Monday, April 13, 2009

The Turtles- You Showed Me

Anyone who can point out this track's significance in relation to hip hop gets a "huzzah".

12 comments:

Whisk E. Bear said...

Was it sampled in something? (Sorry, Eric, I'm bad at this.)

Eric said...

yes

I'd be pretty shocked if anyone knew it from just recognizing the sample in the other song, but there's a...well, not well known, but not completely unknown story that goes with it.

Eric said...

(also, I am a gigantic nerd with this stuff. I have a couple friends who are similarly nerdy about it, and we occasionally play this game.)

((yes, this is my life. and I just slept through most of the games, and Lilly almost getting a no hitter. sigh.))

Whisk E. Bear said...

(I assume you are a 93-year-old in an assisted living facility, and the "games" are the daily round of pinochle, backgammon and hearts. A "no-hitter" is what you mistakenly call "shooting the moon"; Lilly is your wife's name.)

(Lilly died in 1997.)

Eric said...

Aye.

(I read pinochle as Pinochet at least 3 times before I got it right.)

Craig said...

We need the answer! (The Lightning Seeds covered this in.....well it must have been '97, since that was the summer of M2 at my house, and they played the shit out of that video.)

Eric said...

Alright, here you go.

De La Soul sampled this track on "Transmitting Live from Mars", off of "Three Feet High and Rising". The De La track consists of that part that starts at around 11 seconds playing on a loop, with a French tutorial tape playing overtop (ecoutez et repetez...a midi, etc). Anyway, The Turtles got pissed about the unauthorized use of the sample, and (successfully) sued De La Soul. This was really sort of the end for free use of sampling, specifically in hip hop, and dramatically changed "the game". No longer was it possible to just dig through the crates and randomly sample anything that you found interesting, as Paul did on "3 Feet High", but now you needed to be granted permission to use the sample, which now often means paying the original artist.

(I blame this for the lame single song samples that Puffy made famous)

Craig said...

The big one was really the Biz Markie thing. So you can blame Biz for Puffy. It was only a matter of time. Music rights are notoriously convoluted, because there are just a shitload of entities with their fingers in the pie - the artist, the songwriter, the publisher, the record company. You can cut some of those people out by re-recording the song, but that's a lot more trouble. Or you can just sample songs that are in the public domain, but that only works if you want to sound all old-timey.

Eric said...

I'd heard of the Biz one but wasn't too familiar with it before looking it up.

Blaming things on Biz Markie> blaming things on De La Soul

Eric said...

That reminds me, over winter break I was home taking care of my younger cousin, and he was watching this show on nick that had Biz Markie on it. He beatboxed, and the kids were supposed to mimic him. Apparently The Roots once appeared on this show.

Anyway, most bizarre shit ever. I had to restrain myself from yelling "oh shit" when Biz came on.

Craig said...

(That really should have been "oh snap".)

Eric said...

(I wish I would have thought of that line at the time. Then I could have actually said it with about being..I don't know, offensive to my cousins sensibilities, or whatever, while also remaining hilarious to myself at the same time. But, alas.)