Whenever I hear the opening of Queen’s “Under Pressure,” I inevitably think I’m about to hear Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.” It used to be that I was always disappointed when the song turned out to be “Under Pressure” (I blame this on being a child of the late 80s with little to no musical guidance).
I was driving around today and “Under Pressure” came on, and for the first time I was glad that it was Queen and not Nilla.
Any other songs that do that to you? It’s the same thing with James Brown’s “SuperFreak” and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” (Both examples feature muscial sampling, natch.)
I’m usually pretty good at “I can name that tune in one note” but somewhere along the way I got the opening notes of “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger stirred up with “Sweet Melissa” by the Allman Brothers.
I’m not sure if it’s the right sort of example since those songs aren’t cross-pollinated like the ones in the OP, it’s just my brain screwing it up…
There is exactly one Lenny Kravitz song that I like “Are you gonna go my way” whatever idiot took that riff from the opening and turning it to some teeny bopper song needs to be strangled.
Ahh, here it is.
Every time I hear this I think “Hey, I love this riff…waitaminute what’s that sound coming in…dammit it’s that other song”
It was really hard not to hear the other song. Minor nitpick though, and I didn’t notice this until I really started listening to the lyrics when I was in college…Rikki is a girl.
No, you don’t understand. Those bass lines are totally different. Under Pressure’s goes: “da da da dada da da \ da da da dada da da” and Ice Ice Baby’s goes: “da da da dada da da \ DA da da da dada da da”
Yeah, gotta love Robert Van Winkle. “It doesn’t sound anything like ‘Under Pressure.’ Only part that sounds like ‘Under Pressure’ is the hook.” I still can’t tell whether he was just trolling with that or didn’t realize the idiocy of what he just said. I really can’t.
Not sure if this should count, since the obvious influence is in the title, but there’s:
Those are pretty darned close to being the exact same song with just different lyrics. One features “stops” that the other doesn’t, but that’s about as far as the really obvious musical differences go.
Garbage’s Stupid Girl samples the opening drum part from The Clash’s Train in Vain. Any time I hear either I have to wait about 5 seconds to know which song it is. Popping guitar = Clash; descending synth line = Garbage.
Once when the car radio was turned down really low, I reached over and cranked up what I thought was Cheap Trick’s She’s Tight only for it to be Talk Dirty To Me by Poison. They don’t sound that much alike at regular volume.
When the radio is turned down or it’s just a car out in the parking lot it’s amazing how many songs have very similar bass lines when that’s all you can hear.
