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December 14, 2009 12:34 PM

What songs have sampled the philosopher Alan Watts?

The Books' song "All our base are belong to them" has an Alan Watts sample, as does Giraffes? Giraffes! song "I Am S/H(im)e[r] As You Am S/H(im)e[r] As You Are Me And We Am I And I Are All Our Together: Our Collective Consciousness' Psychogenic Fugue". There must be a ton of other songs containing Watts' quotes. I thought there was a Lemon Jelly song as well, but can't find a reference to it at the moment.

posted by benzenedream to media & arts (4 answers total)

Van Morrison sings one of my favorite songs - Alan Watts' Blues. I'm not familiar enough with Watts to know if any of his quotes are in the lyrics, but they might be.
posted by HeyAllie at 12:57 PM on December 14, 2009

I think the Hallucinogen (a/k/a Simon Posford from Shpongle) track "Gamma Goblins" (It's Turtles All the way down mix) samples AW.
posted by minimii at 3:26 PM on December 14, 2009

(Alan Watts is not a philosopher! He's a more of a new-agey mystic, but he's also a decent explainer of Buddhism, so I'll give him a break.)

"In the River Where She Sleeps" by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer mentions Alan Watts. Kind of funny the first time you hear it but maybe annoying after that.
posted by k. at 5:57 PM on December 14, 2009

When I first heard the sample in the Giraffes? Giraffes! track, it blew my mind so hard I nearly crashed my car:

Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be.'

And you would dig that, and come out of it and say 'That was a close shave, now wasn't it?' Then, you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now.

You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.

posted by (lambda (x) x) at 7:39 PM on December 14, 2009