You rarely hear anyone cover the Beastie Boys. Is it because their songs rely so much on samples that they’re impossible to recreate legally without making a profit? How did they not get sued into oblivion with hundreds of samples used? Where do those royalties go today?
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I realise this is a parody, not a cover, but it immediately came to mind when I saw this post.
Slip n Slide by the Beastie Boys.
I don’t think you could produce a punk album in the late 00s if it didn’t include a cover of “Gratitude”.
I don’t think hip hop songs in general tend to get covered, or at least not that I’m aware of (am absolutely open to being corrected on that).
I guess a lot of the rhymes are often very specifically about the person rapping, so someone else doing it might be a bit weird.
That said, I do know of one good example in eLZhi’s Elmatic a remake of Nas’ Illmatic. It has significantly rewritten lyrics though.
Yeah. There isn’t a tradition of covering someone else’s rap because the rapper was originally supposed to be both writer and performer. A lot of Beastie Boys songs are written in that perspective.
That being said, not all of their songs are like that and there is some cross genre mixing with rock. I can see Fight For Your Right or Sabotage getting easily covered.
This Sabotage cover was always great.
By definition one cannot improve upon perfection, so what would be the point?
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Paul’s Boutique was a landmark record in music law. The Beatles did sue them. It’s largely thanks to that album that sampling isn’t a legal liability and allowed the practice to continue. It’s one of the most important records of all time IMO.
For a modern example of something similar, Avalanches took like 15 years to release their second album, Wildflower because they had to clear hundreds of samples, including the Beatles.
The Beatles thing is a myth. Nobody connected to the Beatles has sued anybody over Paul’s Boutique. Most of the samples on Pauls’ Boutique were cleared, especially the most obvious ones.
He adds that there are two myths about the samples and licensing on the Beastie Boys’ classic. One is that when the record was first released, neither the group nor its label, Capitol, had cleared any of the rights to the snippets of recordings that they and producers the Dust Brothers used. ‘They and their label were really cautious. They cleared tons of songs,’ McLeod says, citing the ballpark $250,000 figure that’s often reported, and the fact that the Jimmy Castor Bunch had sued the group soon after ‘Licensed to Ill’ was released.
Huh, TIL. I even glanced over the Wikipedia page before I posted that. Thanks!
I found a torrent years ago with every song they sampled on this album, I highly recommend it. Absolutely phenomenal collection of music that goes so much deeper than you expect.
If anyone ever tries it, MCA shows up their house with a few of his people.
I like his beard it looks like a billy goat.
ooo-ooo
Is my disco call
so you’re saying I can summon MCA and a bunch of friends anytime I want to party?
Not covering it, but I am currently working on a song that samples “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”.
Maybe they are so bad or nieche that it does not make sense to cover them?
I mean, a piece is usually either covered because it is extreme popular, or because someone has a serious idea of how to improve it.
Did you just call the Beastie Boys niche?
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With all due respect, this couldn’t be wrong-er. Copyright just wasn’t enforced on sampling back in the Beasie Boys’ heyday, it really wasn’t on people’s radar yet. You’ll hear people say “There’s no way you could make [seminal hip-hop album] today!” due to how much it would cost to clear all the samples that went into something like Paul’s Boutique or Three Feet High and Rising.
But would a cover require the original score?
There was a famous remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album called the Gray Album that used Jay-Z’s vocals against samples from the Beatles’ White Album. It is possible that a full cover could include both new vocals and a new set of samples.
There are also cases where the sampled track can be played by live musicians. A lot of work produced by Dr. Dre can be performed by a live funk band; this was shown in his Super Bowl Halftime show. Some Beastie Boys songs had the group play as a band.
You’re right, I was misinformed
All good! Yeah, the wild west days of sampling really showed the art we could have had if sampling was licensed like song covers are.
Someone should do this on the dark web. Start a music industry on the dark web with no copyright rules and no money, just bitcoin and pure inspiration without stupid rules.
I should note that we still got more of this stuff thanks to the regular web, mostly from the early 2000s onward, once digital tools for creating and sharing got better and cheaper. But yeah, mainstream modern platforms with content matching do make sharing more complicated.
What did it say?
