Tag: The Staple Singers

  • 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:

  • The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time

    All aboard the sample train, this is going to be a long ride.

    Let’s start in 1948. Roebuck Staples forms a gospel group with his family called The Staple Singers. Not even mentioned in their Wikipedia-page is the fact that in 1955 they released a recording of the traditional gospel song This May be the Last Time in a blues style.

    Ten years later in 1965, The Rolling Stones ‘borrowed’ most of the lyrics for their single The Last Time. This was not uncommon in those days (see: When the Levee Breaks). On a side note: also not uncommon was for the big bands of that era (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) to cover each other’s songs. So when half of the Rolling Stones were sentenced to prison for drug charges in 1967, The Who recorded their cover version of the song out of support and a bit of irony.

    Back on track, in 1966 Andrew Oldham, former manager/producer of the Rolling Stones created an orchestrated version of the Last Time and released it on the 1966 album The Rolling Stones Songbook. Even though the song barely resembles the original, copyrights were attributed to the Stones. This became an important issue decades later in 1997 when The Verve released their song Bitter Sweet Symphony. It clearly uses a sample of the Oldham version, which they licensed. Strangely enough however they got sued by The Rolling Stones, because according to them they used a lot more of their own song than the license had specified. Eventually, the Verve also got sued by Andrew Oldham. The result was that all of the credits on Bitter Sweet Symphony now point to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, writers of the Rolling Stones song The Last Time. Which in itself is ‘stolen’ from a 1955 song. An irony also pointed out in the sample-documentary RIP, a Remix Manifesto.

    The Verve’s song has led to many other artists sampling their track again. Our last stop on this long ride ends with just one of them: Mark van Dale’s Water Verve. Although it’s arguable that this track was probably sampled from the Oldham version, the fact that it was released just a year after Bitter Sweet Symphony should be proof enough that it was riding The Verve’s popularity wave. Oh and the title Water Verve is a play on words, since  the word waterverf not only sounds like Water Verve, it means “water paint” in Dutch.

    After all the music that was inspired by each other, here’s the place where we started: The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time:

    Keith Richards and Mick Jagger