Referencing in music
 

A thread for sharing instances of referencing in music.

It happens more often in literature I think, but still musicians refer to each others work, or to each other as a person (Sleater-Kinney's I Wanna Be your Joey Ramone) or to their own work (John Lennon going SHE LOVES YOU YEAH YEAH YEAH at the end of All You Need is Love). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (Oasis' "Sail with me in my yellow submarine"). The cool thing about music in this context is that references can be made in multiple ways: it might be in the lyrics, or in the melody or other aspects of the music.

References to books or other kinds of art count too

Since I wrote my Master's on Moby-Dick, my favorite reference is Mastodon's 2004 sludge album, Leviathan.

Cool! And how fitting. If anything is full of references it's Moby Dick

Yeah. Like Biblical references?

I'm mostly frustrated by biblical references because I can't pick them up myself. I've had a very a-religious upbringing so I hardly know any bible stuff. But with some accompanying notes explaining them I can appreciate them. In fact I'm planning to read the bible sometime just to get all the references to it

Even if you don't like screamed metal vocals, it DOES have All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter in clean singing, which is beautiful in its own regard.

I'm fond of screamed punk vocals, but the death metal growl does nothing to me. I should have expected that there was metal music about LotR :)

My typical answer to yes or no questions when I was a kid was: "Nes" That is, not a reference to the game Earthbound, though however, I do llike Earthbound, it was my sarcastic response of "Maybe" to dichotomy. Eventually, I stumbled across early Therion material, which largely helped "bridge the gap" after some digging.



The lyrics for Siren Of The Woods were never printed. It is, however, the Akkadian reference (and language) to Babylonia/Sumerian/Canaanite/Mesopotamian of that of the Enuma Elish in terms of cross-reference work.

Musically, the piece is, quite frankly: A magickal ballad, perhaps of to the highest decree. I find a great beauty in its composition, bridging the worlds of the occult metal underground of its time, with that of classical composition and opera...which in its own regard is as a cross-reference of its own field to the theory of existence as we know it to a theory of frequency and pitch.

I'm probably massively outing myself as a nerd here, but that's okay, because I experience the exact same beauty when listening to the entirety of Beethoven's 9th Symphony...

I was asked once, as a musician in the workforce, primed for workforce non-college management through experience, how I felt about my inevitable passing and what I'd leave behind for my family. My response was: "I have no children, and no wife. What's good enough for Beethoven is good enough for me."

I just looked at my own writing of this and determined that in the modern era, a typical satirical response will be like this:

(which is actually how I think elph reacts to pretty much everything I say. I love you too elph!)

Great thread idea!

I'm sure there's a ton of metal stuff I could think of with references, but first song that comes to mind is Clutch's What Would a Wookie Do?

Most obvious metal literature reference.