Round about the same time that I started paying attention to samples used in songs I found there are well known songs whose lyrics aren’t always about what you might think

1. Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Under the Bridge

The LA rock band released this song off their 1990 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik
It’s a fairly amicable ballad which fans of all ages can be found singing along to.
However, I suspect many do not realise that the lyrics are an introspective reflection on vocalist Anthony Kiedis’ drug addiction (in this case heroin)
The track has been covered several times, though perhaps the most well known in the UK is the one by girl band All Saints where in my opinion they murdered John Frusciante’s guitar line by taking the flow out of it cutting it with samples. They also didn’t include the final verse which is the verse that is most obvious in terms of it’s drug references.

2. Semisonic – Secret Smile

There is some debate about this song out there, but the general consensus I get about this pop ballad by another american rock band is that it’s about oral sex or at the very least has some form of sexual innuendo. Again it’s a very easy to listen to song which people of all ages listen to. Not an awful lot to say about it, but next time you hear it bear the lyrics in mind.

3. The La’s – There She Goes
Another drug reference in this song – again another apparently harmless pop song.
Like Under the Bridge, it’s about heroin:

There she goes
There she goes again
Pulsing through my veins
And I just can’t contain
This feeling that remains

“She” is the personification of heroin
It is, as with Secret Smile, debatable, but is largely thought to be about the drug

4. The Kinks – Lola

This one is not debatable at all and for years I had never thought about the lyrics for the song
But again, it’s a pop ballad with lyrics that are about subjects that you wouldn’t think about
Lola is about a ladyboy who comes onto the main character.
Verse 2 is probably the one that reveals this the most:

Well Im not the worlds most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola
Well Im not dumb but I cant understand
Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man
Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

I don’t think I properly listened to the lyrics before, but I know what it’s about now whenever I hear the track.

5. The Police – Every Breath you take

Another song that people sing along to, dance to and even get married to
It’s actually quite a scary song as it’s about the break-up of Sting’s marriage and how after he broke up he metaphorically followed her everywhere she went

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you

I’ve also heard theories that it could be interpreted as a reference to the iron curtain and how the communist governments watched everything you did to make sure you didn’t step out of line.

Make of it what you will, but I wouldn’t rate it as a song to get married to

6. Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side

Finally, a song that I just didn’t realise how filthy the lyrics are. I think it was this verse that really made me jump:

Candy came from out on the island
In the backroom she was everybodys darling

But she never lost her head
Even when she was given head
She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the coloured girls go

Well, that concludes my lyrics post – feel free to comment if you have anything to add

For about 6 years I’d been toying with the idea of creating a site with some kind of voting system for the worst lyrics in Music History
I got as far as creating a list of my personal favourites in this criteria.
On a jaunt through wikipedia I found a link to a recent poll by Radio DJ’s Mark & Lard (aka Mark Radcliffe and Mark Riley) and am pleased to say that my number one tallies with their result for number one!

Their list:

1. Des’ree – Life
2. Snap – Rhythm is a Dancer
3. Razorlight – Somewhere Else
4. ABC – That Was Then But This is Now
5. U2 – Elevation
6. Toto – Africa
7. Oasis – Champagne Supernova
8. Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know?
9. Human League – The Lebanon
10. Black Sabbath – War Pigs

My List:

1. Des’ree ‘Life’ (toast/ghost/most rhyme)
2. Europe ‘The Final Countdown’ (heading to venus verse)
3. Crowded House ‘Weather with you’ (always take the weather…)
4. Elton John ‘Your Song’ (2nd verse)
5. Lyte Funkie Ones ‘Summer Girls’ (hits/sick/fitch rhyme)
6. Feeder ‘Buck Rogers’ (he’s got a brand new car/cider from a lemon)
7. Feeder ‘Just the way I’m feeling’ (10 feet below the ground)
8. Everclear ‘I will buy you a new life’ (I will buy you a new garden/car – shiny & new)
9. Depeche Mode ‘Everything Counts’ (career/korea/insincere rhyme)
10. The Beautiful South ‘Don’t Marry Her’ (Your love light shines like cardboard)

I’m sure there are probably better (ie worse) ones, but unless I actually get round to creating the site we may never know

I haven’t been posting much on the blog of late because I’ve been spending an unhealthy time on facebook

My last few posts have been rather cricket based, so thought I’d post something which one of my friends on facebook did which is good fun
I know these usually come in email forwards, facebook notes, and myspace bulletins but i find those things fairly silly, i don’t always read them and i hate myspace, so i’m gonna blog it here instead.

Before I get into it, you must remember what my music collection is like – quite varied. Also remember that some things on my ipod aren’t in that list because they’re on strange compilation cds, i’ve bought them online or i’ve copied them (just don’t tell the RIAA)

So, onto the soundtrack (plus the instructions so you can try it at home)

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool..

Opening Credits:
“Far From Here” – The Levellers
Interesting, didn’t know I had that, not a huge fan of them, but I can cope with that

Waking Up:
“Mine” – Sepultura
You can’t beat a bit of Brazillian death metal in the morning!

First Day At School:
“Slip Inside This House” – Primal Scream
Not the track I’d go for in that album, but I like the track, didn’t know it was called that. Quite upbeat, and I quite enjoyed my primary school from what I remember

Falling In Love:
“The Only One” – Skin
Kinda appropriate, again a track I don’t know very well – think it was on a metal hammer cover cd

Breaking Up:
“The Sky Is Broken” – Moby
I hadn’t listened to Moby in ages and again kinda appropriate
Think I’ll have to re-rip the track cos it’s very crackly (unless it’s supposed to sound like that!)

Prom:
“How Many Times Must My Heart Be Broken” – French Car and the Bulimic Wizards
I doubt many will know this track/artist (unless you’re from the French Car/Serafin clan). Can’t say I’ve actually been to a Prom, so can’t draw any parallels

Life’s Ok:
“Still D.R.E.” – Dr Dre
A a feelgood track – like it for the section, but wouldn’t normally pick it

Mental Breakdown:
“The Boy with the Bubble Gum” – Tom McRae
You can’t get much more of a contrast than singer songwriter Tom McRae – so i think it works

Driving:
“Evolution” – Ram Trilogy
A bit of synthesiser Drum n Bass sounds good to me

Flashback:
“Ed-Ucation” – Dr Dre
What’s with the Dr Dre – I don’t even like him that much. Such foul language in this track.

Getting Back Together:
“If Tomorrow Never Comes” – The Controllers
From the title it doesn’t really work – but listening to it, you could imagine it in the scene. It’s a golden oldie.

Birth of Child:
“Minnesoter” – The Dandy Warhols
I think the lyrics say enough

I saw my baby dance a latin
Number with her shirt off
Man her skins soft
But in a mood shed rather
If I jerked off.

If I found my way to minnesoter

Not sure what to make of it

Wedding Scene:
“Souljacker Part 1” – The Eels
Would prob have worked better for the driving scene

Final Battle:
“Storm: Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven / Gathering Storm / “Welcome To Barco Am/Pm…” / Cancer Towers On Holy Road Hi-Way” – Godspeed You Black Emperor
Now that is definitely wrong – could never have a battle scene with Prog Rock as background music – it just doesn’t work. It’d be the longest final battle ever and the build up would never satisfy anyone.
The song also has a very long title to go with it

Death Scene:
“Mad Cat” – Roni Size vs Reprsentz
Some more Drum n Bass – could work

Funeral Scene:
“No” – Soulfly
Haha – that’d be funny – nobody wants me to go Death Metal styley

End Credits:
“Kotton Krown” – Sonic Youth
Could work as ending credits, not convinced though

Don’t think I’d have chosen many of those, but with 6000+ songs to choose from, the fact that any of them worked is pretty remarkable, and at least there wasn’t anything I was embarrassed at owning (though Dr Dre comes pretty close).
Gonna make a playlist out of it for novelty value

As some of you know I have a fair few gripes about the music industry, particularly relating to the use of Pro Tools and that’s just the tip of the iceberg
Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that, I think I’ll use a youtube video to start things off, since a picture is worth 1000 words and a video is worth 1000 pictures – and also I’ve been checking out a lot of videos on there recently:

YouTube link to Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel Rant

I don’t share Paravonian’s hatred of Pachelbel to the same extent (since i’ve never been a ‘cello player!) but what he demonstrates in a witty the way is how many songs are using the same chords as found in a piece written 300 years ago. But it’s not just Pachelbel – no, it doesn’t stop there; so many pieces of music use chords from or are based on classical music
While this suggests that there is an almost lazyness in being more creative, it also shows how formulaic pop/punk/folk/rock music is. Even Bob Marley is featured in the video, which surprised me the most.

Perhaps the master of “borrowing” music and passing it off as his own was Andrew Lloyd Webber – much of his compositions comes from operas by the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. Recently I’ve seen nearly all of Puccini’s work performed and the similarities are uncanny to the point where in La Fanciulla del West not only is the tune al most identical to Phantom of the Opera’s Music of the Night but it even has a line that translates roughly as “music of the night”.

Having said that, the estate of Puccini sued Lloyd Webber and he settled out of court, so he didn’t completely get away with it (he just brushed it under the carpet as best he could). On the other hand, much of the musical Cats comes straight out of one of Puccini’s other operas Turandot (which contains the aria Nessum Dorma comes for those interested).

But, not content with that, modern “artists” take recently composed pieces and then take “samples” from them and use them in their own songs without any necessity to put credit on the new song to the artist they sampled from. The best resource for finding out some of this information is thebreaks.com though wikipedia’s List of Samples can be more uptodate at times as it’s a dynamic wiki whereas the breaks is apparently updated via email by the owner periodically (a sample I sent about a year ago hasn’t been added, so it’s that uptodate). I didn’t know about cratekings.com until now, but it’s another resource

Sampling is one of the biggest grey areas in the law, and like chord progressions it is often difficult to successfully sue another artist over. What tends to happen is artists will talk to the record label owning the track in advance and agree a license to use it. This license can vary from a lump sum to a percentage of the royalties. The problem is how much is a sample? And that is where the legal jungle starts…
My favourite one that nearly went to court was Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice, which sample’s David Bowie & Queen’s Under Pressure, apparently with the exception of a grace note
eg:

The grace note is a small note that adjoins a full-sized note, It is usually depicted as a small eighth note with a slash through its flag and stem

Vanilla Ice chose to pay Queen & David Bowie a fee to ensure there was no lawsuit

The artist who has had most songs sampled is more than likely James Brown but the most sampled drum beat is less well known, and by a band called the Winstons with an interesting tale. I’ll let Youtube tell the story:

YouTube Link to the Amen Break video

At the opposite end of the spectrum we get the artists who can’t seem to write a song without having a sample loop. The one I always mention is Fatboy Slim a.k.a. Norman Cook. The story goes that he used to live above a 2nd hand discount record shop and used to pick up whatever was going cheap hence the obscurity of some of the tracks he samples – some of them the only thing that’s known is the track name even on thebeatz.com

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not against sampling, I just feel that the artist who is sampled doesn’t get the recognition they deserve, as when a sample is used it is often repeated and/or becomes the most important part of the song – if it wasn’t, they’d get away with it

I’m also increasingly frustrated with the sameness of music being produced and lack of originality

I seem to accumulate a lot of music which doesn’t have id3 tags because it comes from various sources/computers – lots of it came from previous installations of my computer where i’ve backed up my mp3 archive to CD – I have about 15 cds worth. I didn’t use to use iTunes either, and it wasn’t until I got an iPod that I started using all the iTunes features.
So when it comes to my iTunes library it ends up as a bit of a mess – there are mp3s littered around my hard drive which I have little idea who the artist is, what album it came from and indeed quite likely don’t recognise it when i listen to it. And that’s even before I start on the compilation CDs I’ve made over the years and lost the covers for.
Because of copy protection Gracenote/CDDB or FreeDB won’t integrate into iTunes to extract the track info for me, so
the challenge of how to make it look better when I sync the music with my iPod.

I started doing it manually track by track using gracenote as a resource, but I soon realised the laboriousness of this and thought someone else must’ve had the same problem and sure enough, there’s a database called MusicBrainz which has a mac client called iEatBrainz which tries to match the tracks in
your iTunes Music library against the MusicBrainz database. You can choose whether to add songs to a list to be matched or simply to match the whole library.

It was pretty helpful, but because of my music tastes a lot of the tracks are not in the database, but being opensource the whole library is contributed by the community. Putting my opensource hat on, I thought I would see whether I could contribute to this database and indeed this is encouraged through the database’s app Picard. They offer Windows and Linux/Unix downloads. Thinking this is an opensource project, I thought maybe the Linux/Unix version might work on OSX either through compilation or emulation which should’ve been a good assumption until I got to the app’s install instructions:

MusicBrainz Picard Install Instructions
—————————————————

OS Support:

Linux: Works.
Windows: Works.
Mac: Has many horrible bugs due to wxWindows. 🙁

Even if you can get it to work the installation requires about 8 different 3rd party installations before you can even try at getting it working

It was not to be – but if/when a working version of the ap comes out for OSX I will try and do my bit for this database as I think it’s a really useful idea which can only get better with an increasing archive.