Interesting question.
Maybe Terry Allen's, "Whatever Happened To Jesus", though that feels more like it just segues into a different song.
I should be able to come up with other examples, but it will take some thinking.
Air conditioner, not radiator. Great song.
Ah, right. As I wrote that I was thinking "but why would he have a radiator?".
Two songs about the creation of other songs:
"The Man Who Wrote 'Danny Boy'"
"Greensleeves" (Flanders and Swann).
'River' with 'Jingle Bells'
Madama Butterfly with the 'Star Spangled Banner'
'River' with 'Jingle Bells'
Thank you. I was trying to remember that, and it was annoying me.
Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" references Sondheim's "Somewhere", from West Side Story, in the lyrics.
Two songs that name-check other songs (but don't really quote them)
"Punk Rock Girl" (Dead Milkman) quotes "California Dreaming" (and attributes it to the Beach Boys)
"Kid About It" (Elvis Costello) mentions "Leaving Of Liverpool"
I ... why does Desperadoes Under The Eaves* get included? The air conditioner in the Hollywood Hawaiian hotel has its own song?
But, if I understand the game right, Anthrax's I'm The Man.
And I guess nothing sampled counts?
Um, duh.
No, it gets included because that's an instance where singing or, well, vocalizing anyway becomes an element of the song. It's not merely the means by which the lyrics are conveyed, but something that's thematized as part of what the subject of the song is doing.
So just mentioning another song doesn't count (sorry, NickS).
Oooh, I have one for TRO -- "Blood Of The Wolf" (Hamell On Trial) is awesome and quotes Bon Scott ("he made it out with a bullet in his back")
So just mentioning another song doesn't count (sorry, NickS).
I agree, that's why I made the distinction (incidentally, in "Punk Rock Girl" they do deliver the line "on a winter's day" in character, but they don't sing it . . .).
Wait, so does "I'm The Man" count or not? They're playing Hava Nagila, but not explicitly saying, "now we will be playing Hava Nagila as a separate song as part of this song." I may be confused.
I can't tell because I could barely stand to listen to twenty seconds of it.
I had imagined Anthrax being less awful.
Christmas Unicorn and Love will Tear us Apart?
There's that song by that group that references and quotes Idiot Wind.
Led to litigation, looks like.
So just mentioning another song doesn't count (sorry, NickS).
Out of curiosity, would you say that, "The Man Who Wrote Danny Boy" fits what you are looking for?
This is all over rap music. Two off the top of my head:
M.I.A.'s chorus in "Paper Planes" takes over the chorus from Wreckx-n-effect's "Rumpshaker".
Mos Def and Talib Kwali's "Children's Story" is a long riff on Slick Rick's "Children's Story".
Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" very movingly incorporates both Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now" and Babyface's "Two Occasions."
I also enjoy the moment in The Cure's "Lovesong" where Robert Smith sings "fly me to the moon," sotto voce.
'Money for Nothing' quotes 'Don't Stand So Close to Me'
But this happens all the time in hip hop songs, right? Like how Missy Elliott in "1 2 Step" sings (with slight alteration) a verse from Teena Marie's "Square Biz," which itself is an (also altered) quote from Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." There are a ton of other examples.
A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Center Of The Ultraworld (Loving U)
Probably a better remix of the song in 29
Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" quotes Slick Rick's "La Di Da Di." It's very pretty.
Money For Nothing will now forever conjure for me the version on Empire with people dancing around with televisions on their heads.
I...don't think I can think of any examples of this right now. Except one or two in a genre I'm tired of being over-identified with.
Tainted Love quotes Where Did Our Love Go, but mostly I'm jealous that I didn't write 25.
Hey Sifu you might like Kommando Raumschiff Zitrone's "Roberta".
Toward the end of this live "Second Skin" (and maybe others) Mark Burgess sings "Last night I said these words to my girl..." I can't overstate how much I love this song, and this version especially
I wish I could definitively decide whether or not to go to this.
I mean, I love that Lou Harrison piece.
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. One of the saddest songs there is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrSK-0-MQ8s
Ok, this doesn't qualify, but I like her voice a whole lot.
Maybe you can find something that incorporates La Marseillaise . . .
That Simon & Garfunkel song that has fake Bob Dylan saying "everybody must get stoned" ?
And doesn't American Pie quote a Buddy Holly song?
40: Like All You Need Is Love?
American Pie references 8 miles high . . .
Just as St Dominic's Preview references I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry.
You know what the worst one is? When Sting starts singing "Every Breath You Take" in the middle of that idiotic "Love" song.
Backup singers on "Young Americans" intone "I heard the news today o boy." Just after 3:50 here.
41: "A Simple Desultory Philippic".
But I think they might have actually been talking about Dylan Thomas.
How about Springsteen referencing "Night of the Johnstown Flood", a song that doesn't exist (but should)?
Sorry, 49 should have been, "Whoever he was."
And doesn't American Pie quote a Buddy Holly song?
NPR interviewed Don Maclean recently, and good lord is he a self-important blowhard.
41, 48: Same line quoted* at the end of Loudon Wainwright's "Talking New Bob Dylan" (whole song is a Dylan thing, however).
*And surely in many other songs as well.
Built to Spill, "You Were Right".
I was 19 in 1971, and found the copious references and conspicuous formal allegory: king, jester, devil, to be clever, knowing and annoying.
Couldn't believe Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly was about Maclean; I wanted it not to be true. KMS has been remixed lately, I know I've heard it.
There are lots of songs that randomly start singing "Roadrunner." MIA's "Bamboo Banga" and the Sex Pistols' "Johnny B. Goode" are two among others.
I always thought it was a little weird that my metalhead college roommate who was mostly into stuff out of Norway and Sweden with cookie monster vocals and whatnot thought that Don Maclean was amazing.
song that doesn't exist (but should)
There's this, but it doesn't seem like it would be easy to dance to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK8uv5wBxcI
It's not merely the means by which the lyrics are conveyed, but something that's thematized as part of what the subject of the song is doing.
It occurs to me that, by that standard, "Don't Leave Your Records In The Sun" should be included as well.
"Surfin' Bird" of course, contains a whole 'nother song.
Speaking of John Hartford, "Good Old Electric Washing Machine (circa 1943)" belongs somewhere in the same category with Warren Zevon's air conditioner hum.
As previously mentioned, this is really common in rap. TI's "Bring 'Em Out" is built around a Jay-Z sample, and in that sample Jay is actually quoting Big. There are at least half a dozen Rakim lines that have become full-blown colloquialisms. It's a feature of the genre I've always loved.
The last record I made, I stuck in a quote from "Rainy Day Women" right before the noisy part on the first song, in part because I find a lot of the conspicuous formal allegory of that era to be clever, knowing and annoying
Two Christmas tunes: Randy Newman's "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America" ends with a wry and loaded "and may all your Christmases be white." Joni Mitchell's "River" starts with a gentle "Jingle Bells" on the piano.
Dire Straits, "Romeo and Juliet":
Juliet says hey it's Romeo you nearly gimme me a heart attack
He's underneath the window she's singing hey la my boyfriend's back
I've got dreams, dreams to remember, I've got dreams, dreams to remember
Oh Sara, come back to New Hampshire we'll stay there forever
- Listening to Otis Redding At Home During Christmas, Okkervil River
I wrote a coda to a song that was just "I don't wanna work / I just wanna sing karao-o-ke"
The boys from the NYPD choir are singing "Galway Bay" throughout "A Fairy Tale of New York", but you don't actually hear them doing it. Does that count?
And the Beatles' "Glass Onion" references a whole lot of other Beatles songs - "I am the Walrus", "The Fool on the Hill", etc.
Ooh, opera one. In the last act of "Don Giovanni" the Don's musicians are playing tunes from various other operas of the time. The characters on stage comment on them, and when the musicians play a tune from Mozart's own "Marriage of Figaro", one says something to the effect of "Ugh, I've heard that one far too often recently".
I'm not really clear on when something is regarded as a "sample" rather than simply being quoted--for instance it seems that the annoying Kid Rock song "All Night Long" is listed as sampling Skynyrd and Zevon but not how I would have initially thought to characterize it. Probably because lame. Also old. However, the Wikipedia article did remind me of Zevon's great "play that dead man's song" song--"Play It All Night Long"
Just don't riff too recognizably on a well known folk song, as Australian band Men at Work did in "Down Under," or you might come to a tragic end.
71 I think of the walrus Glass Onion reference as being to the Paul McCartney is Dead hysteria, not the actual song. Goo googa joob.
Jane Siberry references that line from the end of Abbey Road - the love you make is equal to the square root of the love you fake -- in one of those songs on When I Was a Boy.
And Bob Dylan quotes John Lennon's line "I read the news today, old chum" on "Roll On, John", his attempt at a jingle for an antiperspirant ad.
"Walk on the Wild Side"
And the colored girls go 'doo doo doo' etc.
TV on the Radio incorporates "Don't Worry, Be Happy" into the chorus of "Trouble".
On Quadrophenia - maybe the song is "5:15"? -- Roger Daltrey goes all self-referential -- stuttering, "m-m-m-my generation" .
Best example yet ! Eddie Money song -- he goes, "Just like Ronnie sang" -- and Ronnie Spector appears out of nowhere and sings , "Be my little baby".
Eddie Money is a bottle of stale beer and cigarette butts spilled onto a carpet.
82: I saw him open for the Clash and the Who at Pontiac Stadium in 1982.
I loved that his song "Peace in our Time" gave every indication that he had no idea the phrase had any historical significance.
I say Eddie Money open for the Rolling Stones in 2007 or so. Or maybe it was Eddie Vedder. He had a bottle of wine, not beer.
84: There's no carpet in Pontiac Stadium.
The construction worker who married Liz?
72: The word "sample" does a lot of work. It can mean anything from as large as "we're rapping over some other song as the backing track" to as small as "we took one drum hit and are using it as the sound in our synthesizer", to anything in between. So I'd go with it meaning "any musical quotation facilitated by direct audio borrowing."
A long time ago and in galaxy far, far away.
82: Back around 2000, I was driving from Santa Fe to Los Alamos and passed a very sad and neglected looking Indian casino whose billboard announced that the week's headlining act was...Eddie Money.
I figure that must be at least the third circle of former celebrity hell.
93: Oh, I was talking back to 54. So "the long 1971"?
71.2 might be the reference I was going to make if I listened to that particular genre of music or whatever.
Who made the joke that the very dirtiest title in the video store was "Headcleaner"?
"the long 1971"?
Nice.
54 was typed hurriedly from a motel room after my son's graduation, but I've been musing on the persistence of opinions from before we have the vocabulary to articulate them.
During the long 1971 I was often impressed, even admiring of the cleverness or technical sophistication of something that didn't do much for me as art. This could be doubly-alienating, because to the people you'd talk to about a song's references, with an expectation of comprehension, it was dissonant not to be rhapsodic.
Moody Blues is an example that comes to mind. Even though then I wouldn't have been able to say "homage to Gerald Finzi" or "quotation from Debussy's Fetes, I don't feel anything I've learned has actually changed my opinion.
Late to the musical quote thread, but following on 71.2, Beethoven quotes Don Giovanni (specifically Leporello's opening aria ""Notte e giorno faticar") in turn in the Diabelli Variations. Given the gist of the aria and coming where it does, late in the variations, it's funny, as though Beethoven is saying, okay, this is becoming a pain in the ass.
The lyrical I of Lake Marie (or I guess it's his wife?) sings a little bit of Louie Louie, if that counts.
the commodores song "nightshift" sings songs by the dead soul stars they talk about, so "aw, talk to me, so you can see, what's going on" and also "jackie (jackie), hey what you doing now/it seems like yesterday/when we were workin out...you came and gifted us/your love it lifted us/higher and higher." they manipulate it enough to sing the tunes also, briefly. there's a similar phenomenon to this, adjacent, maybe in the raspberries song "overnight sensation"--the sound cuts out and it seems like it's coming from the radio for a half-verse before roaring back. same is true for free designs "hit record;" I had thought of making a mix with this theme but stopped at two...speaking of which with further zevon "mohammed's radio" is a little like this with it being implied the sheriff has been up all night listening to...the song itself?
Hadn't listened to this album in years, but I am today, and:
I got to quit staying home
Gotta get outta here
It just hasn't been home
Since you haven't been here
I knew it when I heard it the first time
I knew it when I heard it the last time
Nothing compares to you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Foj9cIi3I&index=4&list=PLpGCJz85iG22CR4j6xpzhdfsCuHLfZkpG