The Private Canon: Speeding Through "Roma"
This post is part of a series; for an explanation go here.
Can sampling be a kind of composing? After all, Stravinsky was said to have relished the connotation of "composer" as "organizer": "I am organizing music," he would often say. The music of Pizzicato Five, the most prominent exemplars of a 1990s trend in Japanese pop toward retro Western kitsch called Shibuya-kei, makes a great case study. Dense with both needle-drop samples and soundalike snippets, their best tracks are nevertheless wholly original pop gems greater than the sum of their parts. Their most famous, "Twiggy Twiggy" (later amended for U.S. release as "Twiggy Vs. James Bond") is a breathless, bouncy earworm built on drums and bass from Lalo Schrifin, Burt Bacharach, and the Ventures, plus a throat-clearing horn blast by Jimmy Smith. The Sonny-and-Cher-like "Baby Love Child" is a deft bit of pop melancholia fashioned over the movie soundtrack of Sweet Charity, the Righteous Brothers, a TV commercial for the Beatles, the ubiquitous "Funky Drummer" beat, even a previous Pizzicato Five track.
My favorite track of theirs, a headlong roller coaster ride called "Roma," arguably contains much less original Pizzicato Five content—most of it is lifted almost entirely from a manic Peter Nero soundtrack cut from 1963 called "On Frantic Fifth." But I'd argue that P5's artful rearrangement is an improvement on the Nero original, slicing and dicing pieces of his improvisatory piano composition into a more coherent whole while also amping up its speed-freak energy (in part by adding relentless drum parts). In fact "Roma's" main hook seems to be original—the dissonant piano-jazz riff that powers the song, which starts at :22. (It's possible that P5's Yasuharu Konishi somehow constructed this from pieces of the Nero record, but if so that's even more impressive, because I can't trace it.)
To take another example, check the sweet boogie-woogie hook that kicks in around 1:22 on "Roma." Now try to find it in the Nero original. It's there, but it passes by so quickly you might barely notice it (at :33):
Essentially Pizzicato Five stripped Nero's "Fifth" for parts, then built them up into a sleek new vehicle. If his original is a spiked cocktail spilling over the edges of the glass, "Roma" is a blast of pure caffeine as eye-opening as a double espresso.
For the record, the song's other samples are the intro to this blooper record ("This recording is a collection of unintended indiscretions before a microphone and camera") and the first second of this Dizzy Gillespie track. Ow!
Can sampling be a kind of composing? After all, Stravinsky was said to have relished the connotation of "composer" as "organizer": "I am organizing music," he would often say. The music of Pizzicato Five, the most prominent exemplars of a 1990s trend in Japanese pop toward retro Western kitsch called Shibuya-kei, makes a great case study. Dense with both needle-drop samples and soundalike snippets, their best tracks are nevertheless wholly original pop gems greater than the sum of their parts. Their most famous, "Twiggy Twiggy" (later amended for U.S. release as "Twiggy Vs. James Bond") is a breathless, bouncy earworm built on drums and bass from Lalo Schrifin, Burt Bacharach, and the Ventures, plus a throat-clearing horn blast by Jimmy Smith. The Sonny-and-Cher-like "Baby Love Child" is a deft bit of pop melancholia fashioned over the movie soundtrack of Sweet Charity, the Righteous Brothers, a TV commercial for the Beatles, the ubiquitous "Funky Drummer" beat, even a previous Pizzicato Five track.
My favorite track of theirs, a headlong roller coaster ride called "Roma," arguably contains much less original Pizzicato Five content—most of it is lifted almost entirely from a manic Peter Nero soundtrack cut from 1963 called "On Frantic Fifth." But I'd argue that P5's artful rearrangement is an improvement on the Nero original, slicing and dicing pieces of his improvisatory piano composition into a more coherent whole while also amping up its speed-freak energy (in part by adding relentless drum parts). In fact "Roma's" main hook seems to be original—the dissonant piano-jazz riff that powers the song, which starts at :22. (It's possible that P5's Yasuharu Konishi somehow constructed this from pieces of the Nero record, but if so that's even more impressive, because I can't trace it.)
To take another example, check the sweet boogie-woogie hook that kicks in around 1:22 on "Roma." Now try to find it in the Nero original. It's there, but it passes by so quickly you might barely notice it (at :33):
Essentially Pizzicato Five stripped Nero's "Fifth" for parts, then built them up into a sleek new vehicle. If his original is a spiked cocktail spilling over the edges of the glass, "Roma" is a blast of pure caffeine as eye-opening as a double espresso.
For the record, the song's other samples are the intro to this blooper record ("This recording is a collection of unintended indiscretions before a microphone and camera") and the first second of this Dizzy Gillespie track. Ow!
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