While pretending to know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen, I had some music on for companionship. One of my favorite songs is “God is a DJ” by Faithless. It’s a great dance-type song, and I never tire of listening to it.

This time however I noticed an interesting sound in the song. Faithless often uses odd bleeps, sweeps and loops in their songs, and this one sounded familiar. I’d probably noticed it before, but this time I paid attention to it. While my hands chopped various vegetables my mind stirred around and tried to remember where I’d heard that particular sound before.

After some mental wandering through my archives I remembered. It was from one of my all-time favorite movies, the masterpiece known as “Apocalypse Now“.

Apocalypse Now has a very interesting soundscape. The music is this odd synthesizer-and-percussion thing, and most of the soundscape is somewhat surreal and unreal – which goes well with the films somewhat bisarre themes. One of the more noticeable aspects of this is that a lot of the helicopter sounds have been replaced with similar-sounding (yet at the same time kind of alien) synthesizer-created sounds.

The very first minutes of the film demonstrates this, with the Huey swooping across the film with a distinctly non-Huey type sound.

It was this very sound I heard in “God is a DJ”. An odd, swooping type sound filling out the background.

I briefly wondered if Faithless had sampled it from the movie, and if so whether it was a legitimate (i.e. they asked for permission from the copyright holders) or whether it was a black-market sample. The latter option seemed much more logical, and while it’s a fairly uniquie soundbite it’s also quite generic to the untrained ear.

But then my mind continued thinking about this. What if they’d recreated the sound using the same type of equipment? What if Faithless discovered they could replicate the sound using completely different equipment?

So who owns the sound if an almost identical sound can be recreated using completely different equipment some twenty years after the “original” sound was created?

Could the copyright holders of Apocalypse decide that they owned the IP of that particular sound, and that any other sound created independently of that sound, sounds that weren’t completely identical but at the same time sounded similar enough, was in fact infringing on their intellectual property? That they owned the rights to every similar sound?

Of course it’s quite bizarre to think about, but it’s also essentially how the copyright-mafia works today so it wouldn’t really surprise me either if some crazed hollywood rights-holder unleashed a shitload of lawyers over this trivial matter.

Which in the long run reminds me that this IP-hostility only serves to stifle creativity. If Faithless had to leave out that sound due to threats of being sued into oblivion, then the rights-holder of that sound would’ve stifled innovation and creativity.

Kind of sad to think about.

(The sound in question can be heard here, in this Youtube-video of the very introduction from Apocalypse Now. It’s the very first sound heard, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh.)

—

I am merely the product
Of the life that I’ve lived
An amalgam of sorrows
And the wisdom they give
But the weight has grown heavy
And its dragging me down
It’s so hard not to sink now
But I don’t want to drown

I can reach for the surface
And try to pull myself free
But the last thing I want is
To drag you down here with me

So, I hope Louie is drumming in heaven. Preferably doing drum-battles with Buddy Rich and handing Buddys ass to him.

Enjoy this incredibly tight and fluid solo by Louie from when he was on Johnny Carsons show some twenty years ago.

Anyway. For the last few days I’ve been casually trying to figure out what that song really is about. Just like Mr Pink deducing that Madonnas “Like A Virgin” is really about well-endowed members of the male species I have now figured out the true meaning of this song.

It’s about a man who has multiple personalities. Or in this case, dual personalities. He shares his head with the personality of a psychotic serial-killing woman. Mostly the main character is in control, but occasionally he loses control and the other personality takes over, perpetrating horrible crimes while he watches, unable to do anything.

This is evidenced in several lines, and once I realized this the rest was obvious.

You frighten me
You spy on me
You’re scaring me
You care for me

He’s scared of this other personality since it’s so violent. The other personality also protects him, knowing that they can only co-exist in the same body, thus she tries (unsuccessfully as it would seem) to shield him from the knowledge of her.

She’s living in the house

Of course, since they share the same body they also share the same house.

She knows my body inside out

Again, since it’s a body shared by two personalities she knows his body inside out and is familiar with all the quirks.

I don’t recall when this affair began
She was simply there

I would guess that maybe he developed this other personality due to some traumatic event in his life? Who knows. One day she simply appeared.

Sometimes I watch her kill
Cold eyes and no restraint
And I wonder how it feels
To annihilate a friend

When he loses control and she takes over he can still see through the eyes and watch her do her deeds. He sees the acts she performs, but don’t understand the emotion that drives it.

You frighten me
It’s getting harder to conceal
You spy on me
All my secrets are revealed

Since the two personalities are aware of each other it would seem that aspects of their existence bleed over onto each other, and they can watch each other “inside” the shared brain. So far he might have managed to keep his thoughts private, but it would seem she’s figuring out ways around it.

So, what do you think? Am I correct in deducing this or am I completely wrong here?

You frighten me
You spy on me
You’re scaring me
You care for me

You’re scaring me
A play on words for us to see
You care for me
I find this harder to believe