RE: sampling (Re: Basement Jaxx sample ID)

From: Marco Baroni (baroni@humnet.ucla.edu)
Date: Tue May 30 2000 - 21:32:09 MET DST

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    >For example, Lately used to be
    >>one of my favorite Massive Attack's songs until I heard Lowrell's Mellow
    >>Mellow Right On...
    >fair call, I guess you have to take it in context though - that MA album demo
    >was originally written using something like 2 decks, mixer and a yamaha drum
    >machine. I rate Blue Lines as their best album still too...

    I agree. I think that Massive Attack was one of the most important bands of
    the nineties, and that Blue Lines is a great, moving album that, when it
    came out, was also amazingly original and innovative. Actually, the very
    idea of sampling a mellow rare groove like that was probably very original,
    at that time (and, btw, I still think that Lately is a better song than
    Mellow Mellow Right On!) (Also, I just noticed that they do list the people
    who wrote Mellow Mellow among the authors of Lately.)

    Still, there is something tricky about songs with a very prominent but very
    obscure sample at their core, as most listeners will not recognize the
    sample. When Prince Paul + De La Soul sampled Peg, they probably expected
    the listener to identify the sample, and enjoy how it took a new life in
    the new context. On the other hand, a lot of good nineties artists go for
    very obscure samples (in part, probably, to avoid being sued), and thus the
    "look at how smartly they recycled this!" dimension is lost, and it becomes
    much harder to tell what is original in the classic sense and what is
    original in the sense that they had a very original idea about what to
    sample.

    Having said that, I'd rather have DJ Shadow deceiving me with obscure
    samples than listening to Puff Daddy sampling eighties hits...

    Regards,

    Marco



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