Close to thirty years ago fans of the Clash started to refer to them as ‘The Only Band That Matters.’ Now twenty-seven years after the release of Combat Rock one of the Clash's guitar/synthesizer riffs from that album can still be heard on pop radio stations today- stations that would never play an actual song by the Clash. The Only Band That Matters lives on, even if few people seem to realize it.
Samples in Pop Music
Sampling is nothing new in music. Especially within the hip-hop community, sampling has been used for decades. Different from actually covering a song by another artist, small sections of a song are borrowed and reworked into a new song; sections of old songs are ‘sampled’ for inclusion in new creative works.
This is nothing new. All that is relatively new is the predominance of hip-hop in pop culture and the use of less readily recognizable samples, thus leading to pieces of songs by classic artists playing on pop radio stations unbeknownst to most casual listeners.
Over a decade ago when hip-hop started to make major headway into mainstream music samples could be heard in many of these hip-hop songs. But everyone seemed to be aware that when P. Diddy (then Puff Daddy) released ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ he was sampling the Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take.’
Likewise when he released ‘Come With Me’ people knew that the song was sampling Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ (having Jimmy Page playing guitar in the video for the song certainly helped younger fans with this realization).
This trend continues, where the use of samples is often blatantly recognizable. When T.I. released ‘Live Your Life’ most people recognized the sample, even if few people knew that the original artist was O-Zone and even fewer knew the title of the song it was sampled from (‘Dragostea din Tei’).
Most people would only have known the original song from parodies or from a YouTube video of a teenage dancing to the song. But most people seemed to recognize the song, even if they didn’t know exactly where from, and seemed to realize that T.I. was only sampling it. The Clash’s ‘Straight to Hell’ fails to get that same level of recognition.
‘Paper Planes’
With the release of Kala in 2007, M.I.A. rocketed up the pop star ladder, largely on the success of the single ‘Paper Planes.’ Due to the motion pictures Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire both featuring the song prominently in theatrical trailers or within the movie, there was hardly a time when ‘Paper Planes’ wasn’t playing somewhere on the dial in 2008. But that instantly recognizable synthesizer intro predates M.I.A.’s release by 25 years- going back to 1982’s Combat Rock and the track 'Straight to Hell.'
Yet no one seems to realize that if you put on ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash you will hear the same recognizable riff. Most listeners would assume it was ‘Paper Planes’ and would be confused when it shifted into a softer, more exotic Far East sound. And the average listener would probably assume that someone new had sampled M.I.A. and not the other way around.
The liner notes in the CD jacket to Kala would reflect the truth. However, when most people no longer buy albums and instead download individual songs, the true credit is not given where deserved. But if a new generation is bobbing their heads along to a riff from the Clash’s ‘Straight to Hell,’ even if they have no idea that it is the Clash that they’re hearing or even if they have no idea who the Clash are, it still makes the Clash a relevant band- a band that still matters.
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