Tag: The Prodigy

  • Bernard Purdie

    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 Davis and Joe Cocker.

    Sampled drum breaks from Bernard Purdie songs are also in popular demand. The block rockin’ beats in Block Rockin’ Beats (1997) by the Chemical Brothers came from Purdie’s Changes from 1972. Interestingly the song was sampled before by Zhigge in Rakin’in the Dough (1992), but it used a bassloop. Changes itself is a cover of Them Changes (1970) by Buddy Miles.

    The Prodigy’s 3 Kilos (1994) samples Good Livin’ (Good Lovin’) (1972). The song 3 Kilos is on the album Music for the Jilted Generation. On the same album is Poison which contains a bunch of drum samples, one of them being Bernard Purdie’s Heavy Soul Singer (1972). The same sample can be heard faintly in the back ground on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (1998).

    I mentioned Beck already, but his album Odelay contains another track, Hotwax, that samples Song for Aretha (1971) also by Bernard Purdie. Pepe Deluxe used the same sample in Lying Peacefully (2003).

    To top it off, Bernard Purdie himself ‘sampled’ too. His 1971 track Funky Mozart borrows the basics from Symphony #40 in G Minor by Mozart from 1788. That’s some old funky stuff.

    My personal favourite that contains a Purdie sample? Block Rockin’ Beats obviously:

  • Human Resource – Dominator

    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 in your own track.

    There’s been outrage a few weeks back that Lady Gaga’s new single Born this Way would be creepily similar to Express Yourself (1989) by Madonna. By the way you can say Madonna borrowed parts of that song from Respect Yourself (1972) by The Staple Singers. I don’t want to get into the Born this Way/Express Yourself-discussion, but it reminded me of something going on a few years back when Bad Romance (2009) by Lady Gaga came out in The Netherlands.

    Apart from really hard to distinguish drumloop from Ballanation (2000) by DJ Jean, Bad Romance doesn’t use any samples. But Dutch people instantly recognised the ‘electronic saw’ noise in Bad Romance as a sample from one of Rotterdam’s finest classic rave formations Human Resource and their 1991 hit-single Dominator. If you Google “Lady Gaga Dominator” you can find a pile of discussions in Dutch about whether or not Lady Gaga stole the sample.

    Guess what? She didn’t. That distinct sound is what’s known as a ‘hoover’ among rave-lovers and is actually a preset on many synths, in this case the Roland Alpha Juno. It’s quite commonly used in rave and later hardcore tracks and you can find tons of videos of people recreating it. Even on a Casio.

    The Prodigy became famous for introducing the ‘hoover’-sound into the rave scene with their 1991 song Charly (you can see the Roland-synth in the video) and they certainly didn’t sample it from Human Resource either. It’s interesting considering the Prodigy have sampled a lot of people, but most of their synth-noises come straight from the electronics. I mean, the band is named after a synth, the Moog Prodigy for crying out loud.

    So: no, Lady Gaga did not sample the hoover from Human Resource:

  • Max Romeo – I Chase the Devil

    In 1976 reggae stars Max Romeo & the Upsetters released the album War ina Babylon. On it is a song entitled I Chase the Devil, which was penned by Max Romeo and legendary dub/reggae artist & producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. The fact that The Upsetters are on the album with Max Romeo isn’t surprising, since they are Lee “Scratch” Perry’s backing band (and Perry himself is also know under the pseudonym The Upsetter).

    Some decades later around 1992 a young Liam Howlett picked up the album and added a sample of the Max Romeo track to the first album Experience by his own band The Prodigy. While a string of singles was released from this album in the middle of the rave explosion, there was one that became the defining single for the Prodigy that blew them into international fame. That track, which hinges on the Max Romeo sample, is Out of Space. And it’s safe to say that it became famous despite of it’s low budget video, which was only slightly less seizure inducing as Stakker Humanoid (but I’m getting off-topic now).

    For completeness sake, Jay-Z has also sampled the Max Romeo track in the crappy track Lucifer and Madness has made a cover of I Chase the Devil. But let’s listen to where it all began: the original Max Romeo and the Upsetters – I Chase the Devil: