Madonna's sampling of ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" on her new song

Okay, not the freshest news, but I read in the forum on the ABBA website (no cite provided), that Madonna paid 8,000,000 euros (a little over $9 million) in order to sample the keyboard riff from ABBA’s song, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” on her recent release “Hung Up”.

Benny and Bjorn are notorious for refusing to allow anyone to sample their ABBA songs (the only other time was on a Fugees’s song where they sampled “The Name of the Game”, but I’ve never heard it), but they did so for Madonna because they liked the way she used the riff.

This amount sounds way too high, or is it? Anybody read anything about this?

According to [url=]this site, Madonna’s song “heavily samples [ABBA’s] 1979 hit GIMMIE, GIMMIE, GIMMIE.”

I would hope that it was heavy sampling if $9 million was offered. How much would it cost to hire some random dude to come in and do the same keyboard riff so that only someone with expensive audio processing equipment could even tell the difference?

Yeah, that’s something I don’t get. Why pay for some bit of sound (or steal it)? Just make the damn sound yourself! Good God, why is music made with instruments by musicians (or your computer, synthesizers, etc.) too freakin’ hard for people to do today? Do they need someone elses dick to take a piss, too?

Because it’s a classic hook. And good hooks are rare and very hard to write. In the Pop world, it’s pretty standard practice to use other people’s hooks, but you have to pay for it. As long as you don’t abuse the practice, no one really cares.

I’d say that if coming up with hooks is so hard for some folks, then maybe they’re in the wrong line of work. Of course, the buying public seems not to mind, so nothing to stop them, I guess. Where’s the integrity in that?

Its their riff (or whatever you want to call it) whether she samples it or gets somebody else to reproduce it so she has to cash them up either way, assuming she doesn’t want to get sued.

This attitude is astoundingly ignorant. Sampling does require talent and skill, however, the talents and skills are often overlooked, because many people, I imagine yourself included, have a limited view of what art is, and hence dismiss the technique out of hand.

Sampling requires creativity, an understanding of how sounds work together, and the ability to effectively recontextualize existing work to create something new. The ABBA sample in the Madonna track is an excellent example of a recontextualization. The song was produced by Stuart Price, a well esteemed producer and remixer who also goes by the names Thin White Duke and Jacques Lu Cont. Price has a particularly distinctive style, his remixes are always instantly recognizable, usually based on a slightly hazy rush of sound, with the high end smoothed over and the low end propelling the track. He is also very clever at dragging the hooks into sharp focus in any track; witness his remix of Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For.” The original was an enjoyable electro-pop track, but Price’s remix finds about a million hooks, which he brings to the forefront, and turns a good song into a thumping, trance-y great. He did the same with Starsailor, who are usually a group of stodgy Brits making boring, sub-Coldplay mope rock. With Price remixing, however, they made their best track ever, the ridiculously catchy “Four To The Floor.”

Price’s work with Madonna is no disappoitment, either, which should not be a surprise, considering that he’s working with a pop star of her talent. The producer chopped up the ABBA sample expertly so that it sounds perfectly at home in his song - he bends the music to fit his devices, not the other way round. He also manages to make “Hung Up” sound entirely distinctive as an original track - you could never accidentally think you were listening to ABBA when you put it on - but at the same time utilizing the unmistakable recognizability of the sample. It’s clever - you hear the song, and you’ve heard the central motif a million times before, but nevertheless, the entire song is unmistakably fresh and distinct from anything that has preceded it.

Sampling is a technique, that’s all. Just like guitar playing is a technique. There are people who do sampling well, just like there are people who play guitar badly. And recontextualization is a legitimate means of creating art, and to try to argue that it is not shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how human beings create art. For thousands of years, people have created art by taking things other people have all ready done, changing them a bit, slotting them into new styles, giving them new ideas and generally expanding the scope of human creativity. It is only relatively recently that the necessary evil of intellectual property laws has made seeking permission and throwing about big wads of cash a requirement to producing art in a manner that has always existed (and still exists both in first and third world countries - consider the concept of reggae and dancehall riddims, for instance).

In a fair world, Madonna wouldn’t have to pay ABBA squat. She and Price were the ones doing all the hard work to create a new chart-topping song, whereas ABBA did absolutely nothing in the past 25 years and they rake in the cash.

However, should you still be wanting to dismiss recontextualization out of hand, please explain how the following exhibit a lack of creativity:

  1. Tom Stoppard stole characters and dialogue from William Shakespeare for his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Dead. Just make up the damn characters yourself!

  2. Led Zeppelin stole countless riffs from old blues musicians. Just make up the damn riffs yourself!

  3. William Shakespeare stole the plot of King Lear from an already existing story. Just come up with a damn story yourself!

  4. The Simpsons stole the concept, plot and many shots for the episode Rosebud from Citizen Kane. Pfft, they might as well have had Orson Wells come in and write the damn thing for them!

  5. Andy Warhol stole the design of a Campbells’ Soup can label for various artworks. Just come up with a damn soup label yourself!

Thanks, that is a very thought provoking post. Have fun here.

There’s a difference between “recontextualization” (god what a pretentious term!) and using someone else’s riff and calling it your own. Madonna’s hired samplers didn’t do that, but many “artists” have.

For someone calling some someone else astoundingly ignorant, your examples are seemingly willfully obtuse. The only one applicable here, that isn’t simply an example of parody or interpretation is Led Zeppelin, who indeed stole blues riffs for some of their songs. I think that’s wrong, too, but LZ had a whole bunch of good songs that didn’t recycle blues riffs, so at least they proved capable of coming up with their own stuff.

Hey, I don’t think playing with found sounds and making songs out of them isn’t art or music or doesn’t involve talent, but it’s really a different thing than making music on an instrument; it’s more or less engineering with a creative slant. Nothing wrong with that, I reckon… :shrugs::

> TWEEET!! < ::: Moderator bloweth his Official Whistle for attention :::

**ayalabmaj **, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, we’re glad to have you with us. You might please go to FORUM RULES, and note especially Post #3. Personal insults are not permitted in this forum. I grant you, there’s a fine line, but when you accuse someone’s attitude of being “astoundingly ignorant”, you’ve got one toe across that line.

Please note the difference between your comment and An Arky’s (who’s been around a while): he’s calling your examples obtuse, he’s not calling you obtuse. And that’s the fine-line distinction that we want to make. It is possible to exchange ideas, viewpoints, and information without being insulting to each other… at least, in this forum.

Example:
Acceptable: What you state as facts are sadly out of kilter with reality.
Unacceptable: You’re a flake.

See the diff?

You’re new, and it’s fairly minor, so I’m going to consider this a friendly word of caution and not bother with Official Warnings and all that. As I say, we’re glad to have you here, you’ve said some thought-provoking things very well, and we hope you’ll stick around. We just want to gently remind you (and everyone) that we’re different from most other message boards.

Why is satire the only appropriate form of “recontextualization”? Another example might be the book “Wicked”. Jefferson Airplane took the story of “Alice in Wonderland”, a kid’s story, and used as inspiration for a songs about drugs.

That’s the type of thing that I meant by interpretation…it’s fine by me. It’s not meant to pass as totally original work, it’s a riff on an existing work. And I understand how sampling other people’s music can sometimes be like that. But sometimes the audience isn’t let on what’s a sample and what’s a played riff. I don’t think that’s kosher. Like a few years ago, there were some teenagers who loved MC Hammer, but didn’t know his “song” was lifted heavily from a Rick James song. Or didn’t care. ::sigh::

BTW, I didn’t think ayalabmaj was insulting me, just my attitude. I didn’t see the harm, really, but mods know best.

legal issues aside - she sampled ABBA!!! Of all artists, ABBA!!! I had to pick my jaw off the floor when I first heard “Hung Up

[hijack]I always thought Thin White Duke was a nickname for David Bowie.[/hijack]

See, he can’t even come up with an original nickname!

Sorry, that was too tempting.

I’ll keep settin’ ‘em up, you keep knockin’ 'em back.