Tag: Limp Bizkit

  • 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.

  • Movie Sequel Clones

    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.