So this thing has been creating a bit of buzz lately, and this post isn't so much another case of linking to the videos (here), but my opinion on it.
I watched three of the episodes and I'm surprised about the attention it's getting. The concept of it is pretty common knowledge I thought. Everything is ripped off something else... refer to the Jimmy Corrigan/Family Guy post.
I'm not really a follower of Led Zeppelin, so I didn't realize how Led Zeppelin copied and did "covers" without crediting the other bands! I hate it when bands do that. The example of the beat from a Led Zeppelin song being sampled/copied was meh though, If you ever pay attention to drums or play drums, you know that the leeway for "copying" a beat is much more than a well known guitar riff. Tons of songs have the same beat.
So here's my contribution to "Everything is a Remix": How one of the main drum beats in death metal and the like is actually a polka beat (aka skank beat) and a really really fast polka beat (aka the blast beat).
The polka beat:
A metal song with a skank beat that turns into a blast beat later:
Nice. Apparently Peter Wildoer did the drums on this Old Man's Child album. He rules!
ReplyDeleteIf you ever pay attention to drums or play drums, you know that Led Zeppelin drum tracks are sampled less for the originality of the "beats" than the groundbreaking production and performance. In 1971 drums had never sounded like that before, and here we are 40 years later still mining those same tracks because of their awesomeness; combining them with new material to produce original (if you like) music, as Led Zeppelin did then.
ReplyDeleteIt feels like the guy in the video was sort of vaguely implying that other artists were ripping off Led Zeppelin or something like they supposedly did. I don't know what that first video was trying to accomplish really. He seemed to be painting a pretty negative picture of Zeppelin. Showing examples of how various musicians sampled Bonham's playing was kind of pointless to me... are we supposed to be surprised that Bonham was being sampled, or that anything is being sampled? Sampling has been going on for a long time and this guy kind of makes it seem like it's some sort of giant unknown secret. Hence why I said it was "meh", I wasn't referring to Bonham's playing.
ReplyDeleteI think his point was that yeah, all artists take from what came before, and provide for those that come after. I was just bothered by his broad sweeping "they didn't credit people" and "they didn't change anything", neither of which is 100% true. I love you, man.
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