Friday 20 May 2011

SummersRadio™ New Order! Who Did They Sample?

SummersRadio™ New Order! Who Did They Sample? New Order - 'Blue Monday' After posting the rare 'Blue Monday' remix below I figured it would be the perfect time to tell you about the awesome website called 'WhoSampled'! Their official address is whosampled.com http://www.whosampled.com/ and their tag line is 'Exploring and discussing the DNA of music'. Here's some info from their site on what it's all about if you're not already familiar with them:

'We're building the ultimate database of sampled music, remixes and cover songs. Dig deeper into music by discovering direct links among over 95,000 songs and 37,000 artists, from Hip-Hop and R&B via Electronic Music through to Rock, Pop, Funk, Soul, Jazz and beyond. Watch the videos, contribute new content, discuss and vote.'

Basically you can type in the name of any artist or song and it will list every artist that they've sampled and every artist who's sampled them. Of course not everything is in there yet, but it's constantly growing. Not only do they post the audio for the original song and the source of the sample - they also indicate at exactly what point in each song the sample occurs!

The interesting thing about New Order's 'Blue Monday' is that people generally believe it to be entirely a New Order composition - while they did write it - it features several obvious influences and samples from other songs. So here's few of the tracks that provided some of the elements that helped mold what became the club anthem we know as 'Blue Monday'...

The keyboard bit on the intro and extro was sampled from the Kraftwerk song 'Uranium' from their album 'Radio-Activity' which was released in 1975... Enjoy!



The kick drum beat was borrowed from Donna Summer's track 'Our Love' from her 'Bad Girls' album which was written and produced by Summer and Giorgio Moroder and from her 1979 album 'Bad Girls'. The kick drum sample appears 1:33 in - and even before that the keyboards sound a lot like another New Order track - 'Temptation' that was released as a single just prior to 'Blue Monday' - Enjoy!



The bassline was styled from Sylvester's 1978 disco classic 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)'...



And the overall arrangement of the song came from a song called 'Dirty Talk' by the Italian post-disco group Klein + M.B.O...



So although 'Blue Monday' was a groundbreaking record it was also influenced by and a fusion of many different sounds that came before it - mixing disco, new wave, synthpop and New York club music - to create a new club anthem. Just for kicks here's the excellent remix from Hardloor to remind us of how great all these influences sound stitched together... Enjoy!


No comments:

Post a Comment