Here’s a really quick one I submitted to whosampled.com recently:

In 2002 American lounge/triphop-duo Thievery Corporation released their album The Richest Man in Babylon. On it is the instrumental track Resolution. Around the same time another American triphop band named Etro Anime is making a small name for itself, though their effort seems to mainly spark interest in the Netherlands. One of its members, Liset Alea (who doesn’t even have a wiki-page), left the group to go solo.

When finally she releases an album in 2005, it’s on the Dutch branch of EMI music. It’s titled No Sleep after the title track and first single No Sleep. It’s produced by Yoad Nova, who also did work for the likes of the Sugababes (among others involved on Freak Like Me, which has been mentioned here before), Bryan Adams and Sophe Ellis-Bextor. Right from the beginning of the song, what do we hear? Thievery Corperation – Resolution:

In 1966 saxophone Mike Sharpe and his band recorded an instrumental song titled Spooky. About a year later, the track found its way into the charts and got noticed. A band that mainly played covers named the Classics IV, decided to record a cover of the song also titled Spooky which was released in 1967 and became a huge hit in 1968. The Classics IV added something to their cover that wasn’t on the original, apart from their own instrumentation: lyrics.

The Classics IV track spawned a number of covers. In 1969 Carl Tjader recorded an again instrumental xylophone cover of which you can wonder whether it was based on the Sharpe or the Classics IV version.  In 1970 Dusty Springfield recorded a cover of Spooky with the lyrics of the Classics IV version. In 1980 Lydia Lunch did her take on Spooky. Several other bands have played or recorded a cover like REM, Imogen  Heap, the Puppini Sisters and many others. The most intriguing ‘cover’ of Spooky is by a band named the Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1979. The band consisted of former members of the Classics IV and another band, the Candymen.

The song didn’t go unnoticed when sampling started. When former model Naomi Campbell released an album, Spooky was used in the track Looks Swank (which I can’t listen to thanks to Sony being a dick on YouTube).  Barry Adamson used a clearly recognisable sample of Spooky on his 1996 track Something Wicked This Way Comes. The track found its way onto the soundtrack of the bizarre David Lynch film Lost Highway in 1997. Also in 1996, The Bloodhound Gang used Spooky in their song Why is Everybody Always Pickin’ on Me?

Though technically speaking the Classics IV version of Spooky isn’t the original, it did birth a lot of versions and samples:

Nice one, Frank Paats! Clever. :>

I just submitted something to whosampled.com I found obviously missing. I was actually shocked it wasn’t on there. Today we’re doing a cover AND a sample! And a whole string of other artist who borrowed the same sample.

In 1998 the band Limp Bizkit broke through to a major audience with their single Faith taken from their 1997 album Three Dollar Bill, Yall$. The song Faith is a cover from George Michael’s original version from 1987. Limp Bizkit went on the next few years to score a string of hits, including the song Take a Look Around which I mentioned two weeks ago.

As sort of an in-between-albums thing, Limp Bizkit released a remix album titled New Old Songs in 2001 which featured new remixes of their old songs (go figure). One was released as a single and was a remix of their very first big hit: Faith. The new version was entitled Faith/Fame Remix.  Why? because instead of just doing the cover again, they also mashed up the riff from David Bowie’s 1975 track Fame (co-written by John Lennon) into it and had Fred Durst sing the word ‘Faith’ in the same manner Bowie sang ‘Fame’. Is it a cover? Is it a sample? Or is it both?

They’re not the first and certainly not the last to cover that track though.  James Brown borrowed the tune in the same year Bowie released it in his track Hot. Public Enemy used it as a small hidden snippet of it in their 1988 track Night of the Living Baseheads. EPMD used a very slowed down sample of Fame in their It Wasn’t Me, It Was The Fame in 1989. When Vanilla Ice had dropped off the radar and released another album, he used Fame in his own track also titled Fame in 1994. Dr. Dre used it quite prominently (is it a cover? is it a sample?)  in 1996 track Fame. Even Jay-Z borrows the lyrics in the 2001 track Takeover. To top it off, Lady Gaga sampled one her heroes and lifted the riff from Fame in her 2009 track Fancy Pants.

Here’s the original: David Bowie – Fame.

I spoke too soon in my previous post. I said: “This means the crazy situation arises that tickets for a festival like Lowlands held at the end of August 2011, might likely be sold out already before half December“. I got it wrong. When 45000 tickets went on sale today at 11:00, they were sold out in 2 hours (Dutch source). The regular tickets at least, not all of the 10000 special discount tickets are sold out, but those are only for people who have a special pass. Last year it took 8 days and by then a few names playing were already known. Not a single name has been confirmed yet for 2011.

I will be there, by the way, I made it in time. Each year I keep thinking I should buy a few extra tickets to sell to those who were late But if I see the online auction sites where people are already trying to sell extra tickets for €400 to €1000 even (original prices were €155), I’m glad I don’t. I don’t want to be one of those sleazy scalpers. Besides, with todays digital tickets there’s way too much risk that if you buy a ticket from an unreliable source, it’s going to be an invalid ticket.

The current Dutch government is going to increase the VAT-tax rate (in Dutch: BTW) for performing arts in the Netherlands from 6 to 19%, starting 2011. As a result of this, there have been many protests. One of the more prominent protesters, concert organiser Mojo Concerts has been very vocal about opposing this. And for good reason cause this would mean their ticket prices (already very high) might sky-rocket some more. They have taken matters into their own hands and announced they will start pre-sales for their bigger festivals (Pinkpop, Lowlands, the Zwarte Cross) in 2010 already to evade the increase, knowing full-well the tickets will sell out before 2011.

This means the crazy situation arises that tickets for a festival like Lowlands held at the end of August 2011, might likely be sold out already before half December , since the tickets go on sale this Friday the 26th. The tickets for the 2010 edition sold out in 8 days in the pre-sales. Mind you,when those sold out, only a handful of artists had been confirmed. This Friday, not a single name has been confirmed yet.

What prompted me to post this entry might be an even more astounding record. Singer-song writer Ane Brun announced on her Facebook page that tickets for her concert in Amsterdam will go on sale on the 27th of November … for a concert on the 18th of October 2011. That’s a little under 11 months in advance. There is no mention on whether this is related to the tax rise, but my gut instinct says it is. Will any venue break the record by starting pre-sales for a concert in December 2011?

I frequently use whosampled.com as a source, but I also try to give back finds not listed on the site. When I submitted the fact that 2 Hi use a sample from the Jungle Brothers in the 1992 track Jump a Little Hi-er, one of the moderators wondered out loud where another sample in that track with the lyrics “I wanna get high” at the beginning came from. Turns out a simple Google query for the lyrics gave a result: Rita Marley (the widow of Bob) put out the track One Draw in 1981 and that’s where the sample is from.

Oddly enough, the track has also been sampled by Cypress Hill. While you’d expect them to take a literal sample of the track, they actually rapped the lyrics themselves in I Wanna Get High from 1993. Sizzla sampled the song too in 2005, but his track Smoke Di Herb, but his track only features the music, not the lyrics.

So the track Jump a Little Hi-er is not just the only track to sample the vocals of Rita Marley, it’s the only one which is (arguably) the only one not about smoking marijuana. For as far as dance songs are about any thing but dancing, that is.

A special brand of clones are movie theme songs. Or more precisely sequel theme songs. Often film studios exploit a sequel as “the same film but with more explosions”, likewise they give the soundtrack the same treatment for a quick cash in. And like you try to keep the characters the same, you want to keep the audio backdrop the same and recognisable. Sampling, covering, a tribute and some times blatantly stealing become justified.

The most famous and often cloned song are obviously the James Bond opening songs. Don’t confuse these with John Barry’s James Bond theme song however, since this usually precedes the opening credits. No, the big epic songs by famous musicians usually have a distinct style that not only use the same instrumentation but often roughly the same build-up. Compare You Only Live Twice (1967) by Nancy Sinatra and The World Is Not Enough (1999) by Garbage for instance. It should be noted that, though performed by a wide range of artists, all of the recent themes are the work of composer David Arnold and the Bond films are heavily formula driven.

While the first Rocky film from 1976 has a signature theme song by Bill Conti (Gonna Fly Now), the band Survivor did the theme song for Rocky III in 1982; Eye of the Tiger. When Survivor got asked to also do the music to Rocky IV in 1985, the composed a similar song in composition and feel: Burning Heart. When the job of composing the soundtrack for Rocky V in 1990 came to some one else, the first thing you notice in the track by Joey B. Ellis is the fact that it indirectly samples Eye of the Tiger again in Go For It while the style of the track is very similar to The Power also from 1990 by Snap. Snap was also on the full soundtrack of Rocky V.

Like with Rocky, theme songs often get updated to fit the current popular style of music. When the original Ghostbusters film from 1984 got a sequel in 1989 with Ghostbusters II, the theme song from the original, Ray Parker jr.’s Ghostbusters, got a hiphop treatment by Run DMC also titled simply Ghostbusters. The original Mission: Impossible theme song to the 1960’s tv-show fitted perfectly in its time with the James Bond-style spy tune. When it got made into a film in the 1996, the Mission: Impossible theme was quickly adapted by U2’s Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen to a more electronic version. When Limp Bizkit got to do it in 2000 their song Take a Look Around again borrows from the original but with a totally different spin.

The list of example is endless. Feel free to comment about the ones you know, love or despise.

A particular song by Bob James, Nautilus, has been sampled by dozens of hiphop (and other) artists. Since this post would be too long if I went into the entire list, there’s another song I want to focus on: Sing of the Times from 1981.

It first re-appeared as a sampled in the 1991 De La Soul track Keepin’ the Faith. A few years after in 1994 it probably made it’s most famous appearance in Regulate by Warren G. and Nate Dogg. That track also samples Michael McDonald’s 1982 track I keep forgetting and borrows the ‘Let Me Ride‘ lyric from Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975).

In 1995 the sample pops up again in Menelik & No Sé’s track Quelle Aventure, which also uses a sample from Pino D’Angio’s 1980 track Ma Quale Idea (did I hear anyone say Don’t call me baby?).

Finally in 1998 Buzzy Bus also takes on Bob James and puts it in their track Jump. This tracks also samples the Jungle Brother’s I’ll House You with it’s lyric “jump, jump, a little higher” (and I may need to devote a post to that track as well some time in the future). You may know the Buzzy Bus guys (Koen Groeneveld & Addy van der Zwan) under their various release names: The Klubbheads, The Ultimate Seduction, their remixes for the Turn Up The Bass compilations and a dozen more names.

But forget about G-Funk and Club House for now, here’s Bob James – Sign of the Times:

The song Barbra Streisand by Duck Sauce has been taking the world by storm for weeks. The video is loaded with tons of artists including Pharell and Kanye West. Duck Sauce is DJ’s Armand van Helden and A-trak and like the title DJ suggests, apart from making records themselves, they like to spin other people’s tunes too.

So it should come as no surprise that Barbra Streisand is literally sampled from Boney M’s 1979 disco hit Gotta go Home with a few added beats, scratches, sounds and of course the ‘Barbra Streisand’ sample. You’d think that was the end of it, but no.

Gotta go home is in fact a cover of a German song Hallo Bimmelbahn from 1973 by a band called Nighttrain. The original song already includes the ‘woohoohoo’ and same notes as the Boney M. version minus some steel drums and vocals. The same elements Barbra Streisand leans on.

But how did some German song about a train who took some guy’s love away end up as a disco song about going to a sunny beach? Simple; Boney M., despite being headed by Caribbean singers, was in fact based in Germany and the product of German producer  Frank Farian who undoubtedly figured a more internationalised cover of Hallo Bimmelbahn would be more successful. Frank Farian was also responsible for the ill-fated band Milli Vanilli, by the way.

So, a German song about a train, became an English song about heading for Caribbean islands and that in turn became a dance song with a video celebrating the diversity New York. Here’s Hallo Bimmelbahn by Nighttrain (though I dare you not to say “Barbra Streisand” throughout the song):