![]() While Melhuish says he has never been in a situation where a label will “go to an artist and say ‘Here’s a bunch of 90s samples, pick one’,” Gale says that “in the US, there are a few labels who are always looking for songs that use interpolations”. “When you’re betting on a record, especially in today’s market, I would take my chances on a song people already knew, if I worked at a record label.” “Artists are looking for security – and it’s always a risk these days to put something completely new out,” he says. Nick Gale – AKA producer and songwriter Digital Farm Animals – says using a hook that has already proven successful is tempting for a lot of artists and record labels. I think in an era of infinite choice, audiences retreat to familiarity – they have quite a biological, synaptic connection with records they recognise.”ĭigital Farm Animals. Melhuish suggests that listeners are also looking back appreciatively to the kind of 90s and 00s monoculture that so rarely exists in music today, given that “the range of options for music consumers now is, frankly, overwhelming. Audiences need a bit of that relief at a time that still feels quite unstable for a lot of people.” Safiya Lambie-Knight, UK and Ireland head of music at Spotify, says feelgood music which speaks to “that culture of going out, live music, clubs, being with your friends” has become increasingly popular post-Covid, with a lot of songs that may have been once confined to more dance-specific playlists crossing into mainstream ones. “These records take us back to simpler, freer times. When listeners explain why they love her show, she says, it’s often “people saying: ‘I remember my first kiss to this, I remember going clubbing for the first time and hearing this song, I remember being in Ibiza when this dropped.’” They’re these feelgood songs that aren’t too deep,” she says. “In the 90s, the clubbing scene in the UK was a huge thing, and these trance tracks were part of British culture. ![]() ![]() Natalie O’Leary, a Radio 1 DJ who hosts the Sunday morning 00s throwback show, says that nostalgia – for music, but also for the carefree attitude expressed in many of these songs – is potent. Bradford bassline lads Bad Boy Chiller Crew are serial offenders, their latest a sped-up version of Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman. But the past year has seen a huge glut of new songs that interpolate 90s and 00s dance classics, by everyone from mainstream pop names including Rita Ora and James Arthur to cheesy club favourites such as Nathan Dawe. Big-budget mainstream pop stars have been using the technique for a few years now – Ava Max is the undisputed queen, interpolating everything from Barbie Girl to Can’t Fight the Moonlight – and an interest in turn-of-the-millennium dance music among pop producers has been percolating for a while: in 2019, Joel Corry’s cover of Monsta Boy’s 2000 hit Sorry (I Didn’t Know) dominated the summer thanks to a placement on Love Island, and a year later Flume, Nea and GFOTY all riffed on Blue (Da Ba Dee), mere months apart from each other. Both options create an uncanny sense of time warp, a kind of musical deja vu. ![]() These tracks differ from the way rap music has long used samples: the majority feature a faithful recreation of a vocal hook or the original song’s production. “After that record came out, there was a slight change from the producer and artist community, like: OK, now we can really go for this.” ![]() “It wasn’t the first, but in terms of the scale of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a 90s pop-dance sample that was as flagrant and as blatant as that,” he says. Jack Melhuish – who, until Warner’s recent layoffs, served as general manager of Parlophone Records UK – says the tipping point for the craze came last year, when David Guetta and Bebe Rexha released I’m Good (Blue), which interpolated Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee) and later hit No 1 on the UK charts. All of them hark back to an era of bright uncomplicated melodies, big melancholic chords, and messy nights out that went mercifully undocumented on social media. There are now numerous singles that reference the era (most often with interpolation, the reusing of a lyric or melodic phrase) in the UK chart: Switch Disco and Ella Henderson’s React – likely rising into the Top 3 this week – samples Robert Miles’ trance classic Children, David Guetta’s Baby Don’t Hurt Me flips Haddaway’s immortal What Is Love, Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj’s Alone recycles the hook of Alice Deejay’s Better Off Alone, and Denham Audio has had a longstanding hit with a version of Strike’s U Sure Do. P op has always eaten itself, but its appetite for nostalgia has become more voracious than ever – particularly for the dance music of the 90s and 00s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |