In honour of the International Film Festival Rotterdam that’s going on right now, not only a posts about samples from other songs, but also from film!
In 1990 Primal Scream released the song Loaded. Most prominently, it features a sample from their own song I’m losing more than I’ll ever have from 1989. Whosampled.com says the bass-line is replayed from the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil from 1968. You’ll also hear a drumloop taken from the 1989 white label remix of What I Am by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians. On a side note, you might recognise that song from the version that Tin Tin Out and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton covered in 1999.
But there’s also some spoken word samples in it. The most striking comes from the the 1966 film The Wild Angels (imdb + trailer). A biker film in which Peter Fonda plays a biker that tells off a preacher and says they want to be free to do what they wanna do … and they wanna get loaded.
Some songs don’t have an original, or it has become impossible to trace who wrote it or performed it first. You’d think this was just the case for any folk song pre-dating 1900, but it even happens for more recent classics. Take Hey Joe. Most people will say that the original (the one they know best) is by Jimi Hendrix, but this is not the case. Jimi Hendrix covered it and gave it his own spin as was usual in those days. But who did he cover it from?
Hey Joe was a song that emerged in the early sixties and become one of those songs every band covered. Even the WikiPedia article can’t seem to figure out who wrote the original. The earliest know recording of Hey Joe is by the Leaves from 1965. Jimi Hendrix recorded his version in 1966. Some say it was a traditional song. The first copyright on it was claimed by a traveling musician Billy Roberts. He however may have composed the song out of mix of different originals, including Baby, Please Don’t Go To Town from 1955 by (his girlfriend) Niella Miller.
This post is somewhat of a follow-up on the post about Coldplay. Sometimes a song is so coincidentally similar, that despite it being an original work, people have to be credited because otherwise there will be lawsuits.
Radiohead are often praised as being musical geniuses who have made ‘difficult’ and ‘experimental’ music in a time where recycled pop-tunes reign. But even their biggest and most covered hit, Creep from 1992, is not a isolated work of brilliance.
The songs credits list Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood as co-writers of the song. Both of them are song-writers who have quite a few well-known songs from the sixties and beyond. One of the hit songs they wrote together is The Air that I Breathe from 1974 that was performed by The Hollies.
While most people will recognise the subtle similarities in feel and even some chord progressions. And while Radiohead never confirmed they were inspired by the song by the Hollies, they were forced to put the credits on it regardless.
Of course a whole string of people covered the Radiohead version. It was included in Rodeohead(a country & western cover/medley of Radiohead by Hard ‘n Phirm) in 2005. Tears for Fears have done it, Richard Cheese has done it, Amanda Palmer has done it, even Korn have done it and many many more.
If you want a heated debate among music lovers, then suggest that Queen stole their idea for Another One Bites the Dust from Good Times by Chic. Or sampled them even. But did they?
Here’s the facts. Chic’s Good Times came out in 1979. Another One Bites the Dust came out in 1980 an was written by bass-player John Deacon. According to Wikipedia: Chic co-founder Bernard Edwards stated, “…that Queen record came about because that Queen bass player… spent some time hanging out with us at our studio”.
If you analyse the notes quite clinically, you can easily say that they are not exactly the same, but the arrangement of both is at least similar. The Queen version is much more simple. Still, on WhoSampled.com the comment-sections are filled when Queen as a sampler is not only linked to Chic, but also the track Christmas Rappin’ by Kurtis Blow from 1979. So Queen sampled Kurtis Blow? You could even argue that Rapture by Blondie was ‘sampled’ from Chic. Or Kurtis Blow.
The versions by Chic, Queen, Blondie and Kurtis Blow have all been sampled so many times, (including the hold it now!-lyric by Kurtis Blow) it wouldn’t even be funny to list them all here. A few are very notable however.
Of course the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight from 1979 was one of the first hip hop hits. As a result that track has been sampled a zillion times also (Hotel, Motel, Holiday-Inn) and the entry for that song alone on WhoSampled is two pages long. The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel by Grandmaster Flash from 1981 mixes, Chic, Queen, Blondie and quite a few others together in one track. KRS-One’s Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight)from 1997 borrows it’s slightly differently sung vocal line break Rapture by Blondie, but it’s ironic that the Rapture’s Delight references both the Blondie song, but also Rappers Delight, even though KRS-One doesn’t sample that at all in the song.
Coldplay got a bit of flack in 2008 because their song Viva La Vida from the same year sounded a lot like If I Could Fly by Joe Satriani from 2004. Satriani sued, but dropped the charges when Coldplay and Satriani decided to settle out of court. Part of the deal was that they wouldn’t talk about it any more. Personally, I think they may have heard the song and got inspired by it subconsciously. Either that or it’s poor coincidence.
Still, Coldplay has got a track record of borrowing tunes. And some times it makes sense. The opening of Life In Technicolorfrom 2008 sounds a lot like the Jon Hopkins track Light Through the Veins, also from 2008. But there’s a really good reason for that. Jon Hopkins was one of the producers of the Coldplay track and he let them borrow it.
A different case however is the song Talk from 2005. It became a massive hit, but what a lot of people don’t know is that the main theme is borrowed directly from a motif from Kraftwerk’s 1981 track Computer Love. But in all honesty, Chris Martin did try his best to write German to ask Kraftwerk if they could use it (they said yes).
The year 2010 marked the beginning of me writing B-sting.com and making music all on my own. To wrap up the year, here’s an overview of everything that happened since the launch.
Making Music
The site and blog launch on April 1st. Between all the blogging I introduce the Buy Me A Drink-feature. By July in finally realise I need to start finishing up some music. I announce EP01 is coming. I keep the blog posted about the progress: part 1, part 2 and part 3. As promised, I release the EP before the end of the month (on the last day even): If You Want Some Thing Done. Everything (including the cover) is done by me, proving DIY works. Okay, so I used one sample.
In between recording, I help out on a blues cover band, which is not so successful. I visit the Muzikantendag in The Hague. While I keep working on stuff, the blog remains pretty much silent on it.
Notes of interest
Throughout the year, I also post about curious things relating to music I bump into.
Starting the end of April, a repeating fixture of the blog is the weekly post on Monday in the series The Origin of Samples. In it I dig into the links between song from across decades, some times even centuries and how they are all tied together because parts of one piece of music is used in another. The subjects that were covered:
Copyright and sampling is always an interesting issue. Certainly when something very old is involved. Take Ludwig von Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Everyone knows it and thanks to the fact that Ludwig has been very dead for a long time, his works are in the public domain. That means any one can do with it as they please, except re-copyright the exact same song. But here’s the tricky part.
If you rearrange it, you have created something new and therefore a new copyrighted song. This has happened over the years when several artists did their own version. In 1969 the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption, who were known for redoing countless bits of classical music, released The 5th. On the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven, released in 1976. There’s even a metal version by At Vance from 2006.
But something odd happened when a lot of artists sampled the Walter Murphy song A Fifth of Beethoven. Technically speaking, they need to obtain a license to use it. So, if art musician Christian Marclay uses only a tiny snip of it in Second Coming in 1997, he needs to pay up. When A+ samples A Fifth of Beethoven in Enjoy Yourselfin 1999, yep. House-DJ/producer Paul Oakenfold could’ve used any version of Beethoven’s 5th, but instead opted to use a sample from A Fifth of Beethoven in his track 1975 from 2002 it seems. Robin Thicke also sampled A Fifth of Beethoven in 2002 in When I Get You Alone, but uses a more clearly recognisable part. Even master-remixers 2ManyDJs/Soulwax have taken on A Fifth of Beethoven.
So while the Electric Light Orchestra can cover the original Chuck Berry song Roll over Beethoven(which includes nothing by Beethoven), they’ll have to get a license to do so, but when they play it live they can include part of Beethoven’s 5th symphony for free and without an extra license from Beethoven. Oh, and to make things more complicated for you; if you’re a symphony orchestra, you can play Beethoven’s 5th for free, you can’t own a copyright of the song, but you can own a copyright on the recording. So no one can put your recording on a compilation of “Beethoven’s Greatest Hits” without getting a license from you. But of course they can always play their own version and put that on there instead.
Here’s a sample that has toured the world. Initially we start our trip in Jamaica where reggae artist Slim Smith records the track I’ll Never Let You Go for his album Just a Dream. I have varying sources that say the album was released in 1972 or 1968 or simply don’t know. Likewise the sources are unclear about his death, one says he tried to break into his parents house and cut his his arms on the glass and bled to death, the other that he committed suicide in1972.
Regardless of how he dies, the track stayed in Jamaica when in 1984 Jah Screechy samples I’ll Never Let You Go in his dancehall song Walk and Skank. The track borrows the bassline, but ads very distinctive vocals and a piano. As soon as you hear those, you might start to recognise the track.
Moving over to the UK in 1992, the DJ duo SL2 (Slipmatt & Lime) release the breakbeat track On A Ragga Tip on the legendary XL Recordings label (which also made The Prodigy big). That track borrows the bassline, piano and the vocals by Jah Screechy and ads a few instruments and mixes them into a breakbeat tracks that filled many a dance floor.
In the weirdest twist of this post, the track pops up in India where the Bollywood film Stunttman (with two t’s) is released in 1994. One of the film’s musical numbers is the track Amma Dekh Tera Munda Bigda Jaaye which borrows the vocal melody for its chorus, obviously inspired by SL2’s hit from two years earlier.
Last but not least, the track pops up in The Netherlands in 2004, where the Bass Solution DJ Team remixes a track titled by Ragga Trip by the Hardstylerz on a hardcore/hardstyle compilation in 2004. Obviously, it also borrows most of its samples from the SL2 version.
Little did Slim Smith knew before his death in 1972 that his track would eventually end up as a dancehall, breakbeat, Bollywood and Hardstyle tune. Since the Slim Smith video can’t be embedded, here’s my favourite version, SL2 – On a Ragga Tip:
B-sting is a producer/musician, a blogger and an ICT-pro to pay the bills. He has been active on the web as B-sting since 1995, when the web was still filmed in black 'n white. He's been making music on his own and in various bands for even longer than that. He's quite the nerd when it comes to the origin of samples and talks a lot about that.
