Tag: David Bowie

  • David Bowie – Fame

    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.

  • David Bowie – Crystal Japan

    David Bowie’s instrumental track Crystal Japan has a rather odd history of how it slipped into the public attention. When it was written and recorded in 1979 and still had the title Fuje Moto San, it was intended for the album Scary Monsters, but was discarded. Instead it was used in a Japanese commercial for the sake Crystal Jun Rock which also featured Bowie himself.  As a result, the track was released as a single in Japan and mostly forgotten about afterwards.

    Then in 1994, Nine Inch Nails’ ground-breaking album The Downward Spiral comes out. On it is a beautifully haunting instrumental track titled A Warm Place. The main keyboard motive isn’t just similar (as Wikipedia puts it), it’s identical to parts of Crystal Japan. And even though it’s not a direct sample from the original track, it’s clear where the melody came from.

    So is this blatant stealing? No, it turns out, Trent Reznor (the man behind NIN) is quite the David Bowie fan. So much that he doesn’t just sample Bowie’s voice for a remix of that album (at 4:29), Bowie and Reznor were working together on multiple projects. Nine Inch Nails goes on tour with David Bowie. There’s multiple tracks floating on the web of Bowie and Reznor playing songs of both Bowie and NIN together live. Reznor remixed the track I’m afraid of Americans. Ironically for the video, Reznor plays a creepy stalker who follows Bowie. To top  it off in 1997 Reznor puts a track of Bowie on the soundtrack of the 1997 film Lynch film Lost Highway. If you want to know more about the influence and their views on how everything’s connected there’s a 4-part interview with Bowie and Reznor on YouTube that starts here.

    David Bowie’s Crystal Japan can be heard here: