Monday 27 February 2012

Better than the Original?

Here's 5 songs I think come very close and/or surpass the original song, which I don't think happens very often.

Love and Rockets - Ball of Confusion


Soft Cell - Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?


Siouxsie and the Banshees - Dear Prudence


Bauhaus - Ziggy Stardust


Streetheart - Under My Thumb

Thursday 2 February 2012

song evolution pt.1

This week, 5 tracks are selected that all relate back to one song. The original track was remade, then sampled, then sampled again, then the sampled song was sampled...! The end result is one of the top youtube vids of all time...

Street Player by Rufus w/Chaka Khan. I won't go into great detail describing this as there are a ton of resources out there, but will say that this track was released in 1978 on an album with the same name. The album was Rufus' 6th album, by this point they were a supergroup but were beginning to split from their lead singer, Chaka Khan.



The track was covered by Chicago a year later in 1979 and released on the critically and sales-wise unsuccessful 'Chicago 13' album. Apparently the original was co-written by Chicago's ex-drummer, but the story gets a bit convoluted. These details are not important, but are interesting so check 'em out if you have time.



Flash forward to 1995 and the underground sounds of house music. The Bucketheads sampled the Chicago version and the song crossed to the singles charts hitting #5 in the UK. It topped the US Hot Dance Club Play chart in 1995.



August of 2008, although it is difficult to tell exactly, Nicola Fasano released '75, Brazil Street' which took the Chicago hook even further.



Then, American rapper Pitbull took the Nicola Fasano version and basically recorded 'I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)' over top. Apparently, the style of singing overtop of an existing record is popular in countries like Cuba. Turns out Pitbull's take on the original Street Player sample took him to #2 on the hot 100 in both Canada and the US, and at one point was the 8th most viewed music video of all time on youtube with over 200 000 000 views. (I won't cite this because these stats change all the time, but I had a look Feb 2012 and it had 204M views). The vid is completely unremarkable and the 30 seconds or so I actually watched were enough for me to know it's probably not something that you want to be watching at work...! One note is that in the first few lines of the song, Pitbull references 75 Brazil Street.



All for this go round, stay funky until next time!
_jh