different geography and in doing so blends the past with the present.
While there was something ambient and arabesque in some of the orchestral sweeps that ran through the original, here, Zohara redraws it wholeheartedly using the exotic and unmistakable sound of the Middle East. If the original hinted occasionally at distant lands, this new take sounds like a floor filler at the best nightclub in town, and that town could be anywhere from Marrakesh to Dubai, Tel Aviv to Baku!
Zohara’s new vision for the song is as adventurous as the original, but her sound is forged in a space where western grooves meet eastern vibes, where the artful meets the arabesque, where digital forward thinking dances deftly with musical traditions.
It’s a glorious song, one that retains the essence of the original yet is remade in Zohara’s own image, and beautifully so. If only all artists could approach covering a song with the same amount of imagination and creative intellect.
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