Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant here, co
Speaker 1: host of Stuff you Should Know. That's the podcast you're
Speaker 1: listening to right now. If you didn't know, on Saturdays
Speaker 1: we played reruns. That's right. We call them selects because
Speaker 1: we hand pick them ourselves and do these goofy little intros,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a lot of fun, actually, but
Speaker 1: that's what they're called. They're called Saturday Selects, and it's
Speaker 1: a chance for you to either re listen to a
Speaker 1: classic episode or to hear it for the very first time.
Speaker 1: If you didn't start listening to the podcast a gazillion
Speaker 1: years ago when we started. This is from March twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. Oh boy, that's a long time ago. How
Speaker 1: music sampling works. Hope we got this one right.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with
Speaker 3: me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that
Speaker 3: makes this the suit were sample version of Stuff you Should.
Speaker 1: Know, The super Stuff Guide to Sampling. Could that be
Speaker 1: an audiobook? Why not?
Speaker 3: Let's try. As a matter of fact, if you're listening
Speaker 3: to this right now, youoe us a dollar. Mail it in, Yeah,
Speaker 3: mail it into thirty three fifty Peachtree Road, Atlanta and Georgia.
Speaker 3: Carry up, Josh Clark three zho three one three three
Speaker 3: two sixes sweet fifteen hundred. Okay, all right, with that done,
Speaker 3: we can continue on with the podcast. You know what
Speaker 3: we should have gotten really creative and just like sampled
Speaker 3: old podcasts and put them together in too. Jerry, do
Speaker 3: you feel like doing that?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: I do a mashup. That's what they call that.
Speaker 3: Sure, that's what the kids call it these days. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: we'll just do it straight instead boring and guess is
Speaker 3: what you call it. I have an intro.
Speaker 1: Let's hear it?
Speaker 3: Have you heard chuck of a man named Arman Bulladian?
Speaker 1: Arm in Tanzerian? Nope, no, I have not done.
Speaker 3: Arman Balladian is the owner and sole employee of a
Speaker 3: company called Bridgeport.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, now I have.
Speaker 3: Bridgeport is a music catalog company. Yeah, and like many
Speaker 3: other music catalog companies, they basically just sit on a
Speaker 3: lot of copyrights to popular songs the musical composition of
Speaker 3: those songs.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost like owning stock, yes, like you buy
Speaker 1: stock in these musics and wait for them to be
Speaker 1: worth something.
Speaker 3: Sure, or you can allegedly shadily get your hands on
Speaker 3: already valuable music. Sure, and then like stocks, do to
Speaker 3: what Bridgeport did, which is start suing anyone and everyone
Speaker 3: whoever sampled it. So Bridgeport made a big flap in
Speaker 3: two thousand and five when they sued Jay Z for
Speaker 3: his song Justify My Thug. Yeah, I want to go
Speaker 3: ahead and add a disclaimer here. I am far too
Speaker 3: square to talk seriously about hip hop. Like I'm really
Speaker 3: into elevator music right now, seriously. Yeah, So when I
Speaker 3: say things like justify my Thug or jay Z or
Speaker 3: breaks right, I'm speaking strictly as an outside observer, an
Speaker 3: interested outside observer. But I'm not I'm not from the streets.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, I was. I was down, as they say,
Speaker 1: from like eighty seven to ninety five ish. That was
Speaker 1: those were my big hip hop years. Nice and then
Speaker 1: but these days you say jay Z, and I know
Speaker 1: that's the that's the handsome man married to that pretty lady. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we had I'm not down with the new stuff.
Speaker 3: We had a similar trajectory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, except I used to be into it and it
Speaker 1: sounds like you never were right. What in the name
Speaker 1: of God is a walk of flokka?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: All right? So anyway, Bridgeport sued jay Z for sampling
Speaker 3: Madonna's Justify My Love. Somehow Bridgeport got its hands on
Speaker 3: the copyright to Justify My Love. That's a pretty big song, sure,
Speaker 3: and when jay Z sampled it, they suit him. Now,
Speaker 3: this guy runs around suing everybody. Apparently he had like
Speaker 3: seven hundred lawsuits against just people who sampled George Clinton's work.
Speaker 1: Well that's a big attorney fees right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. And but when it pays off, it
Speaker 3: pays off. So this guy has come to be known
Speaker 3: a Bridgeport. People like him have come to be known
Speaker 3: where called sample trolls. Remember patent trolls when I gave
Speaker 3: like the absolute wrong definition of that. Well, sample troll
Speaker 3: is somebody who just buys up songs, hangs on to
Speaker 3: the copyrights, and then sues people who sample them without asking.
Speaker 3: On the one hand, you can make a case that, well,
Speaker 3: these people are breaking copyright lawcher by not asking and
Speaker 3: getting permission to use samples of this. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: Bridgeport has made it their aim to sue anybody who
Speaker 3: sampled it at all, even if they've taken the work
Speaker 3: and made it unrecognizable, right, which that kind of a
Speaker 3: lot of people are on the other side of the
Speaker 3: aisle going like that's ridiculous, that stifles creativity. This is
Speaker 3: just one of the many interesting aspects of music sampling.
Speaker 1: Wow, that was a proper intro.
Speaker 3: It's been a while.
Speaker 1: And that's one, but it's probably the biggest as far
Speaker 1: as what people think about how music is used in
Speaker 1: creativity and ownership. And one of the things that you
Speaker 1: just mentioned was Bridgeport is some big corporation and if
Speaker 1: you talk to like Hank Shockley, the former producer of
Speaker 1: Public Enemy, he will say that, you know, we don't
Speaker 1: have any problems paying music to artists who created the stuff,
Speaker 1: he said, but they're own by these corporations now, and
Speaker 1: it's just it's greed on their part.
Speaker 3: Yes, which is not There are two sides to every
Speaker 3: story now, and the music industry, as we'll see, kind
Speaker 3: of went on a tear of like suing everybody and
Speaker 3: protecting themselves. And now you kind of understand like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's why no one feels bad about this whole music
Speaker 3: piracy thing.
Speaker 1: Well, and there was a big rush at one point,
Speaker 1: because it was a new genre. I mean, we'll get
Speaker 1: into the history of how it came to be in
Speaker 1: all but it was a new thing and so all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you know, for the first you know,
Speaker 1: several years, that was open territory. Yeah, and that's when
Speaker 1: like that was the heyday aps me.
Speaker 3: Well, folks nerdier than us might be confused at this
Speaker 3: point because sampling also refers to digitizing music. Yes, what
Speaker 3: we're talking about is taking a piece of an already
Speaker 3: established piece of music, right, a selection of it, and
Speaker 3: then recreating it using it put maybe putting it back
Speaker 3: to back to back in a.
Speaker 1: Loop sometimes oftentimes actually.
Speaker 3: And then creating something new using this right. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: that's what we're talking about with music sampling, all right,
Speaker 3: it's been around for a while too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well you mentioned taking a snippet. Let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and just get a couple of examples out there. If
Speaker 1: we want to start out with trying to explain to
Speaker 1: people what a sample is. And most people know this, ok,
Speaker 1: there are no further places to look than James Brown's
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy song Funky Drummer. Let's go ahead and hear
Speaker 1: that little break beat Oh it's like that. Huh yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, so that's instantly recognizable.
Speaker 3: So that's funky drummer.
Speaker 1: That's Funky drummer. And that was who was the drummer.
Speaker 3: There, Clyde Stubblefield.
Speaker 1: Yes, Clyde Stubblefield, who has never gotten a scent.
Speaker 3: No, but he's pretty cool man. He is not trying
Speaker 3: to sue anybody. He's not seeking anything any damage from this. Literally,
Speaker 3: thousands of songs have used that drum break, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, James Brown has been sampled and this is not
Speaker 1: just that song, but a lot of it comes from
Speaker 1: Funky Drummer twenty seven and twenty nine times. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the leader.
Speaker 3: And you can make a case that Funky Drummer provided
Speaker 3: the basis for hip hop. Like all early hip hop songs,
Speaker 3: especially in like the mid to late eighties, all used
Speaker 3: that drum break, right, Stubblefield's not going after anybody for that.
Speaker 3: But what he did was get together with some documentarians
Speaker 3: who made something called Copyright Criminals, a documentary called Copyright
Speaker 3: Criminals to release a special version of the DVD that
Speaker 3: has all new ready to sample Clyde Stubblefield drum brakes
Speaker 3: nice that he created just for this, and if you
Speaker 3: want to use them, he's give him like fifteen percent
Speaker 3: of your sales. Nice, So he's like doing it, he's
Speaker 3: trying out a different model.
Speaker 1: Well, on the other side too, which we haven't mentioned,
Speaker 1: is and this is the point that a lot of
Speaker 1: the hip hop producers would make, is that some of
Speaker 1: these people are being pulled from obscurity. For instance, the
Speaker 1: second clip we're gonna play, which is the Amen break
Speaker 1: from Amen Brother and it was a B side from
Speaker 1: a very little known song from a group called the Winstons.
Speaker 1: We can hear this one, dude, Yes, and we'll hear
Speaker 1: that right now. So that one, to me is slightly
Speaker 1: better than Funky Drummer.
Speaker 3: So that's the Amen brank.
Speaker 1: That's the Amen break. And dude, that one has been
Speaker 1: sampled thousands of times.
Speaker 3: So that one gave birth to drum and bass in jungle,
Speaker 3: like all all jungle music is based on the deconstruction
Speaker 3: of the amen break. If you're interested in hearing about
Speaker 3: there's a really cool movie, like a video. It's like
Speaker 3: eighteen minutes long. It's a YouTube video and the title
Speaker 3: is video explains the world's most important six second drum loop. Wow,
Speaker 3: so it gave rise to Jungle. NWA straight out of
Speaker 3: Compton used that. Yeah, Cold Cut used it. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: Third Base famously used it as well.
Speaker 1: And hundreds of others. Yeah, I like their Base, And
Speaker 1: that was because we want to give due to some
Speaker 1: of these folks who created this stuff. That was Gregory
Speaker 1: Sylvester Coleman, who was the actual drummer that played that lick.
Speaker 3: And that was the Winston's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Winston's excellent Gregory Sylvester Coleman.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think what you're originally saying is some
Speaker 3: producers are saying, like you ever heard of Gregory Coleman?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So they're they're bringing some of these folks
Speaker 1: out of obscurity and giving them their due.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure selling some records for him here or there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, although that record's really hard to find obviously, Well
Speaker 1: they need to press it again, maybe they should. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you take an loll cool j Ladies Love Cool
Speaker 1: James for instance.
Speaker 3: Is that what l ALL stands for?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You never knew that, No, Yeah, I even listened
Speaker 1: to him extensively. He was James something and you know
Speaker 1: the ladies Love Cool James or.
Speaker 3: E O Z Cool Jake Cookies, I'm bad see you know, No,
Speaker 3: I did know. I've just fallen off like you.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you take the funky Drummer from James Brown
Speaker 1: song and you take uh sli in the Family Stones,
Speaker 1: Trip to Your Heart the the background vocals, and then
Speaker 1: basically you loop those over and over and over and
Speaker 1: you have a little song called Mama said Knock you out.
Speaker 3: Oh we're about to hear that.
Speaker 1: Well, we're gonna hear him separately. Obviously we already played
Speaker 1: the Funky Drummer, and now this is the Trip to
Speaker 1: your Heart backing vocals from Slying the Family Stone whom
Speaker 1: I love. All right, So that's it, dude, over and
Speaker 1: over and over with ladies love cool James rapping. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you got a huge, huge hit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh that was a big one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah huge. I wasn't a big local Jake though.
Speaker 3: I like the one. I don't remember what it's called,
Speaker 3: but it had like the boom box on the cover
Speaker 3: of the tape. I don't like the album artwork was
Speaker 3: a boombox.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was good. Uh, it had I'm bad on
Speaker 1: Oh it did. Yeah. Okay, it's not always songs that
Speaker 1: you're sampling. Sometimes you're sampling stuff from like a TV
Speaker 1: show or a movie, or like the Living Color song
Speaker 1: called a Personality. You remember that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they had like an FDR speech.
Speaker 1: I think it was Kennedy or no, it was FDR.
Speaker 3: Kennedy too, Okay, but that that was Kennedy. But he
Speaker 3: said the only thing we have to fear his fear itself. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: doubting Thomas. They were like a skinny puppy offshoot. They
Speaker 3: sampled I think the Day the Earth Stood Still extensively
Speaker 3: throughout this one album that they created. It was pretty good.
Speaker 1: Well, and guns and Roses on their song civil War,
Speaker 1: remember at the beginning of that they played the cool
Speaker 1: hand Luke bit over the you know guitar, and then
Speaker 1: Axel's weasley little voice comes through.
Speaker 3: Oh and Metallica is one, oh yeah, yeah, sample Johnny
Speaker 3: got his gun.
Speaker 1: That's right in the video too. Right, So those are
Speaker 1: all samples. You might just think, oh, that's a snippet
Speaker 1: from a movie, but it's a sample, just like you
Speaker 1: would use the amen brake. Right, Okay. The first sampler,
Speaker 1: if you want to go back in time a bit,
Speaker 1: was the melotron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the actual not the person but the machine that
Speaker 3: someone used that was creative for sampling, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was. It was the first time
Speaker 1: that they had ever you know, it's basically a little keyboard.
Speaker 1: They're very basic. I wish I had one. They're really sweet,
Speaker 1: and it has a volume, a tone, and a pitch
Speaker 1: control a low and high octave you can switch between,
Speaker 1: and then three samples A, B and C flutes, violins,
Speaker 1: and cello. And it was the first time that they
Speaker 1: basically had ever sampled anything like that. So you press
Speaker 1: the keyboard and it plays back a pre recorded loop
Speaker 1: of a single note of that single note on a flute,
Speaker 1: let's say, okay, which seems you know, you take that
Speaker 1: for granted now when you buy these keyboards where you
Speaker 1: can do a million different things. But back then, the
Speaker 1: melotron was huge.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. And even before that, people would take magnetic tapes,
Speaker 3: like real, real tapes and literally cut and splice them, yeah,
Speaker 3: to create their own samples.
Speaker 1: Well, and if you want to hear a classic example
Speaker 1: of the melotron flute and I do, listen to this
Speaker 1: little clip right here?
Speaker 3: Is it aqualong no?
Speaker 1: Ready?
Speaker 3: Aquaalongue no.
Speaker 1: That was the intro for the Beatles Strawberry Fields, and
Speaker 1: that was Paul McCartney playing the flute sample of the
Speaker 1: melotron on the melotron. Crazy, pretty cool, huh.
Speaker 3: I always thought it was just flutes.
Speaker 1: And then like King Crimson and Yet and Genesis, like
Speaker 1: they went crazy with a melotron.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Genesis was awesome early on. Yeah, they awesome, but
Speaker 3: in a different way, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a very different way. Very okay. So you talked
Speaker 1: about the origins with the tape splicing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean you were. You can go back
Speaker 3: even further than the melotron. It was at the sixties.
Speaker 1: Yes, there were these two dudes.
Speaker 3: They were the two Pierre's I call them Pierre Schaeffer
Speaker 3: and Pierre Henry, but probably Pierre Omri, I bet. And
Speaker 3: they were I guess what you would call a couple
Speaker 3: of avant garde musical artists, and they created what's called
Speaker 3: music concrete.
Speaker 1: S freaky stuff. Did you hear any of it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I did. There's again the YouTube factors in heavily
Speaker 3: in this episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If you want to find out a little bit about
Speaker 3: music concrete, check out the nineteen seventy nine BBC documentary
Speaker 3: The New Sound of Music that is very awesome.
Speaker 1: I did watch that actually, Yeah, that guy was a
Speaker 1: really great host. Yeah it was. He really laid it down.
Speaker 3: So he talks about music concrete where it's basically like
Speaker 3: these people before there were tape recorders. Even I don't
Speaker 3: know how they were doing this, I guess real the
Speaker 3: real Yeah, and then these guys were doing splicing. They
Speaker 3: would record the sound of a can falling or the
Speaker 3: sound of a metronome or you know, a piece of
Speaker 3: music off of you know, the radio, and then they
Speaker 3: would splice it all together into something that's like barely listenable, right.
Speaker 3: It was. It was electronically reproduced music, and it formed
Speaker 3: the basis of everything that came after it that had
Speaker 3: anything to do with electronic from like Pink Floyd to
Speaker 3: all electronic music, to the Residents to Silver Apples, to
Speaker 3: all these people who craftwork, who created electronic music. It's
Speaker 3: all based on this, these two guys creating this in
Speaker 3: like nineteen forty eight or something like that.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. Did you see the part of the video
Speaker 1: where they took the tape by hand and were dragged
Speaker 1: it through. Yeah, that ended up sounding like and I
Speaker 1: think was sort of the origins of record scratching.
Speaker 3: That's what it sounded like to me as well.
Speaker 1: Of course it was produced back in the day, so
Speaker 1: they didn't say it was before record scratching.
Speaker 3: This is about to give rise to this. Actually it
Speaker 3: was coming out at the same time, because it was
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy nine and that's when like DJ Cool Hurt
Speaker 3: and Grandmaster Flash, We're starting to get really good. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they were playing high school so people were taking notice.
Speaker 1: That is true. So jumping back again in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: James Tenny Huh took blue Swede shoes from Elvis Presley
Speaker 1: and have you heard this thing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very avant garde, is the way to put it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to put it into Collage
Speaker 1: number one was what he called it. And it is
Speaker 1: in many many parts virtually unrecognizable.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh yeah, it's really hard to listen to.
Speaker 1: It is very hard to listen to.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a piece of electronic music that's deconstructed.
Speaker 3: It's Bluth Suade. She's deconstructed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, big time.
Speaker 3: And I mean if you look back and you're like,
Speaker 3: holy cow. The video on YouTube shows like the guy
Speaker 3: sitting in front of his setup. Yeah, and It's like
Speaker 3: pretty extensive, and the guy was obviously, you.
Speaker 1: Know, out of his mind lots of drugs, wasn't he.
Speaker 3: But when you look back at it and you're like, oh,
Speaker 3: that was what nineteen sixty one, that's pretty impressive work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Jo Job, Dicky Goodman and Bill Buchanan in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six had a more commercial version of I
Speaker 1: guess you would call it music concrete with Flying Saucer.
Speaker 1: Did you listen to that one? I did? That was
Speaker 1: the stuff we heard on FM radio growing up. Remember
Speaker 1: all that mashup stuff they used to do, like.
Speaker 3: Pat Midler's from a Distance with like the during the
Speaker 3: First Gulf War.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't remember that, No, I mean
Speaker 1: like when the radio stations would do these well, let
Speaker 1: me go and say what it was and play a
Speaker 1: snippet flying Saucer. They took rock and roll hits from
Speaker 1: that era and mashed it up with a fake news
Speaker 1: report about aliens landing from outer space, and it sounded
Speaker 1: a little something like this, we.
Speaker 2: Interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin the
Speaker 2: Reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city have
Speaker 2: been confirmed. The flying saucers are real, Captain. See that
Speaker 2: was the clutters recording to real. We switch you now
Speaker 2: on the Spoder Reporter down town, Take it away, John.
Speaker 1: So that's the stuff that we heard on FM radio.
Speaker 1: Like they would do. I remember when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: They would say, like, we're gonna call so and so
Speaker 1: right now, and they would say, Hey, how you feeling,
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden you'd hear Buck couldn't sleep
Speaker 1: at all last night, and then they would ask him
Speaker 1: in another question. It'd be like an interview, and the
Speaker 1: answers were snippets from rock songs answering, which is really like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it had its hey day in the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties. For sure.
Speaker 3: I don't have a clip, so I'm gonna have to
Speaker 3: describe it. But the bet Miller thing was slightly different.
Speaker 3: It would be like Bette Miller's From a Distance, interspersed
Speaker 3: with patriotic speeches.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 3: You remember that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was sampling, I guess. So it's most jingoistic form.
Speaker 3: At the very least. It was a mashup right those Oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, those Flying Saucer guys, Buchanan and Goodman. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they went on to do a lot of those things,
Speaker 3: like they did one during the energy crisis of seventy four,
Speaker 3: the energy crisis of seventy nine, but it'd be like
Speaker 3: how much gas will be rationed just enough for the city.
Speaker 1: Dude, I remember that, That's what I was remembering.
Speaker 3: Really. Yeah, oh, eight years old, I was not cognizant
Speaker 3: at that time. I had a lot of like poop,
Speaker 3: my own poop on my hands from like playing with
Speaker 3: it when you were thinking, wow, this is really neat stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was a little radio kid back then.
Speaker 3: Oh. Also, I want to say one more thing, I
Speaker 3: went a little deeper in the music concrete thing. Okay,
Speaker 3: and apparently Phillips right the manufacturing concern. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 3: tried to get into electronic music in like the late
Speaker 3: fifties and had this whole little wing that let a
Speaker 3: couple of guys just go to town like trying to
Speaker 3: make popular electronic music. And if you search acid House
Speaker 3: from nineteen fifty eight on YouTube, these guys did a
Speaker 3: pretty good job of it.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 3: It is very clearly like the predecessor of like it's listenable.
Speaker 3: It's not just like yeah, yeah, just it's not even
Speaker 3: avant garde. It has like a beat to it in
Speaker 3: a melody, and it's just it's really neat interesting. I
Speaker 3: don't have that clip either.
Speaker 1: We should do a podcast on the mogue. That should Okay,
Speaker 1: that'll be coming.
Speaker 3: Didn't you guys do that on the B side? Uh?
Speaker 1: I think so, but we'll do it up.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: We've gotten requests for more music stuff. That's why I
Speaker 1: picked this one up.
Speaker 3: Oh gotcha.
Speaker 1: So you flash forward a little bit and you mentioned
Speaker 1: cool DJ Hirk Graham, DJ grand Master Flash, who a
Speaker 1: lot of people think that was the group. It was
Speaker 1: grand Master Flash and the Furious Five if you remember,
Speaker 1: and they hit it big in nineteen eighty with the
Speaker 1: song Freedom, which sampled get Up and Dance by the
Speaker 1: band Freedom. Yeah, pretty straight up.
Speaker 3: Well that that kind of took this whole thing into mainstream.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's when scratching started too, wasn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Grandmaster Flash definitely started scratching. DJ Cole Hirk started
Speaker 3: sampling very clearly, like he's the guy, right. He's from Kingston, Jamaica,
Speaker 3: and he moved to New York in nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 3: I think, and started bringing like his turntables to block
Speaker 3: parties and he would just he'd find like a drum
Speaker 3: break or something, and then a drum break from another song,
Speaker 3: and he'd just keep like putting him together. So it
Speaker 3: was like one long drum break, maybe bring in a
Speaker 3: little bit of a bassline. And I went back and
Speaker 3: listened to some of it and it was good stuff, man.
Speaker 3: And he's doing this in like the mid seventies. And yeah,
Speaker 3: he started sampling as we know it, like turntable sampling.
Speaker 1: Crazy, yeah, innovating, Josh, that's even better than crazy. Marley.
Speaker 1: Marl is someone else we should mention if we're talking
Speaker 1: about the early heyday. He was a house producer for
Speaker 1: the Juice Crew, which was Big Daddy, Kane and Bismarckys
Speaker 1: among others, but he also produced Eric b and raheem Ello,
Speaker 1: Cool Jay, and he was like, he's off insided as
Speaker 1: like the early Leader.
Speaker 3: What about Redhead Kingpin?
Speaker 1: I don't know that.
Speaker 3: What is that he's like in there somewhere. Yeah, Big
Speaker 3: Daddy came in. You just blasted me with the nostalgia.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, remember the hat?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Remember the Gumby haircut?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh yeah, the uh what they call that the
Speaker 1: high High? Right? Oh? I always thought it was called
Speaker 1: the Gumby that's what you call it. Huh, Well, they
Speaker 1: may call it the Gumby hair cut. I don't know.
Speaker 1: In Toledo it's a fade essentially, Big Daddy Cane. The
Speaker 1: Beastie Boys, see what I was talking about, Like back
Speaker 1: in the day, in the in the eighties, late eighties,
Speaker 1: they were constructing full songs from dozens of samples. And
Speaker 1: this was before you had to pay permission rights and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So you get a song like Hey
Speaker 1: Ladies from Paul's Boutique, which is, if you ask me,
Speaker 1: the pinnacle for the Beastie Boys, Paul's boutiqu or Hey Ladies,
Speaker 1: Paul's boutique.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know if it's the pinnacle, it's well,
Speaker 3: I think it's one of several pinnacles.
Speaker 1: Well check your head was great too, But Paul's boutique
Speaker 1: was great. Hey ladies, who's sixteen samples? And that was
Speaker 1: not on the low side. But Terminator X of Public
Speaker 1: Enemy and the beast Boys would craft songs out of
Speaker 1: dozens and dozens of samples.
Speaker 3: And that's that's DJ Hurricane. You're giving props too. He's
Speaker 3: the Beastie Boys. DJ was he always I believe so okay, but.
Speaker 1: I think they all like wrote the stuff together. Okay,
Speaker 1: as we'll find out, because the the court case against
Speaker 1: the Beast Boys was Newton versus Diamond Ouch, and we
Speaker 1: all know who Diamond.
Speaker 3: Is, Dustin Diamond, Mike D's brother.
Speaker 1: No No No. Groups like De La Soul, Public Enemy
Speaker 1: and the Beasts were crafting these songs whereas nowadays, partially
Speaker 1: because I think they're not as good and creative, and
Speaker 1: partially because you have to pay rights. You'll get like
Speaker 1: a kid rock who just plays this one loop over
Speaker 1: and over and that's the sample he uses in his song. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not like he's crafting these songs out of
Speaker 1: dozens and dozens of samples.
Speaker 3: Well. Public Enemy even said like, after all these lawsuits
Speaker 3: and threats of lawsuits, if you're crafting a song out
Speaker 3: of seventeen other songs, you basically have to like figure
Speaker 3: out something else because you can't do it anymore. And
Speaker 3: I mean, what a buzzkill too to make a song
Speaker 3: and then take it to the to your record company
Speaker 3: overlords who say like, Okay, we can get this cleared,
Speaker 3: we can get this cleared. This one we can't clear
Speaker 3: no way wherever clearing this. Yeah, so you have, like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, two thirds of your song is intact,
Speaker 3: but the other third is it has holes in it.
Speaker 3: You know. That's it kind of takes away from the
Speaker 3: whole thing. But at the same time, yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 3: it's breaking a law. It's a copyright law, and it's
Speaker 3: not an arbitrary law. It's not a superfluous law. There
Speaker 3: is validity to it. You know.
Speaker 1: Well, let's go ahead and talk about it then, okay,
Speaker 1: right law.
Speaker 3: The one that changed everything, it was. It was not
Speaker 3: the first copyright lawsuit. I think those guys who did
Speaker 3: the flying Saucer thing were the first to start attracting
Speaker 3: copyright lawsuits. Yeah. Yeah, But the first one as far
Speaker 3: that that changed hip hop, I guess was Bismarquys landed
Speaker 3: a beef from one Gilbert O'Sullivan who wrote the song
Speaker 3: alone Again naturally.
Speaker 1: And what seventies for You Got What I Need or whatever?
Speaker 3: No Alone Again his nineteen ninety one song from I
Speaker 3: Need a Haircut. That album it's called alone Again, and
Speaker 3: bis Marquis lifted pretty heavily from that, and he was
Speaker 3: signed to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers got sued by
Speaker 3: the owners of Alone again naturally right, and the judge
Speaker 3: ruled in the copyright holders favor against Warner Brothers. So
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, Warner Brothers, big business, big company,
Speaker 3: starts circling the wagons like okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There,
Speaker 3: we're really exposed right now because yeah, all of our
Speaker 3: hip hop artists are runninground sampling anybody they want to, right,
Speaker 3: and now we can get sued for it. And the
Speaker 3: judge caught a lot of flak because he said, and
Speaker 3: not only not only am I ruling in your favor,
Speaker 3: I think that this should go to some sort of
Speaker 3: criminal prosecution. Wow, right, because this is their defense. Warn't
Speaker 3: Brother's defense was it's a rampant everybody's doing this and
Speaker 3: we've been doing it for ten years, Like what's your problem?
Speaker 3: And the judge was like, well, if that's the case,
Speaker 3: then we need to really start looking into this. And
Speaker 3: that shut everything down. That's when sampling went from art
Speaker 3: to business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm surprised it took that long for people to
Speaker 1: catch on. Yeah, and it was money is what did it?
Speaker 1: As sales and you know, it was just like DJs
Speaker 1: and queens, was no big deal. In the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: and early eighties, right, but all of a sudden, these artists,
Speaker 1: these hip hop artists were making money, yeah, on work
Speaker 1: from that was previously recorded by other people, and people
Speaker 1: saw green essentially, It's true, it's all dollar signs they did.
Speaker 3: But let me ask you, this, should the original people,
Speaker 3: the original artists, Like I can understand just hating on
Speaker 3: corporations because they didn't create this at all. These right
Speaker 3: happen to own it or whatever, But it should the
Speaker 3: original artists expect some sort of compensation for somebody who's
Speaker 3: making millions of dollars by taking some of that original work.
Speaker 3: Do they deserve any kind of consideration?
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 3: I think I agree too, depending on how like what
Speaker 3: degree the work has changed, right, you know.
Speaker 1: I say, use the crap out of it, but get
Speaker 1: permission and pay royalties. Yeah, Like, if that's the genre
Speaker 1: you're if that's what you're choosing to do, Like no
Speaker 1: one's forcing these people to do that, that's what you're
Speaker 1: choosing to do, then you've got to play by the rules,
Speaker 1: That's what I think, and then go wild with it.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess that's kind of like the status quo now.
Speaker 3: And that's not working necessarily. It's leading to like your
Speaker 3: beef with kid.
Speaker 1: Rock, Well, my beef is that he's just not very good.
Speaker 3: It's large. It's larger than that. You'd be careful, man.
Speaker 3: He gets in fights and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, waffle houses in Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so he knows where we live.
Speaker 1: I saw Bizmarque at the airport one time.
Speaker 3: By the way, you we hung out with biz Marquie once.
Speaker 3: Really yeah, played PlayStation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I saw him on the on the little internal
Speaker 1: train and I was like, is that yeah? That is
Speaker 1: I mean I thought for about a half a second and.
Speaker 3: I was like, yeah, they're worrying the gray curly powdered wig.
Speaker 1: No, no, he didn't wear that marque. All right, So
Speaker 1: let's talk about what the cost of it is. Ten dollars, No,
Speaker 1: not ten dollars. At first, it was something it was
Speaker 1: called a buyout, so you purchased rights to sample a song.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that much money. But like I said, as
Speaker 1: sales grew in the rap and hip hop world, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know rock Band said it too, they started paying
Speaker 1: rollover rates, which is you got to pay per your sales, right,
Speaker 1: which all of a sudden, you know, the bill got
Speaker 1: larger and large and.
Speaker 3: Larger, And you're not necessarily just paying one person. No, No,
Speaker 3: you might pay the copyright owner of the composition of
Speaker 3: the music. And if you use a specific recording rather
Speaker 3: than record that composition yourself and use it, then you
Speaker 3: have to pay the owner of that particular recording, which
Speaker 3: aren't necessarily one and the same right, and they both
Speaker 3: might want equal amounts of money rather than giving you
Speaker 3: a deal.
Speaker 1: You know, or if you're Vanilla Ice, you would just
Speaker 1: slightly alter Queen's famous baseline from under pressure, not even
Speaker 1: so much as credit them on your album. Forget asking
Speaker 1: for rights. He didn't even say like special thanks to
Speaker 1: Queen and settle out of court eventually for an undisclosed
Speaker 1: sum of money.
Speaker 3: He raises jet skis now under the name Vanilla Ice.
Speaker 1: Does he also he has a home renovation show too?
Speaker 3: Does he really?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he flips houses.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, it's pretty weird. Well it's not weird, it's
Speaker 1: weird for him to do it.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: Mc hammer very famous for his sampling of and Can't
Speaker 1: Touch This and his pants super Freak? Oh yeah yeah?
Speaker 3: Did he royalties?
Speaker 1: No? He did? That was all on the up and up.
Speaker 1: Is he really? Yeah? He was back then.
Speaker 3: Well he's he.
Speaker 1: Got a pray angelist. You got to pray just to
Speaker 1: make it.
Speaker 3: Today, says Run from Run DMC.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, huh. And and Ice Ice Baby is out
Speaker 1: there flipping houses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they all got to do something. And Dustin Diamond
Speaker 3: from Saved by the Bell, Uh.
Speaker 1: It was not a rapper.
Speaker 3: He was evicted. He was in the process of being evicted,
Speaker 3: and he had he launched a web campaign to save
Speaker 3: his house.
Speaker 1: I remember that.
Speaker 3: I wonder whatever happened.
Speaker 1: I don't know. The drum intro for led Zeppelins when
Speaker 1: the levee breaks, that thing has been sampled dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens and dozens of times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's so massive and it's so immediately recognizable
Speaker 3: that it takes over a song, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't think it's a it's just it's
Speaker 3: basically like, oh, this this is a led Zeppelin sample,
Speaker 3: rather than like that's a great thing about a men brother,
Speaker 3: It's like no one ever ever heard of that. But
Speaker 3: it was a perfect drum break. Yeah, that LEDs that
Speaker 3: when the lovey breaks, it's just it's too led Zeppelin.
Speaker 1: So too recognizable and you're off of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just started thinking about Robert Plant right.
Speaker 1: I think they were down with it though. Jimmy Page,
Speaker 1: I remember, was totally cool with it. Yeah, yeah, with
Speaker 1: the musing that. Of course it wasn't his lick. No,
Speaker 1: it was John Bonham. Uh, he's not around to say
Speaker 1: anything no and things jogging job. In two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: the b C Boys, I said, the landmark case Newton v. Diamond.
Speaker 1: They did a sample and we'll hear it right now,
Speaker 1: the very beginning of past the mic contains this six
Speaker 1: second flute stab, so you hear that. It's like three
Speaker 1: notes on a flute. And they got the rights, the
Speaker 1: sample rights for the sound recording, but not the compositional
Speaker 1: rights because they were like, you know, this guy played it,
Speaker 1: so we'll pay him, but it's three notes on a flute, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't feel like we should have to pay compositional rights. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I've always thought it was something like eight notes. Was
Speaker 3: the cutoff or something like that, Like there's a number
Speaker 3: of notes. I remember that from being a kid. I
Speaker 3: don't know why that would have come up when I
Speaker 3: was a kid, but I seem to remember that.
Speaker 1: Well. The BC Boys won their case, actually, and the
Speaker 1: judge said that the brief composition consisting of three notes
Speaker 1: separated by a half step, is not sufficient to sustain
Speaker 1: a claim for copyright infringement. So that was we already
Speaker 1: played the clip, didn't we. Yeah? Yeah, so that was it.
Speaker 1: And you also you not only heard at the very
Speaker 1: beginning of that song, but you hear it underlying the
Speaker 1: entire song.
Speaker 3: What's the best sample of all time? Best use of
Speaker 3: a sample? Your favorite? How about that doesn't have to
Speaker 3: be best?
Speaker 1: You know what my favorite is from the b C Boys.
Speaker 1: Hey ladies, remember when it's from Ballroom Blitz. You know
Speaker 1: that song, Ballroom Blitz? Yeah, a terrible, terrible song. Yeah sampled.
Speaker 1: BC boy sampled that song, and hey ladies, when they
Speaker 1: break that one part down, it goes she thinks she's
Speaker 1: the passionate one that's from Ballroom Blitz.
Speaker 3: Huh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So that's my favorite one.
Speaker 3: I definitely wouldn't have ever ever caught that.
Speaker 1: U still love the BC Boys Back in the day.
Speaker 3: Have you ever heard the pop will eat Itself?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Back in like the early nineties are kind of electronic.
Speaker 3: They had a song, well, they're one big song psycho
Speaker 3: Sexual actually sampled a classical composition, Eric Sati's Jinna Pedi Nice.
Speaker 3: It's really awesome. I'd heard I loved Gina Pedi and
Speaker 3: I love Psychosexual, and then one day I just heard
Speaker 3: it just where I was like, oh.
Speaker 1: My god, that's that's.
Speaker 3: That's one of my favorites. Favorite, like probably of all
Speaker 3: time was Ice Cubes Good Day, Yeah, using the Isley
Speaker 3: Brothers Footsteps in the Dark.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was good. And then Doctor Dre's The Chronic
Speaker 1: was like, that was just the soundtrack of one year
Speaker 1: of my college life. Oh yeah, and that was a
Speaker 1: lot of George Clinton in there. Tons and Dre was
Speaker 1: actually one of the first people to stop sampling and
Speaker 1: start recreating stuff with live musicians.
Speaker 3: Himself, which is called producing. Yeah, you're right, And now
Speaker 3: he has his own line of headphones.
Speaker 1: Should we talk about Danger Mouse real quick?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: The Gray Album?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He famously in two thousand and four did a mashup
Speaker 1: of the Beatles White Album and Jay Z's The Black
Speaker 1: Album and called it the Gray Album. Very creative, and Emi,
Speaker 1: who owned the Beatles recordings, even though Jay Z and
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney were totally fine with it, they shut it
Speaker 1: down and said, you're not selling this.
Speaker 3: No, but it made his career.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it got around on the internet such that
Speaker 1: he was like, fine, I'm not selling it, but everyone's
Speaker 1: going to hear it anyway.
Speaker 3: I'll go hang out with ce Lo and do some
Speaker 3: stuff in MF Doom and we'll just make some money
Speaker 3: from that instead. Oh, chuck, what about cover songs?
Speaker 1: Yeah, since nineteen o nine, you can cover songs.
Speaker 3: You can play a song faithfully, especially live, Yeah, and
Speaker 3: not pay the owner of the composition as cent, as
Speaker 3: long as you don't alter it, like play it in
Speaker 3: a different language or something like that. Right, And there's
Speaker 3: a lot of people who say, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: that's like that's a sample in its entirety. This is crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what is the deal? And everyone has said, we don't know,
Speaker 3: we'll figure it out in another ten years.
Speaker 1: You know what bugs me is when these new country
Speaker 1: artists will cover a song that's like a year old,
Speaker 1: like another song and release it's a great acclaim.
Speaker 3: Well, that used to happen like a lot, like more
Speaker 3: than one person would record the same song and they
Speaker 3: get released about the same time, like in the fifties
Speaker 3: and the sixties. So just be glad you don't live then,
Speaker 3: because you'd be going crazy.
Speaker 1: That's true. And just so you guys know, the reason
Speaker 1: we're able to play these clips is because something called
Speaker 1: fair use, which we've talked about a lot with Jerry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because just put your pens down, lawyers, because we
Speaker 3: know what we're doing.
Speaker 1: It's only in the United States and it is the
Speaker 1: exclusive right granted to us to play a snippet of
Speaker 1: something without acquiring permission, as long as we use it
Speaker 1: as commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting. Well wait
Speaker 1: a minute, this is what we're doing.
Speaker 3: Does that mean that if this is heard in Australia, though,
Speaker 3: are we still covered by fair use that?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I we'll find out. All right, Well, let's it for
Speaker 3: music sampling. This turned out better than I thought. You
Speaker 3: got anything else? No, I mean you got any more samples?
Speaker 1: No, I'm putting my turntable back in my pocket. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you know they have those little iPhone turntables now, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is eh. Come on, Jerry and Sid gave us it.
Speaker 3: If you want to learn more about music sampling, you
Speaker 3: can type that into the handy search part HowStuffWorks dot Com,
Speaker 3: which means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: Before listener mail, Josh, I want to point people who
Speaker 1: are into sampling in the history of sampling to go
Speaker 1: to who sampled dot com.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you mentioned this. I meant to mention it too.
Speaker 1: It's a really awesome website and it allows you basically
Speaker 1: you can you can search for artists who have sampled
Speaker 1: and who have been sampled, and search for songs and
Speaker 1: they basically throw them up side by side as two turntables,
Speaker 1: like the original sample or the original uh you know,
Speaker 1: break or whatever than how it was used. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: You can plain I'm simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3: It's something.
Speaker 1: So that is WhoSampled dot com. Yeah, all right, Josh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read this. It's kind of a long one,
Speaker 1: but this is about spies. And this is from Tom
Speaker 1: and he said that his family has a strange tendency
Speaker 1: of being arrested on suspicion of being Kiwi spies New
Speaker 1: Zealand spies in France.
Speaker 3: They all wear trench coats.
Speaker 1: The first story concerns my parents on their honeymoon in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. It was immediately following the sinking of
Speaker 1: the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor by French saboteurs. My
Speaker 1: parents were traveling into France from the UK when they
Speaker 1: were arrested and detained on suspicion of being New Zealand
Speaker 1: counter terrorists. Nothing could be further from the truth by
Speaker 1: the way they were held in separate holding cells for
Speaker 1: two days. When French agents would come inside the cell,
Speaker 1: smoking cigarettes and yelling at them in French. It was
Speaker 1: pretty terrifying for my mother, who was only twenty one
Speaker 1: at the time, And after two days they were released
Speaker 1: and dropped off at the New Zealand Embassy where they
Speaker 1: learned of the incident back in Auckland. So that's one incident.
Speaker 1: The second story is comes from great great Anti Anne
Speaker 1: or Sister Marie. She's a nun with an order of
Speaker 1: the Little Sisters of the Poor, and she is ninety
Speaker 1: eight years old this year and is still going strong.
Speaker 1: Her story originates with the Nazis. She had been with
Speaker 1: her fellow nuns in rural France looking after the elderly
Speaker 1: who had been abandoned as the Nazis approached. They were
Speaker 1: also sheltering three to four British airmen who had been
Speaker 1: shot down nearby. When the Nazis arrived, they rounded up
Speaker 1: the nuns, and the airmen accused the nuns of being spies.
Speaker 1: She and her fellow nuns, of which she was mother superior,
Speaker 1: were taken to a pow camp interrogated by Gestapo officers
Speaker 1: He's nuns. Eventually she was marched into the commandant's office
Speaker 1: told she was being taken away. Believing she was going
Speaker 1: to be shot, she told them she would not cooperate
Speaker 1: unless her nuns were also set free. Turned into a
Speaker 1: pretty hostile negotiation, and she stuck to her guns, even
Speaker 1: though at one point she was looking down the barrel
Speaker 1: of one. The commandant finally agreed and bundled all the
Speaker 1: sisters together on a freight train, where they believed they
Speaker 1: were going to be executed together. Suddenly the train stopped.
Speaker 1: The gar cauards on the train threw the nuns out
Speaker 1: one by one into the snow, The doors closed, and
Speaker 1: the train sped off. Sister Marie eventually led her nuns
Speaker 1: to the convent, where they spent the last two years
Speaker 1: of the war, not only helping the elderly, but also
Speaker 1: sheltering and feeding members of the French resistance, so he said.
Speaker 1: Tom said, if I could read this on the podcast,
Speaker 1: I know Auntie Anne would really appreciate the airtime for
Speaker 1: the convent in which she is dedicated over seventy years too,
Speaker 1: and I would appreciate letting people know about why nobody
Speaker 1: and my family feel safe in France. Man, So, ninety
Speaker 1: eight year old Auntie Anne, the nun, We thank you
Speaker 1: for all your work over the years, and I hope
Speaker 1: you make it to one hundred and twenty.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Way to thwart the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Yeah nice? How about that? That's from Tom R.
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, Tom for letting us know that we
Speaker 3: appreciate it. Wow. I guess if you have a cool
Speaker 3: family story, we want to hear that. We're always We're
Speaker 3: always up for us and you can send us an
Speaker 3: email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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