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Pop links: 3. Steve Miller vs Shaggy

Shaggy’s Angel bass line comes from this! Yep, the song’s wiki makes it official. Tracking samples is fun in itself but it also offers the opportunity to compare songs across genres:

Steve Miller’s ‘You’re the cutest thing/That I ever did see/I really love your peaches/Want to shake your tree’ doesn’t, for me, compare favourably with Shaggy’s ‘Life is one big party when you’re still young/But who’s gonna have your back when it’s all done/It’s all good when you’re little, you have pure fun/Can’t be a fool, son, what about the long run’. There’s more of a sense of a real relationship and some classic instructional wisdom to boot. [Blog about instructional wisdom in pop songs coming very soon, see: God Bless the Child, A Message to You Rudy, Get Up Edina, Don’t Be a Dropout]

Pop links: 2. Benjamin Britten vs. Phil Spector

This has been an obsession of mine for ages. It isn’t confirmed anywhere and some disagree with me but surely, surely, Spector was listening to this when he wrote this. You might know the song from the Aretha Franklin or Drifters (Ben E. King) version but the original Spector demo makes it clearer.

These won’t all be classical-pop crossovers by the way – see no. 3…

Pop links: 1. Nelson Riddle vs. Maurice Ravel

No. 1 in a new series, ‘fascinating pop links’: Nelson Riddle’s justly revered arrangement of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ was influenced by Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. It’s there in the dramatic ‘slow-build’ general approach but it’s also clearly present in the chromaticism in ‘I said to myself: this affair never will go so well‘.

[NB: I didn’t spot this. Proper respect to David Roberts in ‘1001 Songs…’ for pointing it out.]

Critiquing the critics

If you happened to come across Ted Giola’s recent thoughts on the degradation of music criticism, you might want to check out my essay on PJ Harvey’s ‘Let England Shake‘. It’s about how the themes of the album relate to its construction but more broadly it’s an argument for a way of listening to records: one that doesn’t see songwriting/making records as some adulterated relation of poetry, composition, or live music performance, but as an art form and a tradition worthy of attention in its own right.