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