Selects: How Music Sampling Works

Hello, everyone. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant here, co host of Stuff you Should Know. That's the podcast you're listening to right now. If you didn't know, on Saturdays we played reruns. That's right. We call them selects because we hand pick them ourselves and do these goofy little intros, which is kind of a lot of fun, actually, but

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes this the suit were sample version of Stuff you Should.

Know, The super Stuff Guide to Sampling. Could that be an audiobook? Why not?

Let's try. As a matter of fact, if you're listening to this right now, youoe us a dollar. Mail it in, Yeah, mail it into thirty three fifty Peachtree Road, Atlanta and Georgia. Carry up, Josh Clark three zho three one three three two sixes sweet fifteen hundred. Okay, all right, with that done, we can continue on with the podcast. You know what we should have gotten really creative and just like sampled old podcasts and put them together in too. Jerry, do you feel like doing that?

No?

I do a mashup. That's what they call that.

Sure, that's what the kids call it these days. Yeah, yeah, no, we'll just do it straight instead boring and guess is what you call it. I have an intro.

Let's hear it?

Have you heard chuck of a man named Arman Bulladian?

Arm in Tanzerian? Nope, no, I have not done.

Arman Balladian is the owner and sole employee of a company called Bridgeport.

Oh yeah, okay, now I have.

Bridgeport is a music catalog company. Yeah, and like many other music catalog companies, they basically just sit on a lot of copyrights to popular songs the musical composition of those songs.

Right.

Yeah, it's almost like owning stock, yes, like you buy stock in these musics and wait for them to be worth something.

Sure, or you can allegedly shadily get your hands on already valuable music. Sure, and then like stocks, do to what Bridgeport did, which is start suing anyone and everyone whoever sampled it. So Bridgeport made a big flap in two thousand and five when they sued Jay Z for his song Justify My Thug. Yeah, I want to go ahead and add a disclaimer here. I am far too square to talk seriously about hip hop. Like I'm really

So like, yeah, I was. I was down, as they say, from like eighty seven to ninety five ish. That was those were my big hip hop years. Nice and then but these days you say jay Z, and I know that's the that's the handsome man married to that pretty lady. Okay, So we had I'm not down with the new stuff.

We had a similar trajectory.

Yeah, except I used to be into it and it sounds like you never were right. What in the name of God is a walk of flokka?

You know?

Yes?

All right? So anyway, Bridgeport sued jay Z for sampling Madonna's Justify My Love. Somehow Bridgeport got its hands on the copyright to Justify My Love. That's a pretty big song, sure, and when jay Z sampled it, they suit him. Now, this guy runs around suing everybody. Apparently he had like seven hundred lawsuits against just people who sampled George Clinton's work.

Well that's a big attorney fees right there.

Yeah, it is. And but when it pays off, it pays off. So this guy has come to be known a Bridgeport. People like him have come to be known where called sample trolls. Remember patent trolls when I gave like the absolute wrong definition of that. Well, sample troll is somebody who just buys up songs, hangs on to the copyrights, and then sues people who sample them without asking. On the one hand, you can make a case that, well, these people are breaking copyright lawcher by not asking and

Wow, that was a proper intro.

It's been a while.

And that's one, but it's probably the biggest as far as what people think about how music is used in creativity and ownership. And one of the things that you just mentioned was Bridgeport is some big corporation and if you talk to like Hank Shockley, the former producer of Public Enemy, he will say that, you know, we don't have any problems paying music to artists who created the stuff, he said, but they're own by these corporations now, and it's just it's greed on their part.

Yes, which is not There are two sides to every story now, and the music industry, as we'll see, kind of went on a tear of like suing everybody and protecting themselves. And now you kind of understand like, oh, that's why no one feels bad about this whole music piracy thing.

Well, and there was a big rush at one point, because it was a new genre. I mean, we'll get into the history of how it came to be in all but it was a new thing and so all of a sudden, you know, for the first you know, several years, that was open territory. Yeah, and that's when like that was the heyday aps me.

Well, folks nerdier than us might be confused at this point because sampling also refers to digitizing music. Yes, what we're talking about is taking a piece of an already established piece of music, right, a selection of it, and then recreating it using it put maybe putting it back to back to back in a.

Loop sometimes oftentimes actually.

And then creating something new using this right. Yeah, So that's what we're talking about with music sampling, all right, it's been around for a while too.

Yeah. Well you mentioned taking a snippet. Let's go ahead and just get a couple of examples out there. If we want to start out with trying to explain to people what a sample is. And most people know this, ok, there are no further places to look than James Brown's nineteen seventy song Funky Drummer. Let's go ahead and hear that little break beat Oh it's like that. Huh yeah, all right, so that's instantly recognizable.

So that's funky drummer.

That's Funky drummer. And that was who was the drummer.

There, Clyde Stubblefield.

Yes, Clyde Stubblefield, who has never gotten a scent.

No, but he's pretty cool man. He is not trying to sue anybody. He's not seeking anything any damage from this. Literally, thousands of songs have used that drum break, right.

Yeah, James Brown has been sampled and this is not just that song, but a lot of it comes from Funky Drummer twenty seven and twenty nine times. Okay, so the leader.

And you can make a case that Funky Drummer provided the basis for hip hop. Like all early hip hop songs, especially in like the mid to late eighties, all used that drum break, right, Stubblefield's not going after anybody for that.

Well, on the other side too, which we haven't mentioned, is and this is the point that a lot of the hip hop producers would make, is that some of these people are being pulled from obscurity. For instance, the second clip we're gonna play, which is the Amen break from Amen Brother and it was a B side from a very little known song from a group called the Winstons. We can hear this one, dude, Yes, and we'll hear that right now. So that one, to me is slightly better than Funky Drummer.

So that's the Amen brank.

That's the Amen break. And dude, that one has been sampled thousands of times.

So that one gave birth to drum and bass in jungle, like all all jungle music is based on the deconstruction of the amen break. If you're interested in hearing about there's a really cool movie, like a video. It's like eighteen minutes long. It's a YouTube video and the title is video explains the world's most important six second drum loop. Wow, so it gave rise to Jungle. NWA straight out of Compton used that. Yeah, Cold Cut used it. Yeah, and Third Base famously used it as well.

And hundreds of others. Yeah, I like their Base, And that was because we want to give due to some of these folks who created this stuff. That was Gregory Sylvester Coleman, who was the actual drummer that played that lick.

And that was the Winston's.

Yeah, the Winston's excellent Gregory Sylvester Coleman.

So yeah, I think what you're originally saying is some producers are saying, like you ever heard of Gregory Coleman?

Yeah, exactly. So they're they're bringing some of these folks out of obscurity and giving them their due.

And I'm sure selling some records for him here or there.

Yeah, although that record's really hard to find obviously, Well they need to press it again, maybe they should. Okay, So you take an loll cool j Ladies Love Cool James for instance.

Is that what l ALL stands for?

Yeah? You never knew that, No, Yeah, I even listened to him extensively. He was James something and you know the ladies Love Cool James or.

E O Z Cool Jake Cookies, I'm bad see you know, No, I did know. I've just fallen off like you.

Okay, So you take the funky Drummer from James Brown song and you take uh sli in the Family Stones, Trip to Your Heart the the background vocals, and then basically you loop those over and over and over and you have a little song called Mama said Knock you out.

Oh we're about to hear that.

Well, we're gonna hear him separately. Obviously we already played the Funky Drummer, and now this is the Trip to your Heart backing vocals from Slying the Family Stone whom I love. All right, So that's it, dude, over and over and over with ladies love cool James rapping. Okay, and you got a huge, huge hit.

Yeah, oh that was a big one.

Oh yeah huge. I wasn't a big local Jake though.

I like the one. I don't remember what it's called, but it had like the boom box on the cover of the tape. I don't like the album artwork was a boombox.

Yeah that was good. Uh, it had I'm bad on Oh it did. Yeah. Okay, it's not always songs that you're sampling. Sometimes you're sampling stuff from like a TV show or a movie, or like the Living Color song called a Personality. You remember that.

Oh yeah, they had like an FDR speech.

I think it was Kennedy or no, it was FDR.

Kennedy too, Okay, but that that was Kennedy. But he said the only thing we have to fear his fear itself. Yeah, yeah, doubting Thomas. They were like a skinny puppy offshoot. They sampled I think the Day the Earth Stood Still extensively throughout this one album that they created. It was pretty good.

Well, and guns and Roses on their song civil War, remember at the beginning of that they played the cool hand Luke bit over the you know guitar, and then Axel's weasley little voice comes through.

Oh and Metallica is one, oh yeah, yeah, sample Johnny got his gun.

That's right in the video too. Right, So those are all samples. You might just think, oh, that's a snippet from a movie, but it's a sample, just like you would use the amen brake. Right, Okay. The first sampler, if you want to go back in time a bit, was the melotron.

Yeah, the actual not the person but the machine that someone used that was creative for sampling, right.

Yeah, I mean it was. It was the first time that they had ever you know, it's basically a little keyboard. They're very basic. I wish I had one. They're really sweet, and it has a volume, a tone, and a pitch control a low and high octave you can switch between, and then three samples A, B and C flutes, violins, and cello. And it was the first time that they

Oh yeah. And even before that, people would take magnetic tapes, like real, real tapes and literally cut and splice them, yeah, to create their own samples.

Well, and if you want to hear a classic example of the melotron flute and I do, listen to this little clip right here?

Is it aqualong no?

Ready?

Aquaalongue no.

That was the intro for the Beatles Strawberry Fields, and that was Paul McCartney playing the flute sample of the melotron on the melotron. Crazy, pretty cool, huh.

I always thought it was just flutes.

And then like King Crimson and Yet and Genesis, like they went crazy with a melotron.

Yeah. Genesis was awesome early on. Yeah, they awesome, but in a different way, you know.

Yeah, a very different way. Very okay. So you talked about the origins with the tape splicing.

Yeah, yeah, I mean you were. You can go back even further than the melotron. It was at the sixties.

Yes, there were these two dudes.

They were the two Pierre's I call them Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, but probably Pierre Omri, I bet. And they were I guess what you would call a couple of avant garde musical artists, and they created what's called music concrete.

S freaky stuff. Did you hear any of it?

Yeah? I did. There's again the YouTube factors in heavily in this episode.

Yeah.

If you want to find out a little bit about music concrete, check out the nineteen seventy nine BBC documentary The New Sound of Music that is very awesome.

I did watch that actually, Yeah, that guy was a really great host. Yeah it was. He really laid it down.

So he talks about music concrete where it's basically like these people before there were tape recorders. Even I don't know how they were doing this, I guess real the real Yeah, and then these guys were doing splicing. They would record the sound of a can falling or the sound of a metronome or you know, a piece of music off of you know, the radio, and then they would splice it all together into something that's like barely listenable, right.

That's crazy. Did you see the part of the video where they took the tape by hand and were dragged it through. Yeah, that ended up sounding like and I think was sort of the origins of record scratching.

That's what it sounded like to me as well.

Of course it was produced back in the day, so they didn't say it was before record scratching.

This is about to give rise to this. Actually it was coming out at the same time, because it was nineteen seventy nine and that's when like DJ Cool Hurt and Grandmaster Flash, We're starting to get really good. Yeah, they were playing high school so people were taking notice.

That is true. So jumping back again in nineteen sixty one, James Tenny Huh took blue Swede shoes from Elvis Presley and have you heard this thing?

Yeah, it's very avant garde, is the way to put it.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it into Collage number one was what he called it. And it is in many many parts virtually unrecognizable.

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's really hard to listen to.

It is very hard to listen to.

It's a it's a piece of electronic music that's deconstructed. It's Bluth Suade. She's deconstructed.

Yeah, big time.

And I mean if you look back and you're like, holy cow. The video on YouTube shows like the guy sitting in front of his setup. Yeah, and It's like pretty extensive, and the guy was obviously, you.

Know, out of his mind lots of drugs, wasn't he.

But when you look back at it and you're like, oh, that was what nineteen sixty one, that's pretty impressive work.

Yeah, exactly, Jo Job, Dicky Goodman and Bill Buchanan in nineteen fifty six had a more commercial version of I guess you would call it music concrete with Flying Saucer. Did you listen to that one? I did? That was the stuff we heard on FM radio growing up. Remember all that mashup stuff they used to do, like.

Pat Midler's from a Distance with like the during the First Gulf War.

I don't know, I don't remember that, No, I mean like when the radio stations would do these well, let me go and say what it was and play a snippet flying Saucer. They took rock and roll hits from that era and mashed it up with a fake news report about aliens landing from outer space, and it sounded a little something like this, we.

Interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin the Reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real, Captain. See that was the clutters recording to real. We switch you now on the Spoder Reporter down town, Take it away, John.

So that's the stuff that we heard on FM radio. Like they would do. I remember when I was a kid. They would say, like, we're gonna call so and so right now, and they would say, Hey, how you feeling, And all of a sudden you'd hear Buck couldn't sleep at all last night, and then they would ask him in another question. It'd be like an interview, and the answers were snippets from rock songs answering, which is really like, I mean, it had its hey day in the seventies and eighties. For sure.

I don't have a clip, so I'm gonna have to describe it. But the bet Miller thing was slightly different. It would be like Bette Miller's From a Distance, interspersed with patriotic speeches.

Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that.

You remember that.

Yeah, that was sampling, I guess. So it's most jingoistic form.

At the very least. It was a mashup right those Oh, by the way, those Flying Saucer guys, Buchanan and Goodman. Yeah, they went on to do a lot of those things, like they did one during the energy crisis of seventy four, the energy crisis of seventy nine, but it'd be like how much gas will be rationed just enough for the city.

Dude, I remember that, That's what I was remembering.

Really. Yeah, oh, eight years old, I was not cognizant at that time. I had a lot of like poop, my own poop on my hands from like playing with it when you were thinking, wow, this is really neat stuff.

Yeah, I was a little radio kid back then.

Oh. Also, I want to say one more thing, I went a little deeper in the music concrete thing. Okay, and apparently Phillips right the manufacturing concern. Oh yeah, they tried to get into electronic music in like the late fifties and had this whole little wing that let a couple of guys just go to town like trying to make popular electronic music. And if you search acid House from nineteen fifty eight on YouTube, these guys did a pretty good job of it.

Really.

It is very clearly like the predecessor of like it's listenable. It's not just like yeah, yeah, just it's not even avant garde. It has like a beat to it in a melody, and it's just it's really neat interesting. I don't have that clip either.

We should do a podcast on the mogue. That should Okay, that'll be coming.

Didn't you guys do that on the B side? Uh?

I think so, but we'll do it up.

Okay.

We've gotten requests for more music stuff. That's why I picked this one up.

Oh gotcha.

So you flash forward a little bit and you mentioned cool DJ Hirk Graham, DJ grand Master Flash, who a lot of people think that was the group. It was grand Master Flash and the Furious Five if you remember, and they hit it big in nineteen eighty with the song Freedom, which sampled get Up and Dance by the band Freedom. Yeah, pretty straight up.

Well that that kind of took this whole thing into mainstream.

Well, and that's when scratching started too, wasn't it.

Yeah, Grandmaster Flash definitely started scratching. DJ Cole Hirk started sampling very clearly, like he's the guy, right. He's from Kingston, Jamaica, and he moved to New York in nineteen sixty seven I think, and started bringing like his turntables to block parties and he would just he'd find like a drum break or something, and then a drum break from another song, and he'd just keep like putting him together. So it was like one long drum break, maybe bring in a

Crazy, yeah, innovating, Josh, that's even better than crazy. Marley. Marl is someone else we should mention if we're talking about the early heyday. He was a house producer for the Juice Crew, which was Big Daddy, Kane and Bismarckys among others, but he also produced Eric b and raheem Ello, Cool Jay, and he was like, he's off insided as like the early Leader.

What about Redhead Kingpin?

I don't know that.

What is that he's like in there somewhere. Yeah, Big Daddy came in. You just blasted me with the nostalgia.

Oh yeah, remember the hat?

Yeah? Remember the Gumby haircut?

Yeah? Oh yeah, the uh what they call that the high High? Right? Oh? I always thought it was called the Gumby that's what you call it. Huh, Well, they may call it the Gumby hair cut. I don't know. In Toledo it's a fade essentially, Big Daddy Cane. The Beastie Boys, see what I was talking about, Like back in the day, in the in the eighties, late eighties, they were constructing full songs from dozens of samples. And this was before you had to pay permission rights and

Yeah, I don't know if it's the pinnacle, it's well, I think it's one of several pinnacles.

Well check your head was great too, But Paul's boutique was great. Hey ladies, who's sixteen samples? And that was not on the low side. But Terminator X of Public Enemy and the beast Boys would craft songs out of dozens and dozens of samples.

And that's that's DJ Hurricane. You're giving props too. He's the Beastie Boys. DJ was he always I believe so okay, but.

I think they all like wrote the stuff together. Okay, as we'll find out, because the the court case against the Beast Boys was Newton versus Diamond Ouch, and we all know who Diamond.

Is, Dustin Diamond, Mike D's brother.

No No No. Groups like De La Soul, Public Enemy and the Beasts were crafting these songs whereas nowadays, partially because I think they're not as good and creative, and partially because you have to pay rights. You'll get like a kid rock who just plays this one loop over and over and that's the sample he uses in his song. Yeah, so it's not like he's crafting these songs out of dozens and dozens of samples.

Well. Public Enemy even said like, after all these lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, if you're crafting a song out of seventeen other songs, you basically have to like figure out something else because you can't do it anymore. And I mean, what a buzzkill too to make a song and then take it to the to your record company overlords who say like, Okay, we can get this cleared, we can get this cleared. This one we can't clear

Well, let's go ahead and talk about it then, okay, right law.

The one that changed everything, it was. It was not the first copyright lawsuit. I think those guys who did the flying Saucer thing were the first to start attracting copyright lawsuits. Yeah. Yeah, But the first one as far that that changed hip hop, I guess was Bismarquys landed a beef from one Gilbert O'Sullivan who wrote the song alone Again naturally.

And what seventies for You Got What I Need or whatever?

No Alone Again his nineteen ninety one song from I Need a Haircut. That album it's called alone Again, and bis Marquis lifted pretty heavily from that, and he was signed to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers got sued by the owners of Alone again naturally right, and the judge ruled in the copyright holders favor against Warner Brothers. So all of a sudden, Warner Brothers, big business, big company,

Yeah, I'm surprised it took that long for people to catch on. Yeah, and it was money is what did it? As sales and you know, it was just like DJs and queens, was no big deal. In the nineteen seventies and early eighties, right, but all of a sudden, these artists, these hip hop artists were making money, yeah, on work from that was previously recorded by other people, and people saw green essentially, It's true, it's all dollar signs they did.

But let me ask you, this, should the original people, the original artists, Like I can understand just hating on corporations because they didn't create this at all. These right happen to own it or whatever, But it should the original artists expect some sort of compensation for somebody who's making millions of dollars by taking some of that original work. Do they deserve any kind of consideration?

I think so.

I think I agree too, depending on how like what degree the work has changed, right, you know.

I say, use the crap out of it, but get permission and pay royalties. Yeah, Like, if that's the genre you're if that's what you're choosing to do, Like no one's forcing these people to do that, that's what you're choosing to do, then you've got to play by the rules, That's what I think, and then go wild with it.

Well, I guess that's kind of like the status quo now. And that's not working necessarily. It's leading to like your beef with kid.

Rock, Well, my beef is that he's just not very good.

It's large. It's larger than that. You'd be careful, man. He gets in fights and stuff.

Yeah, waffle houses in Atlanta.

Yeah, so he knows where we live.

I saw Bizmarque at the airport one time.

By the way, you we hung out with biz Marquie once. Really yeah, played PlayStation.

Yeah. I saw him on the on the little internal train and I was like, is that yeah? That is I mean I thought for about a half a second and.

I was like, yeah, they're worrying the gray curly powdered wig.

No, no, he didn't wear that marque. All right, So let's talk about what the cost of it is. Ten dollars, No, not ten dollars. At first, it was something it was called a buyout, so you purchased rights to sample a song. It wasn't that much money. But like I said, as sales grew in the rap and hip hop world, and uh, you know rock Band said it too, they started paying rollover rates, which is you got to pay per your sales, right, which all of a sudden, you know, the bill got larger and large and.

Larger, And you're not necessarily just paying one person. No, No, you might pay the copyright owner of the composition of the music. And if you use a specific recording rather than record that composition yourself and use it, then you have to pay the owner of that particular recording, which aren't necessarily one and the same right, and they both might want equal amounts of money rather than giving you a deal.

You know, or if you're Vanilla Ice, you would just slightly alter Queen's famous baseline from under pressure, not even so much as credit them on your album. Forget asking for rights. He didn't even say like special thanks to Queen and settle out of court eventually for an undisclosed sum of money.

He raises jet skis now under the name Vanilla Ice.

Does he also he has a home renovation show too?

Does he really?

Yeah?

Oh yeah, he flips houses.

Yeah yeah, it's pretty weird. Well it's not weird, it's weird for him to do it.

Uh.

Mc hammer very famous for his sampling of and Can't Touch This and his pants super Freak? Oh yeah yeah?

Did he royalties?

No? He did? That was all on the up and up. Is he really? Yeah? He was back then.

Well he's he.

Got a pray angelist. You got to pray just to make it.

Today, says Run from Run DMC.

Really yeah, huh. And and Ice Ice Baby is out there flipping houses.

Yeah, they all got to do something. And Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell, Uh.

It was not a rapper.

He was evicted. He was in the process of being evicted, and he had he launched a web campaign to save his house.

I remember that.

I wonder whatever happened.

I don't know. The drum intro for led Zeppelins when the levee breaks, that thing has been sampled dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

Yeah, but it's so massive and it's so immediately recognizable that it takes over a song, you know what I'm saying, Like, I don't. I don't think it's a it's just it's basically like, oh, this this is a led Zeppelin sample, rather than like that's a great thing about a men brother, It's like no one ever ever heard of that. But it was a perfect drum break. Yeah, that LEDs that when the lovey breaks, it's just it's too led Zeppelin.

So too recognizable and you're off of it.

Yeah, I just started thinking about Robert Plant right.

I think they were down with it though. Jimmy Page, I remember, was totally cool with it. Yeah, yeah, with the musing that. Of course it wasn't his lick. No, it was John Bonham. Uh, he's not around to say anything no and things jogging job. In two thousand and three, the b C Boys, I said, the landmark case Newton v. Diamond. They did a sample and we'll hear it right now, the very beginning of past the mic contains this six second flute stab, so you hear that. It's like three

I've always thought it was something like eight notes. Was the cutoff or something like that, Like there's a number of notes. I remember that from being a kid. I don't know why that would have come up when I was a kid, but I seem to remember that.

Well. The BC Boys won their case, actually, and the judge said that the brief composition consisting of three notes separated by a half step, is not sufficient to sustain a claim for copyright infringement. So that was we already played the clip, didn't we. Yeah? Yeah, so that was it. And you also you not only heard at the very beginning of that song, but you hear it underlying the entire song.

What's the best sample of all time? Best use of a sample? Your favorite? How about that doesn't have to be best?

You know what my favorite is from the b C Boys. Hey ladies, remember when it's from Ballroom Blitz. You know that song, Ballroom Blitz? Yeah, a terrible, terrible song. Yeah sampled. BC boy sampled that song, and hey ladies, when they break that one part down, it goes she thinks she's the passionate one that's from Ballroom Blitz.

Huh wow.

Yeah, So that's my favorite one.

I definitely wouldn't have ever ever caught that.

U still love the BC Boys Back in the day.

Have you ever heard the pop will eat Itself?

Uh?

Yeah?

Back in like the early nineties are kind of electronic. They had a song, well, they're one big song psycho Sexual actually sampled a classical composition, Eric Sati's Jinna Pedi Nice. It's really awesome. I'd heard I loved Gina Pedi and I love Psychosexual, and then one day I just heard it just where I was like, oh.

My god, that's that's.

That's one of my favorites. Favorite, like probably of all time was Ice Cubes Good Day, Yeah, using the Isley Brothers Footsteps in the Dark.

Yeah, that was good. And then Doctor Dre's The Chronic was like, that was just the soundtrack of one year of my college life. Oh yeah, and that was a lot of George Clinton in there. Tons and Dre was actually one of the first people to stop sampling and start recreating stuff with live musicians.

Himself, which is called producing. Yeah, you're right, And now he has his own line of headphones.

Should we talk about Danger Mouse real quick?

Sure?

The Gray Album?

Yeah.

He famously in two thousand and four did a mashup of the Beatles White Album and Jay Z's The Black Album and called it the Gray Album. Very creative, and Emi, who owned the Beatles recordings, even though Jay Z and Paul McCartney were totally fine with it, they shut it down and said, you're not selling this.

No, but it made his career.

Yeah, and it got around on the internet such that he was like, fine, I'm not selling it, but everyone's going to hear it anyway.

I'll go hang out with ce Lo and do some stuff in MF Doom and we'll just make some money from that instead. Oh, chuck, what about cover songs?

Yeah, since nineteen o nine, you can cover songs.

You can play a song faithfully, especially live, Yeah, and not pay the owner of the composition as cent, as long as you don't alter it, like play it in a different language or something like that. Right, And there's a lot of people who say, well, wait a minute, that's like that's a sample in its entirety. This is crazy. Yeah, what is the deal? And everyone has said, we don't know, we'll figure it out in another ten years.

You know what bugs me is when these new country artists will cover a song that's like a year old, like another song and release it's a great acclaim.

Well, that used to happen like a lot, like more than one person would record the same song and they get released about the same time, like in the fifties and the sixties. So just be glad you don't live then, because you'd be going crazy.

That's true. And just so you guys know, the reason we're able to play these clips is because something called fair use, which we've talked about a lot with Jerry.

Yeah, because just put your pens down, lawyers, because we know what we're doing.

It's only in the United States and it is the exclusive right granted to us to play a snippet of something without acquiring permission, as long as we use it as commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting. Well wait a minute, this is what we're doing.

Does that mean that if this is heard in Australia, though, are we still covered by fair use that?

I don't know.

I we'll find out. All right, Well, let's it for music sampling. This turned out better than I thought. You got anything else? No, I mean you got any more samples?

No, I'm putting my turntable back in my pocket. Okay, and you know they have those little iPhone turntables now, yeah, which is eh. Come on, Jerry and Sid gave us it.

If you want to learn more about music sampling, you can type that into the handy search part HowStuffWorks dot Com, which means it's time for listener mail.

Before listener mail, Josh, I want to point people who are into sampling in the history of sampling to go to who sampled dot com.

I'm glad you mentioned this. I meant to mention it too.

It's a really awesome website and it allows you basically you can you can search for artists who have sampled and who have been sampled, and search for songs and they basically throw them up side by side as two turntables, like the original sample or the original uh you know, break or whatever than how it was used. It's pretty cool.

You can plain I'm simultaneously.

Yeah, that's awesome.

It's something.

So that is WhoSampled dot com. Yeah, all right, Josh, I'm gonna read this. It's kind of a long one, but this is about spies. And this is from Tom and he said that his family has a strange tendency of being arrested on suspicion of being Kiwi spies New Zealand spies in France.

They all wear trench coats.

The first story concerns my parents on their honeymoon in nineteen eighty five. It was immediately following the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor by French saboteurs. My parents were traveling into France from the UK when they were arrested and detained on suspicion of being New Zealand counter terrorists. Nothing could be further from the truth by the way they were held in separate holding cells for two days. When French agents would come inside the cell,

Yeah. Way to thwart the Nazis.

Yeah nice? How about that? That's from Tom R.

Thanks a lot, Tom for letting us know that we appreciate it. Wow. I guess if you have a cool family story, we want to hear that. We're always We're always up for us and you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

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