SO GET UP & GO INSANE ! The Hit Song That Immortalized JUN JI HYUN 全智賢 전지현 (By Ithaka Darin Pappas)

Ithaka's "So Get Up", The Song That Made JUN JI HYUN (全智賢 전지현) A Star

In 1999, after starring in her first feature film at the age of eighteen, (the little-watched White Valentine), Korean actress Jun Ji-Hyun was still largely unknown.

It was not until later that year when she starred in a hugely popular commercial for Samsung My Jet Printers featuring a remix of Californian songwriter Ithaka Darin Pappas' iconic 1993 vocal-poem song, So Get Up, that, according to most media sources, she became a a public sensation.

The version of So Get Up featured in the campaign (called "Get Up! Go Insane") was made by UK producers Stretch & Vern, who brought Ithaka to the UK to re-record his 1993 classic. The final result, restructured the vocal hook differently from the original, but the overall message was the same, So Get Up...and live life to the fullest ! This anthem of defiance and celebration was exuberantly communicated by Jun Ji-Hyun's dancing dance and attitude in the clip.

The commercial sky-rocketed her from being a relatively unknown actress to being a cultural youth icon for all of South Korea and beyond (and eventually one of Korea's biggest film and television stars).

Ji-Kyun has since gone on to star in Sassy Girl (when of the biggest films in Korean history), You Who Came from the Stars, and The Legend of the Blue Sea.
She has won several national and international awards for her acting ability.

*Note: Ithaka rerecorded his iconic 1993, So Get Up specifically for Stretch & Vern's mix (in the UK, 1996). This is one of the only authorized versions of So Get Up in 25 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf-4C7VYzEw
Also see; So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas

Ithaka'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.

Most Remixed Vocal In History - Guinness World Record - Lyricist: Ithaka Darin Pappas

"So Get Up" Guinness World Record Holder For Most Remixed A Capella (Writer: Ithaka Darin Pappas)

 

In 2016, with at least 1029 documented remixes to its credit

 "So Get Up" a vocal spoken-word poem written and recorded by 

Californian artist and songwriter Ithaka (Ithaka Darin Pappas)

was the Guinness World Record holder for

"Most Musical Remixes Created From Single Acapella"

Ithaka initially penned "So Get Up",

(first titled, The End Of The Earth Is Upon Us)

in mid-1993 for a daily segment of a program he regularly hosted 

on Rádio Comerical Lisbon called "Bairro Quatro".

It was recited the first time live on-air 

just an hour or two after it was written.

In 1994, also in Portugal, he re-recorded it with

a house music duo called Underground Sound Of Lisbon.

It was distributed nationally and later on Tribal Records (NY) 

with an a capella version, incredulously without a vocal credit.

It is this a capella that has been remixed, robbed, sampled, remade 

and covered to a degree unseen in the history of modern music.

In 2016, at last count there were 1029 released remixes 

of  the vocal "So Get Up" (often under different titles such as;

  The End Of The Earth, Get Up Go Insane, Forget The Past, etc). 

Guinness World Record now recognizes the SO Get Up vocal poem

 as holding the title for "Most Musical Remixes Created From Single A Capella" 

bypassing #2, Turkish pop-vocalist Evrim Tuzun, by more than 800 mixes.

Because the first release of So Get Up was not vocally credited, 

this seemed to green-light all other remix users 

of the acapella to not credit it as well (most producers 

thought the vocal and lyrics were  public domain, perhaps from an old film).

Although some mixes were legally licensed, 

many EDM artists simply made their own electronic music tracks

and place Ithaka's vocals and lyrics on top of it,

and called it entirely their own without requesting permission 

or paying royalties.

Among the more known mixes of "So Get Up" there are versions by such all-star groups/producers as; Cosmic Gate (Germany), Danny Tenaglia (USA), Junior Vazquez (USA), DJ Vibe (Portugal), Mert Yücel (Turkey), Eric Kupper (USA), Fatboy Slim (UK) and Miss Kittin (France). 

An incomplete list of DJ/producers who have remixed, reworked, covered or sampled the vocal poem "So Get Up" by Ithaka Darin Pappas since its first recording in 1993 include: Cosmic Gate (Germany), Danny Tenaglia (USA), Junior Vazquez (USA), DJ Vibe (Portugal), Mert Yücel (Turkey), Eric Kupper (USA), Fatboy Slim (UK) and Miss Kittin (France), Pelarli, Alex Di Stefano, Public Domain (Holland), Pagano (Italy), Mirabeau (UK), Damaged People (UK), Mowree (Italy), Stretch & Verne (UK), Sarasite, Orion's Voice, Bob Ray & Van Dyuk, Igor Carmo, JJ Mullor, Dani Sber, Swing Kings, Atlantis IT, Ben Gold, Nixu Zsun (France), Ricardo Diaz, Peter Bailey (USA), DJ Kingsize, FuturePlays (Mexico), Derek Marin,  Oxia (France), Domino, DJ Diego Mendonça, Mauro Ferno, Maik Ibane, Ce Ce Lee (Italy), Dj Kryst-Off Aka Zornéus (France), FRANKYEFFE (Italy), Branko & Club Atlas (members of Buraka Som Sistema), Alex Page (Portugal), Nell Silva (Portugal), Alex Farolfi, Fargetta, GianLuca Mens, The Ventura 87, Dimas Carbajo, Christo Z (Greece), Ronni King,Terry Lee Brown JR., DJ Theo V (Greece), Djz Rom (Cambodia), DJ Beg, Lexicon Avenue, DJ Screw (Thailand) etc etc.

Labels that have released "So Get Up" mixes include: Tribal (USA-UK), Twisted (USA-UK), Forensic, Kaos (Portugal), Plastic City, Bosphorus Underground Recording (Turkey)