Tag: wikipedia

  • Toontje Lager – Zoveel te doen

    In honour of the EP-release, this week a real simple Origin of Samples-post. The track So Much To Do uses samples from the band Toontje Lager. They were active in the early Eighties and score a few hits in The Netherlands. After they split up, their lead-singer went solo for a while, but eventually disappeared from public view. Apparently according to the Dutch wiki, he’s a music teacher now.

    The bits from one of their hits Zoveel te doen (which literally means So Much To Do) I used are a fairly small part of the song, but are locked into the Dutch collective memory for another reasons. The exact same bit was used a Dutch television program about cars in the Eighties: De Heilige Koe (The Holy Cow, aka: cars).

    Here’s the original Zoveel te Doen by Toontje Lager that reached #19 in the Dutch charts in 1983:

  • S.O.S. Band – Just Be Good To Me

    Recently on a popular music television station that mostly plays reality shows, I ran across the the song Just Be Good To Green by Professor Green featuring Lily Allen. It uses a familiar tactic of sampling part of the original and having the other part sung (in this case by Lily Allen) with slightly different lyrics.

    The sample and melody is lifted from the 1990 song Dub be Good to Me by Beats international. Norman Cook aka FatBoy Slimwas involved in producing the 1990 track Dub be Good to Me and that usually means samples come from all over the place. In this case the bass line from The Guns of Brixton by The Clash (1979), the harmonica tune from Once Upon a Time in the West, aka Man with a Harmonica (1969) and some of the rap vocals are directly taken from Johnny Dynell’s 1983 track Jam Hot. The Beats International version was subsequently also covered by Faithless featuring Dido in 2008.

    Dub be Good To Me however takes its melody and lyrics directly from yet another track. The S.O.S. Band‘s producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been noted to popularise the sound of the 808. They also used it in the song which Norman Cook got this melody from: The S.O.S. Band – Just be Good to Me (1983). So is Lily Allen singing the tune of a song from 1990 or 1983?

  • The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come

    The Delfonics are soul group who had their most successful period in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1968 they released a single entitled Ready or Not Here I Come. Though the Delfonics themselves weren’t on Motown, Motown’s own Jackson 5 covered the song in 1970.

    A few decades later in 1996 The Fugees released their album The Score and soon released the single Ready or Not from it. Despite the similar title, the song didn’t contain any direct sample from The Delfonics track. Instead Fugees’s singer Lauryn Hill borrowed most of the melody and lyrics from that track when she sang it. They were almost sued however, but not by The Delfonics, but Irish singer Enya, who’s track Boadicea was sampled quite clearly in the Fugees track. The matter was settled out of court and the song became a great international hit.

    Just a year later in 1997 A British DJ and Dutch vocalist scored a hit under the name The Score with their dance version of Ready or Not. You can wonder however whether they ever paid royalties to either The Delfonics, Enya or the Fugees. Here’s the original: The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come:

  • How to become famous without talent

    Meet Florence Foster Jenkins. The no-longer living proof that with enough money passion and persistence you can become famous despite having no talent at all. She really, REALLY wanted to become a classical singer, but her rich dad would not let her. However, when he father died and she inherited all her fathers money, she could kick off her singing career.  How little talent she had can be heard in this YouTube video. Despite all this, she went on to perform for audiences even in Carnegie Hall, deaf to the critics’ laughter.

    She may have been really awful, but she loved making music. You can’t blame her that. And in the end her lack of talent did bring her fame. Realistically though maybe she should have stuck with singing in the shower and spent her money otherwise. In that sense, not much has changed.