Shared DNA in Music - Hacker News

Posted by ksampath02 4/1/2025

251 points | 61 comments

Boogie_Man 4/2/2025|

I once had the realization that a riff from Metallica's "The Four Horseman" was the same as that from Tom Petty's "Last Dance With Mary Jane" except, as I learned several years after the realization, it is actually the riff from "Sweet Home Alabama" which was introduced in a session as a joke by the guitarist to make fun of the drummer for having narrow musical knowledge. He was correct in his assumption that the drummer wouldn't recognize it, and it was included in the final version of the song.

The story: https://youtube.com/shorts/nY6CPOtN47w?si=K_9EKvKGbgnuGKSg

The riffs: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6HbSkAD5g&pp=ygUgZm91ciBob3J...

basisword 4/2/2025||

Funny you mention "Mary Jane's Last Dance". The Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Dani California" overlaps with that (the chord progression is the same and rhythm style is pretty close too).

n4r9 4/2/2025|||

This is surprisingly common with Metallica for some reason. Could just be that they have so many tracks that statistically there's bound to be some overlaps.

Another example is "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiIc0HuJ78Q

Whose intro sounds the same as "Rainbow Warrior" by Bleak House, released 5-6 years earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zowid7KAmnM

xeromal 4/2/2025|||

I've showed a few people this and I'm surprised that so many people don't notice that it's sweet home alabama. I am from Georgia though and that song used to be an anthem. lol

KurSix 4/2/2025|||

Like a game of telephone but with guitar riffs

memalign 4/2/2025||

In a similar vein, I maintain a website[0] where users can submit songs that sound like other songs. Several times this has helped me figure out where I’ve heard a riff or melody before (when it’s not a direct sample, which I usually find on whosampled.com).

0: https://memalign.github.io/m/similarsongs.html

jl6 4/2/2025||

What this mostly seems to demonstrate is that hip-pop is endlessly derivative. That might be a consequence of their data source:

> To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix.

Genres where sampling is openly and explicitly acknowledged are going to be massively over-represented. It would be cool build a relationship network using feature extraction on the actual audio.

zeruch 4/11/2025||

It's also not helped that some of the early hip hop musicians have themselves become highly sought after session musicians and producers, that have in turn seeded certain sounds all over the musical map; several members of the Sugarhill rap label (most notably Keith leblanc and Doug Wimbish) have literally over 1000 credits, including NIN's debut, Public Enemy, P-Funk, and Jeff Beck, so much like how Jeff Porcaro of Toto created a certain drum sound endemic to the 80s, such patterns are going to be exacerbated by use of much of the same limited musician/production pool.

Hip hop is no more derivative than the blues or funk, but they are definitely more sample-friendly.

nyrikki 4/2/2025|||

The same applies to risk-adverse, high profit genres and/or producer heavy ones like pop country. Obviously zeitgeist and even conventions and music theory play a role.

Sir Mashalot had a few videos a while ago.

https://youtu.be/FY8SwIvxj8o

The Blues Traveler trolling with the song Hook using the melody from Pachelbel's Canon with lyrics explicitly calling this out wasn't noticed by almost anyone.

https://youtu.be/pdz5kCaCRFM

Obviously Pop heavily samples too, E.G. Tom Tom Club Genius of Love being used by Mariah Carey's Fantasy, but it goes beyond sampling.

The Rolling Stones pulling from artists like Fred McDowell and Led Zeppelin settled copyright suits on Lemon Song, Whole Lotta Love, Bring it on Home and Dazed and Confused etc...

The invention of the Fairlight Sampler may have lead to groups like the Pet Shop Boys sampling dozens of other works, but as the Stones and Led Zeppelin show it wasn't unique.

Well I guess the Pet Shop Boys were inspired by Grandmaster Flash, and if you listen to the original recording of West End Girls you can hear James Brown samples...not sure if that counts as "hip-hop" in that case or not.

https://youtu.be/PKB2bYYYTYw

As a bad guitar player, I can understand why even Rock and Roll pretty much grew out of artists copying R&B/Gospel artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but inspiration vs copying is a fuzzy line.

But basically the tooling changed, not the methods which have complex and intertwined causes, motivations, and effects.

Agraillo 4/2/2025|||

I wonder whether a possible audio similarities analyzer would be capable of detecting influences described by the creators themselves. For example, in a podcast, Tal Bachman said that making his most famous hit "She's So High" started when he heard the chorus of "If It Makes You Happy" by Sheryl Crow in a supermarket. After that revelation I now can not unhear it and the choruses of those songs are connected in my brain. But the connection is not that obvious.

breakbread 4/2/2025|||

There's also https://www.whosampled.com/

MrMcCall 4/2/2025||

I wonder, do you find Outkast's ATLiens album to be derivative? Especially "Elevators" and "Wheels of Steel". I certainly don't know enough music to answer that question definitively, if anyone does.

Even though some of the lyrics have certainly not aged well, I do like its minimal aesthetic, and I was in Decatur, GA at the time, and it sure beat the crap Diddy and Mase were putting out at the time.

Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic. That's also where I learned of the magical spoken word intro version of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World".

"No one's musical education is complete."

aspenmayer 4/3/2025||

> Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic.

You’ll probably like WEFUNK, a hip hop/soul/funk weekly program that has been streaming since the late 90s, with ad-free streams and downloads, livestreams, RSS feeds etc while being listener-supported. They even have some basic apps for your devices.

https://www.wefunkradio.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio

trial3 4/2/2025||

when i gave a presentation on sampling for a public speaking class in college i played the amen break, then slowed it down to show it was used in Fuck Tha Police, then sped it up to show it was used in the powerpuff girls theme song

maxweylandt 4/2/2025||

Thanks for teaching me about this! I listened to it and immediately thought I recognized it from Jamie XX's Oh my Gosh. In the event I was wrong, it samples Lyn Collins -- another classic sample I believe, certainly in hip hop. But I'm sure I'll hear it pop up in lots of places now, always nice to learn a piece of history.

https://www.whosampled.com/sample/343380/Jamie-xx-Gosh-Lyn-C...

securingsincity 4/2/2025|||

This is my favorite video on the Amen break from about 20 years ago that explains the history and more of the context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

Kye 4/2/2025|||

The presenter chose different songs, but the concept is the same.

jqr- 4/2/2025||

I got curious and tried searching for it, ended up finding out they actually sample James Brown's "Funky Drummer". Very interesting either way. Thanks!

xnx 4/1/2025||

Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites sites: https://www.whosampled.com/

audiodude 4/2/2025||

What really blows my mind is not the fact that all these songs borrow from and remix one another, but the overall "problem of universals" from metaphysics. In the realm of music, how do we even identify specific characteristics that lead to properties of resemblence? How does your brain know "Oh, that's the Funky Drummer beat" when it's played on a different drum kit or at a different tempo, etc etc.

edit: Would love to see an AI driven project where you drag a slider to "mutate" a sample until it's no longer that sample but another piece of music. A "boil the frog" type thing.

code_for_monkey 4/2/2025|

I actually think what your asking for exists, I cant remember the name but I think Aphex Twin was involved?

reassess_blind 4/1/2025||

Huh, I never put together "Inspector Gadget" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King".

nodompa 4/2/2025||

This is amazing and something I personally love to do myself, and it's great to see a website that encourages engaging with culture and art in a deeper and historical level, I feel like that's something that we need more and more of nowadays.

Just wanted to let you know that I'm getting a pretty big audio pop when I scroll through the mountain king section on my phone, like my speaker is getting blown out a little, maybe some clipping or weird audio initializing going on.

Vaslo 4/1/2025||

Wasn’t this Pandoras original claim to fame - that they used 30 or 40 different aspects of music to categorize music and help you find what you liked?

Loughla 4/2/2025|

The secret to Pandora is to never give thumbs up but religiously thumbs down anything you don't like. Then it's constantly searching for new things you like related to the original theme!

But also, yes that was the original thought process.

freedomben 4/2/2025||

100%. I bought into the "thumbs up what you like and get more of it" when I signed up for Pandora, and that quickly led to getting the same thumbs up songs over and over...

Fortunately with Pandora you could create a new station that wasn't aware of the thumbs so it was able to work around, but it took me a while to figure that out and stop thumbing up

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