Stuff You Should Know - How Music Sampling Works

Episode Date: March 29, 2012

Today music sampling is a common practice, especially in electronic or hip-hop music. But how does it work? After all, other artists made the original music, and most of them would presumably like to be paid. Tune in to learn more about music sampling. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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go to audiblepodcast.com slash stuff. That's audiblepodcast.com slash stuff. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and that makes this the super sampling version of stuff you should know. The super stuff guide to sampling. Could that be an audio book? Why not? As a matter of fact, if you're listening to this right now, you owe us a dollar. Mail it in. Mail it in to 3350 Peach Tree Road, Atlanta, Georgia. Carat of Josh Clark. 3031226. Sweet 1500. 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. Jerry, do you feel like doing that? No. Do a mashup? That's what they call it. Sure. That's what the kids call it these days. Yeah. No, we'll just do it straight instead. Boring, I guess is what you call it. I have an intro. Let's hear it. Have you heard Chuck of a man named Armin Boletian? Armin Tanzarian? Nope. No. I have not, then. Armin Boletian 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? 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 what Bridgeport did, which is start suing anyone and everyone who ever sampled it. So Bridgeport made a big flap in 2005 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 into elevator music right now, seriously. Yeah. So when I say things like Justify My Thug or Jay-Z or Breaks. Right. I'm speaking strictly as an outside observer, an interested outside observer, but I'm not, I'm not from the streets.

So like I don't, yeah. I was, I was down as they say from like 87 to 95-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 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-a-flocka? 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. It's a pretty big song. Sure. And when Jay-Z sampled it, they sued him. Now this guy runs around suing everybody.

Only had like 700 lawsuits against just people who sampled George Clinton's work. Well, that's a big attorney's fees right there. Yeah, it is. And, but when it pays off, it pays off. So this guy's come to be known, Bridgeport, people like him have come to be known were called sample trolls. Remember Patton trolls when I gave like the absolute wrong definition of that? Yeah. Well, a sample troll is somebody who just buys up songs, hangs on the copyrights and then sues people who sample them without asking. Right. On the one hand, you can make a case that, well, these people are breaking copyright law. Sure. By not asking and getting permission to use samples of this. Yeah. On the other hand, Bridgeport has made it their

aim to sue anybody who sampled it at all, even if they've taken the work and made it unrecognizable. Right. Which that kind of a lot of people are on the other side of the aisle going like, that's ridiculous. That stifles creativity. This is just one of the many interesting aspects of music sampling. Wow. That was a proper intro. It been a while. And that's one, but it's probably the biggest as far as what people think about how music is used and 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 this stuff. He said, but they're owned by these corporations now and it's just, it's greed on their part. Yes. But there are two sides to every story. And the music industry, as we'll see, kind of went on the 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, no, it 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 and 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. And that's when like that was the heyday, if you ask me.

Well, folks nerdy or the nests 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. Yeah, 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. Okay. There are no

further places to look than James Brown's 1970 song, Funky Drummer. Let's go ahead and hear that little breakbeat. Oh, it's like that. 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 cent. No, but he's pretty cool, man. He is not trying to sue anybody is not seeking anything, any damages from and 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. 2729 times. Okay. So the leader and you can make a case of Funky Drummer provided

the basis for hip hop, like all early hip hop songs, especially in like the mid to late eighties, all use that drum break, right? Yeah. Stubblefield's not going after anybody for that. But what he did was get together with some documentarians who made something called copyright criminals, a documentary called copyright criminals to release a special version of the DVD that has all new, ready to sample Clyde Stubblefield drum breaks that he created just for this. And if you want to use them, you just give them like 15% of your of your sales. Nice. So he's like doing it. He's trying out a different model. Well, on the other side too, which we haven't mentioned is, is, and this is a 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 going to 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 Winston's War. We can hear this one too. Yes. And we'll hear that right now. So that one to me is slightly better than funky drummer. So that's the amen break. That's the amen break. And dude, that one has been sampled thousands of times. So that one gave birth to drum and bass and 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 18 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. Um, NWA straight out of Compton used that cold cut used it. Um, 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. 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. So that record is really hard to find. Obviously. Well, they need to press it again. Maybe they should. Okay. So you take an LL Cool J. Ladies love Cool James, for instance. Is that what LL stands for? Yeah, you never knew that? No, no, I haven't listened to him extensively. He was James something. And, you know, the ladies love Cool James or Eosie Cool J 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 my James Brown song. And you take a Sly and the Family Stones trip to your

heart, 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. Or about to hear that. Well, we're going to hear them separately. Obviously, we already played the funky drummer. And now this is the trip to your heart backing vocals from Sly and 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. That wasn't a big L. O. Cool J. I like the one I don't remember what it's called, but it had like the boombox on the cover of the tape. Like the album artwork was a boombox.

Yeah, that was good. It had I'm bad on. Oh, it did. 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, cult of personality. Remember that? Oh, yeah, they had like an FDR speech. I think it was Kennedy. Or no, it was FDR. Asked Kennedy to. Okay. But that was Kennedy. Or he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah. Douting 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 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 Weasley little voice comes through. Oh, and Metallica is one. Oh, 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 break. Right. Okay. The first sampler, if you want to go back in time a bit was the Melotron. Yeah, the actual not not the person, but the machine that someone used that was created 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 basically had ever sampled anything like that. So you press the keyboard key and it plays back a pre recorded loop of a single note of that single note on a flute, let's say. Okay. Which seems, you know, you take it for granted now when you buy these keyboards, we can do a million different things. But back then the Melotron was huge. Oh yeah. And even before that people would take magnetic tapes, like real real tapes and literally cut and splice them 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 aqua long? No, ready? Aqua Long. 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 Yes, and Genesis, like they went crazy with the Melotron. Yeah, Genesis was awesome early on. Yeah, they stayed awesome, but in a different way. You know, yeah, a very different way. Okay, so you talked about the origins with the tape splicing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can go back even further than the Melotron was at the 60s. Yes, there were these two dudes. They were the two piers, I call them Pierre Schaefer and Pierre

Henry, but probably Pierre Henri. 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. It'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 1979 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, 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're doing this. I guess real to real. Yeah, it was

really real. And then these guys were doing splicing. They would record the sound of a can falling or the sound of a metronome or a piece of music off of the radio. And then they would splice it all together into something that's like barely listenable. But it was electronically reproduced music. And it formed the basis of everything that came after it that had anything to do with electronic from like Pink Floyd to all electronic music to the residents, to Silver Apples, to all these people who craft work, who created electronic music. It's all based on these two guys creating this in like 1948 or something like that. That's crazy. Did you see the part of the video where they took the tape by hand and were dragging

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. So it was 1979. And that's when like DJ Cool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were starting to get really good. Yeah. They were playing high school so people were taking notice. That is true. So jumping back again in 1961, James Tinney took blue suede 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. And to 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 piece of electronic music that's deconstructed. It's blue suede shoes 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, you're like, oh, that was what 1961. That's pretty impressive work. Yeah, exactly. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going

to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

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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 the that mashup stuff they used to do? Like a bit middlers 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. I'm 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. Yeah. 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. 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 going to call so and so right now. And they would say, hey, how are you feeling? And all of a sudden you'd hear, but couldn't sleep at all last night. And then they would ask them another question and it'd be like an interview and the answers were snippets from from rock songs answering, which is really like, I mean, it had to say date in the 70s and 80s for sure. I don't have a clip. So I'm going to have to describe it. But the bet middler thing was slightly different. It would be like bet middlers from a distance

interspersed with patriotic speeches. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that. You remember that? Yeah. Yeah. That was sampling. I guess so. It's most jingoistic form. At the very least it was a mash up, 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 74. I remember the crisis of 79. Yeah. But it'd be like, how much gas will be ratcheted? Just enough for the city. Dude, I remember that. That's what I was remembering. Really? Yeah. Oh, I was 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 at that 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 was that led a couple of guys just go to town, like trying to make popular electronic music. And if you search asset house from 1958 on YouTube, these guys did a pretty good job of it really is very clearly like the predecessor of like it's listenable. It's not just like yeah, yeah, just it's not it's not even on guard. It has like a beat to it and 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 Moog.

That should. Okay. That'll be coming. Didn't you guys do that on the B side? 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, got you. So you flash forward a little bit and you mentioned cool DJ Herc and grand DJ Grandmaster Flash who a lot of people think that was the group. It was Grandmaster Flash in the Furious Five, if you remember. And they hit it big in 1980 with the song Freedom, which sampled Get Up and Dance by the band Freedom. Yeah. Pretty straight up. Well, that kind of took this whole thing into mainstream. Well, that's when scratching started too, wasn't it? Yeah. Grandmaster Flash definitely started scratching. DJ Cool Herc started sampling very clearly. Like he's the guy.

Right. He's from Kingston, Jamaica, and he moved to New York in 1967, 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 just keep like putting them together. So it was like one long drum break, maybe bring in a little bit of a bass line and I went back and listened to some of it and it was good stuff, man. Was it? And he's doing this in like the mid-70s and yeah, he started sampling as we know it, like turntable sampling. 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 Biz Marquis, among others. Yeah. But he also produced Eric B. and Rakeem, L.O. Cool J, and he was like, he's often cited as like the early leader. What about Redhead Kingpin? I don't know that. What is that? He's like in there somewhere. Oh, is he? Yeah. Big Daddy Kane, man. You just blasted me with the nostalgia. Oh, yeah. Remember the hat? Yeah. Remember the Gumbi haircut? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The, uh, what do they call it? The high, high right? Oh, I always thought it was called a Gumbi. That's what you called it. Huh? Well, they may call it a Gumbi haircut. I don't know. In Toledo. It's a fade, essentially. Big Daddy Kane. The Beastie Boys. See, what I was talking about, like back in the day in the 80s, late 80s, they were constructing

full songs from dozens of samples. And this was before you had to pay permission rights and stuff like that. So you get a song like Hey Ladies from Paul's Boutique, which is, if you ask me, the pinnacle for the Beastie Boys. Paul's Boutique or Hey Ladies? Paul's Boutique. Yeah. I don't know if it's the pinnacle. I think it's one of several pinnacles. Well, check your head was great too, but Paul's Boutique was great. Hey ladies, you have 16 samples and that was not on the low side, but Terminator X of Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys would craft songs out of dozens and dozens of samples. And that's DJ Hurricane you're giving props to. 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 court case against the Beastie 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 Beasties 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 a 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 17 other songs, you basically have to like figure out something else because you can't

do it anymore. And I mean, what a buzzkill to to make a song and then take it to the to the your record company overlords who say like, okay, we can get this cleared. We can get this cleared. This one we can't clear no way we're ever clearing this one. So go back and redo everything. Yeah. So you have like, I don't know, two thirds of your song is intact. But the other third is it has holes in it, you know, that's it kind of takes away from the whole thing. But at the same time, I mean, again, it's breaking a law. It's a copyright law. And it's not an arbitrary law. It's not it's not a superfluous law. There is validity to it. You know, well, let's go and talk about it then. Okay, copyright law, the one that changed everything. It wasn't 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. But the first one as far that that changed hip hop, I guess, was Bismarck, he landed a beef from one Gilbert O'Sullivan, who wrote the song alone again, naturally. And what was it for for you got what I need or whatever. No, alone again. Oh, his 1991 song from I need a haircut, that album, it's called alone again. And Bismarck, he lifted pretty heavily from that. And he was signed to Warner Brothers, 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 sure

starts circling the wagons like okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There we're really exposed right now because yeah, all of our hip hop artists are running around sampling anybody they want to. Right. And now we can get sued for it. And the judge caught a lot of flak because he said, and not only not only am I ruling in your favor, I think that this should go to some sort of criminal prosecution. Wow. Right. Because this is their defense, Warner Brothers defense was it's rampant. Everyone's doing this. We've been doing it for 10 years. Like what's your problem? And the judge was like, well, if that's the case, then we need to really start looking into this and that shut everything down. That's when sampling went from art to business. 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 when you know, it was just like DJs and Queens was no big deal in the 1970s and early 80s. But all of a sudden these artists, these hip hop artists were making money on work from that was previously recorded by other people and people saw green, essentially. It's true. They saw 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. They just happened to own it or whatever. But if 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. Yeah. I say use the crap out of it, but get permission and pay royalties. Yeah. Like if that's the genre, 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 out 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 larger than that. You be careful, man. He gets in fights and stuff. Yeah. Waffle House is in Atlanta. Yeah. So he knows where we live.

But I saw Bismarcky at the airport one time, by the way. You be hung out with Bismarcky once. Really? Yeah. Played PlayStation. Yeah. I saw him 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, that's it. That man wearing that gray curly powdered wig. No, he didn't wear that. Bismarcky. All right. So let's talk about what the cost of it is. $10. No, not $10. 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 and the rap and hip hop world and you know, Rock Band said it too, they started to pay a rollover rates, which is you got to pay per your sales.

Right. Which all of a sudden, you know, the bill got larger and larger and larger. Yeah. 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 in the same. And they both might want equal amounts of money rather than giving you a deal. 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? He has a home renovation show too. Does he really? Yeah. Oh yeah, he flips houses. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty weird. Oh, it's not weird. It's weird for him to do it. MC Hammer, very famous for his sampling of, and can't touch this. And his pants. Super free. Oh yeah. Yeah. Did he not pay royalties? No, he did. Okay. That was all in the up and up. He's a veteran now. Is he really? Yeah, he was back then. Well, he's, he gotta pray. He gotta pray just to make it today. Right. So is Ron from Run DMC. Really? Yeah. And Ice Ice Baby is out there flipping houses. Yeah. They all gotta do something. And Dustin Diamond from Save by the Bell.

It was not a rapper. He was evicted. He was in the process of being evicted. He had, he launched a web campaign to save his house. I remember that. I wonder what ever happened. I don't know. Yeah. The drum intro for Led Zeppelin's When the Levy 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 just, it, it's basically like, oh, this, this is a Led Zeppelin sample rather than like, that's the great thing about Amen Brother. It's like no one ever, ever heard of that, but it was a perfect drum break. Yeah. That led, that led, when the Levy 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 music that, of course, it wasn't his lick. No, it was John Bonham. Yeah. He's not around to say anything. No. The War on Drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes,

they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. How's that New Year's resolution coming along? You know the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save a retirement? Well,

you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet. Roughly four in five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two. But that doesn't have to be the case for you and your goals. Our podcast, How to Money Can Help. That's right. We're two best buds who've been at it for more than five years now and we want to see you achieve your money goals. And it's our goal to provide the information and encouragement you need to do it. We keep the show fresh by answering list of questions, interviewing experts and focusing on the relevant financial news that you need to know about. Our show is chock full of the personal finance knowledge that you need with guidance three times a week and we talk about debt payoff. If let's say you've had a

particularly spend-thrift holiday season, we also talk about building up your savings, intelligent investing and growing your income. No matter where you are on your financial journey, How to Money's got your back. Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them achieve their financial goals. Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to How to Money on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2003, the Beastie 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.

Do you hear that? Yes. It's like three notes on a flute and they got the rights, the sample rights for the sound recording but not the compositional rights because they were like, you know, this guy played it so we'll pay him but it's three notes on a flute like we don't feel like we should have to pay compositional rights. Yeah, I thought it was something like eight notes was the cut off or something like that. Like there's a set 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 Beastie 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. So that was it and also you not only hear it at the very beginning of that song but you hear it underlying the entire song. It's the best sample of all time, best use of a sample. Your favorite, how about that? It doesn't have to be best. You know what? My favorite is from the Beastie Boys, Hey Ladies. Remember when it's from Ballroom Blitz. You know that song? Ballroom Blitz. Yeah. A terrible, terrible song. Yeah. That's a sample, Beastie Boys 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. You still love the Beastie Boys back in the day. Have you ever heard The Pop Will Eat Itself? Yeah. Back in like the early 90s they were kind of electronic. They had a song, well they're one big song, Psycho Sexual. Actually sampled a classical composition, Eric Sati's Junipiti. It's really awesome. I'd heard, I love Junipiti and I love Psycho Sexual and then one day I just heard it just right. I was like, oh my God, that's that. That's one of my favorites. Favorite, like probably of all time was Ice Cube's Good Day. Yeah. Using the Isley Brothers footsteps in the dark. Yeah, that was good. And then Dr.

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. Yeah, tons. And Dr. 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 2004 did a mashup of The Beatles' White Album, Jay-Z's The Black Album, and called it The Gray Album. Very creative. And EMI, who own 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 C. 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 1909 you can cover songs. You can play a song faithfully, especially live. Yeah. And not pay the owner of the composition a cent. Yeah. 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 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 10 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 to great acclaim. Well, that used to happen like a lot. Like more than one person would record the same song and they'd get released about the same time, like in the 50s and the 60s. 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. So 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. That's what we're doing. Does that mean that if this is heard in Australia, though, is that are we still covered by Fair Use? That I don't know. Well, we'll find out. All right. Well, that'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, uh, you know, they have those little iPhone turntables now. Yeah, which is come on. Jerry, if you want to learn more about music sampling, you can type that into the handy search bar, howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail.

Oh, before listener mail, Josh, I want to point people who are into sampling in the history of sampling to go to who sampled.com. I'm glad you mentioned this. I meant to mention it too. It's a really awesome website and it's, um, it allows you basically you can, you can search for artists who have sampled and who have been sampled and, uh, 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, then how it was used. It's pretty cool. You can play them simultaneously. Yeah, that's awesome. So that is who sampled.com. Yeah. All right, Josh, I'm going to read this. It's kind of a long one, but this is about, uh, 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. Uh, the first story concerns my parents on their honeymoon in 1985. Uh, it was immediately following the sinking of the rainbow warrior in Auckland Harbor by French saboteurs. Uh, my parents were traveling into France from the UK when they were arrested and detained on suspicion of being New Zealand counter terrorists. Uh, 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 smoking cigarettes and yelling at them in French. It was pretty terrifying for my mother who was only 21 at the time. And after two days,

they were released and dropped off at the New Zealand embassy where they learned of the incident back in Auckland. So that's one incident. Okay. The second story is my, uh, comes from a great, great Auntie Anne or sister Marine. Uh, she's a nun with the order of the little sisters of the poor and she is 98 years old this year and is still going strong. Uh, her story originates with the Nazis. She had been with her fellow nuns in rural France looking after the elderly who had been abandoned as the Nazis approached. Uh, they were also sheltering three to four British airmen who had been shot down nearby. Uh, when the Nazis arrived, they rounded up the nuns and the airmen accused the nuns of being spies. She and her fellow nuns, uh, of which she was mother superior,

were taken to a POW camp interrogated by this, uh, Gestapo officers. He's none. Yeah. Uh, eventually she was marched into the commandant's office, told she was being taken away, believing she was going to be shot. She told them she would not cooperate unless her nuns were also set free. Uh, turned into a pretty hostile negotiation and she stuck to her guns, even though at one point she was looking down the barrel of one. Wow. Uh, the commandant finally agreed and bundled all the sisters together on a freight train, but they believed they were going to be executed together. Suddenly the train stopped. The guards on the train threw the nuns out one by one into the snow. The doors closed and the train sped off. Uh, Sister Marie eventually led her

nuns to the convent where they spent the last two years of the war, not only helping the elderly, but also sheltering and feeding members of the French resistance. So, uh, she, he said, uh, Tom said, if I could read this, uh, on the podcast, I know Auntie Anne would really appreciate the air time for the convent in which she is dedicated over 70 years to, and I would appreciate letting people know about why nobody in my family feels safe in France. Man. So 98 year old Auntie Anne, the nun, we thank you for all your work over the years, and I hope you make it to 120. Yeah, way to thwart the Nancy's. Yeah. Nice. How about that? That's from Tom R. Thanks a lot, Tom, for letting us know that. We appreciate it. Um, wow. I guess if you have a cool family story, we want

to hear that. We're always, we're always up for those. Uh, there's a plethora that's entirely untrue. There's actually just three, but there's three ways you can get in touch with us electronically. One is through Twitter. Our Twitter handle is, uh, syskpodcast. All one word. If you're not following us on Twitter, you're missing out. Believe me. Agreed. Um, also you can hang out with us on Facebook. We're on there pretty frequently. Right? Yeah. Uh, facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com. This podcast is brought to you by audible.com, the internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions

of many New York Times bestsellers. To try Audible free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audiblepodcast.com slash stuff. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off the cops. Are they just like looting? They just like pillaging. They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever

you get your podcast. I'm Langston Kerman. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Borey and I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting groundbreaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Cowell Goodman, Sam J. Quinta Brunson and so many more new episodes around every Tuesday, many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.