Why does the beginning of "White Town - Your Woman" remind me of a Nazi theme?

by daraseti_piqqudeka
hillsonghoods

One reason might be that the beginning of 'Your Woman' by White Town samples a 1932 track by Lew Stone & His Monseigneur Band (feat. Al Bowlly) called 'My Woman'. Lew Stone and Al Bowlly were popular British musicians of the 1930s in the style that in the UK gets called 'trad jazz', and so the song has the recording quality, style, and sound that evokes the 1930s era when the Nazis came to power in Germany; this is readily apparent in the way the sample used by White Town sounds. I suspect that music in the style of 'My Woman' has often been used in documentaries as a contemporary soundtrack of footage of Hitler in the 1930s - it gets across the feel of the time and (unlike, say, the big band swing dominant in the US or the British music hall styles of George Formby) it has an anxious, minor key feel that's not inappropriate for the topic matter.

And as /u/sunagainstgold points out, and the YouTube video above also makes explicit, there is a resemblance between the melody at the start of 'My Woman'/'Your Woman' and the Imperial March. The Empire in Star Wars obviously has a bunch of Nazi symbolism, including calling the army 'stormtroopers', and people who put together soundtracks are adept at identifying semiotic similarities between themes which means they can do two jobs of suggesting how you should feel about what's on screen. So I would not be surprised if 'My Woman' has been used to soundtrack BBC documentaries about Hitler in the 1930s, or the like, because it simultaneously sounds like the 1930s and implicitly compares the evil of the Third Reich to the evil of the Empire.

sunagainstgold

I'm not sure if this is strictly a historical question, but: I don't think it's Nazis you're thinking of. (Well, not directly.) It's the Imperial March from Star Wars. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bgAKATS68

Listen around 34,35 seconds for the melody bit picked up in "Your Woman." (But also listen to the whole thing, because it's John Williams and the Imperial March.)