Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, there is no doubt that the sample is a significant part of the song. Which got me thinking - which hit single (or for that matter, I guess, non-hit) was most dependent on a sample?
This is the other example that springs immediately to my mind:
So: what others do we have? (A link to song and sample for each example would be nice.)
j
(Utterly irrelevant aside: when Trep junior was a youth footballer, he played against a Brighton side that was sponsored by Fatboy Slim, and featured his logo on their kit. So hats off to the fella for supporting sport for kids in the community!)
Personally, I don’t think Bittersweet Symphony would be an example, it is lyrically a very well written song that would have been a hit if acapella, or with totally different music, ala Gary Jules’ Mad World.
I would say a 100-way tie with almost every one-off rap song in the 80’s and 90’s? It Takes Two- Rob Base, Knockin’ Boots- Candyman, Cantaloop- Us3, Rebirth of Slick- Digable Planets, etc. etc. and dozens of others that take a well known quality song and hook and pair it with limp lyrics- like taking the Mona Lisa, adding some houses in the background and calling it your own.
Maybe the best example would be Pump up the Volume By MARRS, which I believe has no original content at all and like 100 samples, but at least there is creativity at work here.
Wasn’t that closer to a straight ripoff, not a sample? The hook from “Under Pressure” wasn’t taken directly from the original recording, and her tried to add a note or something to claim it wasn’t the same.
Personal opinion #1: I disagree, I think the sampling makes the song.
Personal opinion #2: I’m having so much fun learning new things in this thread that I kinda wish the question asked was not “which hit single was most dependent on a sample?” but simply “which hit single used which sample?”. Maybe the thread will go that way anyways.
The orchestral backing is definitely a huge part of the song, but I think with a little work they could have come up with a similar track that would have been almost as good, and not gotten 100% (!) of their royalties taking away for twenty years:eek:
BTW, youtube is of course an excellent source for everything, but especially for this- tons of best samples, worst samples, songs you didn’t know were samples, etc.
One of my fav rarities, the famous opening from Bust a Move is from the song Found A Child from the criminally unknown band Ballin’ Jack:
You can (or better, could, nobody except superstars like Kanye West today have the means to clear all their samples) be so very creative using samples (just listen to the Beastie Boys’ and the Dust Brother’s “Paul’s Boutique”, an album consisting of hundreds of samples so cleverly compiled and composed into something new that it has a natural flow). But when someone just uses the whole instrumental backing of a song and lays over new lyrics/rapping, that’s just lazy. Prominent examples:
House of Pain’s “Jump Around” is built around three samples:
The opening horn fanfare is sampled from Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle”
The melody is built around a sample of Chubby Checker’s “Popeye the Hitchhiker”
The squealing horn in the verses is likely a sample, though from where is subject to debate. The most likely sources appear to be either Junior Walker & the All Stars’ “Shoot Your Shot,” or Prince’s “Gett Off,” and members of House of Pain appear to have given conflicting answers to the question. (If the source is Prince, it’s not a horn at all, but Prince’s voice.)
While American Badass was only a minor rock radio hit, it was the lead (only new?) single from the 2 million selling Kid Rock compilation release and pretty much inescapable if you listened to rock music circa 2000.
