Word: disco
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...concept dates back to the late '70s, when some enterprising disco deejay played a disembodied bit of an old record over and over again to give it a funky new spin. That technique took a quantum leap when the first electronic samplers were introduced around 1980. Unlike synthesizers, which generate tones artificially, samplers record real sounds. Anything audible is eligible: prerecorded music, drumbeats, human voices, even ordinary noise like a slamming door. Samplers transform these sounds into digital codes, which in turn can be manipulated to produce melodies, rhythm tracks and complicated webs of sounds...
...Europe sampling has created some controversial musical stews. The techno- rockers EMF have stirred up a fuss with their single Lies, in which they sample the voice of Mark David Chapman, the John Lennon assassin, reciting lyrics from Lennon's last album. To create the disco hit Sadeness, Part I, Romanian-born producer Michael Cretu sampled Gregorian chants, juxtaposed them with whispered verses from the Marquis de Sade, and set them to a metronomic beat. Whether such sampling is artistry "depends on how you use it," says Cretu. "If you are a really creative person...
...group of Soviet and Alaskan businessmen, in the meantime, have come to town proposing to build what they are calling Perestroyka Palace, a park for disco, diplomacy and dealmaking. Plans call for an $18 million palace modeled after St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, linked symbolically to an Alaska mining- and trading-company post by a bridge over a man-made reproduction of the Bering Strait...
Madonna's artistic persona has clearly transformed from daffy Disco Dolly into a more substantial, surrealistic Poly Dali incarnation. For a long time, she seemed like a rebelette without a cause vamping for the world's attention. Now she has it. Not content to continue spinning out mere dance-floor fodder, she has used her bully pulpit to preach scantily clad homilies on bigotry, abortion, civic duty, power, love, death, safe sex, grief and the importance of families...
...Music Factory debut album, Gonna Make You Sweat, has hit No. 2 on the Billboard pop-album chart. Its first single, the title track, reached No. 1; its second, Here We Go, is also heading for a high perch. "They tried to kill disco, and it's back," adds the other C, Robert Clivilles, 26. "They just call it dance music now. It's a big deal. It's the people's choice...