“There is no such thing as an original idea”.
The lecture this week was on remix culture, a subject which I find very interesting.
We listened to a song called ‘This is the Remix’ by an artist named Girl Talk, someone I recall being really into when I was around 16-17. I saw them at Big Day Out in… 2010 it must have been? Girl Talk specialises in ‘mash-ups’ using Creative Commons licencing. Anyway, we were asked to pick out as many samples as we could in the song. The most obvious one was ‘I Want You Back’ by The Jackson 5 but after that i found it hard to keep up with spotting others. After looking the song up I found that around 28 different songs are sampled.
One of my favourite artists that frequently makes use of sampling is A Tribe Called Quest, who are often cited as the pioneers of alternative hip hop.
This song, ‘Can I Kick It?’ contains samples of “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed, “What a Waste” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, “Spinning Wheel’ by Dr. Lonnie Smith and a few more.
Mmmmmm that sweet, smooth mix of jazz and rap.
