ICM - Leeds Design Agency

In my previous blog I wrote about our much of our world is a recreation of the past, we see this all around us in things such as television show and fashion.

Music is another example of using the past to recreate new music, this can be achieved by using samples or covers of old records or by taking an old genre of music and adding modern day elements to it. Like most things artists take inspiration from the music they grew up listening to or the music they like and recreate for a modern day audience.

When music samples another song it can be anything from the beat to the melody or to a single line from the original song. The most sampled artist is Michael Jackson whose songs have been sampled on 85 different songs.

SWV’s video for Right Here which samples Michael Jackson’s Human Nature Song,

Song artists like certain songs so much that they do a complete cover of them. They take the original song and sing it in their own way. Mark Ronson’s Version album was an album completly of covers.

Run DMCs cover of Aerosmiths Walk This Way which was later covered by Sugarbabes and Girls Aloud for Comic Relief in 2007.

Some songs borrow elements of other songs, this blog talks about how the Sugarbaes new song ‘Get Sexy’ has elements of at least four other songs.

By using existing genres of music, new genres can be created. The most recent example of this is Dubstep. The dubstep genre comes from a mixture of UK garage, grime and drum and bass and has been around since late 1999 but is only now in the last few years has it become bigger and more mainstream. Now many hip hop artists are now rapping over dubstep beats which could lead to another genre of music being created.

Music videos borrow from the past. There are so many videos out there that to come up with truly original ideas can be hard, so why not borrow some elements form previous decades? The video for this Bashy song ‘Your wish is my command’ uses the disco theme, from the dress to the colourful, background the song itself even has the disco beat influence.