| I have been fighting to get the rights back for "Move Your Body" for 20+ years. This is why people have sampled the record with no consequences. Todd Terry did it 1st, then had the nerve to sue Jungle Brothers for sampling his sample of me. The floodgates seemed to open after Todd did it, seems like everyone started doing it after that.
My feelings on it? At 1st i was pretty pissed off. I've never sampled another artist because of that. And also I discourage anyone I've ever worked with from sampling. I play all my keyboards on all my records myself, and I started out not knowing how to play anything at all. My technique? When I 1st started, I would play stuff at 40-60 bpms into the sequencer and speed it up to 120+. Easy. I couldn't understand why everyone else couldn't just play whatever they wanted the same way.
All my friends saw how i did it, and started doing it too. This is why almost all of the original Chicago guys have their own sound: it's because we played everything ourselves.
Now something got lost when other areas started making it and they assumed we were all hiring keyboard players. I considered sampling other peoples music the absolute bottom of the barrel. The sampled people had paid to hire full orchestras, somethings 50+ musicians, and some kid at home had the nerve to just sample it and call it his own. Sorry about feeling this way, but I did and still do.
That's not even including what I saw then about the industry wide ramifications: every single person on the planet now had the ability to make a record. This had been started with sequencing, I'm living proof of that. But this was different. I thought within 50 years, there would be no more musicians. Why would there be? Who would sit at home for hours practicing when their friend next door sounds great right away by sampling something? I could easily see releases going from 20 a week to 20,000+ a week-and it's happened already!
As I got older, I stopped getting mad about it and told myself, if they're going to sample me, make sure it's the best quality, because they're starting to get 4th generation samples now; dance music has no history now because of the flood of releases. They don't know that their sample is DJ X-who sampled DJ Y-who sampled DJ
Z-who sampled DJ O, who got his sample from Masters At Work. If they sampled Masters at Work 1st then the quality would be almost acceptable. But we're starting to get really crap quality now, and people are thinking everything in dance music has shitty quality.
I want House music quality to be great because if it sucks, that wipes out everything I've spent my whole music career trying to do-improve the quality and perception of House music. |