A song by Fatboy Slim, released on the album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. The vocals are sampled from a live recording of Macon Hambone Blues by Wet Willie.
The samples drive this song, but Slim really knows what to do with them. Let the vocals flow along, then when they're done, play with it all you want. On both segments of the song, this leaves me rather ambivalent, though. For the first half of the song, it's all about the vocals. The music is pretty inconsequential, and is even ignorable. Then in the second half, all he does it write one really nice, dancey loop and plays it for a while. In both parts of the song, Fatboy Slim is hardly doing anything. But it turns out really good. It's a lot easier not to think about the artistic merit of songs like this, especially with regard to the concept of sampling.
The strangest and funniest thing about this song is how Slim cuts off the last line of the song he samples - but I'll explain that at the end, where it makes more sense.
Length: 3:43
Lyrics:
Aaaaaaah ah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah yeah!
Waaah yeah talkin' 'bout my baby
Talkin' 'bout my baby
When she go walkin' down Bourbon Street
I just can't hardly stand to walk behind her
She's got her red hot pants on
She got on her yellow high-heeled sneakers
She got on a yellow low-necked see-through blouse without no brassiere on
She's shakin' like two big ol' balloons in a hurricane
Ohhh she got on her purple afro wig
She got her hand on her hip
Let the backbone slip
Battin' 'er eyes, battin' 'er eyes, battin' 'er eyes, battin' 'er eyes,
Battin' 'er eyes 'n lookin straight at me,
Yeah, lookin' straight at me
She's battin' her eyes and lookin' straight at me with that sassy, saucy look on her face
She said, yeah,
"I wanna go out on a picnic with you baby, under the big bright yellow sun."
She said
"I wanna go out on a picnic with you baby, under the big bright yellow sun."
"...Under the big bright yellow sun."
(Bring in the funky bass and repeat the sample of that last line for a minute and a half. There's no clear ending, but I could listen to this loop forever.)
Now, Fatboy Slim uses "under the big bright yellow sun" because it's nice. It's simple, it's pretty, it's positive. But the thing is, he samples the last two minutes of the vocals from a song - a full conceptual section, the whole part of the song about this particular woman - and he cuts off the last line. The end of the lyrics to Wet Willie's Macon Hambone Blues goes as follows:
She said "I wanna go out on a picnic with you baby, under the big bright yellow sun."
She said "Daddy, I'm gonna take care of your hotdog, if you take care of my bun."
I will leave you to make your own judgments regarding Fatboy Slim's excising of that final line.