the thing about being a musicnerd is that if some new composition is based on an old composition be it a cover, a sampling or a reworking, then you want to hear the original and compare it the newer version. if you are into hiphop then that's just called the main side effect of being a crate digger. i consider myself a crate digger but i tend to look in the crates that have certain hard plastic boxes with these five inch plastic discs inside of them. but i look for records as well as wax.
crate diggers have there databases of who sampled who in their minds and then a few years later some people created websites specifically for these databases. i seem to have forgotten on what that popular website is but anyhow. the nerdy hiphop cratediggers have used the forums for the-breaks.com as their main watering hole and there are a few swedish people who tend to try to identify sample-sources for swedish records.
i keep certain records in mind from that site when i look for records and i was grabbing ten record from a store up in stockholm and i found this one lp by swedish singer lill lindfors. now let's be confessional for a second and for someone who looked elsewhere than swedish culture in ones youth then swedish singers and musicians were the squarest thing possible. whether it's lill babs, siw malmkvist, lill lindfors, monica zetterlund, alice babs or lasse berghagen or whatever.
however one does grow away from whatever norms and prejudice you have about music or any form culture. part of this is discovery that they could sing extremely well and lill lindfors in particular became a name that people told me dig deeper into the catalogue. she had a number of records where she sang a couple of original songs and some that were swedish covers of a popular international record. in this case it's a cover of "feel like makin' love" made popular by roberta flack.
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to be honest i hadn't heard robertas version first since i was quite late on that track but the reason is that i really wasn't on many of the soul or r&b classics. you get to know them much later, i mean i knew who roberta flack was since she was a big singer and she was the one who made "killing me softly with his song" popular which of course was mentioned when the fugees did their version back in '96.
which leads to the how i knew of lill lindfors' version of the song since it was sampled in one my favourite records by swedish hiphop due ison & fille. dj large chopped up a bit from the end of this one for "utanför tullarna", the intro to ison & fille's third album "stolthet".
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now after discovering this record i've discovered more of lindfors' music and found the versions she used to do of songs where really good and i think her versions of "canto de ossanha" (fri som en vind) and "killing me softly me with his song" (sången han sjöng var min egen) are great. of course she is most famous outside of the nordic regions for the wardrobe malfunction stunt* at the 1985 eurovision song contest. but she can really sing and do it well and i think this version is on par with roberta flack's version.
buy here (7digital)
*yeah it's awesome and it will never happen again since the whole janet jackson thing but to be fair the only thing more awesome than the stunt is terry wogan's commentary.
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