Oh No He Didn't: Mike Doughty Rerecording Soul Coughing Songs

Soul Coughing were one of my favourite bands from the 90's; a wacky, oddball, groove-driven marriage of demented spoken word and bombastic free jazz rock, they released three solid slabs of music from 1994 to 1998 before a messy breakup in 2000. Bickering over songwriting credits tore this band apart but good.

Mike Doughty, the band's main songwriter of Soul Coughing, traditionally doesn't like people talking about his old band (whose often improvised grooves became the backbone of many a Soul Coughing classic). He's often shown total and utter disdain for his former band in interviews, and has even tweeted urging Soul Coughing fans to give up on it, that he was finished with that band. He was particularly unfriendly in a memoir released last year. A sample:

"If someone says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you. Somebody yells out for a Soul Coughing song during a show, it means fuck you."


So, either Doughty's softened his stance, or he's trying to fuck us. He's started a campaign on Pledge Music wherein he's rerecording Soul Coughing songs to "make them more like what (he) initially intended them to be". Which, to me at least, translates to "make them so that none of my former bandmates who I hate can claim any type of ownership over them because they're all mine".

Whatever the case, it's really baffling that he's doing this; after years of railing against those songs he's now, seemingly suddenly, chosen to not just revisit them, but to RERECORD AND CHARGE PEOPLE MONEY FOR. You know, the people he accused of saying "fuck you". The people he told (in all caps) to "DROP IT".

That's what's sticking in my craw, because I love those Soul Coughing records. Even if Doughty was the only one writing things down, his bandmates were also responsible for what happened on record. To dismiss those albums basically to the point of wishing them out of existence then dig them all up again for another payday (reminder: all three of Soul Coughing's albums went gold) smacks just a bit of hypocrisy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he's got his reasons. He wants to "separate the songs from that darkness" - the Soul Coughing years run parallel to Doughty's battles with drugs - and I'm sure it's all very therapeutic for him. However, as one of the few fans who continued to champion this unique and entertaining band long after they dissolved, I can't help but feel slighted. After essentially being told to stop loving something we loved to the point of borderline verbal abuse, we're now being told, essentially, "if you're going to love it, I prefer if you consider them part of my solo career because those other guys are dicks and don't matter".

When I hear that, Mike, I hear fuck you.

Mike Doughty's rehashing of songs that he basically said he hated will be out later this year. Here's a Soul Coughing video for a great song that was performed by a great BAND, and doesn't deserve to be buried like a rotting corpse and dug up when it's convenient: