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Did Producer Timbaland Steal From the Demoscene?
gloom writes "In 2000 the Finnish demoscene musician Janne Suni (also known as 'Tempest') won the Oldskool Music Competition at the Assembly demoparty with his four-channel Amiga .MOD entitled 'Acid Jazzed Evening.' A Commodore 64 musician called 'grg' remade the song on the C64 (using the infamous SID soundchip); it is this that was stolen. The producer's name is Timbaland and he is one of the hottest names in American music these days. The track in question is called 'Do it' and it is featured on the Nelly Furtado album 'Loose' on the Geffen label. Getting nowhere with Geffen, the demoscene has now risen to the aid of Tempest, first by creating a stir at SomethingAwful (files downloadable from the forum), then at Digg.com, then on YouTube, with a video demonstrating the blatant ripoff. Being an online-posting musician myself — what rights do I have if this should ever happen to me, and what can be done to raise awareness about such things?"
People please. There's a double-standard. Try to keep up with these things.
Please listen to what's behind the links before posting the first thing that comes to mind. It's not just a similarity - much less simple influence. It's an exact match all the way from the melody down to the bass and drum lines and the synth samples.
One hell of a coincidence if you ask me.
Name a type of music that has been more influential in the last 30 years..
Music from the Demoscene, apparently.
"Hip-Hop" is just a bastard child of rap and pop.
Wrong. Hip-hop is an all-encompassing culture, a movement started in New York City by inner city Hispanics and African Americans. Hip-hop traditionally consists of 4 "elements": DJ'ing (originally the backbone of hip-hop culture), Emceeing (rapping), Breakdancing, and Graffiti.
Originally, rap was the combination of an emcee rhyming over a DJ's beat. An emcee's job was originally to get the crowd more into the music the DJ was playing, hence the title (derived from MC, or Master of Ceremonies).
Through the late 90's, rap was simply called rap. Somewhere along the way, around the transition from the "jiggy era" to the Cash Money dominated southern sound of the mainstream, fans of underground rap music and conscious early 90's rap started referring to anything that was not mainstream as "hip-hop music", in an effort to differentiate "good" rap from "bad" rap"
Only recently have radio stations and music channels that typically play mainstream style rap referred to the music that they play as "hip-hop". This has prompted many people to revert to referring to the music they like as "rap" in backlash, to express their disappointment to the direction popular rap artists have taken musically (focusing more on simple beats and rhymes in efforts to appeal to pop crowds and club scenes).
Seriously, it's two thousand goddamn seven, the "What is this X the article speaks of?" thing is OVER. You're on the fucking Internet, go to Google or Wikipedia and do five seconds of research.
... and act like you're an expert on the matter, like the rest of us!
Not to go too far OT, but Hip hop and Rap are actually the same thing as far as the actual pop-cultural relation to them are concerned. To be technical, Hip Hop refers to the entire culture, including things one might not generally think of such as fashion and speach. We used to refer to the four elements of hip hop: graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, and MCing (a.k.a. rapping), which in its early forms was actually subservient to DJing. Nowadays, MCing has moved overwhelmingly to the forefront, as the other elements have become more diluted, diversified, and hybridized (beatboxing could be seen as a more recently formalized and popularized hybrid of MCing and DJing, though it's generally been around for almost as long as hip hop itself). Now Hip Hop dance includes a lot more than just breakdancing, graffiti is much less popular (probably because it's not quite so marketable being illegal in nature).
Since Rap has taken such a dominant role, nowadays whenever someone says "hip hop" they're generally talking about Rap, but to refer to the two things as though they were different musical genres is a fallacy. People think that the subject matter of the songs determines the genre (rap being the sole property of gangster rappers, and all other forms falling under some other umbrella of "hip hop"). In truth, they're all hip hop, and rapping is what they all do. It's just a matter of what they rap about that determines the subgenre (gangster, etc.).
I find the people who try to argue that Hip Hop and Rap are different are generally people who don't listen to it much, or only listen to 3 or 4 artists and then declare themselves expert.
What you have listed there are not musical genres in order of their influence, but probably more in order of your own personal preference or encounterance (which is self-select no doubt, and very much anecdotal). You get outside of the US and Germany, and you'll find Metal drops off the list fairly quickly (and even within those countries, I doubt you'd ever find it that high on any list). Country barely has an influence the farther in any direction you go from midwestern or Southern America before you even hit the borders, much less outside the country. Disco, come on, really? And whatever "Movie Classical" is. But, you go anywhere in the world from as far back as the mid to early 90's, and hip hop was already ubiquitous, from the American brand that gets exported in abundance to the various local flavors that grew up on their own. We're talking from France to Japan to Zimbabwe here I might add.
But listing music in order of influence is also kind of fallacious, since all music is generally organic, and all genres have influenced and been influenced by others. If Disco has a great influence on modern hip hop, and hip hop is very popular, is it fair to say that Disco is the genre that's truly influential or hip hop itself? What if you could say the same for any other musical genre's influence on hip hop and vice-versa? Hip hop, at its very roots, is an assimilator, and has been growing due to its ability to absorb other musical genre's influences into itself seamlessly. From the earliest DJs mixing and remixing established Pop, Disco, and R&B tracks on turntables, to the modern mashups, this has always been a core element of Hip Hop.
Quite frankly, the competition of "my genre of choice is more popular/influential than yours" is a bit ridiculous, because it's not like popularity is the sole legitimizer of an art form. In most cases, it means the destruction of creativity in favor of formulaic nonsense and posers taking over and steering the future of the genre, which is what has happened to most of modern popular hip-hop. One should be happy while their genre or artist of choice remains in relative obscurity, because that is the place where they can enjoy the most creativity; even if it means other more popular and successful performers end up sampling or outright stealing their work.