Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Samples used in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Over the weekend, K and I saw Four Lions and heard, over the closing credits, a melody that is included in Blame Game on Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. That sent me to Kanye's liner notes that I had not read. That, plus LJ and Scooter's interest in the 21st Century Schizoid Man sample, motivated me to investigate the samples further.

With links to a cool site that streams audio of songs with their samples, side by side, here are Kanye's samples, in track order:

Dark Fantasy: Contains samples of “In High Places” by Mike Oldfield

Gorgeous: Contains portions of the composition “You Showed Me,” written by Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn.

Power:
  • Contains elements of “It’s Your Thing,” recorded by the Cold Grits.
  • Contains elements of “Afromerica” (Francois Bernheim/Jean-Pierre Lang/Boris Bergman)
  • Contains material sampled from “21st Century Schizoid Man” performed by King Crimson Taken from the album: In The Court Of The Crimson King.
All of the Lights: None

Monster: None

So Appalled: Contains samples of the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band recording “You Are – I Am.”

Devil in a New Dress: Contains samples of the recording “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” as performed by Smokey Robinson.

Runaway:
  • Contains a sample of “Expo 83” performed by Backyard Heavies.
  • Contains excerpts from Rick James ‘Live at Long Beach, CA’ 1981.
Hell of a Life:
  • Contains samples of the Mojo Men recording “She’s My Baby.”
  • Contains samples of the Tony Joe White recording “Stud-Spider.”
  • Contains portions of “Iron Man,” written by T. Butler, A. Iommi, J. Osbourne and W.T. Ward (Black Sabbath).
Blame Game: Contains elements of “Avril 14” by Richard James, Aphex Twin.

Lost in the World:
  • Contains portions of “Soul Makossa,” written by M. DiBango.
  • Contains a sample of the recording “Think (About It)” as performed by Lyn Collins. Written by James Brown.
  • Contains samples of “The Woods” performed by Bon Iver
  • Contains samples of “Comment No. 1” performed by Gil Scott-Heron.
Who Will Survive in America: Contains samples of “Comment No. 1” performed by Gil Scott-Heron

Of note, the artistic use of autotune at the beginning of Lost in the World, that I'd given Kanye credit for, is almost entirely the doing of Bon Iver.

2 comments:

Richard P said...

Wow, whosampled.com is a very cool site.....

Stephanie said...

Rich - whosampled is cool. Looks like a lot of work for someone to put it together. I wish they organized samples by albums, though, so I wouldn't have had to write this post!