March 29, 2012 • 44 mins
Today music sampling is a common practice, especially in electronic or hip-hop music. But how does it work? After all, other artists made the original music, and most of them would presumably like to be paid. Tune in to learn more about music sampling.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to you Stuff you Should
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That's Audible podcast dot com slash stuff. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always
as Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this the
(01:01):
super sample version of Stuff you Should Know, The super
Stuff Guide to Sampling. Could that be an audiobook? Let's try.
As a matter of fact, if you're listening to this
right now, just you owe us a dollar. Mail it
in Yeah, mail it into thirty three fifty Peachtree Road,
(01:22):
Atlanta and Georgia. Carrot up Josh Clark three oh three
one three two six s Okay, alright, with that done,
we can continue on with the podcast. You know what
we should have gotten really creative and just like sampled
old podcasts and put them together in two How, Jerry,
(01:44):
do you feel like doing that? Nod A mash up?
That's what they call that. Sure, that's what the kids
call it these days. Yeah, no, we'll just do it
straight instead boring and guess is what you call it.
I have an intro. Have you heard chuck of a
man named Arman Balladian? Arm Intansarian? Nope, no, I have
(02:08):
not done. Armin Balladian is the owner and sole employee
of a company called Bridgeport, now I have. Bridgeport is
a music catalog company, um and like many other music
catalog companies, they basically just sit on a lot of
copyrights to popular songs the musical composition of those songs. Right,
it's almost like owning stock, Yes, like you buy stock
(02:32):
in these musics and wait for them to be worth something. Sure,
or you can allegedly shadily get your hands on already
valuable music. Sure, and then do what Bridgeport did, which
is uh, start suing anyone and everyone whoever sampled it.
Um So. Bridgeport made a big flap in two thousand
(02:55):
five when they m sued Jay Z for his song
Justify My Thug. Yeah, I want to go ahead and
add a disclaimer here. I am far too square to
talk seriously about hip hop, Like I'm really into elevator
music right now, seriously. Um So, when I say things
(03:15):
like justify my Thug or jay Z or breaks, I'm
speaking strictly as an outside observer, an interested outside observer.
But I'm not. I'm not from the streets. So like
I was, I was down, as they say, from like
(03:36):
seven to nine five ish. That was those were my
big hip hop years and then but these days you
say jay Z, and I know that's the that's the
handsome man. Mary did that, pretty lady, Okay, So I'm
not done with the new stuff. We had a similar trajectory,
except I used to be into it and it sounds
like you never were. Right. What in the name of
(03:57):
God is a waka flaca? You know? Yes? Alright? So anyway,
Bridgeport sue jay Z for sampling Madonna's justifying My Love.
Somehow Bridgeport got his hands on the copyright to Justify
My Love. It's a pretty big song. And when jay
Z sampled that, they sued him. Now this guy runs
(04:17):
around suing everybody. Apparently had like seven hundred lawsuits against
just people who sample George Clinton's work, and big Attorney spees,
right there it is and but when it pays off,
it pays off. So this guy has come to be
known at Bridgeport. People like him have come to be
nowhere called sample trolls. Remember patent trolls when I gave
(04:39):
like the absolute wrong definition of that. Well, uh, sample
troll is somebody who just buys up songs, hangs out
of the copyrights, and then suits people who's sampling without asking.
On the one hand, you can make a case that, well,
these people are breaking copyright lost by not asking and
getting permission to use samples of this. On the other hand,
(05:00):
Bridgeport has made it their aim to sue anybody who
sampled it at all, even if they've taken the work
and made it unrecognizable, right, which that kind of a
lot of people around the other side of the aisle
going like that's ridiculous. That stifles creativity. This is just
one of the many interesting aspects of music sampling. Wow,
(05:23):
that was a proper intro. It's been a while, um,
and that's one, but it's probably the biggest as far
as uh, what people think about how music is used
in creativity and ownership. And one of the things that
you just mentioned was Bridgepoort is some big corporation. And
if you talk to like Hank Shockley, the former producer
(05:46):
of Public Enemy, he will say that, you know, we
don't have any problems paying music to artists who created
the stuff, he said, but they're about these corporations now,
and it's just it's greed on their part. Yes, it's
just not There are two sides to every story now,
and um, the music industry, as we'll see, kind of
went on a tear of like suing everybody and protecting themselves,
(06:09):
and um, now you kind of understand, like, oh, that's
why no one feels bad about this whole music piracy thing. Well,
there was a big rush at one point because it
was a new genre. I mean, we'll get into the
history of how it came to be in all, but
it was a new thing and so all of a
sudden you know, for the first you know, several years
that was open territory and that's when like that, that
(06:31):
was the heyday if you ask me, Well, folks nerdier
than us might be confused at this point because UM
sampling also refers to digitizing music. Uh. What we're talking
about is taking a piece of an already established UM
piece of music, right, a selection of it, and then
recreating it using it, put maybe putting it back to
(06:55):
back to back in a loop sometimes um oftentimes actually
and then creating something new using this. Yeah right, yeah,
so that's what we're talking about with music sampling, all right.
It's been around for a while too. Yeah. Uh, well,
you mentioned UM taking a snippet. Let's go ahead and
just get a couple of examples out there. If we
(07:15):
want to start out with trying to explain to people
what a sample is, and as people know this, there
are no further places to look. Then James Brown's uh
V song Funky Drummer. Let's go ahead and hear that
that little break beat. Oh it's like that huh yeah,
(07:41):
all right, so that's instantly recognizable. So that's funky drummer.
That's funky drummer, And that was who was the drummer there,
Clyde stubble Field. Yes, Clyde stubble Field, who has never
gotten a sent no, but he's pretty cool man. He
is not trying to see anybody's not seeking anything any
damage from And this literally thousands of songs have used
(08:04):
that drum break right, Yeah, James Brown has been sampled
and this is not just that song, but a lot
of it comes from Funky Drummer two thousand seven times. Okay,
so um the leader, and you can make a case
that Funky Drummer provided the basis for hip hop. Like
all early hip hop songs, especially in like the mid
to late eighties, all used that drum brake, right, Um,
(08:25):
stubble Fields not going after anybody for that. But what
he did was get together with some documentarians who made
something called Copyright Criminals, a documentary called Copyright Criminals to
release a special version of the DVD that has all
new ready to sample Clyde stubble Field drum brakes that
he created just for this and if you want to
use them, he's give him like fifteen of your of
(08:48):
your sales. So he's like doing it. He's trying out
a different model. Well. On the other side to which
we haven't mentioned is is and this is a point
that a lot of the hip hop producers would make,
is that some of these people are being pulled from obscurity.
For instance, the second clip we're gonna play, which is
the Amen break from Amen Brother and it was a
(09:09):
B side from a very little known song from a
group called the Winston's We can hear this one, do yes,
and We'll hear that right now. So that one, to
me is slightly better than Funky Drummer. So that's the
(09:32):
A member that's the Amen break, and do that one
has been sampled thousands of times, so that one UM
gave birth to UM drum and based in jungle, like
all all jungle music is based on the deconstruction of
the Amen break. If you're interested in hearing about there's
(09:53):
a really cool movie like a video. It's like eighteen
minutes long. It's a YouTube video and the title is
video explains the world's most important six second drum loop.
So it gave rise to jungle. UM n W a
straight out of Compton used that. Uh, Cold Cut used it,
UM and Third Base famously used it as well, and
(10:16):
hundreds of others. Yeah, I like their base, and that
was because we want to give due to some of
these folks who created this stuff. That was Gregory Sylvester Coleman,
who was the actual drummer that played that lick, and
that was the Winston's. Yeah, the Winston's excellent Gregory Sylvester Coleman.
So yeah, I think what you're originally saying is some
producers are saying, like you ever heard of Gregory Coleman? Yeah, exactly,
(10:39):
So They're they're bringing some of these folks out of
obscurity and giving them their due, and I'm sure selling
some records for him here there. So although that record
is really hard to find, obviously, well they need to
press it again, maybe they should. Okay, Uh so you
take an l O cool j Ladies love Cool James
for instance. Is that what l else stands for? Yeah?
(11:00):
You never knew that. Yeah, you even listen to him extensively.
He was James something, and you know the ladies love
Cool James or EOS cool Jake Cookies. I'm bad see
you know, no, I did know. I've just fallen off
like you. Okay, Um, so you take the funky drummer
from James Brown song, and you take uh Slying the
Family Stones, Trip to Your Heart the the background vocals,
(11:24):
and then basically you loop those over and over and
over and you have a little song called Mama said,
Knock you Out. We're about to hear that, well, we're
gonna hear him separately. Obviously we already played the Funky Drummer,
and now this is uh the Trip to your Heart
backing vocals from Slying the Family Stone whom I love.
(11:49):
All right, So that's it, dude, over and over and
over with ladies love cool James rapping, and you've got
a huge, huge hit. Yeah, oh that was a big one.
Oh yeah huge. I wasn't a big local jag though.
I like the one I don't remember it's called. But
it had like the boom box on the cover of
the tape, like the album artwork was a boom box.
(12:12):
Yeah that was good. It had I'm bad on Okay. Um,
it's not always songs that you're sampling. Uh. Sometimes you're
sampling stuff from like a TV show or a movie,
or like the Living Color song called the Personality. Remember that?
Oh yeah, they had like an FDR speech I think
it was. Kennedy was FDR had Kennedy took but that
(12:34):
that was Kennedy, but he said the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, uh, doubting Thomas.
They were like a skinny puppy off shoot. They exampled UM.
I think the Day the Earth Stood Still UM extensively
throughout this one album that they created. It was pretty good.
Well and guns and Roses on their song Civil War,
(12:55):
remember at the beginning of that they played the cool
hand Luke bit uh over the you know, guitar, and
then Axel's Weasley Little Boys comes through. Oh and Metallica
is one oh yeah, yeah sample Johnny got his gun.
That's right in the video too, Right, So those are
all samples. You might just think, oh, that's a snippet
from a movie, but it's a sample, just like you
(13:15):
would use uh the amen breake. Okay. Um. The first sampler,
if you want to go back in time a bit
um was the melotron. Yeah, the actual not not the person,
but the machine that someone used that was created for sampling, right, Yeah,
I mean it was. It was the first time that
(13:36):
they had ever. You know, it's basically a little keyboard.
They're very basic. I wish I had one. They're really sweet,
and it has a volume, a tone, and a pitch
control a low and high octave you can switch between.
And then three samples um uh, A, B and C flutes, violence,
and cello. And it was the first time that they
(13:58):
basically it ever sampled anything like that. So you press
the keyboard key and it plays back a prerecorded loop
of a single note of that single note on a flute,
let's say, which seems you know, you take that for
granted now when you buy these keyboard where you can
do a million different things. But back then, the melotron
was huge. Oh yeah. And even before that, people would
(14:19):
take magnetic tapes like real real tapes and and literally
cut and splice them to create their own samples. Well,
and if you want to hear a classic example of
the melotron, flute and uh, listen to this little clip
right here, is it? Aqual no? Ready, aqualung no. That
(14:49):
was the intro for the Beatles Strawberry Fields. And that
was Paul McCartney playing the flute sample of the melotron
on the melotron. I always thought it was just lutes
and then like King Crimson and yes and Genesis like
they went crazy with the melotron. Yeah, Genesis was awesome
early on, awesome, but in a different way, you know, yeah,
(15:12):
a very different way. Okay, So you talked about the
origins with the tape splicing. Yeah, yeah, I mean you
you can go back even further than the melotron. It
was at the sixties. Yes, there were these two dudes.
They were the two Piers I call them, um, Pierre
(15:32):
Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, but probably Pierre amri Um. And
they were I guess what you would call a couple
of um avant garde musical artists, and they created what's
called music concrete spreaky stuff. Did you hear any of it? Yeah?
I did. There's UM again, the YouTube factors in heavily
in this episode. UM. If you want to find out
a little bit about music concrete, UM, check out the
(15:55):
nineteen BBC documentary The New Sound of Music. That is
very awesome. Actually, yeah, that guy was a really great
host down so he talks about musique concrete where it's
basically like these people before they were tape recorders. Even
I don't know how they were doing this, I guess
real the real and then these guys were doing splicing. Um,
(16:17):
they would record the sound of a can falling or
the sound of a metronome or you know, a piece
of music off of you know, the radio, and then
they would splice it all together into something that's like
barely listenable. But it was. It was electronically reproduced music,
and it formed the basis of everything that came after
(16:38):
it that had anything to do with electronic from like
Pink Floyd to all electronic music, to the Residents to
Silver Apples, to all these people who craft work who
created electronic music. It's all based on this, these two
guys creating this in or something like that. Did you
(16:58):
see the part of the video where they took the
tape by hand and we're dragging it through. That ended
up sounding like and I think was sort of the
origins of record scratching. That's what it sounded like to
me as well. Of course it was produced back in
the day, so they didn't say it was before record scratching.
This is about this. Actually it was coming out at
the same time, So that was nine nine, and that's
(17:19):
been like DJ Cool Hirk and Grandmaster Flash. We're starting
to get really good. They were playing high school, so
people were taking notice. That is true. So jumping back
again in nine, James Tenney uh took Blue Swede shoes
from Elvis Presley and have you heard this thing? Yeah?
(17:41):
It's very avant garde, is the way to put it. Yeah,
that's a good way to put it into collage number
one was what he called it. And it is in
many many parts virtually unrecognizable. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's really
hard to listen to. It is very hard to listen
to it. It's a it's a a piece of electronic
music that deconstructed. It's so it's Blue Swayede. She's deconstructed time.
(18:05):
And I mean if you look back and you're like,
holy cow. The video on YouTube shows like the guy
sitting in front of his setup and it's like pretty
extensive and like I was obviously, you know, out of
his mind. Um, lots of drugs, wasn't he. When you
look back at and you're like, oh that was what
That's pretty impressive work, Yeah, exactly. Um. Dicky Goodman and
(18:26):
Bill Buchanan in nifty six had a more commercial version
of of I guess you would call it music Concrete
with Flying Saucer. Did you listen to that one I did.
That was the stuff we heard on FM radio growing up.
Remember all that matchup stuff they used to do, like
Bette Miller's from a Distance with like the during the
(18:47):
first goal four. I don't know what to remember that now.
I mean, like when the radio stations would do these
um well, let me go and say what it was
and play a snippet um flying saucer. They took rock
and roll hits from that era and mashed it up
with a fake news report about aliens landing from outer space,
and it sounded a little something like this, we interrupt
(19:12):
this record to bring you a special bull of them.
The reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city
have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real. That was
the Clatters recording to real We switch you now to
(19:32):
all on the spot reporter Dom Tom take it away.
So that's the stuff that we heard on FM radio,
like they would do. I remember when I was a kid.
They would say like, we're gonna call so and so
right now, and and they would say, hey, how are
you feeling, And all of a sudden you'd hear but
couldn't sleep at all last night. And then they would
(19:53):
ask him another question to be like an interview, and
the answers were snippets from from rock songs answering, which
is really like, I mean, it had to say in
the seventies and eighties. For sure. I don't have a clip,
so I'm gonna have to describe it. But the Bette
Midler thing was slightly different. It would be like Bette
Miller's from a Distance, interspersed with patriotic speeches. Oh yeah, yeah,
(20:15):
I remember that. Remember that? Yeah, that that was sampling,
I guess. So it's most jingoistic form at the very least.
It was a mash up right those Oh by the way,
those flying saucer guys, Um Buchanan and Goodman, they went
on to do a lot of those things, like they
did one during the energy crisis of seventy four crisis
(20:36):
of seventy nine. But it'd be like, um, how much
gas will be ration? Just enough for the city, dude,
I remember that, That's what I was remembering. Yeah, Oh,
I was not cognizant at that time. I had a
lot of like poop, my own poop on my hands
from like playing with it at that when you were thinking, wow,
(20:57):
this is really neat stuff. Yeah, I was a little
radio kid back then. Also, I want to say one
more thing, Um, I went a little deeper in the
music concrete thing, and apparently Phillips right the manufacturing concern Um.
They tried to get into electronic music in like the
late fifties and had this whole little wing that was
(21:20):
that let a couple of guys just go to town
like trying to make popular electronic music. And if you
search Acid House from nineteen eight on YouTube, these guys
did a pretty good job of it. It is very
clearly like the predecessor of like it's listenable. It's not
just like just it's not it's not even avant garde.
It has like a beat to it and a melody,
(21:41):
and it's just it's really neat interesting. I don't have
that clip either. We should do a podcast on the
mogue that should Okay, that'll that'll be coming. Didn't you
guys do that on the B side? I think so,
But well, we'll do it up. But we've gotten requests
for more music stuff. That's why I picked this one up.
So you flash word a little bit and you mentioned
(22:02):
cool DJ Hirk Graham, DJ Grandmaster Flash who a lot
of people think that was the group. It was Grandmaster
Flash and the Furious Five if you remember, and uh,
they hit it big in nineteen eighty with the song Freedom,
which sampled Get Up and Dance by the band Freedom
(22:22):
pretty straight up. Well that that kind of took this
whole thing into mainstream. Well, and that's when scratching started
to wouldn't it. Yeah, Grandmaster Flash definitely started scratching. DJ
cool Hirk started sampling very clearly like he's the guy.
He's from Kingston, Jamaica, and he moved to New York
in nineteen sixty seven, I think, and started bringing like
(22:43):
his turntables to block parties and he would just he'd
find like a drum break or something, and then a
drum break from another song, and he just keeps like
putting him together. So it was like one long drum break,
maybe bring in a little bit of a bassline. And
I went back and listened to some of it and
it was good stuff, man, was it? And he's doing
this in like the mid seventies, and uh, yeah, he
(23:05):
started sampling as we know it, like turntable sampling. Crazy yeah,
innovating Josh. That's even better than Crazy Marley Marl is
someone else we should mention if we're talking about. But
the early heyday he was a house producer for the
Juice Crew, which was Big Daddy, Kane and Bismarcki among others,
but he also produced Eric B and rackiem uh Ellow
(23:29):
cool J. And he was like he's often cited, is
like the early leader. What about Redhead Kingpin? I don't
know that. What's that he's He's like in there somewhere. Yeah,
Big Daddy came in. You just blasted me with the nostalgia.
Oh yeah, remember the hat where the gumby haircut? Yeah,
(23:49):
oh yeah, the what they call that, the high high right.
I always thought it was called the gumby. That's what
you call it. Huh, Well, they may called it gumby, heiric.
I don't know until it's a fade essentially, um the
Beastie boys, see what I was talking about, Like back
in the day, in the in the eighties, late eighties,
(24:09):
they were constructing full songs from dozens of samples. And
this was before you had to pay permission rights and
stuff like that. So you get a song like Hey
Ladies from Paul's boutique, which is he asked me the
pinnacle for the Beastie Boys. Ladies, Paul's boutique, Yeah, I
don't know if it's the pinnacle, it's well, I think
(24:31):
it's one of several pinnacles. We'll check. Your head was
great too, but Paul's boutique was great. Hey, ladies use
sixteen samples and that was not on the low side.
But uh, Terminator X of Public Enemy and the Beast
Boys would craft songs out of dozens and dozens of samples.
And that's that's DJ Hurricane you're giving props to. He's
(24:51):
the Beast Boys. J was he always I believe, so okay,
but I think they all like wrote the stuff together.
Um as we'll find out because the the court case
against the BC boys was Newton versus Diamond Ouch, and
we all know who Diamond is, Dustin Diamond, Mike The's Brothers,
(25:12):
No no, no, uh, groups like day Las Sole Public
Enemy in the BCS were crafting these songs whereas nowadays,
partially because I think they're not as good and creative,
and partially because you have to pay rights. You'll get
like a kid rock who just plays this one loop
over and over and that's the sample he uses in
(25:33):
a song. So it's not like he's crafting these songs
out of dozens and dozens of samples. Well, Public Enemy
even said, like, after all these lawsuits and threats of lawsuits,
if you're crafting a song out of seventeen other songs,
you basically have to like figure out something else because
you can't do it anymore. And I mean, what a
buzz kill two to make a song and then take
(25:53):
it to the to the your record company overlords who
say like, Okay, we can get this cleared, we can
get this cleared. This one we can't clear no way
wherever clearing this. Yeah, so you have, like I don't know,
two thirds of your song is intact, but the other
third is it has holes in it. You know, that's
(26:15):
it kind of takes away from the whole thing. But
at the same time, yeah, I mean again, it's breaking
a law. It's a copyright law, and it's not an
arbitrary law. It's not as it's not a superfluous law.
There is validity to it. You know, Well, let's go
ahead and talk about it. Then, Okay, copyright law the
one that changed everything. It wasn't It was not the
(26:35):
first copyright lawsuit I think those guys um who did
the flying saucer thing were the first to start attracting
copyright lawsuits yea um. But the first one as far
that that changed hip hop, I guess it was Bismarck
Key landed a beef from one Gilbert O'Sullivan who wrote
the song alone Again naturally for you Got what I
(26:58):
Need or whatever? No Alone Again his song from I
Need a Haircut. Um. That album it's called Alone Again,
and um, bismarckis lifted pretty heavily from that, and he
was signed to Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers got sued
by the owners of Alone Again naturally right, and the
judge ruled in um the copyright holders favor against Warner Brothers.
(27:23):
So all of a sudden, Warner Brothers, big business, big company,
starts circling the wagons like, okay, whoa wa wa, whoa there,
we're really exposed right now because all of our hip
hop artists are running around sampling anybody they want to,
and now we can get sued for it. And the
judge caught a lot of flak because he said, and
not only not only am I ruling in your favor?
(27:45):
I think that this should go to some sort of
criminal prosecution, right, because this is their defense. Warner Brothers
defense was it's rampant. Everyone's doing this and we've been
doing it for ten years, Like what's your problem. And
the judge was like, well, if that's the case, then
we we need to really start looking into this, and
that shut everything down. That's when sampling went from art
(28:07):
to business. Yeah, I'm surprised it took that long for
people to catch on. And it was money that is
what did it as sales and when you know, it
was just like DJ's and Queens was no big deal
in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, but all of
a sudden, these artists, these hip hop artists were making
money on work from that was previously recorded by other
people and people saw green. Essentially, it's true they saw
(28:31):
dollar signs. They do um, But let me ask you this,
should the original people, the original artists, like I can
understand just hating on corporations because they didn't create this
at all. This happened to own it or whatever, but
it should the original artists expect some sort of compensation
for somebody who's making millions of dollars by taking some
(28:52):
of that original work. Do they what do they deserve
any kind of consideration? I think I agree to depending
on how like what degree the work has changed. Yeah,
I say, used the crap out of it, but get
permission and pay royalties. Yeah, Like, if if that's the
(29:13):
genre you're if that's what you're choosing to do, Like,
no one's forcing these people to do that, that's what
you're choosing to do, then you've got to play by
the rules. That's what I think, and then go wow
with it. Well, I guess that's kind of like the
status quo now, and that's not working necessarily. It's leading
to like your beef with Kid Rock, Well, my beef
is that he's just not very good. It's large. It's
(29:36):
larger than that. You'd be careful, man. He gets in
fights and stuff. Yeah, waffle house is in Atlanta, so
he knows where we live. I saw BISMARKI the airport
one time. By the way, you be hung out with
Bismarck Key wants played PlayStation. Yeah, saw I'm on the
on the little internal train and I was like, is
that yeah? That is I mean I thought for about
a half a second and I was like, then I'm
(29:56):
worrying that gray curly powdered wig now and he didn't
with uh all right, so let's talk about what the
cost of it is. Um ten dollars No, not ten
dollars um. At first it was something it was called
a buy out, so you purchased rights to sample a song.
It wasn't that much money. But like I said, as
sales grew in the rap and hip hop world, and uh,
(30:20):
you know rock band said it too, they started pay
rollover rates, which is you gotta pay per your sales, right,
which all of a sudden, you know, the bill got
larger and larger and larger, and you're not necessarily just
paying one person. No, No, you might pay the copyright
owner of the composition of the music. And if you
(30:41):
use a specific recording rather than record that composition yourself
and use it right, then you have to pay the
owner of that particular recording, which aren't necessarily one and
the same, right, and they both might want equal amounts
of money rather than giving you a deal. You know,
or if you're Vanilla Ice, you would just slightly altered
Queen's famous baseline from under pressure, not even so much
(31:05):
as credit them on your album. Forget asking for rights.
He didn't even say like special thanks to to Queen,
and uh settle out of court eventually for an undisclosed
sum of money. He raises jet skis now under the
name Vanilla Ice. Does he he also? He has a
home renovation show too, Does he really? Yeah? Oh yeah,
(31:26):
he flips houses. Yeah yeah, it's pretty weird. It's not weird,
it's weird for him to do it. Uh. Mc hammer
very famous for his sampling of h and Can't Touch
This and his pants super freak? Oh yeah yeah did he? No,
(31:46):
he did that was all on the up and up?
Is he really? Yeah? He was back then? Well he's
got you gotta pray just to make it today. So's
run from run dmc huh and and I s ized
baby is out there flipping houses. They all got to
do something. And Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell.
(32:09):
Uh it was not. He was evicted. He was in
the process of being evicted, and he had he launched
a web campaign to save his house. I remember that.
I wonder whatever happened. I don't know. Um. The drum
intro for led Zeppelin's When the Levee breaks, That thing
has been sampled dozens and dozens and dozens of times.
But it's so massive and it's so immediately recognizable that
(32:34):
it takes over a song. You know what I'm saying, Like,
I don't. I don't think it's a It's just it's
basically like, oh, this this is a led Zeppelin sample,
rather than like that's a great thing about um. Amen, brother,
It's like no one ever heard of that. But it
was a perfect drum break that leads that level when
the levee breaks, it's it's too led Zeppelin, so too recognizable,
(32:57):
and you're off of it. Yeah. I just started thinking
of about Robert Plant right. I think they were down
with it. Though. Jimmy Page I remember, was totally cool
with it. Yeah, yeah, with am using that. Of course
it wasn't his lick it. Uh, he's not around to
say anything. No. In two thousand three, the Best Boys,
(33:19):
I said, the landmark case Newton v. Diamond Um, they
did a sample and we'll hear it right now. The
very beginning of past the mic contains this six second
flute stable. Do you hear that? It's like three notes
(33:46):
on a flute. And they got the rights, the sample
rights um for the sound recording, but not the compositional
rights because they were like, you know, this guy played it,
so we'll pay him, but it's three notes on a flute, Like,
we don't feel like we should have to pay compositional rights. Yeah,
I've always thought it was something like eight notes was
the cut off or something like that, like there's a
(34:07):
center number of notes. I remember that from being a kid.
I don't know why that would have come up when
I was a kid, but I seem to remember that. Well.
The BC Boys won their case, actually, and the judge
said that the brief composition um, consisting of three notes
separated by a half step, is not sufficient to sustain
acclaim for copyright infringement. So that was we already played
(34:29):
the clip, didn't we here? So that was it. And
also you can not only hear at the very beginning
of that song, but you hear underlying the entire song.
It's the best sample of all time, best best use
of a sample. Uh, your favorite? How about that doesn't
have to be best? You know what my favorite is
from the BC Boys? Um, hey, ladies, remember when um,
(34:54):
it's it's from Ballroom Blitz. You know that song, Ballroom Blitz? Yeah, terrible,
terrible song that's sampled. BC Boys sampled that song and
hey ladies, when they break that one part down, it
goes she thinks she's the passionate one that's from Ballroom Blitz.
Huh wow. Yeah, so that's my favorite one. I definitely
(35:15):
wouldn't have ever ever caught that. I you still love
the BC Boys back in the day, have you ever
heard um uh uh the pop will eat Itself? Uh yeah,
back in like the early nineties are kind of tronic.
They had a song there, well, they're one big song.
Psycho Sexual actually sampled um a classical composition Eric Sati's
(35:37):
Jina pet It's really awesome. I'd heard I love Jinna
Peeny and I love psycho Sexual, and then one day
I just heard it just where I was like, oh
my god, that's that. That's that's one of my favorite favorite,
like probably of all time was um ice Cube's Good
Day using the Isley Brothers Footsteps in the Dark, and
(35:59):
then Dr Dre's The Chronic was like that was just
the soundtrack of one year of my college life and
that was a lot of George Clinton and Andre was
actually one of the first people to stop sampling and
start recreating uh stuff with live musicians himself, which is
called producing. Yeah, you're right, And now he has his
(36:22):
own line, I've had funds. Should we talk about Danger
Mouse real quick? Sure? The Gray Album? He famously in
two thousand four did a mash up of the Beatles
White Album and jay Z's The Black Album and called
it the Gray Album. Very creative and h E. M I,
who owned the Beatles recordings. Even though Jay Z and
Paul McCartney were totally fine with it, they shut it
(36:44):
down and said, you're not selling this. No, but it
made his career. Yeah, and it got around on the
internet such that he was like, fine, I'm not selling it,
but everyone's gonna hear it. Anyway. I'd go hang out
with CLO and do some stuff and MF and we'll
just make some money from instead. Oh chuck. What about
cover songs? Yeah, since nineteen o nine, you can cover songs.
(37:06):
You can play a song faithfully, especially live, uh, and
not pay the owner of the composition assent, as long
as you don't alter it, like played in a different
language or something like that. Um. And there's a lot
of people who say, well, wait a minute, that's like
that's a sample in its entirety. This is crazy. What
(37:29):
is the deal? And everyone has said, we don't know,
we'll figure it out in another ten years. You know
what bugs me is when these new country artists will
cover a song that's like a year old, like another
song and release it's a great acclaim. Well that that
used to happen like a lot um like more than
one person would record the same song and they get
(37:50):
released about the same time, like in the fifties and
the sixties. Um, so just be glad you don't live then,
because you'd be going crazy. That's true. And uh, just
so you guys know, the reason we're able to play
these clips is because something called fair use, which we've
talked about a lot with Jerry, So you just put
(38:11):
your pens down, lawyers, because we know what we're doing.
It's only in the United States, and it is the
exclusive right granted to us to play a snippet of
something without acquiring permission, as long as we use it
as commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting. Well wait
a minute, this is what we're doing. Does that mean
(38:32):
that if this has heard in Australia though it is,
are we still covered by fair use that. I don't know. No,
we'll find out. All right, Well, let's it for music sampling.
This turned out better than I thought. You got anything else? No,
I mean you got any more samples? Keep you I'm
putting my turntable back in my pocket and h you
(38:53):
know they had those little iPhone turntables now, which is
come on, yeah, um Jerry instagatism. If you want to
learn more about music sampling, you can type that into
the handy search part How Stuff Works dot Com, which
means it's time for listener mail. Before listener mail, Josh,
(39:19):
I want to point people, um who are into sampling
in the history of sampling to go to who Sampled
dot com. I'm glad you mentioned, as I'm meant to
mention it too. It's a really awesome website and it's
um allows you basically you can you can search for
artists who have sampled and who have been sampled, and
uh search for songs and they basically throw them up
(39:40):
side by side as two turntables like the original sample
or the original uh you know, break or whatever, then
how it was used. It's pretty cool, you complain, I'm
simultaneously Yeah, that's awesome. So that is who Sample dot Com.
All right, Josh, I'm gonna read this. It's kind of
a long one, but this is about spies and this
is from Tom and he said that his family has
(40:03):
a strange tendency of being arrested on suspicion of being
Kiwi spies New Zealand spies in France. They all were
Trench coats. The first story concerns my parents on their honeymoon.
It was immediately following the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
in Auckland Harbor by French saboteurs. My parents were traveling
(40:23):
into France from the UK when they were arrested and
detained on suspicion of being New Zealand counter terrorists. Nothing
could be further from the truth by the way they
were held in separate holding cells for two days, when
French agents would come inside to sell smoking cigarettes and
yelling at them in French. It's pretty terrifying for my mother,
who was only twenty one at the time. And after
(40:43):
two days they were released and dropped off at the
New Zealand embassy where they learned of the incident back
in Auckland. So that's one incident. The second story is
my comes from great great Auntie Anne, or Sister Marine.
She's a nun with the Order of the Little Sister
to the Poor, and she is ninety eight years old
this year and is still going strong. Her story originates
(41:06):
with the Nazis. She had been with her fellow nuns
in rural France looking after the elderly who had been
abandoned as the Nazis approached. They were also sheltering three
to four British airmen who had been shot down nearby.
When the Nazis arrived, they rounded up the nuns, and
the airmen accused the nuns of being spies. She and
her fellow nuns, of which she was mother superior, were
(41:27):
taken to a pow camp interrogated by Gestapo officers He's nuns.
Eventually she was marched into the commandant's office told she
was being taken away. Believing she was going to be shot,
she told them she would not cooperate unless her nuns
were also set free. Turned into a pretty hostile negotiation,
(41:48):
and she stuck to her guns, even though at one
point she was looking down the barrel of one. The
commandant finally agreed and bundled all the sisters together on
a freight train where they believed they were going to
be executed together. Sadly, the train stopped. The guards on
the train threw the nuns out one by one into
the snow, the doors closed, and the train sped off.
Sister Marie eventually led her nuns to the convent, where
(42:10):
they spent the last two years of the war, not
only helping the elderly, but also sheltering and competing members
of the French resistance. So she he said. Tom said,
if I could read this on the podcast, I know
Auntie Anne would really appreciate the airtime for the convent
in which she has dedicated over seventy years too. And
I would appreciate letting people know about why nobody and
(42:32):
my family feel safe in France. Me so year old
Auntie Anne, the nune. We thank you for all your
work over the years, and I hope you make it
a hundred and twenty Yeah waited four the Nancy's Yeah.
How about that? That's from Tom. Are thanks a lot,
Tom for letting us know that we appreciate it. Um. Wow,
(42:56):
I guess if you have a cool family story, we
want to hear that we're all always are always up
for those. Uh, there's a plethora that's entirely on true,
there's actually just three, but there's three ways you can
get in touch with us, yes, electronically. One is through Twitter.
Our Twitter handle is uh s y s K podcast
(43:17):
all one word. If you're not following us on Twitter,
you're missing out. Believe me, I agreed. Um. Also, you
can hang out with us on Facebook. We're on there
pretty frequently, all right, Yeah, uh Facebook dot com slash
Stuff you should know, and you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. This podcast
(43:38):
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That's Audible podcast dot com slash stuff. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always
as Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this the
(01:01):
super sample version of Stuff you Should Know, The super
Stuff Guide to Sampling. Could that be an audiobook? Let's try.
As a matter of fact, if you're listening to this
right now, just you owe us a dollar. Mail it
in Yeah, mail it into thirty three fifty Peachtree Road,
(01:22):
Atlanta and Georgia. Carrot up Josh Clark three oh three
one three two six s Okay, alright, with that done,
we can continue on with the podcast. You know what
we should have gotten really creative and just like sampled
old podcasts and put them together in two How, Jerry,
(01:44):
do you feel like doing that? Nod A mash up?
That's what they call that. Sure, that's what the kids
call it these days. Yeah, no, we'll just do it
straight instead boring and guess is what you call it.
I have an intro. Have you heard chuck of a
man named Arman Balladian? Arm Intansarian? Nope, no, I have
(02:08):
not done. Armin Balladian is the owner and sole employee
of a company called Bridgeport, now I have. Bridgeport is
a music catalog company, um and like many other music
catalog companies, they basically just sit on a lot of
copyrights to popular songs the musical composition of those songs. Right,
it's almost like owning stock, Yes, like you buy stock
(02:32):
in these musics and wait for them to be worth something. Sure,
or you can allegedly shadily get your hands on already
valuable music. Sure, and then do what Bridgeport did, which
is uh, start suing anyone and everyone whoever sampled it.
Um So. Bridgeport made a big flap in two thousand
(02:55):
five when they m sued Jay Z for his song
Justify My Thug. Yeah, I want to go ahead and
add a disclaimer here. I am far too square to
talk seriously about hip hop, Like I'm really into elevator
music right now, seriously. Um So, when I say things
(03:15):
like justify my Thug or jay Z or breaks, I'm
speaking strictly as an outside observer, an interested outside observer.
But I'm not. I'm not from the streets. So like
I was, I was down, as they say, from like
(03:36):
seven to nine five ish. That was those were my
big hip hop years and then but these days you
say jay Z, and I know that's the that's the
handsome man. Mary did that, pretty lady, Okay, So I'm
not done with the new stuff. We had a similar trajectory,
except I used to be into it and it sounds
like you never were. Right. What in the name of
(03:57):
God is a waka flaca? You know? Yes? Alright? So anyway,
Bridgeport sue jay Z for sampling Madonna's justifying My Love.
Somehow Bridgeport got his hands on the copyright to Justify
My Love. It's a pretty big song. And when jay
Z sampled that, they sued him. Now this guy runs
(04:17):
around suing everybody. Apparently had like seven hundred lawsuits against
just people who sample George Clinton's work, and big Attorney spees,
right there it is and but when it pays off,
it pays off. So this guy has come to be
known at Bridgeport. People like him have come to be
nowhere called sample trolls. Remember patent trolls when I gave
(04:39):
like the absolute wrong definition of that. Well, uh, sample
troll is somebody who just buys up songs, hangs out
of the copyrights, and then suits people who's sampling without asking.
On the one hand, you can make a case that, well,
these people are breaking copyright lost by not asking and
getting permission to use samples of this. On the other hand,
(05:00):
Bridgeport has made it their aim to sue anybody who
sampled it at all, even if they've taken the work
and made it unrecognizable, right, which that kind of a
lot of people around the other side of the aisle
going like that's ridiculous. That stifles creativity. This is just
one of the many interesting aspects of music sampling. Wow,
(05:23):
that was a proper intro. It's been a while, um,
and that's one, but it's probably the biggest as far
as uh, what people think about how music is used
in creativity and ownership. And one of the things that
you just mentioned was Bridgepoort is some big corporation. And
if you talk to like Hank Shockley, the former producer
(05:46):
of Public Enemy, he will say that, you know, we
don't have any problems paying music to artists who created
the stuff, he said, but they're about these corporations now,
and it's just it's greed on their part. Yes, it's
just not There are two sides to every story now,
and um, the music industry, as we'll see, kind of
went on a tear of like suing everybody and protecting themselves,
(06:09):
and um, now you kind of understand, like, oh, that's
why no one feels bad about this whole music piracy thing. Well,
there was a big rush at one point because it
was a new genre. I mean, we'll get into the
history of how it came to be in all, but
it was a new thing and so all of a
sudden you know, for the first you know, several years
that was open territory and that's when like that, that
(06:31):
was the heyday if you ask me, Well, folks nerdier
than us might be confused at this point because UM
sampling also refers to digitizing music. Uh. What we're talking
about is taking a piece of an already established UM
piece of music, right, a selection of it, and then
recreating it using it, put maybe putting it back to
(06:55):
back to back in a loop sometimes um oftentimes actually
and then creating something new using this. Yeah right, yeah,
so that's what we're talking about with music sampling, all right.
It's been around for a while too. Yeah. Uh, well,
you mentioned UM taking a snippet. Let's go ahead and
just get a couple of examples out there. If we
(07:15):
want to start out with trying to explain to people
what a sample is, and as people know this, there
are no further places to look. Then James Brown's uh
V song Funky Drummer. Let's go ahead and hear that
that little break beat. Oh it's like that huh yeah,
(07:41):
all right, so that's instantly recognizable. So that's funky drummer.
That's funky drummer, And that was who was the drummer there,
Clyde stubble Field. Yes, Clyde stubble Field, who has never
gotten a sent no, but he's pretty cool man. He
is not trying to see anybody's not seeking anything any
damage from And this literally thousands of songs have used
(08:04):
that drum break right, Yeah, James Brown has been sampled
and this is not just that song, but a lot
of it comes from Funky Drummer two thousand seven times. Okay,
so um the leader, and you can make a case
that Funky Drummer provided the basis for hip hop. Like
all early hip hop songs, especially in like the mid
to late eighties, all used that drum brake, right, Um,
(08:25):
stubble Fields not going after anybody for that. But what
he did was get together with some documentarians who made
something called Copyright Criminals, a documentary called Copyright Criminals to
release a special version of the DVD that has all
new ready to sample Clyde stubble Field drum brakes that
he created just for this and if you want to
use them, he's give him like fifteen of your of
(08:48):
your sales. So he's like doing it. He's trying out
a different model. Well. On the other side to which
we haven't mentioned is is and this is a point
that a lot of the hip hop producers would make,
is that some of these people are being pulled from obscurity.
For instance, the second clip we're gonna play, which is
the Amen break from Amen Brother and it was a
(09:09):
B side from a very little known song from a
group called the Winston's We can hear this one, do yes,
and We'll hear that right now. So that one, to
me is slightly better than Funky Drummer. So that's the
(09:32):
A member that's the Amen break, and do that one
has been sampled thousands of times, so that one UM
gave birth to UM drum and based in jungle, like
all all jungle music is based on the deconstruction of
the Amen break. If you're interested in hearing about there's
(09:53):
a really cool movie like a video. It's like eighteen
minutes long. It's a YouTube video and the title is
video explains the world's most important six second drum loop.
So it gave rise to jungle. UM n W a
straight out of Compton used that. Uh, Cold Cut used it,
UM and Third Base famously used it as well, and
(10:16):
hundreds of others. Yeah, I like their base, and that
was because we want to give due to some of
these folks who created this stuff. That was Gregory Sylvester Coleman,
who was the actual drummer that played that lick, and
that was the Winston's. Yeah, the Winston's excellent Gregory Sylvester Coleman.
So yeah, I think what you're originally saying is some
producers are saying, like you ever heard of Gregory Coleman? Yeah, exactly,
(10:39):
So They're they're bringing some of these folks out of
obscurity and giving them their due, and I'm sure selling
some records for him here there. So although that record
is really hard to find, obviously, well they need to
press it again, maybe they should. Okay, Uh so you
take an l O cool j Ladies love Cool James
for instance. Is that what l else stands for? Yeah?
(11:00):
You never knew that. Yeah, you even listen to him extensively.
He was James something, and you know the ladies love
Cool James or EOS cool Jake Cookies. I'm bad see
you know, no, I did know. I've just fallen off
like you. Okay, Um, so you take the funky drummer
from James Brown song, and you take uh Slying the
Family Stones, Trip to Your Heart the the background vocals,
(11:24):
and then basically you loop those over and over and
over and you have a little song called Mama said,
Knock you Out. We're about to hear that, well, we're
gonna hear him separately. Obviously we already played the Funky Drummer,
and now this is uh the Trip to your Heart
backing vocals from Slying the Family Stone whom I love.
(11:49):
All right, So that's it, dude, over and over and
over with ladies love cool James rapping, and you've got
a huge, huge hit. Yeah, oh that was a big one.
Oh yeah huge. I wasn't a big local jag though.
I like the one I don't remember it's called. But
it had like the boom box on the cover of
the tape, like the album artwork was a boom box.
(12:12):
Yeah that was good. It had I'm bad on Okay. Um,
it's not always songs that you're sampling. Uh. Sometimes you're
sampling stuff from like a TV show or a movie,
or like the Living Color song called the Personality. Remember that?
Oh yeah, they had like an FDR speech I think
it was. Kennedy was FDR had Kennedy took but that
(12:34):
that was Kennedy, but he said the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, uh, doubting Thomas.
They were like a skinny puppy off shoot. They exampled UM.
I think the Day the Earth Stood Still UM extensively
throughout this one album that they created. It was pretty good.
Well and guns and Roses on their song Civil War,
(12:55):
remember at the beginning of that they played the cool
hand Luke bit uh over the you know, guitar, and
then Axel's Weasley Little Boys comes through. Oh and Metallica
is one oh yeah, yeah sample Johnny got his gun.
That's right in the video too, Right, So those are
all samples. You might just think, oh, that's a snippet
from a movie, but it's a sample, just like you
(13:15):
would use uh the amen breake. Okay. Um. The first sampler,
if you want to go back in time a bit
um was the melotron. Yeah, the actual not not the person,
but the machine that someone used that was created for sampling, right, Yeah,
I mean it was. It was the first time that
(13:36):
they had ever. You know, it's basically a little keyboard.
They're very basic. I wish I had one. They're really sweet,
and it has a volume, a tone, and a pitch
control a low and high octave you can switch between.
And then three samples um uh, A, B and C flutes, violence,
and cello. And it was the first time that they
(13:58):
basically it ever sampled anything like that. So you press
the keyboard key and it plays back a prerecorded loop
of a single note of that single note on a flute,
let's say, which seems you know, you take that for
granted now when you buy these keyboard where you can
do a million different things. But back then, the melotron
was huge. Oh yeah. And even before that, people would
(14:19):
take magnetic tapes like real real tapes and and literally
cut and splice them to create their own samples. Well,
and if you want to hear a classic example of
the melotron, flute and uh, listen to this little clip
right here, is it? Aqual no? Ready, aqualung no. That
(14:49):
was the intro for the Beatles Strawberry Fields. And that
was Paul McCartney playing the flute sample of the melotron
on the melotron. I always thought it was just lutes
and then like King Crimson and yes and Genesis like
they went crazy with the melotron. Yeah, Genesis was awesome
early on, awesome, but in a different way, you know, yeah,
(15:12):
a very different way. Okay, So you talked about the
origins with the tape splicing. Yeah, yeah, I mean you
you can go back even further than the melotron. It
was at the sixties. Yes, there were these two dudes.
They were the two Piers I call them, um, Pierre
(15:32):
Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, but probably Pierre amri Um. And
they were I guess what you would call a couple
of um avant garde musical artists, and they created what's
called music concrete spreaky stuff. Did you hear any of it? Yeah?
I did. There's UM again, the YouTube factors in heavily
in this episode. UM. If you want to find out
a little bit about music concrete, UM, check out the
(15:55):
nineteen BBC documentary The New Sound of Music. That is
very awesome. Actually, yeah, that guy was a really great
host down so he talks about musique concrete where it's
basically like these people before they were tape recorders. Even
I don't know how they were doing this, I guess
real the real and then these guys were doing splicing. Um,
(16:17):
they would record the sound of a can falling or
the sound of a metronome or you know, a piece
of music off of you know, the radio, and then
they would splice it all together into something that's like
barely listenable. But it was. It was electronically reproduced music,
and it formed the basis of everything that came after
(16:38):
it that had anything to do with electronic from like
Pink Floyd to all electronic music, to the Residents to
Silver Apples, to all these people who craft work who
created electronic music. It's all based on this, these two
guys creating this in or something like that. Did you
(16:58):
see the part of the video where they took the
tape by hand and we're dragging it through. That ended
up sounding like and I think was sort of the
origins of record scratching. That's what it sounded like to
me as well. Of course it was produced back in
the day, so they didn't say it was before record scratching.
This is about this. Actually it was coming out at
the same time, So that was nine nine, and that's
(17:19):
been like DJ Cool Hirk and Grandmaster Flash. We're starting
to get really good. They were playing high school, so
people were taking notice. That is true. So jumping back
again in nine, James Tenney uh took Blue Swede shoes
from Elvis Presley and have you heard this thing? Yeah?
(17:41):
It's very avant garde, is the way to put it. Yeah,
that's a good way to put it into collage number
one was what he called it. And it is in
many many parts virtually unrecognizable. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's really
hard to listen to. It is very hard to listen
to it. It's a it's a a piece of electronic
music that deconstructed. It's so it's Blue Swayede. She's deconstructed time.
(18:05):
And I mean if you look back and you're like,
holy cow. The video on YouTube shows like the guy
sitting in front of his setup and it's like pretty
extensive and like I was obviously, you know, out of
his mind. Um, lots of drugs, wasn't he. When you
look back at and you're like, oh that was what
That's pretty impressive work, Yeah, exactly. Um. Dicky Goodman and
(18:26):
Bill Buchanan in nifty six had a more commercial version
of of I guess you would call it music Concrete
with Flying Saucer. Did you listen to that one I did.
That was the stuff we heard on FM radio growing up.
Remember all that matchup stuff they used to do, like
Bette Miller's from a Distance with like the during the
(18:47):
first goal four. I don't know what to remember that now.
I mean, like when the radio stations would do these
um well, let me go and say what it was
and play a snippet um flying saucer. They took rock
and roll hits from that era and mashed it up
with a fake news report about aliens landing from outer space,
and it sounded a little something like this, we interrupt
(19:12):
this record to bring you a special bull of them.
The reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city
have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real. That was
the Clatters recording to real We switch you now to
(19:32):
all on the spot reporter Dom Tom take it away.
So that's the stuff that we heard on FM radio,
like they would do. I remember when I was a kid.
They would say like, we're gonna call so and so
right now, and and they would say, hey, how are
you feeling, And all of a sudden you'd hear but
couldn't sleep at all last night. And then they would
(19:53):
ask him another question to be like an interview, and
the answers were snippets from from rock songs answering, which
is really like, I mean, it had to say in
the seventies and eighties. For sure. I don't have a clip,
so I'm gonna have to describe it. But the Bette
Midler thing was slightly different. It would be like Bette
Miller's from a Distance, interspersed with patriotic speeches. Oh yeah, yeah,
(20:15):
I remember that. Remember that? Yeah, that that was sampling,
I guess. So it's most jingoistic form at the very least.
It was a mash up right those Oh by the way,
those flying saucer guys, Um Buchanan and Goodman, they went
on to do a lot of those things, like they
did one during the energy crisis of seventy four crisis
(20:36):
of seventy nine. But it'd be like, um, how much
gas will be ration? Just enough for the city, dude,
I remember that, That's what I was remembering. Yeah, Oh,
I was not cognizant at that time. I had a
lot of like poop, my own poop on my hands
from like playing with it at that when you were thinking, wow,
(20:57):
this is really neat stuff. Yeah, I was a little
radio kid back then. Also, I want to say one
more thing, Um, I went a little deeper in the
music concrete thing, and apparently Phillips right the manufacturing concern Um.
They tried to get into electronic music in like the
late fifties and had this whole little wing that was
(21:20):
that let a couple of guys just go to town
like trying to make popular electronic music. And if you
search Acid House from nineteen eight on YouTube, these guys
did a pretty good job of it. It is very
clearly like the predecessor of like it's listenable. It's not
just like just it's not it's not even avant garde.
It has like a beat to it and a melody,
(21:41):
and it's just it's really neat interesting. I don't have
that clip either. We should do a podcast on the
mogue that should Okay, that'll that'll be coming. Didn't you
guys do that on the B side? I think so,
But well, we'll do it up. But we've gotten requests
for more music stuff. That's why I picked this one up.
So you flash word a little bit and you mentioned
(22:02):
cool DJ Hirk Graham, DJ Grandmaster Flash who a lot
of people think that was the group. It was Grandmaster
Flash and the Furious Five if you remember, and uh,
they hit it big in nineteen eighty with the song Freedom,
which sampled Get Up and Dance by the band Freedom
(22:22):
pretty straight up. Well that that kind of took this
whole thing into mainstream. Well, and that's when scratching started
to wouldn't it. Yeah, Grandmaster Flash definitely started scratching. DJ
cool Hirk started sampling very clearly like he's the guy.
He's from Kingston, Jamaica, and he moved to New York
in nineteen sixty seven, I think, and started bringing like
(22:43):
his turntables to block parties and he would just he'd
find like a drum break or something, and then a
drum break from another song, and he just keeps like
putting him together. So it was like one long drum break,
maybe bring in a little bit of a bassline. And
I went back and listened to some of it and
it was good stuff, man, was it? And he's doing
this in like the mid seventies, and uh, yeah, he
(23:05):
started sampling as we know it, like turntable sampling. Crazy yeah,
innovating Josh. That's even better than Crazy Marley Marl is
someone else we should mention if we're talking about. But
the early heyday he was a house producer for the
Juice Crew, which was Big Daddy, Kane and Bismarcki among others,
but he also produced Eric B and rackiem uh Ellow
(23:29):
cool J. And he was like he's often cited, is
like the early leader. What about Redhead Kingpin? I don't
know that. What's that he's He's like in there somewhere. Yeah,
Big Daddy came in. You just blasted me with the nostalgia.
Oh yeah, remember the hat where the gumby haircut? Yeah,
(23:49):
oh yeah, the what they call that, the high high right.
I always thought it was called the gumby. That's what
you call it. Huh, Well, they may called it gumby, heiric.
I don't know until it's a fade essentially, um the
Beastie boys, see what I was talking about, Like back
in the day, in the in the eighties, late eighties,
(24:09):
they were constructing full songs from dozens of samples. And
this was before you had to pay permission rights and
stuff like that. So you get a song like Hey
Ladies from Paul's boutique, which is he asked me the
pinnacle for the Beastie Boys. Ladies, Paul's boutique, Yeah, I
don't know if it's the pinnacle, it's well, I think
(24:31):
it's one of several pinnacles. We'll check. Your head was
great too, but Paul's boutique was great. Hey, ladies use
sixteen samples and that was not on the low side.
But uh, Terminator X of Public Enemy and the Beast
Boys would craft songs out of dozens and dozens of samples.
And that's that's DJ Hurricane you're giving props to. He's
(24:51):
the Beast Boys. J was he always I believe, so okay,
but I think they all like wrote the stuff together.
Um as we'll find out because the the court case
against the BC boys was Newton versus Diamond Ouch, and
we all know who Diamond is, Dustin Diamond, Mike The's Brothers,
(25:12):
No no, no, uh, groups like day Las Sole Public
Enemy in the BCS were crafting these songs whereas nowadays,
partially because I think they're not as good and creative,
and partially because you have to pay rights. You'll get
like a kid rock who just plays this one loop
over and over and that's the sample he uses in
(25:33):
a song. So it's not like he's crafting these songs
out of dozens and dozens of samples. Well, Public Enemy
even said, like, after all these lawsuits and threats of lawsuits,
if you're crafting a song out of seventeen other songs,
you basically have to like figure out something else because
you can't do it anymore. And I mean, what a
buzz kill two to make a song and then take
(25:53):
it to the to the your record company overlords who
say like, Okay, we can get this cleared, we can
get this cleared. This one we can't clear no way
wherever clearing this. Yeah, so you have, like I don't know,
two thirds of your song is intact, but the other
third is it has holes in it. You know, that's
(26:15):
it kind of takes away from the whole thing. But
at the same time, yeah, I mean again, it's breaking
a law. It's a copyright law, and it's not an
arbitrary law. It's not as it's not a superfluous law.
There is validity to it. You know, Well, let's go
ahead and talk about it. Then, Okay, copyright law the
one that changed everything. It wasn't It was not the
(26:35):
first copyright lawsuit I think those guys um who did
the flying saucer thing were the first to start attracting
copyright lawsuits yea um. But the first one as far
that that changed hip hop, I guess it was Bismarck
Key landed a beef from one Gilbert O'Sullivan who wrote
the song alone Again naturally for you Got what I
(26:58):
Need or whatever? No Alone Again his song from I
Need a Haircut. Um. That album it's called Alone Again,
and um, bismarckis lifted pretty heavily from that, and he
was signed to Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers got sued
by the owners of Alone Again naturally right, and the
judge ruled in um the copyright holders favor against Warner Brothers.
(27:23):
So all of a sudden, Warner Brothers, big business, big company,
starts circling the wagons like, okay, whoa wa wa, whoa there,
we're really exposed right now because all of our hip
hop artists are running around sampling anybody they want to,
and now we can get sued for it. And the
judge caught a lot of flak because he said, and
not only not only am I ruling in your favor?
(27:45):
I think that this should go to some sort of
criminal prosecution, right, because this is their defense. Warner Brothers
defense was it's rampant. Everyone's doing this and we've been
doing it for ten years, Like what's your problem. And
the judge was like, well, if that's the case, then
we we need to really start looking into this, and
that shut everything down. That's when sampling went from art
(28:07):
to business. Yeah, I'm surprised it took that long for
people to catch on. And it was money that is
what did it as sales and when you know, it
was just like DJ's and Queens was no big deal
in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, but all of
a sudden, these artists, these hip hop artists were making
money on work from that was previously recorded by other
people and people saw green. Essentially, it's true they saw
(28:31):
dollar signs. They do um, But let me ask you this,
should the original people, the original artists, like I can
understand just hating on corporations because they didn't create this
at all. This happened to own it or whatever, but
it should the original artists expect some sort of compensation
for somebody who's making millions of dollars by taking some
(28:52):
of that original work. Do they what do they deserve
any kind of consideration? I think I agree to depending
on how like what degree the work has changed. Yeah,
I say, used the crap out of it, but get
permission and pay royalties. Yeah, Like, if if that's the
(29:13):
genre you're if that's what you're choosing to do, Like,
no one's forcing these people to do that, that's what
you're choosing to do, then you've got to play by
the rules. That's what I think, and then go wow
with it. Well, I guess that's kind of like the
status quo now, and that's not working necessarily. It's leading
to like your beef with Kid Rock, Well, my beef
is that he's just not very good. It's large. It's
(29:36):
larger than that. You'd be careful, man. He gets in
fights and stuff. Yeah, waffle house is in Atlanta, so
he knows where we live. I saw BISMARKI the airport
one time. By the way, you be hung out with
Bismarck Key wants played PlayStation. Yeah, saw I'm on the
on the little internal train and I was like, is
that yeah? That is I mean I thought for about
a half a second and I was like, then I'm
(29:56):
worrying that gray curly powdered wig now and he didn't
with uh all right, so let's talk about what the
cost of it is. Um ten dollars No, not ten
dollars um. At first it was something it was called
a buy out, so you purchased rights to sample a song.
It wasn't that much money. But like I said, as
sales grew in the rap and hip hop world, and uh,
(30:20):
you know rock band said it too, they started pay
rollover rates, which is you gotta pay per your sales, right,
which all of a sudden, you know, the bill got
larger and larger and larger, and you're not necessarily just
paying one person. No, No, you might pay the copyright
owner of the composition of the music. And if you
(30:41):
use a specific recording rather than record that composition yourself
and use it right, then you have to pay the
owner of that particular recording, which aren't necessarily one and
the same, right, and they both might want equal amounts
of money rather than giving you a deal. You know,
or if you're Vanilla Ice, you would just slightly altered
Queen's famous baseline from under pressure, not even so much
(31:05):
as credit them on your album. Forget asking for rights.
He didn't even say like special thanks to to Queen,
and uh settle out of court eventually for an undisclosed
sum of money. He raises jet skis now under the
name Vanilla Ice. Does he he also? He has a
home renovation show too, Does he really? Yeah? Oh yeah,
(31:26):
he flips houses. Yeah yeah, it's pretty weird. It's not weird,
it's weird for him to do it. Uh. Mc hammer
very famous for his sampling of h and Can't Touch
This and his pants super freak? Oh yeah yeah did he? No,
(31:46):
he did that was all on the up and up?
Is he really? Yeah? He was back then? Well he's
got you gotta pray just to make it today. So's
run from run dmc huh and and I s ized
baby is out there flipping houses. They all got to
do something. And Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell.
(32:09):
Uh it was not. He was evicted. He was in
the process of being evicted, and he had he launched
a web campaign to save his house. I remember that.
I wonder whatever happened. I don't know. Um. The drum
intro for led Zeppelin's When the Levee breaks, That thing
has been sampled dozens and dozens and dozens of times.
But it's so massive and it's so immediately recognizable that
(32:34):
it takes over a song. You know what I'm saying, Like,
I don't. I don't think it's a It's just it's
basically like, oh, this this is a led Zeppelin sample,
rather than like that's a great thing about um. Amen, brother,
It's like no one ever heard of that. But it
was a perfect drum break that leads that level when
the levee breaks, it's it's too led Zeppelin, so too recognizable,
(32:57):
and you're off of it. Yeah. I just started thinking
of about Robert Plant right. I think they were down
with it. Though. Jimmy Page I remember, was totally cool
with it. Yeah, yeah, with am using that. Of course
it wasn't his lick it. Uh, he's not around to
say anything. No. In two thousand three, the Best Boys,
(33:19):
I said, the landmark case Newton v. Diamond Um, they
did a sample and we'll hear it right now. The
very beginning of past the mic contains this six second
flute stable. Do you hear that? It's like three notes
(33:46):
on a flute. And they got the rights, the sample
rights um for the sound recording, but not the compositional
rights because they were like, you know, this guy played it,
so we'll pay him, but it's three notes on a flute, Like,
we don't feel like we should have to pay compositional rights. Yeah,
I've always thought it was something like eight notes was
the cut off or something like that, like there's a
(34:07):
center number of notes. I remember that from being a kid.
I don't know why that would have come up when
I was a kid, but I seem to remember that. Well.
The BC Boys won their case, actually, and the judge
said that the brief composition um, consisting of three notes
separated by a half step, is not sufficient to sustain
acclaim for copyright infringement. So that was we already played
(34:29):
the clip, didn't we here? So that was it. And
also you can not only hear at the very beginning
of that song, but you hear underlying the entire song.
It's the best sample of all time, best best use
of a sample. Uh, your favorite? How about that doesn't
have to be best? You know what my favorite is
from the BC Boys? Um, hey, ladies, remember when um,
(34:54):
it's it's from Ballroom Blitz. You know that song, Ballroom Blitz? Yeah, terrible,
terrible song that's sampled. BC Boys sampled that song and
hey ladies, when they break that one part down, it
goes she thinks she's the passionate one that's from Ballroom Blitz.
Huh wow. Yeah, so that's my favorite one. I definitely
(35:15):
wouldn't have ever ever caught that. I you still love
the BC Boys back in the day, have you ever
heard um uh uh the pop will eat Itself? Uh yeah,
back in like the early nineties are kind of tronic.
They had a song there, well, they're one big song.
Psycho Sexual actually sampled um a classical composition Eric Sati's
(35:37):
Jina pet It's really awesome. I'd heard I love Jinna
Peeny and I love psycho Sexual, and then one day
I just heard it just where I was like, oh
my god, that's that. That's that's one of my favorite favorite,
like probably of all time was um ice Cube's Good
Day using the Isley Brothers Footsteps in the Dark, and
(35:59):
then Dr Dre's The Chronic was like that was just
the soundtrack of one year of my college life and
that was a lot of George Clinton and Andre was
actually one of the first people to stop sampling and
start recreating uh stuff with live musicians himself, which is
called producing. Yeah, you're right, And now he has his
(36:22):
own line, I've had funds. Should we talk about Danger
Mouse real quick? Sure? The Gray Album? He famously in
two thousand four did a mash up of the Beatles
White Album and jay Z's The Black Album and called
it the Gray Album. Very creative and h E. M I,
who owned the Beatles recordings. Even though Jay Z and
Paul McCartney were totally fine with it, they shut it
(36:44):
down and said, you're not selling this. No, but it
made his career. Yeah, and it got around on the
internet such that he was like, fine, I'm not selling it,
but everyone's gonna hear it. Anyway. I'd go hang out
with CLO and do some stuff and MF and we'll
just make some money from instead. Oh chuck. What about
cover songs? Yeah, since nineteen o nine, you can cover songs.
(37:06):
You can play a song faithfully, especially live, uh, and
not pay the owner of the composition assent, as long
as you don't alter it, like played in a different
language or something like that. Um. And there's a lot
of people who say, well, wait a minute, that's like
that's a sample in its entirety. This is crazy. What
(37:29):
is the deal? And everyone has said, we don't know,
we'll figure it out in another ten years. You know
what bugs me is when these new country artists will
cover a song that's like a year old, like another
song and release it's a great acclaim. Well that that
used to happen like a lot um like more than
one person would record the same song and they get
(37:50):
released about the same time, like in the fifties and
the sixties. Um, so just be glad you don't live then,
because you'd be going crazy. That's true. And uh, just
so you guys know, the reason we're able to play
these clips is because something called fair use, which we've
talked about a lot with Jerry, So you just put
(38:11):
your pens down, lawyers, because we know what we're doing.
It's only in the United States, and it is the
exclusive right granted to us to play a snippet of
something without acquiring permission, as long as we use it
as commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting. Well wait
a minute, this is what we're doing. Does that mean
(38:32):
that if this has heard in Australia though it is,
are we still covered by fair use that. I don't know. No,
we'll find out. All right, Well, let's it for music sampling.
This turned out better than I thought. You got anything else? No,
I mean you got any more samples? Keep you I'm
putting my turntable back in my pocket and h you
(38:53):
know they had those little iPhone turntables now, which is
come on, yeah, um Jerry instagatism. If you want to
learn more about music sampling, you can type that into
the handy search part How Stuff Works dot Com, which
means it's time for listener mail. Before listener mail, Josh,
(39:19):
I want to point people, um who are into sampling
in the history of sampling to go to who Sampled
dot com. I'm glad you mentioned, as I'm meant to
mention it too. It's a really awesome website and it's
um allows you basically you can you can search for
artists who have sampled and who have been sampled, and
uh search for songs and they basically throw them up
(39:40):
side by side as two turntables like the original sample
or the original uh you know, break or whatever, then
how it was used. It's pretty cool, you complain, I'm
simultaneously Yeah, that's awesome. So that is who Sample dot Com.
All right, Josh, I'm gonna read this. It's kind of
a long one, but this is about spies and this
is from Tom and he said that his family has
(40:03):
a strange tendency of being arrested on suspicion of being
Kiwi spies New Zealand spies in France. They all were
Trench coats. The first story concerns my parents on their honeymoon.
It was immediately following the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
in Auckland Harbor by French saboteurs. My parents were traveling
(40:23):
into France from the UK when they were arrested and
detained on suspicion of being New Zealand counter terrorists. Nothing
could be further from the truth by the way they
were held in separate holding cells for two days, when
French agents would come inside to sell smoking cigarettes and
yelling at them in French. It's pretty terrifying for my mother,
who was only twenty one at the time. And after
(40:43):
two days they were released and dropped off at the
New Zealand embassy where they learned of the incident back
in Auckland. So that's one incident. The second story is
my comes from great great Auntie Anne, or Sister Marine.
She's a nun with the Order of the Little Sister
to the Poor, and she is ninety eight years old
this year and is still going strong. Her story originates
(41:06):
with the Nazis. She had been with her fellow nuns
in rural France looking after the elderly who had been
abandoned as the Nazis approached. They were also sheltering three
to four British airmen who had been shot down nearby.
When the Nazis arrived, they rounded up the nuns, and
the airmen accused the nuns of being spies. She and
her fellow nuns, of which she was mother superior, were
(41:27):
taken to a pow camp interrogated by Gestapo officers He's nuns.
Eventually she was marched into the commandant's office told she
was being taken away. Believing she was going to be shot,
she told them she would not cooperate unless her nuns
were also set free. Turned into a pretty hostile negotiation,
(41:48):
and she stuck to her guns, even though at one
point she was looking down the barrel of one. The
commandant finally agreed and bundled all the sisters together on
a freight train where they believed they were going to
be executed together. Sadly, the train stopped. The guards on
the train threw the nuns out one by one into
the snow, the doors closed, and the train sped off.
Sister Marie eventually led her nuns to the convent, where
(42:10):
they spent the last two years of the war, not
only helping the elderly, but also sheltering and competing members
of the French resistance. So she he said. Tom said,
if I could read this on the podcast, I know
Auntie Anne would really appreciate the airtime for the convent
in which she has dedicated over seventy years too. And
I would appreciate letting people know about why nobody and
(42:32):
my family feel safe in France. Me so year old
Auntie Anne, the nune. We thank you for all your
work over the years, and I hope you make it
a hundred and twenty Yeah waited four the Nancy's Yeah.
How about that? That's from Tom. Are thanks a lot,
Tom for letting us know that we appreciate it. Um. Wow,
(42:56):
I guess if you have a cool family story, we
want to hear that we're all always are always up
for those. Uh, there's a plethora that's entirely on true,
there's actually just three, but there's three ways you can
get in touch with us, yes, electronically. One is through Twitter.
Our Twitter handle is uh s y s K podcast
(43:17):
all one word. If you're not following us on Twitter,
you're missing out. Believe me, I agreed. Um. Also, you
can hang out with us on Facebook. We're on there
pretty frequently, all right, Yeah, uh Facebook dot com slash
Stuff you should know, and you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. This podcast
(43:38):
is brought to you by audible dot com, the Internet's
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