A Verdadeira História de "So Get Up", a Mais Remixed Acapella da História Musical

PÚBLICO - Suplemento Pop-Rock (Quinta-feira 10 Abril 1996)

excerto do artigo, O Americano Feio? por Jorge Dias 

O greco-americano Ithaka Darin Pappas participou em "So Get Up" dos USL e assinou o album, "Flowers And The Color Of Paint". Estão certamente entre os projectos mais fortes da música de dança feita em Portugal nos anos 90s. Entretanto, Ithaka viajou pelos Estados Unidos e o seu nome ficou um pouco esquecido. Até agora quando regressa a Lisboa para pôr em causa as sua antigas ligações.

Pappas "versus" USL-Kaos

Ithaka Darin Pappas passou alguns meses em Los Angeles, cidade de onde é natural e onde fez algums contactos para conseguir um "manager" e um advogado. "Fui aos Estados Unidos porque havia uma séria de problemas a resolver aqui. Um deles foi que fiz un disco em 1994 com os Underground Sound of Lisbon [USL] e, quando o gravámos, foi uma coisa entre amigos, estavamos a fazer arte em conjunto e foi uma coisa boa. Fiz um acordo verbal com eles segundo o qual receberia 25 mil escudos (approx. 120 €) por mil discos que fossem lançados em Portugal. Nunca se falou de contratos nem de distribuição no estangeiro."

Desde então, "So Get Up" – que era originalmente o lado B do maxi que tería por tema principal "Dance With Me" – fez furor nos Estados Unidos, para onde o disco foi enviado, transformando os USL, de que fazem parte Rua da Silva (Doctor J) e Tó Pereira (DJ Vibe), no projecto de "dance music" nacional mais aclamado a nivel internacional.

"O tema entrou para as 'charts' e foi lançado em muitos paises, mas eles não reconheceram a minha participação. Apesar de muitas das remisturas que foram feitas – principalmente as de Danny Tenaglia e Junior Vasquez, as mais populares- practicamente só reterem as minhas palavras e a minha voz. Nessa ponto é questionável quem é realmente o artista. É o Ithaka? Ou são os USL? Quando se 'descartaa a musica original e faz outra é questionável. É que não sou membro dos USL….?", diz Ithaka. E acrescento: "Pode perguntar-se a quem se quiser, nos Estados Unidos ou em Portugal, o que é que indentifica a canção: são as palavras. Neste tipo de música, que há numeras versões diferentes, a etiqueta são as palavras. A canção é o poema."

Dai que Ithaka reclame direitos de interpretação – "royalties", uma vez que os direitos de autor lhe pertencem por direito – sobre os lucros com "So Get Up". É que o poema a que Ithaka dá voz no "intro" do tema tinha sido escrito seis meses antes de ser convidado para juntar-se aos USL, depois de estes o terem ouvido numa emissão do programa Quatro Bairro, da Rádio Comerical. Segundo António Cunha, da Kaos, editora dos USL – e depois de o PÚBLICO ter marcada uma entrevista com Rui da Silva que acabou por não acontecer-, "o que passa é a vlha história de negócio da música: quando as coisas têm sucesso há sempre alguema tentar aproveitar-se".

So Get Up - A Poem By Ithaka Darin Pappas

 

Ithaka : So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas

Collection of vocal poems recorded in Europe in 1993, which had been completely lost until being rediscovered in early 2017 (on a damaged cassette tape in a Los Angeles garage). These are the companion works for the iconic, So Get Up.

 https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ithaka2

Californian-born writer and vocalist Ithaka (aka Ithaka Darin Pappas) relocated from his native Los Angeles in 1992 to Europe where the artist entered of six year period of hyper-creativity. There he wrote, vocalized, created sculptures and photographed among other activities.

In 1993 he wrote a collection of poems for a daily audio segment he hosted on a program called Quatro Bairro on Rádio Commercial, Lisbon. After reciting some these poems live on Rádio Comerical in 1993, he later recorded them as a collection of demos with a producer friend in the UK.

The next year he recorded one of these poems, So Get Up, with the progressive-house project Underground Sound Of Lisbon who achieved massive international success with the track via distribution by Tribal/I.R.S. Records in New York.

Between a series of moves and career developments, the original 1993 vocal poem demos recorded in England were lost. Neither studio technician or artist could find the original, or copies.

So Get Up went on to become an international EDM anthem remixed by greats such as; Miss Kittin, Fatboy Slim. Mert Yücel, Dave Seaman etc.


Later in 2013, the song saw yet another chapter of fame when top DJ's both Hardwell and Armina Van Buuren endorsed a new version of the So Get Up rleased by German trance music stars Cosmic Gate using Ithaka's original lyrical/ vocal acapella)

Ithaka himself went on to record a series of critically acclaimed hip hop albums.

Here together on this disc are two new vocal recordings of Ithaka's iconic poems "So Get Up" and "We Are The Players" (recorded in Mexico - 2017) along with the complete collection of vocal-poem acapella demos made in 1993, some with their original proposed instrumental sketches. Please note: These are not intended to be finished songs, but instead are included to demonstrate Ithaka's early musical direction prior to both Underground Sound Of Lisbon's version of So Get Up (1994) and his own solo album, Flowers And The Color Of Paint (1995).

In the future, the artist hopes to collaborate with some of the EDM producers that have previously mixed his vocal-literary works, perhaps without even knowing who had recorded them.

Cosmic Gate's - "So Get Up" - The Poem & The Poet

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.