This leads me to re-pose the big question about sampling to the group: When you hear a blatant sample from a song you loved as a child, how do you react to it?

Personally, I think it's cool. This idea that every song that comes out must be a completely new musical idea is both asking a lot of musicians as well as just plain impractical. I mean how can you ask a musician to avoid making his music sound ANYTHING like any other song, especially then these artists have been influenced by existing music. They would end up spending all of their time listening to others' music to make sure their is sufficiently different! Or you would end up with nothing but merzebow-like noise... People have spent hundreds of years trying to emulate Bach. Does that mean their music is inherently bad, or just that Bach's was really really good? ;)

The reason I ask is that a small percentage of people are really offended by samples. They hear something they recognize from another song and they hate it.

I can understand this from the perspective of the musician. Sort of a "He's stolen my idea!" kind of self righteous, petulant reaction. But from a fan? How can you hate something simply because it sounds like something else which you like? One would think that the presence of familiar sounds would predispose you to liking the thing more, not less... I think it also depends on the extent of the ripoff. Like the KLF's god save the queen... It was just absurd of them to do that without at least getting Abba's permission first. I mean, they play like a 40 second clip of the song exactly as is. That's a little disrespectful. But the beastie boys sampling a 6 second led zep drum beat? I would argue that it's such a small part of the sonic palate of the new song, and such an obvious homage to the original song, that that is totally acceptable.

My own generalization about these people is they tend to hate unfaithful covers of songs, they don't like "jam" bands, their haircuts are ten to twenty years out of date, and they find anything that hasn't come out of the radio in their car as suspect.

Hahaha! One could also try and find parallels between such jam bands and or songs made by them. Like I bet you could find a live phish recording and a live dead recording which for at least 10 minutes are sonically indistinguishable, even tho they are playing "different songs." Plus, is anyone here going to stand up and argue that 98 Degrees, the Backstreet Boys, etc are truly "musically unique?" I mean come on, these pop bands are concieved and controlled by corporate entities all trying to sell the same products to the same audience. The similarities between these groups is apalling, even if they may not share the exact same sampled rif ($10 goes to the person who finds such a rif/drum loop which two of these groups share! :P) _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail