A virtual representation of those records that you used to hide at the back of your collection, hoping that your close friends would never find them and ridicule you while secretly reveling in their awfulness
One of my favourite 4 Seasons tracks. This single from 1966 is notable for the following reasons:
'17' in the title is supposed to represent both the elements from classical music (according to co-writer Denny Randell) and the 17th single released by The 4 Seasons (although they had released singles under a permutation of names and Frankie Valli solo releases by then)
This was the first 4 Seasons single with Joe Long singing bass. He had replaced original member Nick Massi. Unfortunately, Joe passed away from COVID-19 earlier this year
Has the most number of chromatic key changes in a Top 40 song, tied with Bobby Darrin's 'Mack the Knife'
Bonus tracks: if we are looking for 4 Seasons related tracks that are somewhat silly, look no further than those released in the mid-60s under the nom-de-plume, The Wonder Who?, starting with this Bob Dylan cover...
... followed up by a cover of 'On the Good Ship Lollipop"...
... and seeing as it was mentioned above, here is 'Mack the Knife'
Credit To The Nation was one M.C. Fusion aka Matty Hanson with a couple of dancers. If you know of them at all, it is probably from their 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' sampling track 'Call It What You Want' released at the height of mid-90s 'Brit Hop' or their association with Chumbawamba on 'Enough Is Enough'/'The Day The Nazi Died'.
This, however, was their first release on Chumbawamba'a 'Agit Prop' label in 1991 and, somewhat similar to 3rd Bass's 'Pop Goes The Weasel' released the same year, is a Vanilla Ice diss track!
Bonus Clips: 'Call It What You Want'...
... 'Enough Is Enough'...
... 'The Day The Nazi Died'...
... and for comparison, here's 3rd Bass with the Peter Gabriel sampling 'Pop Goes The Weasel'
Longtime readers of this blog may know that I get some of inspiration from songs that I have heard on TV e.g. from commercials or music heard as background. Today's selection is also from TV - however, this one was actually used in a Bollywood routine on 'So You Think You Can Dance' (Season 14, Episode 13 for those interested). Realising that this songs 'slaps' (I believe that is the correct term from my kids), I turned to the internet to find out more...
... and came across the scene from the 2015 movie 'Do Dhadakne Do' where it originated and fell in love. Now, I have not seen the entire film so have absolutely no context about this scene but a couple of things are apparent:
The scene was (allegedly) filmed in a single shot and;
It looks like every Jewish wedding or bar mitzvah that I have ever attended!
You may recognise some of the actors in this movie e.g. Priyanka Chopra (Mrs Nick Jonas), Anil Kappor (Slumdog Millionaire, 24) etc. However, as is usual with most Bollywood movies, none of the actors here sing and instead 'playback singers' are used. In this case, the song was composed by the trio Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy and features Shankar Mahadevan, Yashita Sharma, Manish Kumar Tipu, Farhan Akhtar, and Sukhwinder Singh.
You can file this tongue-twister next to other 'big beat' tunes on this blog such as Crazy Horses, I'm So Crazy and Neanderthal Man but I believe that I first heard this in a scene in the TV series 'Fargo'.
Adriano Celentano was an already-established pop star and film director in his native Italy when he wrote 'Prisencolinensinainciusol' in 1972. The song, if you hadn't realised already, is written in total gibberish but made to sound as if it was an American rock song to Italian ears. Celentano stated "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."
Here's an appropriately 70s Italian TV performance from the great man himself:
Bonus Clips: there are some other great contemporary TV performances of 'Prisencolinensinainciusol' that can be found online:
... the official video with Adriano on acoustic guitar(!)...
and a skit where Celentano attempts to teach the chorus to, um, Will Smith of all people...
2022 Update: OMG I've just found out that Mike Reid (British actor/comedian, probably best known as Frank Butcher in Eastenders and Doug The Head in Snatch) covered this back in 1974 as 'Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso'! What it lacks in the gibberish lyrics and rhythm is more than made up by the cockney Reid's 'triffic' performance. BTW I discovered this from a Twitter thread started by none other than Tim Burgess (him from The Charlatans). Cheers Tim!
Oh come on! How can you not listen to this without breaking out in a huge grin? :-)
The Bees (or Band of Bees if you're in the US) come from the Isle of Wight, of all places (yes, that's a real place) and released a few albums in the early 2000s but seem to have been pretty much dormant for the last decade or so. A shame really as they were quite fun...
Bonus Clip: Their cover of 'A Minha Menina' by Jorge Ben/Os Mutantes (who I may do a feature on in the near future).
Remember way back when when I posted a blog entry on Jesus Christ Superstar? Many years ago, when I was first searching for JCS related material, I came across a number of videos of Middle Eastern pop songs from the 70s, all of which appeared to be based on the main riff from 'Heaven On Their Minds'!
Here is 'Heaven On Their Minds' as performed by Murray Head from the original JCS concept album (the Carl Anderson version taken from the film can be found on the JCS blog linked above):
And now here is 'Soyle Beni' by Grazia. Grazia Peretz was an Israeli from a family with a Turkish background who began performing at Turkish weddings and Mediterranean nightclubs. Her father paid for an album session with the Jaffa record label, Koliphone, for her 16th birthday and the album was released in 1978. 'Soyle Beni' is a traditional song with added Moog and the funky bassline riff.
Next up: 'Talagh' by Googoosh, an Iranian pop singer from the 70s. Here the riff is slightly slowed down and they also seem to have lifted part of the verses too:
Finally, back to Turkey with 'Yali Yali' by Neşe Karaböcek, a singer and actress with a career stretching from the late 1960s to the 2010s.
Why was this riff incorporated into several Turkish/Persian songs from the 70s? Answers on the back of a postcard to the usual address!
Bonus Tracks: a great live version of 'Yali Yali' by the contemporary Dutch Anatolian band, Altin Gün.
... and Tim Minchin singing 'Heaven On Their Minds' from the recent arena tour.
'Under Me Sleng Teng' (also known as 'Under Mi Sleng Teng') has the notoriety of being the first reggae riddim that was fully computerized. Apparently it was taken from a slowed-down sample of the 'Rock' sound from a Casio keyboard (itself allegedly based on Eddie Cochran's 'Somethin' Else'.
Bonus Clip: There have been many other songs and cover versions that use the 'Sleng Teng' riddim. Here's a 90 minute mix of 55 of them!
Ah the heady days of early 90s UK rave! SL2 were the duo of DJs Matt "Slipmatt" Nelson and John "Lime" Fernandez - the S & L coming from their nicknames and the 2 because they were a duo, duh.
Note: every time I play this I end up with 'Dey da dey da wot la dun dey' going round my head for the next few days... and now you will too!
Bonus clip: SL2 only had one other charting single, a remix of 'Way In My Brain' which had been the B-Side of their previous single 'DJs Take Control' and features a sample of Wayne Smith's 'Under Me Sleng Teng'. Talking of which...
Long time, no blog! Apologies for the absence which was mostly due to a change of job and family life but I'm back with a special single topic posting of a genre that was briefly popular almost 20 years ago but left an impression on the popular culture we know of today.
Back in 2001, thanks to the advent of P2P file-sharing technologies such as Napster and Audiogalaxy, a new form of 'mash up' - that is, the laying of musical elements from one track over elements taken from another - was being created and distributed firstly online and then as bootlegs and white-label pressings. This genre was referred to as 'Bastard Pop' thanks to its DIY underground and somewhat illegal status and was popularized via websites such as Boomselection and Get Your Bootleg On.
'Bastard Pop' did have its antecedents e.g.
and many other examples such as Negativland, Double Dee & Steinski, Coldcut, EBN & ECC.
Here are a few of my favourites from the early 00s:
Freelance Hellraiser - A Stroke Of Genius (Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle/The Strokes - Hard To Explain)
One of the most successful 'Bastard Pop' creations, this got quite a bit of airplay at the time. Freelance Hellraiser actually did remix work of Aguilera and also wrote & produced for the likes of Little Boots and Ladyhawke.
Girls On Top - We Don't Give A Damn About Our Friends (Adina Howard - Freak Like Me/The Tubeway Army - Are 'Friends' Electric?)
Girls On Top was the alias under which Richard X produced bastard pop. Other tracks included 'Being Scrubbed' (TLC - No Scrubs/The Human League - Being Boiled) and 'I Wanna Dance With Numbers' (Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody/Kraftwerk - Numbers). 'We Don't Give A Damn About Our Friends' was covered by The Sugababes and Richard X went on to work with Liberty X on 'Being Nobody' their mash-up of the aforementioned 'Being Boiled' and Chaka Kahn's 'Ain't Nobody'. The link to the original is above, plus here's The Sugababes re-recording and "Being Nobody' by Liberty X.
CigarRos Vs Sealion Dion - Bium Bium Bambalo (Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On/Sigur Ros - Bium Bium Bambalo)
An anonymous release on the Unbearable Recordings related English Muffin Records (so I would guess it was either Gamers In Exile or Goodiepal), this works far better than it should!
Kylie Minogue 'Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head' (Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head/New Order - Blue Monday)
This originally appeared on the 2 Many DJs (an alias for the Belgian band Soulwax who popularized Bastard Pop with their Radio Soulwax and 2 Many DJs mix sets) album as a hidden track and was then performed by Kylie live at the Brit Awards in 2002.
Bonus Tracks:
Osymyso - Intro-Inspection
One of the best UK artists who came out of the Bastard Pop scene, Osymyso put together this track that used 101 song intros.
Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
One of the few artists to actually get a fully-released album out there (instead of releasing a bootleg), Gregg Gillis' latest release is an excellent example of the plunderphonic/mash-up scene. It's pay-what-you-want to boot! http://illegal-art.net/shop#release117
DJ Danger Mouse 'The Grey Album'
In 2004 Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Buton) took some Jay-Z a cappella's from The Black Album and mixed them with some unauthorized samples from The Beatles' White Album to create The Grey Album. Unsurprisingly, EMI were not too enamoured with the results and sent him a Cease & Desist letter - by then it had been downloaded over a million times! Brian went on to Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells.
I realised that I had completely forgotten about this blog until it popped up on my Facebook Memories today! It seems that many of the links have (unsurprisingly) expired. I'll take some time to do some cleanup... and then may actually get round to updating new entries on a quasi-regular basis :-)
