Hope you don’t mind my ripping off your thread title, Lute Skywatcher. However, I was just wondering about something similar to your subject.
What songs exist that sample so heavily from other songs that it is practically a remix, but not quite? For example, it might be new lyrics over an old backing track, or it might be one…
Actually, that is it. I suppose anything else would be flat out sample, though I would like to hear examples of that too. Examples include Plastic Bertrand’s Ça plane pour moi" being made into JetBoy/Jet girl, by Elton Motello. No, wait, it was the other way around. Still, I would like to hear more.
Well, Fluke did a “cover” of a Tears For Fears b-side called “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, but I don’t know if that exactly qualifies, seeing as the only element of the TFF song used in the remix were the vocals…and the vocals weren’t done by TFF-proper in the first place.
During a live concert, Roland Orzabal (the real one) did a pseudo-cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”, but switched around the lyrics and added some new guitar riffs reminiscent of Radiohead’s latest (at the time) work. Thom Yorke was rather pissed off about it, apparently, but then, one gets the impression that Thom Yorke is rather pissed off quite often.
George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord is rather famously like the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine, of course.
On Björk’s first album (very sweet, from when she was only ten or eleven,) there’s something that sounds an awful lot like The Fool on the Hill. (Okay, it’s note-for-note.) I dinna speak Icelandic, so I have no idea if it’s a proper cover or a lift.
About a third of Led Zeppelin’s catalog.
Who did that top-forty version of Mambo #5 that was basically the whole of Perez Prado’s original with some lame lyrics read over top? Forget it, don’t remind me.
There’s some rap song out there that extensively samples Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is.” It uses the entire chorus and I think all of the chords from the verses. I think that pushes the definition of sampling, personally, and I also think that when people are sampling Bruce Hornsby, that means there’s not much left that hasn’t been sampled. (No disrespect to Bruce.)
Here are a couple of pretty obscure examples, and darned if they don’t both have to do with, of all peope, Bobby Vinton.
His 1964 #1 hit “Mr. Lonely” is him singing over a previously recorded instrumental version of the same song by Buddy Greco, which hit #46 in 1962. Both records came out on the Epic label.
Then, his only top 10 hit in the 1970s, “My Melody Of Love” is new words to a song called “Don’t Stay Away Too Long” by Peters and Lee. Both records came out in 1974. I don’t know the story on that one, but I have both records and they are identical in tune and melody. The latter may not have been issued in the US, as it was from Europe and was released there and in Canada on the Philips label.
Yes. More specifically, on the day when I signed up, I’d been listening to a record by Canadian comedy duo Bowser & Blue, called “A Dyke Named Spike”, which goes:
I’m in like with a dyke named Spike
Who needs me like a pike needs a bike…
The Church Street Five did an instrumental record called “A Night With Daddy G (Part 2)” in February 1961 (charted on 2/20/61, #111). In May 1961, Gary U.S. Bonds sang over this recording and released it as “Quarter To Three” (charted 5/22/61, #1 for 2 weeks). Released on Legrand 1004 and 1008, respectively.
In 1906, calypso musician Lionel Belasco composed the song L’Année passée. The song told of a girl from a good family in Trinidad who ran away to live with a boyfriend, who eventually turns her out to working as a streetwalker.
In the 1940s, comedian Morey Amsterdam published a song called “Rum and Coca Cola” that bore a striking musicial resemblence to L’Année passée. Amsterdam refused to admit or settle, and the resulting trial judgement against him nearly bankrupted him.
During the trial, incidentally, one of the proofs of plaigerism offered was the use of a chromatic chord in L’Année passée to bring out the pathos of the girl’s prostitution. “Rum and Coca-Cola” had the exact same chord even though the song’s lyrics were happy and upbeat. In addition, both songs resolved the dissonant chord to C dominant 7, which was unusual.
Besides both being, technically, Merseybeat, I always thought the lyrics, at least, to “World Without Love” sounded like the Beatles. Turns out it was written by Lennon/McCartney.
I also thought that the singing to “Out of Control” by the Chemical Brothers sounded like New Order, and the singer turns out to be … you know.
