Dan Black - HYPNTZ
Let’s call this a cover.
Dan Black’s mashup/homage to Biggie made the rounds last year and is trending again in the wake of a mini copyright battle with the Notorious B.I.G. Estate. Story goes: Dan created this tune and posted it on MySpace without any intention of releasing a proper version. It took off. He reconsidered. Did some homework and discovered the Rihanna and Starman pieces could be used legally, and then hit a wall in clearing the Biggie lyrics. He wrote this blog post about the saga, which includes the following poignant comment on the B.I.G. Estate’s refusal:
I must say I find it a little ironic that the Notorious B.I.G. Estate was so inflexible. Hip hop is a genre totally built upon turntable culture, samples and the placing of pre-existing music into fresh and exciting new worlds. So to then turn around and refuse that very process to someone else seems basically hypocritical to me. The very modern idea of sticking up a fence around a song and saying people can’t touch it goes against the very DNA of song-writing, which for centuries has been a loose and flexible exchanging, borrowing and developing of ideas. A practice at the heart of the greatest of song writing, from Dylan and The Beatles all the way back to Mozart. Hell, the Notorious B.I.G. original itself samples or uses music from Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick, Herb Alpert, The Crystals and Phil Spector!
Dan eventually went back to the drawing board and re-recorded the track with his own lyrics. The new track, Symphonies, will appear on his forthcoming debut ((un)).
Lyrics: Notorious B.I.G. - Hypnotize
Drums: Rihanna - Umbrella (Fun fact: this is a stock GarageBand loop!)
Strings: Starman soundtrack
Photo by Eleanor Hardwick
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