Information regarding the iconic 1992 vocal acapella song by Greek-American songwriter and interdisciplinary artist Ithaka Darin Pappas (Ithaka). As of 2025, this example of lyrical mastery has been remixed over 800 times. In 1994, a hit remix was made by an acid house project from Underground Sound of Lisbon (DJ Vibe, Rui da Silva) and presented as a 100% Portuguese project with absolutely no mention of its creator Ithaka...now considered one of the biggest musical coverups since Milli Vanilli.
Showing posts with label Go Outside Have A Blast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Go Outside Have A Blast. Show all posts
20/01/2017
The clock’s struck 12, the countdown’s over and your
wait is done! Chapter.One of ‘Materia’ - Cosmic Gate’s planetary new
artist album, is available from today.
‘Materia’s maiden chapter
(already a MIXMAG album of the month!) presents a mouthwatering
co-production array. Comprised of nine recordings, it abounds with
tracks in partnership with Cosmic cohorts both established and new!
You’ll quickly find ‘Edge Of Life’, Nic & Bossi’s Spotify-smashing
(2 millions streams and counting!) latest with Californian-based singer
Eric Lumiere. Marking their third outing with JES, the album weighs
anchor with ‘Materia’s vanguard single ‘Fall Into You’. In both name and
nature, ‘Dynamic’ is the outcome of CG’s second studio meet-up with
Ferry Corsten. Melding (says DJ Mag in their 8/10 review) “grit and
melody in equal proportions”, stylishly it picks right up where their
autumn Spotify & chart dynamo ‘Event Horizon’ left off. Working in
perfect synergy, ‘Spectrum’, their debut co-op with iLan Bluestone, is
the perfect summation of the trio’s trance nuance and ingenuity.
‘Materia’ (Mātěrĭa - Latin. Fem. Noun. Decl.): base, matter, essence, the substance that all things are made of).Backed
by Alastor ‘s crowd-rousing vocals ‘Fight The Feeling’s sleek, cruising
trance lines brings another ready made floor-roar to ‘Materia’s
tracklist. Sung by Tim White, the more daytime inclined ‘The Deep End’
meanwhile supplies the album one of its several natural born radio-wave
gifts. Long on CG’s collaboration must-do list, Chapter.One’s latter
stages see Julie Thompson join ‘Materia’s honour roll. The English
songstress’ full vocal range burns vocal heart & soul into the
hauntingly ethereal ‘Fireflies’. At Chapter One’s endzone lies the
Beatport #1 'am2pm’ and new speaker-spanker ‘Halo’, which bring a
counterweighting instrumental balance to ‘Materia’s vocal coterie.
‘Speaking’ directly to clubfloors, each carries the unmistakably
tenacious hallmarks of Cosmic Gate’s production complexion.
In
early, 2017, Los Angeles-based independent music label, Sweatlodge
Records will release the seventh album by the Californian songwriter, Ithaka, entitled, So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas.
The record will include thirteen of Ithaka's vocalized poems (without
music), many of which were written during 1992 and 1993, two of the six years the artist lived in Lisbon. Also, as a bonus track, the original 1993 demo-version of So Get Up will appear.
There in Portugal, Ithaka was
regularly invited to recite his texts and rhymes for the daily program,
Quatro Bairro on the national station, Rádio Comerical. Ten of the poems offered
on the Lost Acapellas release were written specifically for the radio program and
later (in mid-1993) were rerecorded as voice-over and musical demos on a visit to England. These recordings were lost for 23 years until
recently being discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit on a antiquated cassette tape.
Among these early acapella poems is So Get Up,
most recently re-popularized by Armin Van Buuren and Cosmic Gate, which
today (twenty-four years and more than a thousand releases and
adaptions later) is considered The Most Remixed Vocal Acapella In Musical History (by Guinness World Records - 2016, 2017).
So
Get Up was originally written and recorded by Ithaka for Quatro Bairro (Rádio Comerical),
unfortunately this very first recording has never been
recovered. He did however, as mentioned, record it a second time in the U.K - to
present to radio producers and possibly record companies.
There
working at Rádio Comerical, Ithaka met DJ Vibe (Portugal's most prominent DJ),
who played an hour of progressive house music immediately following
Ithaka's segments. There Vibe usually heard the end of Ithaka's vocal slots and was intrigued by the poems. Some months later, he invited
him to participate as a guest vocalist on the first release by Underground Sound Of Lisbon
(an EDM duo consisting of Vibe and Rui Da Silva) for Kaos Records.
They recorded Ithaka's vocal in the early hours of a rainy winter night at the
garage studio, 1 Só Céu,owned by the Portuguese rock band called, Os Delfins.
Ithaka
was told by the label that they would make 200 white-labels vinyls for distribution
within Portugal only. They paid him $70 dollars for his participation,
with a verbal promise to discuss any future distributions and
manufacturing that would possibly follow. And just weeks later, from just that single white-label pressing, the song
exploded into an almost instantaneous national blockbuster.
Although
open-minded musically, Ithaka was more associated with hip hop and street art than
dance music and only infrequently appeared at the clubs his apocalyptic
poem had literally become an anthem for an entire generation of club
goers, inspiring even people who never liked dance music to get
involved.
Ironically, Underground Sound Of Lisbon themselves never
made a point of explaining who the mystery prophet was and nobody
seemed to ask, the press included - even though Ithaka owned 50% of the
publishing and was indeed the actual performer.
"I
remember specifically on a couple of occasions trying to get into
Lisbon-area night clubs, which is always a chore, and there in line, two different times, I
could hear So Get Up playing on the dance floor...The first was at Frágil in Bairro Alto - and I said, hey man,
that's me...let me in. And the doorman said, if that was you...I would
know who you are AND I DON'T! - And the other time..was at Alcatara, when I again declared that
was my voice muffled behind the thick curtains out the dance floor..and that doorman said, Yes, my friend, and Elvis is still alive too!
In
late 1994, Ithaka left Portugal for four months back to Los Angeles for
an art exhibit - and during that short amount of time, Kaos Records had
licensed So Get Up, without consulting him, to several international parties most notably Tribal
Records (USA) a sub-subsidiary of Stuart Copeland's IRS Records (EMI).
Although
Rob Di Stefano, the managing director of Tribal Records had met Ithaka
on a previous trip to Portugal, and obviously understood he was from California and only temporarily residing in Portugal, he realized the marketing potential of
an exotic 100% Portuguese house music product arriving in the U.S. for
the first time and made no attempt to publicize the vocalist's true origins. No featuring Ithaka credit was ever included on any of the
releases, even though he is both the author and the vocalist. Yes, this is dance music, but no matter how good or bad the production is, no one can deny that the vocal-poem and
adjoining hooks are the primal guts of the entire So Get Up experience. How else could it possibly appeal to such a large musucal spectrum of DJ and producers?
The
first 1994 release of So Get Up on Tribal was a double-vinyl set with
ten-mixes, including several versions by New York superstars Junior
Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia. The early international
popularity of So Get Up was undoubtfully manifested by
these interpretations by Vasquez and Tenaglia. Two New York all-stars creating
music around the words of a California hip hop wordsmith. To call So Get Up,
even at that point, a 100% Portuguese release, was inaccurate at best.
The first release by Tribal, which sold upwards of 50,000 copies, also
included an uncredited acapella of Ithaka's raw poem - which paved way
for a vast multitude of remixes and samplings over a huge cross-section
of electronic musical genres.
With the exception of
Stretch & Verne's legally licensed rerecord "Get Up, Go Insane!" in
1997 and (subsequently Fatboy Slim's remix of that), every other
international release of So Get Up has essentially been unauthorized. It
is fair to say that every (of the more than a thousand mixes released)
house, trance, techno, electro, drum & bass, big beat, dub step, and
art rock versions - under their varying titles of "So Get Up", "Get
Up", "Forget The Past", "the End Of The Earth", "Have A Blast",
"Headcharge", "Hardaventure" have been issued illegally. No record royalties or
performance royalties have even been paid to the vocalist/lyricist although all have been made using Ithaka's 1994 recording in Cascais, Portugal. By the most recent estimates of Ithaka's publisher attempting to recoup his writing shares, So Get Up has been either sold or downloaded more than 30,000,000 times and approximately 250,000,000 have at least heard the poem. Whether payment ever falls into the right hands, time will only tell.
Ithaka
himself has had an unusual career (and life) to say the least. He
came to recording not thru music itself, but via music photography, visual
arts....and reading books. For nearly three years, among his many
other sporadic occupations, Ithaka was the principal photographer for
Priority Records gangster rap icons, NWA and Eazy E , but that's a story
for another day.
In 1992, attempting to expand his boundries outside of the Los Angeles area, the half-Greek, Ithaka Darin Pappas, set off
soul-searching. He first relocated to Athens, Greece for six months and
then spent a year in Tokyo, finally landing in Lisbon where he spent
more than six years.
During this six-year period in
Portugal, Ithaka was hyper-productive. He recorded So Get Up (and many other poems), made two award-winning hip
hop albums, published
translated poems and short stories in Portuguese magazines - and also had several large scale sculpture exhibits. He also photographically documented much the early and mid-nineties Portuguese music scene, shooting record covers for rock, hip hop and EDM projects.
The end of the earth is upon us.Pretty soon it wall all turn to dust.
So get up!Forget the past, go outside and have a blast.The end of the
earth is upon us pretty soon it wall all turn to dust. 10000 Miles in a
jet airplane. Go out of your mind Go insane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"SO GET UP" is a vocal poem originally written and vocalized by Californian poet and artist, ITHAKA (Ithaka Darin Pappas). It was recorded for the first time (with a hip hop instrumental) on Radio Commercial in Lisbon, Portugal in 1993, where Ithaka resided between the years of 1992-1998.
He later recorded it in 1994 with the house music duo Underground Of Lisbon on a local label called Kaos, who licensed it (without authorization from the lyricist) to Tribal Records in New York who put a a ten-mix double vinyl release with mixes by Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia. Also included was an acapella of Ithaka's vocal which began a feeding frenzy of mixes, some legal but mostly bootlegs. Producer stole from other producers, never really knowing where the vocal and lyrics came from assuming it was pubic domain.
https://www.facebook.com/SoGetUp/
In 2014, the German trance act Cosmic Gate released it yet again, it became a hit and they based there entire world tour on it including merchandise (with even so much as a vocal credit).
In 2016, an authorized version of the track was presented by Club Atlas at the Red Bull Music Academy's 'Culture Clash Lisbon' music competition. The group took the evening's top honors.
To date So Get Up has been remixed and released more than 900 times in 23 countries. Sometimes called, "Forget The Past", "Get Up, Go Insane!", "The End Of The Earth", "Insane", "Go Outside, Have A Blast" etc.
Note: Ithaka is also the lyricist and vocalist of the underground hip hop hit, "Escape From The City Of Angels" which appeared in Antoine Fuqua's film "The Replacement Killers" starring Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino (Columbia Pictures).
The end of the earth is upon us.Pretty soon it wall all turn to dust.
So get up!Forget the past, go outside and have a blast.The end of the
earth is upon us pretty soon it wall all turn to dust. 10000 Miles in a
jet airplane. Go out of your mind Go insane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"SO GET UP" is a vocal poem originally written and vocalized by Californian poet and artist, ITHAKA (Ithaka Darin Pappas). It was recorded for the first time (with a hip hop instrumental) on Radio Commercial in Lisbon, Portugal in 1993, where Ithaka resided between the years of 1992-1998.
He later recorded it in 1994 with the house music duo Underground Of Lisbon on a local label called Kaos, who licensed it (without authorization from the lyricist) to Tribal Records in New York who put a a ten-mix double vinyl release with mixes by Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia. Also included was an acapella of Ithaka's vocal which began a feeding frenzy of mixes, some legal but mostly bootlegs. Producer stole from other producers, never really knowing where the vocal and lyrics came from assuming it was pubic domain.
https://www.facebook.com/SoGetUp/
In 2014, the German trance act Cosmic Gate released it yet again, it became a hit and they based there entire world tour on it including merchandise (with even so much as a vocal credit).
In 2016, an authorized version of the track was presented by Club Atlas at the Red Bull Music Academy's 'Culture Clash Lisbon' music competition. The group took the evening's top honors.
To date So Get Up has been remixed and released more than 900 times in 23 countries. Sometimes called, "Forget The Past", "Get Up, Go Insane!", "The End Of The Earth", "Insane", "Go Outside, Have A Blast" etc.
Note: Ithaka is also the lyricist and vocalist of the underground hip hop hit, "Escape From The City Of Angels" which appeared in Antoine Fuqua's film "The Replacement Killers" starring Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino (Columbia Pictures).
