What I have is the entire song as one file. What I don’t have right now is an mp3 editor (at the moment I only have software that allows me to copy & burn entire files), which would allow me to chop out a representative portion & post it somewhere like YouSendIt. I know that posting whole songs is kinda frowned upon around here…
If someone knows of a shareware or freeware or even fairly cheap downloadable sound editor to recommend to me, do so & I’ll be happy to oblige. Given my hobby I should’ve had this software some time ago anyway.
BTW, speaking of copyright violations, pretty much everything on the Strip label and dozens of reissue labels like it depend on everyone involved in the small-time labels and bands who produced the music they reprint from 40-50 or so years ago being long dead, oblivious, senile, embarrassed by youthful indiscretion or otherwise unable to seek royalties. Many of the labels of this sort ask you to write them if you were in the band to get some cash, because the original label itself is decades-gone. They run on the assumption that it’s “easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
Keep in mind that this is on a piano, not a… recorder? Flute? Whatever the KFF uses… and not electric guitar like The Vapors.
Would you believe there’s another track called “Ah So!” on the same CD?! This one by another household name, everyone’s favorite band, The Highlights. Not the same song at all though.
Very cool! That’s the closest yet, but it’s still not the exact one. I still think there’s one out there to be found that was used somewhere as incidental music in movies or cartoons. Several of us remember it the same way, with a gong sound. It is disturbing that nobody can remember exactly where, but I’m still convinced it exists. I’ve heard it on the Howard Stern show; they sampled it somewhere and play it occasionally as a joke. But of course that doesn’t help figure out the origin at all.
When I access that link, then click on the download, I immediately get a page that says, “you have clicked on an invalid or stale link.” Does this site expire uploads in less than 6 hours?
If that site isn’t practical, and you can’t put it on a web page, you can email me any file < 5MB and I will volunteer to post it on a temporary web page if you wish.
Musicat: I believe the YouSendIt links are good for a week, and that there may be some bandwith limitation on them… not 100% sure. I’ll email you the file…
Crandolph’sGaylords.mp3 file is posted on a web page for downloading.
Sorry I took so long. I was away at an all-day conference, and I don’t have a hip-pocket PC with a wireless connection. Maybe next year.
That’s an interesting clip. Makes me want to hear the whole album.
As far as the yousendit site, it might be bandwidth. After I was unable to download your file, I could download a link that was posted earlier in this thread, so it isn’t an expire date.
I got fascinated with this question, and for the past month I’ve done some research, mostly utilising various online archives of old sheet music and recordings whose copyright claims have expired.
My findings soon became far to voluminous to fit in a single post, so I created a website dedicated to the “Asian riff”: chinoiserie.atspace.com
My results so far still leave in the open whether the “exact Kung Fu Fighting riff” had any dominant position before its appearance in Carl Douglas’ chart hit of 1974: there is just one single earlier find (from 1935) of that exact figure, with no obvious connection to the Kung Fu Fighting instance.
But what I show very clearly is that there existed far earlier a distinct pattern, which I define on the page and which I name “The Far East Proto-Cliché.” It basically includes all melodical snips that have the same rhythm as the “modern KFF variant,” and where the four first fast notes are of identical repeated height. Plus a requirement that at least a few of several other typical contextual elements should be present: i.e. certain typical ways of instumenting and harmonizing this pattern. And of course it should appear in a context where it’s supposed to signify the Orient.
So it’s still a very specific clichéd figure: My definition does not include random examples that simply make use of some of the many other existing stereotypical ways of depicting the Far East in music (pentatonicism, parallel fourths, etc.)
I reference 70 or more instances of this proto-cliché, most from before 1930.
The earliest usages that I’ve found where the Far East Proto-Cliché is used in exactly the “right” contextual way are from the year 1900 and on, occurring in some dozen of Tin Pan Alley-style songs.
But there exist interesting forerunners in the later part of the 19th century, which I also reference on the page. And if you are willing to be somewhat benevolent when judging the evidence then there are some peculiar occurrences going back as far as 1847.
I give a notated music example for each instance of the riff. And thanks to the expiration of copyright for the earlier examples I have been able to link directly to both sheet music and mp3 or real audio digitalizations of old phonograph records. Needless to say this makes the site a lot more interesting. I’ve also prepared some simple midi files for some of the examples. I’m particularly proud of the chapter about the period between 1915 and 1929.
So feel free to have a look if you always have had a secret dream about exploring the forgotten world of Asian-bashing songs from the 1910’s and 20’s.
Nice work, ligeti–this particular thread is one of my favorite threads on the Dope, and it’s nice to see someone follow through with some additional research.
This is why I love the Dope! Ligeti, fascinating stuff, and I sure hope you stick around!
I would be interested in how you did your research, and how much time it took. Did you use personal contacts, super-google, personal music history knowledge, or what? Did our Dope thread inspire you or did you have this question in your mind earlier than that?
I remember that cartoon–but it was the Coyote who goes through the middle of the earth on a cartoon rocket, and comes up in an inverted China (drawn all stylised), and a rock outcropping stops his flight, then the camera turns over and he falls on the ground next to the rocket hole.
An “oriental” Roadrunner appears on Japanese clog sandals, goes “beep beep” (with mock-chinese characters in a word balloon), and startles the Coyote backwards, and he falls back into the hole, goes back through the earth, and comes up in the desert again.
Did they use that gag more than once?
I remember an episode of the Muppet Show from the seventies where the Japanese and Chinese references are all mixed up. (The Muppets are signing the song “Oklahoma” to an oriental motif, complete with pagodas and kimonos.) I suspect that cluefulness in the differences between Chinese and Japanese (and, for that matter, Korean) is fairly recent here.
Thanks everybody for your compliments. Great to see that somebody was interested in such a large pile of (despite all still somewhat inconclusive) information about this little piece of trivia.
Well, thanks a lot. But now this makes me feel so ashamed that I feel I just have to reveal that this actually is my second account: I registered a guest account with the username mani a little more than a month ago, mainly in order to be able to tell people in the other thread on this subject (not to be confused with any of the otherother threads) about my “Betty Boop finding” (see below), which was how I initially got hooked up on this subject.
Today, when the website with my findings finally was up, my mani account had expired, and I registered a new account from another email adress, mainly out of convenience and because I’m not culturally accustomed to paying for participating in online discussion forums.
So, with that out of the bag I gladly accept your offer preliminarily, in case that I don’t get expelled for the above, or decide that dignity demands that I pay the fee myself now. By the way, can I see you mail adress in some way?
(That the word ligeti popped up in my mind when registering the new account must be some weird case of subliminal perception: I didn’t know (or didn’t think that I knew) that he died today, and I’m actually not very aquainted at all with this composer.)
I think I first read about this topic in a not very informative thread in some other forum, which linked to this thread. Some hour later during that same surfing pass I serendipitously came upon a 1935 Betty Boop cartoon on YouTube which contained the modern KFF variant of the riff. But it was first some week later when I stumbled upon the ucsb.edu Cylinder Digitization Project that I realized that it was possible for me to do some serious research on this.
And sure it has taken a lot and probably too much time, but the thing that took by far the most time, and was the most dull, was preparing those note examples and midi files. Searching the music archives for instances is a relatively fast affair: searching on strategic keywords gives a basic harvest, but as an emergency measure it is not too bad to simply go through a list of some thousand titles (if you can get them on one big html page) to see which may have a Far East theme, because during certain periods they are really common; closer to one song in a hundred that one in a thousand, and of those with a Far East almost as many as half of them contain at least something that is somewhat similar to the proto-cliché.
I was helped by my music ear education: I can read music (if it’s not all too complex) and hear it in my head, and transcribing from recordings is a relatively fast matter. But I would probably have managed without any such abilities, with a keybord at hand by the computer (and the pattern is actually easily spotted visually in sheet music).
I didn’t know anything about this type of music beforehand, which is why it kept being an interesting journey to me.
Every cartoon gag was used more than once. This one was also used in Disney’s “Donald Applecore” from 1952, where Donald’s usage of “nuclear pills” to hunt Chip and Dale (I personally get a very bad aftertaste from this kind of jokes about nuclear weapons) creates a very deep hole in the ground. Unfortunately that one (like the Tweety & Sylvester one) is devoid of the “Asian riff” (in fact there is no music at all is played during that moment).
Searching for the riff in cartoons is made somewhat more difficult by the fact that these parts tend to be censored when the cartoons are shown today, due to their containing racial stereotyping.
