In 2006 the duo Gnarls Barkley (DJ Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo) released their first and biggest hit single: Crazy. Due to the immense popularity of the song, it soon got covered by countless artists (even a lovely theremin version). Most notable of the covers however is the version by The Violent Femmes in 2008. Notable because Gnarls Barkley covered the song Gone Daddy Gone by the Violent Femmes also in 2006. So they covered each other’s songs!

DJ Danger Mouse got a lot of attention in 2004 when he released the Grey Album, a mashup between the Beatles album nicknamed’ ‘the White Album‘ and Jay-Z’s Black Album. So it comes as no surprise that even though the lyrics on Crazy are original, the music is sampled.

In 1968 the film Django, Prepare a Coffin aka Preparati La Bara! aka Viva Django (not to be confused  with the rip-off Viva! Django from 1971) was released as a unofficial rip-off sequel to the film Django (1966). It was not uncommon in spaghetti western days to release a film that ripped title and main characters from other popular films as a cash in. The score however is original and written by brothers Gianfranco & Gian Piero Reverberi. You can hear a hint of the sample in the opening credits (which visually and musically are a rip-off from the style of James Bond opening credits), but if you fast forward to 2:30, you can hear Crazy in the original song titled Nel Cimitero Di Tucson (click here for just the song):

I talked about clone songs a while back. There is yet another example from Dutch pop music that illustrates this point well.

Around 1998/1999 car-brand Mitsubishi aired a TV-commercial that featured music by a temporarily formed duo called City to City. The band name references to the fact that both band members (Maarten van Praag and Sandro van Breemen) have a city in their last name. Not only is their band name quite appropriate for a car commercial, so is their first and only hit single: The Road Ahead (Miles of the Unknown).

But if you listen to the song, the feeling creeps up on you, that you’ve heard this music before. Even the references to roads and cars somehow strike familiar. And you would be right. You might remember a video that (ironically) does not have a wide open road, but a traffic jam as its setting: R.E.M.‘s Everybody Hurts from 1993. Listen to both songs and you’ll notice: same instruments (especially the use of strings and percussion on the opening), same build-up, same mood, even almost the same melodies.

The single The Road Ahead topped the Dutch charts for 4 weeks and was #4 of best sold singles in 1999. The band City to City won the Edison (Dutch equivalent of a Grammy) for Best National Newcomer for that year. They released two more singles which failed to achieve any similar result, before City to City effectively split in 2002 when one of the two members left the band. The song The Road Ahead still shows up in the annual Top 2000 (best songs of all time list, compiled with votes from the listeners of Radio 2), usually somewhere between #500 and #900.

Here’s City to City – The Road Ahead:

And just for comparison, here’s R.E.M. – Everybody Hurts:

In honour of the EP-release, this week a real simple Origin of Samples-post. The track So Much To Do uses samples from the band Toontje Lager. They were active in the early Eighties and score a few hits in The Netherlands. After they split up, their lead-singer went solo for a while, but eventually disappeared from public view. Apparently according to the Dutch wiki, he’s a music teacher now.

The bits from one of their hits Zoveel te doen (which literally means So Much To Do) I used are a fairly small part of the song, but are locked into the Dutch collective memory for another reasons. The exact same bit was used a Dutch television program about cars in the Eighties: De Heilige Koe (The Holy Cow, aka: cars).

Here’s the original Zoveel te Doen by Toontje Lager that reached #19 in the Dutch charts in 1983:

The EP If You Want Some Thing Done is out, get it here:

music.b-sting.com

You can determine the price for it yourself. Yes, that means you can get it for free, but contributions are welcome.

If you like it, tell me! Or better yet, tell your friends. Review it, blog about it, drop the link on Facebook or Twitter, talk about it.

Many thanks to Divadrummer for providing the opening track. If you would like to contribute something to the next release (opening track, remix, cover art, etc.) Let me know!

The EP is done. The music is done. The artwork is done. The download page is done. Scheduled released date: this Saturday 31st of July 2010. People who subscribed for the free digital EP will be notified Saturday. The rest will just have to keep a close eye on B-sting.com .

Recently on a popular music television station that mostly plays reality shows, I ran across the the song Just Be Good To Green by Professor Green featuring Lily Allen. It uses a familiar tactic of sampling part of the original and having the other part sung (in this case by Lily Allen) with slightly different lyrics.

The sample and melody is lifted from the 1990 song Dub be Good to Me by Beats international. Norman Cook aka FatBoy Slimwas involved in producing the 1990 track Dub be Good to Me and that usually means samples come from all over the place. In this case the bass line from The Guns of Brixton by The Clash (1979), the harmonica tune from Once Upon a Time in the West, aka Man with a Harmonica (1969) and some of the rap vocals are directly taken from Johnny Dynell’s 1983 track Jam Hot. The Beats International version was subsequently also covered by Faithless featuring Dido in 2008.

Dub be Good To Me however takes its melody and lyrics directly from yet another track. The S.O.S. Band‘s producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been noted to popularise the sound of the 808. They also used it in the song which Norman Cook got this melody from: The S.O.S. Band – Just be Good to Me (1983). So is Lily Allen singing the tune of a song from 1990 or 1983?

The Delfonics are soul group who had their most successful period in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1968 they released a single entitled Ready or Not Here I Come. Though the Delfonics themselves weren’t on Motown, Motown’s own Jackson 5 covered the song in 1970.

A few decades later in 1996 The Fugees released their album The Score and soon released the single Ready or Not from it. Despite the similar title, the song didn’t contain any direct sample from The Delfonics track. Instead Fugees’s singer Lauryn Hill borrowed most of the melody and lyrics from that track when she sang it. They were almost sued however, but not by The Delfonics, but Irish singer Enya, who’s track Boadicea was sampled quite clearly in the Fugees track. The matter was settled out of court and the song became a great international hit.

Just a year later in 1997 A British DJ and Dutch vocalist scored a hit under the name The Score with their dance version of Ready or Not. You can wonder however whether they ever paid royalties to either The Delfonics, Enya or the Fugees. Here’s the original: The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come:

It’s still not too late to sign up for a free digital EP. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Meanwhile, in the past few days, I’ve been doing two things. First, I’ve been doing some composing on track 000009. It’s a comfy 4+ minutes now, I put the finishing touches on the lyrics and a few hours ago I recorded them. A few days earlier I also re-recorded some organ bits, because I had a few new ideas for that. Sorta gave it a good mix and voilá, track 000009 is done. It’s even got a title now.

Secondly, I’m working on a design for the cover. I wanted to get some help in for that one, but decided the first EP needs to be all mine from front to back. I have an idea for it, but figured my photography skills aren’t exactly up to scratch. So what I did, I set up a complex shot (thanks Ragedaisy, for helping on that one), snapped some pictures and photoshopped those together as best as I could. But! I will rework it into a vector drawing by hand. Those who have been following my private blog might remember the ones I did for Rosana and Judy. Something like that. ;)

Plans for the coming week: make the artwork, check the combined mix on all tracks, see if there is time to squeeze in track 000002.

Techdirt posts about the accounting done in the music industry. The article comes to a not-so-surprising conclusion and explains in detail:

Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales

Shortly summarised, the artist already gets a small slice of the pie to begin with, but thanks to all sorts of contract obligations, the artist is left with very little because advances and loans need to be paid back to the record company. If that doesn’t make you follow Thom Yorke’s advice, I don’t know what will. Do it yourself or sign with a small label you know you can trust. And read the fine print.

An interesting game by MusicMachinery.com :

NameDropper

The rules are simple, you get presented with a list of artists and one if them is a fake name. Can you spot the made-up artist between the real ones? So far my score is 13512.