When I started collecting records I was a heavy progger -- Yes, Genesis,
ELP, Soft Machine, etc. I still like that sort of music and I still listen
to it ... but I thought that stuff was pretty much forgotten back in the
eighties, because it's so cerebral and it's not really for dancing and it
grooves funny because of the odd meters ... what's funny is that in every
dance genre that I've ever heard I've heard little samples from these
things, and it's really stunning to hear the things in a different context,
especially after listening to them in their original context for 20 years
... one in particular that I can think of is this mellotron whoosh at the
start of Genesis' song "The Fountain Of Salmacis" -- and I've heard it
sampled in about half a million goa tunes. It seems if I'm going to hear a
goa dj spin I'm going to hear that sample. I was amazed really because of
the cultural crossing -- people who'd be into prog wouldn't really go for
the dance music (I was this way once) because it was too repetitive, and
people who'd go for dance music wouldn't give prog a chance because it was
so "pompous and arrogant."
One other thing that I've noticed is that when I'm listening, I'm not really
listening for this to be a sample or that to be a sample -- I'm just
listening to the overall groove. It's only when the same sample appears in
two different songs that I catch on ... listened to a whole Deee-lite album
for about a year before I read the cover one day and found that there's
scads of samples on it.