The 80's are back

At least in music. It seems you can't listen to the radio without hearing an 80's track lovingly stolen (I mean, sampled).

Rihanna followed the smash S.O.S. (incorporating the synth blips of Soft Cell's Tainted Love) with Shut Up and Drive (New Order's Blue Monday), both of which did better than the sampled songs. Timbaland's The Way I Are uses the melody of Salt-N-Pepa's Push It. And I'm sure there are more I'm mising.

That's not to say that other decades avoid the touch of the sampler, from the 50's (Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls with Ben E. King's Stand By Me) to this decade (Kanye West's Stronger with Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger).

The case of S.O.S. reflects a problem with the way music is credited. Tainted Love writer Ed Cobb has songwriting credits for the original song and the Soft Cell version, and was credited for S.O.S. However, the part of the song sampled was the creation of Soft Cell, but I don't think they get any payment for that sample.