If you want to know why dance music is currently in a creative rut, the answer may become clearer on March 7th. This particular Monday will see the release of two singles which, to all intents and purposes, are exactly the same.
Sure, they are by different artists, they have different track titles and they're on different labels. Yet both Sunset Strippers' Falling Star and Cabin Crew's Star To Fall use the exact same sample, meaning there's virtually nothing to distinguish the two.
As recently chronicled by industry website Record of the Day (www.recordoftheday.com), this is about to turn into a no-holds-barred heavyweight bout involving two labels and their respective promotional teams and marketing budgets. The music? What, there's music involved? The sample comes from Waiting for A Star To Fall by Boy Meets Girl. This tune was initially pinched by Isle of Skye mischief-maker Mylo, who mated it with Kim Carnes's Bette Davis Eyes to create the In My Arms track for his Destroy Rock & Roll album last year.
But if an idea is good enough to be used once, why not use it again (and again)? Enter Cabin Crew and Sunset Strippers. With Ministry of Sound and Sony weighing in on opposite sides, respectively, to ensure mass radio and club plays, you'll be heartily sick and tired of both versions by mid-March.
And that's before the ubiquitous ring-tones industry kicks in. Blame Eric Prydz for this. His successful annexation of a sample from Stevie Winwood's Valerie for Call On Me gave the notion of recycling cheesy 1980s pop samples the legs required to keep going for another 12 months. Tunes doing the rounds at the moment committing similar musical crimes include High Again, which samples Chris de Burgh, and What Is Love?, using a Howard Jones sample as its hook. It can only be a matter of time before a house tune sampling Jim Diamond's I Should Have Known Better hits the decks. Closing your eyes and wishing it will all go away does not appear to be working.
Of course, there is nothing new or revolutionary about such excessive use of samples, dance music having long maintained a smash-and-grab approach to back catalogues. There were few complaints when samples provided the backbone for Fatboy Slim's Rockafeller Skank (come on down the Just Brothers), Stardust's Music Sounds Better With You (all hail Chaka Khan's Faith) or Basement Jaxx's Red Alert (royalty cheques galore for Locksmith).
While it may be the case that one man's classic is another man's travesty, the problem with the Waiting for A Star To Fall hullabaloo, however, is the complete lack of creativity involved. Both tracks sound as if the producers involved simply decided that the sample was going to do all the work. More creative sweat was probably involved renaming the tune and storyboarding the video, which will inevitably feature several young ladies bending and stretching in a variety of gravity-defining directions.
It's not just video cues which will be borrowed from Prydz's Call On Me. That single may have been the fourth best-selling in the UK in 2004, but it was how it exploited every possible source of revenue, from ring-tones to ring-backs, which came as music to the industry's ear. In the brave new pop world where technology pays the piper, Call On Me set new precedents. No wonder so many industry execs at the recent Midem laugh-in (the music industry's annual version of the Ballinasloe Horse Fair) were drooling when it came to dishing out licensing deals for the Waiting for A Star To Fall tracks.
In the midst of all this commerce, however, it's the sheer laziness of two high-profile releases using the exact same secondhand idea which galls. Dance music can be creative and exciting, but you'll have to go underground to find releases which stop you in your tracks. As commercial dance continues to go heavy on the cheese, is it any wonder that the next batch of "the death of dance music" articles are currently being spellchecked? It will take more than the Chemical Brothers' new album or Mylo re-releases to stop this rot.
