Classical composer Edvar Grieg wrote In the Hall of the Mountain King for the play Peer Gynt which premiered in 1876. As such, it had a cinematic soundtrack quality to it, long before cinema became a broad popular pastime. Because of this it has long been a favorite background music for television and film. Most […]
Last week I talked about Bernard Purdie’s song Soul Drums from 1968 which got sampled in Devil’s Haircut . The same track also got sampled in a Christmas track by Mansfield, entitled 2010.12.25 from 2000. Bernard Purdie is a session drummer who performed with people like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, BB King, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles […]
It’s interesting to see how some artists draw samples from the same artists and albums they have done before. Take Beck and his album Odelay, more specifically Devil’s Haircut from 1996. The track contains a lot of samples, which would take a few years to figure out. I’ll limit this post to three that stand […]
The KLF‘s track What Time Is Love (the Pure Trance 1 version) was originally released in 1988 and is an original acid house track. Their breakthru however came with a reworked version What Time Is Love (Live at Trancentral) in 1990. They described this track as “stadium house”. This version does however contain a few […]
In 1990 three guys, Anthony Mannino, Ralph D’Agostino & Dennis Pino, produced a laid-back, 12-minute long early house track under the name C’hantal entitled The Realm. A song that most likely would have disappeared in the pile of anonymous house tracks that filled the discotheques in the weekends back then. Except it didn’t because of […]
Let’s talk about a sample that isn’t a sample at all. Lady Gaga can and has been accused of a lot of things involving theft of other people’s music, but one thing that’s hardly ever done in her music is sampling. And by that I mean direct sampling; recording a loop and playing it back […]
The drum break in The Soul Searchers song Ashley’s Roachclip from 1974 was well on it’s way to become just as hugely sampled as the Amen break. But something stopped its triumphant march: it went out of fashion. Like many breaks, it was first used in hiphoptracks in the early eighties. A lot of early […]
In 1977 the Isley Brothers released the album Go For Your Guns. Track 2 on that album is the very laid back song Footsteps in the Dark. Three songs were released as singles from that album, but Footsteps in the Dark was not one of them. Nevertheless, the song has gained popularity among hiphop and […]
Van Halen released Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love in 1978. It has since been covered often, for instance by Minutemen in 1984, by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones in 1991 and more recently by Die Hunns in 2006. Surely the oddest one out cover is the version by Jazzkantine from 2008. Apart from that the song has […]
Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy The year 2006 seems to be the absolute peak for the song Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. Not so much the original song, which was released in 1984, but as far as covers and sampling of the song goes. One of the first instances for the song to pop up […]
