"A Night at the Hip-Hopera"

Ha! Glad to see it made the news. Here's a thread we had about this the other day:
http://www.queenzone.com/queenzone/forumnew/forum_topic_view.aspx?Q=394253

There has to be a balance of stuff being sold vs. being reused creatively for free distribution.

I: A) don't believe it hurts anyone. There's always a flipside where someone is going to hear something for the first time and is going to go out and buy the original, so this actually promotes sales.

B) know that this can't be stopped, so the 'industry' might as well just accept the fact that people like to be creative and mess around with stuff, and will share it with friends and fans.

C) if the item in question is later sold for profit, of course royalties should be paid.

I see it as a global village of fans. One person buys something, changes it around a bit and gives it away free.. it's no longer the original at that point. So it's been paid for once and someone else has put their own work into it.. let it be given away free I say.

This is crap! But I like it.

rubbish

heh, sounds like an interesting battle.

Quite well done, most of that. A bit forced in places.

Shame Rapper's Delight couldn't have been stuck onto AOBTD...

Its all pretty boring but very interesting.

Except song 2, forget its name, I liked that...

downloading the album right now (takes forever on dial-up)...anyone able to give a good idea as to what i should expect to hear? like, writing a decent review based on artistic merits of the album, giving me some idea of what samples were used (was it a "P. Diddy" type sampling project, where they "sampled" an entire song, minus lyrics, or have they gotten more creative than that?)

Well, there's so much stuff it's hard to describe. It runs about 78 minutes.

I wouldn't call it 'sampling'... what they've done for the most part is simply add acapellas to karaoke & 'The Eye' mixes. Then there's various historical sound clips, stuff from movies, news events. There's also extra overdubs of Queen, such as Freddie working the crowd live, interview bits.

I ignored the cue sheet and titles and split it up as follows for my own CD version. I've noted the few instances where I recognize the vocal:

01 - Procession-One Vision (original Procession/karaoke One Vision)
02 - Keep Yourself Alive (karaoke, most likely one I posted since it has the full intro.. ha!)
03 - Another One Bites The Dust (karaoke)
04 - More Of That Jazz (The Eye)
05 - We Will Rock You (karaoke)
06 - Fight From The Inside (The Eye)
07 - Even More Of That Jazz (intro from original sped up and looped)
08 - Play The Game ("Gay Bar") (karaoke)
09 - Bicycle Race (Eminem - "My Name Is") (karaoke)
10 - Under Pressure (karaoke)
11 - Queen Talks (interview segments, I think this is basically the single b-side version)
12 - I'm Going Slightly Mad (karaoke)
13 - I Want To Break Free (Beastie Boys?) (karaoke)
14 - Radio Ga Ga (Beastie Boys?) (karaoke)
15 - Machines (instrumental)
16 - Spread Your Wings (karaoke)
17 - Flash (karaoke)
18 - A Kind Of Magic (karaoke)
19 - Save Me (karaoke)
20 - Don't Stop Me Now (karaoke)
21 - Who Wants To Live Forever (karaoke and 'Forever' versions)

I had hoped for something a bit more similar to "the Grey Album" which was very well done. This sounds to me like someone just putting A Capella stuff on top of instrumental tracks without even editing them. On tracks like Bicycle Race they didn't even try to work around the "You Said" bits....

Shift + Delete

on the first listen, i didn't like it. i might give it another go...

I like it, after all. Not a work of art, really. A little amateur, most of the times, but good fun.

I don't know if a link has been provided before, so here it goes:

http://www.nathanntg.com/mirror/kleptones_opera/

On the other hand, does anybody have the covers of the CD (sleeve)?

Cheers,

Ogre-

They have two front covers and a back at the bottom of this site:

http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads_hiphopera.html

http://www.kleptones.com/images/hiphoperafront1.jpg
http://www.kleptones.com/images/hiphoperafront2.jpg
http://www.kleptones.com/images/hiphoperaback.jpg

I like it a lot. Some songs indeed sound a bit forced, they could have done more to or with the instrumentals, but some others sound just great (stop, bite, see, fuck, listen...).

There are some of my favourite hip hop artists on there, e.g. Herbaliser, KRS-One, DJ Vadim, De La Soul... music that I spent way more time with than with Queen in the last years, so these mashup remixes are a great surprise, especially since they are well-done and not commercially. And since I don't know many people who do the hip hop stuff and still have a soft spot for Queen. It's great, really.

I've just finished to listen to A Night At The Hip-Hopera.Very nice title!
Maybe Queen or Freddie would have appreciate it because tries to break the boundaries between music genres like they always did year after year.
Very nice try but I'm not into hip hop,trip hop or rap music at all!
It's like trying to listen to the best music in the world ever while one is disturbing you speaking incessantely in your ears!
I love rock'n'roll in all it's forms but after all I aprreciate this tentative to product new music with the Queen Art.
Maybe someone more into this genre could like this work even better than me!