Songs that "incorporate" other, older songs?

"Supreme" works better I think because "I Will Survive" is such a huge reference point and a presence in the culture that it seems totally legit to refer to it in a song about being adrift in the modern dating/mating game. Pulp did a similar kind of thing in "She's A Lady".

With Millennium he probably just thought the string hook was cool. And it is, so who can blame him? Never liked the song, though.

It's cocaine-inspired po-mo at its most lazy, smug, cynical and dull. It's when a marketing phenomenon stops being a bit of an amusing impetus for ironic and knowing discussion and becomes something truly, frighteningly morally bankrupt.

It's different from most rap / hip hop sampling, for a variety of reasons, most obviously the indecent length of its steals.

what about that rap thingy that sampled ALL of the Police's "I'll be watching you" Or Dido with Eminem?

I can't share Raymonds apparently rabid disgust with the whole thing, but I would ask, is there any precedent for this? Did a mannerist artist take scissors to an arm in a Raphael painting and then glue it on his own canvas? If you can afford to pay John Barry the huge fee he must have demanded for the cannibalisation of his work, then surely you can pay one of the best contemporary songwriters to make something new?

precedent (eg): Shakespeare "samples" Holinshed, Pliny, Spenser, whatever he can get his thieving poet's hands on

This isn't "pomo", it's not even new. It's normal. Calling a record "A Love Supreme" (name of a famous if super-boring Coltrane LP) when you're reffing "I Will Survive" is funny fom the outset. Coke may well make the record boring, but the cynicism is projected, by smart-arse loser 'critics' who resent that they have to pay some tosser w.no a-levels for THEIR coke, and don't get it free like [ILM's lawyer steps in, and not before time]

How is it "morally bankrupt"? That seems a bit strong, eh? And what does cocaine have to do with it?

Appropriation has been big in art for ages, yeah. I don't think there's anything intentionally artistic-statementy about "Supreme" though. Not that intention's the issue, but the art qn seems a bit of a red herring.

I guess he didnt pay a songwriter to write something new for "Millennium" because he thought it wouldn't work as well. (Except the chorus bit is new, of course).

Puffy's track improves on the original (albeit not enough to be good), so it doesn't bother me. Dido's "Thank You" is faffy nothing on its own and while we should damn and curse Eminem for his samplee's success it's plain that "Stan" makes better use of her warblings than she could manage.

Welcome to ILM, first-time posters.

thanks for the Shakespeare lecture, however I don't believe the bard ever filched 3 acts and 5 scenes in their entirety from Spencer? This kind of "tribute" thing where you vampirise a whole song does strike me as uniquely po mo in the sense of the correlation with "stars in their eyes" karaoke culture. Mark can probably lead us into some informed comments on Warhol on that one.

Morally bankrupt I do not understand. Boring shite, I do.

welcome to ILM first time posters

Message received loud and clear. Adios

If we're talking songs that cannibalize "I Will Survive", Pulp's "She's a Lady" trods all over "a Love Supreme.

Message received loud and clear. Adios

Lord we're a bit touchy aren't we? I noticed a lot of new ppl in the thread so I thought I'd say hello. Just because I was disagreeing doesn't mean I was saying "fuck off", eh?

Not that I was disagreeing - I think "Millennium"'s a dull old song. But, you know, good sample choice.

OK, here's the thing: I don't think "pomo" means _anything_ more than "Modern life is rubbish hmph harumph". People copy stuff because (a) they like it and play it too much (b) they want to better it (c) it's the texture and text of what they share with audiences (or want to fight with audiences about). Beatles cover Barrett Strong's "Money": not "pomo", not "hommage" — a shift from "giving the ignorant Hamburg audience what they're baying for" (oldies) to "giving them us = better than Barrett" to engulfing/absorbing/OVERCOMING the past.

Vampirism and cannibalism are used as throway metaphors: sit down and _think_ abt them. Dracula is the vector of sexual energy, the bringer of life and danger (well, to Whitby, anyway). The vampire hunters have to become vam,piroid themselves, to "conquer" him (eat hime). Anyway, Robbie doesn't loaf around twirling his waxed mustaches and thinking" HaHA! My dastardly plan is COMPLETE! I will cynically record sub-standard imitative pap and thus bring the world its KNEES. I willl make records that sound exactly like other better records and thus PROVE MY GENIUS TO THE PUNY ANTS WHO DARE MOCK ME!"

throway = throwaway

Actually, to be a bit less aggressively flip — if you'll permit me — the question of cover versions/imitation/influence is interesting, not least because the wrong things always seem to get picked out of it (by eg "explain-all" terms like pomo). A pop journalist/ editor called Tim de Lisle had a clever idea at the Sunday Indie, a few years back: to write the history music as a big list of individual cover versions, then and now. Because he was also a simpering halfwit who didn't know good writing from [insert insulting comparison here: point is, he didn't give me a job, the puny ant] the section was almost invariably rubbish (there was a book, too: forget name, but you might find it in bargain bins). But I still think the IDEA is great: because cover versions (and their darkside cousin style-theft) do actually write the book on the Anxiety of Influence, which is the motorforce for pop and rock (and jazz) as a continued energy, since ALL performers now were fans just back then. I KNOW: I'LL DO A "COVER VERSION" OF DE LISLE'S IDEA, ONLY BETTER (OBVIOUSLY), AND CLEAN UP.

Not sure if I want to turn the thread into a discussion of postmodernism, but it seems to me you could fairly legitimately say that quoting a big fat chunk of 'I will survive' is a classic example of the "blank irony" that Freddy Jameson diagnosed as the defining mode of p-modism way back when I was a nipper - that is quotation that, um, disavows irony - the gap between parody and pastiche. I dunno, Tom sees something witty going on there, it's lost on me I'm afraid. Compare it to, say, the PSBs mix-and-match medley of 'Where the streets have no name' and 'Can't take my eyes off of you' which not only skewered U2's 80s pomp but sent them scurrying off into the arms of Brain Eno for the duration of the 90s. Or compare it again to Patti Smith's quotation of 'Land of a thousand dances' way back on 'Horses' - part of Smith's attempt to reignite the primal kaboom of r'n'r within her own symboliste school of pretention. The best criticism of another song, is, after all, another song - I guess it all comes down, like so many things these days, to how you define 'fair use'.

Calling a record "A Love Supreme" (name of a famous if super- boring Coltrane LP) when you're reffing "I Will Survive" is funny fom the outset.

er, no it isn't. It's pointless, a kind of half assed splatter of referents across random and unconnected other bits and pieces. What some might call meta-textual. But pointlessly meta-textual, unlike the same technique in academic culture. It's brainless: which is where I back up Stevie, Fred Jameson and Blank Irony. I think Stevie has established that nicking 35 bars or 45% or whatever of someone else's music is a uniquely modern act. Whether it's a bad thing to do in the context of pop music is another question, or rather, the question originally asked.

I hate Robbie Williams, so to me it fucking well is!

It's actually just called "Supreme", isn't it? So it might be referencing Alan Moore's meta-textual comic book for all I know.

I hate Fred Jameson. He knows sod all abt pop culture, and makes not the slightest effort to rectify this: Dr C's two young colleagues Tom and Anna are better (more informed) critics. His "theory" — which is anyway itself "borrowed" from Susan Sontag's not-very-good essay on camp, and expanded to FJ's usual pay-me-by-the-column-inch unreadable length (at SS can write, in an old-school belle-lettrist fashion) — has been a total disaster, as bright but easily-impressed students in turn "nick" it and slather over everything in sight.

And - Blimey! - the lyri cs to "Supreme" look like they're an attempt to write in a Jarvis Cocker style. It's not inconceivable let's face it that Rob has a copy of His'n'Hers lying around. Where will it all end?

Oh. Just "Supreme"? Then perhaps I should calm down a bit: Robbie-not-Borges-after-all deflation shock. Still brainless is as brainless does, and academic "culture's" theft of what it calls "metatext" is niminy-piminy intelligence-free pop-culture envy. So there.

Mark - up yours D

That DG up there is not me. I just thought I'd make this clear.

Realised that DG, but it made me realise that Greenspun allows people to lie completely about who they are, including their email address.

I could fill in 'Tom' and 'ebros@netcomuk.co.uk' and completely ruin his reputation by arguing that Travis's reworking of 'Baby One More Time' is really kewl.

Sorry, I'm not advocating this as a course of action.

If somebody posts something under your name, tell the forum moderator - currently Josh or Nicole. They can a) delete it. b) do an IP check and kick ass where appropriate.

If it was your drunken self, though, tough shit.

Since I don't have access to the internet outside of work for the forseeable future (thanks to the phone company), it's best to just contact Josh.

Doing my thing of not bothering to read any of the other replies I say: all of these songs that incorporate older songs are SHITE and the work of cockfarmers like Puff Daddy.

So, basically, we've decided that Robbie Williams is NOT ironically nipping off John Coltrane or Gloria Gaynor, but rather he is pathetically ripping off Jarvis Cocker. This makes a lot more sense. Supreme is one of my least favorite songs off of "Sing", but not because of any of this sampling/ripping off nonsense - simply because Pulp already did a much better male-oriented answer to I Will Survive.

Anyhow, I don't understand this "valid artistic path or dubious tribute" thing. Couldn't it be both? Or either? Or neither? Doesn't it depend on the song? If a song is good, it's good regardless. I don't understand people who hate a song because it's sampling or wholesale borrowing from another artist, just as I don't understand people who will vehemently defend the theory of sampling (though I understand the latter more than the former). Neither are right. It depends on what is done. I think Robbie's Millennium is a great song, and the sample is definitely part of it (if not "it"), but it's not as if you would confuse Millennium for the James Bond track. The Heavenly version of You Love Us rips off Lust For Life at the end of it, but that version is (slightly) superior to the version that made it onto Generation Terrorists. Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun sounds suspiciously like Tomorrow Never Knows, but it's still a great track. Etc.

On the other hand, take that one Texas song that rips off Sexual Healing. The song is shit, with or without the rip. It's still just a terrible, terrible song to me. They could sample/rip my most favorite song, and it's still TEXAS and Texas are just...argh. Or Britney Spears redoing the same song about 4 different times, that's just laziness, and I think that's the same thing as the sampling idea. I really, really despise Fatboy Slim's Going Out Of My Head, and to be honest the reason I hate it is because of how little he did with the Who rip. There's so much he could've done, but didn't.

In short, you're fooling yourself if you don't think A) every artist has ripped off another at some point, intentionally or not and B) that this is an all-or-nothing deal that doesn't depend wholly on the song in question. Name me some examples besides Robbie and I will tell you if the sample is C or D, but this is an unanswerable question in my mind as it is :)

1. I love Fredric Jameson. Possibly many folk dislike him for sound, complex reasons: but I think that many who disavow him haven't read that much of his work. He didn't stop and start with one rambling essay in 1984. Quite possibly every contributor here knows that, in which case the point is superfluous. Nonetheless, FJ gets far too much stick on substance - ie, from people disagreeing with this or that argument - and not enough slack on style: ie, people who appreciate his writing as a self-generating principle which over many decades has produced endless sentences many of which make me laugh. Eagleton remains virtually the only one to have got this, once upon a time.

2. Stevie, much as I adore you, you are talking 100% offensive piffle about the Pet Shop Boys - in fact I suspect you put it in just to rile me - and so I am never going to talk to you again.

Does anyone know any other James Bond Songs that were covered except for Live and Let Die - Guns N Roses, and Nobody Does It Better - Radiohead?

Please e-mail me with you answers.

Clearly, we have to judge these kind of things on a case by case basis. I mean, look at who were discussing -- P. Diddy and Robbie Williams. C'mon, ROBBIE WILLIAMS!

Every album ever made by Sting seems to have a snippet clipped from whatever album came before it. Sometimes, he's not even subtle about it.

You listen to Sting albums?! I hope you have a good excuse.

Ah, yes. As the great Robert Plant once said, rock is a long history of beggars and thieves.

For the jury's perusal: Puff Daddy somehow convincing Jimmy Page to reinvent "Kashmir" for the "Godzilla" soundtrack...I hope it was worth the cash, hobmre. Ditto for Five and Queen - Freddie's hitting maximum rpm in his grave, you bastards! Jessica Simpson ripping off John Cougar Mellencamp.

I'm sure there's plenty more, but in my fury I can't think of any more.

As the Romans said, de gustibus est non disputandum.