A reader brought it to our attention that hip hop producer Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley may have in fact illegally sampled Crystal Castles and used the material on 50 Cent’s latest single “She Wants It” featuring Justin Timberlake.
50 Cent - She Wants It
The Crystal Castles track which is believed to be sampled is an un-released song called “Courtship Dating”. Here is a clip of the Canadian duo performing it live in London in March of this year.
Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating
What do you guys think? Most people would say why would a mutli-million dollar producer sample from some low level indie-act. But, Timbaland has been introuble for sampling chiptune bands before. In 2006 he produced Nelly Furtado’s Album ‘Loose’ with the song ‘Do It ‘ on it which was ‘alleged’ to be stolen from Finnish producer Janne Suni. Timbaland adamantly denies sampling the musician, but this side by side comparison is pretty detrimental to his case.
Side by side comparison of Nelly Furtado’s ‘Do It’ vs Janne Suni’s ‘Acid Jazzed Evening’
Timabo went on a radio show where he was asked about the accusations and he explains his definition of ’stealing’ and ’sampling’. It’s pretty funny, check that out here. You could get lost for days in the amount of information and articles on the previous plagiarism charge, but this wikipedia article sums it up pretty well.
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So does CC know about this? Did the reader point this out to CC? Someone should myspace message the CC. They tend to respond back.
the reader indicated that CC was aware and might be taking it to court. We’ll let you guys know as soon as we find anything else out. Although, the Finnish artist has been in lengthy court battles with Timbaland and still has not received any compensation.
As soon as I heard ayo technology, I got CC on my mind. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. If he really did illegally sample from CC, then that really maddens me. Big time producer stealin’ from small time, bah.
crystal castles should make a side by side comparison like that danish guy and put it on youtube — it would shoot to the top of the most watched videos and probably sell them a shit load of records.
i don’t get why he doesn’t just pay for his samples… he’s got more money than michael jackson.
if CC acts on it, this would be a lot more interesting case than the finnish guy, cuz CC are actually pretty well known and they have many famous friends too, so even if nothing legal ever happens, this would make a lot more noise, i think (i hope)
To make this all even funnier, it’s just been discovered that Crystal Castles are known music thieves. They took a song released under Creative Commons, added vocals and a drum machine and released it without attribution.
http://www.8bitcollective.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4417
“Insecticon” by Crystal Castles vs. Lo-bat is unreleased from years ago. I always thought the Lo-bat reworking was great.
If you look at the CC cd credits they list all the samples.
Everyone downloads mp3s (for free) so of course they will miss that.
I cannot believe the blatant hypocrisy on display here. Crystal Castles themselves are probably the biggest thieves on the planet right now. Their music has literally been stolen from a variety of 8-bit chip tune artists, whose original compositions they merely pitch shift and shout over. Furthermore, they’ve never credited or acknowledged the original artists in any way and continue to get away with abusing the Creative Commons license. Everything about CC has been stolen from elsewhere including their logo and artwork.
They claim to make their music using a keyboard with an Atari POKEY chip, but this is a lie as most of the chiptune they “lift” is actually taken from Gameboy sounds.
To be fair, I agree Timbaland should’ve recited the demo composer he sampled for ‘Do It’, but I think it’s sickening that he is constantly raked over the coals for sampling ONE tune that was a cover anyway, whilst Crystal Castles, being white, middle-class, art school hipster darlings get away with shamelessly stealing chunks of other people’s work for ALL of their creative outputs, without a word of criticism from the same people ready to crucify Timbaland.
Double fucking standards of the highest order. And Timbaland sampling CC for the intro of ‘Ayo Technology’ is just poetic justice.
The CC songs that “steal” are 4 years old and no one’s heard the songs until now. The CC songs that everyone knows and loves are original.
Find a new hobby.
wrong. there are stolen uncredited tracks from the creative commons licensed chipscene on the official release too.. if these are old songs unintended for use then why did they so agressively put up these ‘2004′ songs on myspace , youtube, and played at recent live shows..
you cannot defend the indefensible. the issue isn’t sampling , it’s that the old boy ‘kath’ invents stories about how he got those sounds and is quoted in interviews lying that he hadn’t heard of chiptune meanwhile he’s sampling the shit out of it. crystal craps other sample choices are lame.. ‘the message’ haha…yeh you have to credit that cos every other old dj like kath did it 20 times and probably dont even know it was liquid liquid 1st
crystal castles has stole music samples from the 8 bit collective site and the madonna image from an artist for their shirt. deny all of it and don’t give credit to the people
so honestly it may look bad if they complain about this when they are doing the same thing to other
they didnt steal the madonna image, the artist gave them permission verbally but became greedy and decided he wanted $10000 which is ridiculous. they sampled some sounds, never denied it, and never actually sold those tracks and have been trying to reach lo-bat to sort it out, but as far as it goes lo-bat is alright with them remixing the sound he made, and alice put lyrics over it.
they’ve acknowledged the 8bit scene, they just say theyre not a part of it.
Crystal Castles REMIXES songs by other artists AND creates originals. Their “stolen” songs are most likely unofficial remixes of other artists’ songs and have never been sold as their own work.
Did you know that cc has stolen most of their album from other 8 bit artist? Of course not because most of cc fans dont educate themselves about underground 8-bit music hg
You are wrong. The songs with samples from 8 bit artists are unreleased tracks from 5 years ago. Pitchfork just wrote an article about it.
CC don’t care, they are actually quite flattered… if you read their latest article in SPIN you will find what their opinion is about all of this.
in the end… whatever.