A somewhat controversial idea is the contention that all of literature, theatre, and film can be broken down into seven basic plots—overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth—with Shakespeare hitting ‘em all. Therefore, every story in all of history, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Finding Dory, are variations on these plots. And each time the same basic structure takes a different form in each era, with the same archetypes retold over and over again, from generation to generation. If one buys into this, then the concept of originality arguably becomes somewhat of a fallacy.
This is also a contentious notion when it comes to music. There are 12 different notes/roots in the chromatic tonal system, and four basic triads for each root —minor, major, diminished and augmented. So, just starting with basic math, there are only 48 chords. If one plays any of those chords in succession, this number expands to thousands of possible chord progressions. However, even though a taste in music is subjective, most of those chord progressions are probably going to sound like shit. Just like there are all sorts of ingredients which are palatable and can be eaten, only certain recipes are considered great. This is why only a certain number of chord progressions are ubiquitous across pop music, with many of the biggest hit singles sharing the same ones. And it’s for this reason usually only a song’s lyrics and melody are protected by copyright.
However, last year the lawsuit over the song Blurred Lines shifted things a bit. Marvin Gaye’s estate charged that T.I., Pharrell Williams, and Robin Thicke had copied the feel and style of Got to Give It Up. A jury ordered Gaye’s heirs be paid $5.3 million in compensation, even though no specific rhythm, melody, harmony, or lyrics were copied, just a prior admission by Thicke in an interview that he wanted to copy the “feel” of Gaye’s song. The decision led to some consternation among academics and critics who claim it will have a “chilling effect” on music.
Earlier this month, the same attorney which represented Gaye’s estate filed suit on behalf of songwriters Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard against Ed Sheeran, claiming the chorus for the song Photograph shares “39 identical notes — about 70 percent — in pitch, rhythmic duration and placement in the measure” with Amazing, a 2009 song released by British X-Factor winner Matt Cardle. And Led Zeppelin is currently embroiled in a trial over whether the band’s signature hit —Stairway To Heaven— was plagiarized from Spirit’s 1967 instrumental track, Taurus. So this got me to thinking it might be interesting to debate where the line is between creativity and theft, and look at some of the historical examples of musical plagiarism, as well as the ones which never ended up in court but have been the stuff of fan arguments.
- Creep was a huge hit for Radiohead and considered one of the best songs of 1990s. Rumored to be about a girl that lead singer Thom Yorke had a crush on, Yorke has said the track is about being in love with someone, but not feeling you're good enough. He describes the feeling as, "there's the beautiful people and then there's the rest of us." However, Radiohead has come to hate the song, since given its popularity the band, and particularly Yorke, became identified with it and get asked to perform it over and over again. Yorke dislikes the song so much that he's said in interviews that Radiohead "sucked Satan's cock" when they rode it to stardom. In some interviews, Yorke has offered an alternate interpretation of the song. Instead of being a sympathetic perspective, the song is everything that's wrong about the loaner, slacker sad sack that obsesses over a girl. The song is also a famous case of plagiarism. Creep uses the chord progression from The Hollies' The Air That I Breathe in its verse and the melody from the song in the bridge following the second chorus of Creep. The writers of The Air That I Breathe, Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, noticed and sued Radiohead. Both Hammond and Hazlewood are now credited as co-writers of Creep in the liner notes of Pablo Honey.
- Coldplay had their first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2008 with Viva la Vida, attracting the attention of guitarist Joe Satriani, who claimed it was similar to his 2004 instrumental track If I Could Fly. The band settled out of court with Satriani in 2009, calling the similarities between the tracks an unfortunate coincidence.
- Johnny Cash has one of the most memorable and disturbing lines in all of music: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” However, Cash was forced to pay composer Gordon Jenkins $75,000 for using lyrics and melody from Jenkins' 1953 track Crescent City Blues as the basis for 1955’s Folsom Prison Blues. Cash changed significant parts of the song, going from a track about a lonely woman looking to escape the particulars of her life to a prison tale of murder and regret. But the lyrics, including the opening lines, "I hear the train a-comin, it's rollin' 'round the bend" were similar enough to Jenkins’s track to cause a lawsuit.
- Vanilla Ice rode Ice Ice Baby to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 1990, the first hip-hop song ever to top that chart. Unfortunately for him, plenty of listeners pointed out the song's similarity to 1981’s Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen. While Vanilla Ice denied the similarity at first in an infamous interview with MTV, he later relented and decided to pay both parties royalties in order to avoid a court battle.
- The Verve’s 1997 hit Bitter Sweet Symphony reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, and is arguably the band’s biggest hit. However, they saw not one dime from it. The song samples The Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time. The Stones’ business manager, Allen Klein, holds the rights to The Last Time and all of the Rolling Stones’ pre-1970 material. The Verve secured a license to sample a portion of The Last Time. However, Klein went to court and successfully argued The Verve had sampled too much. The rights and royalties to Bitter Sweet Symphony were relinquished to Klein, and songwriting credits on all copies since have been changed to list Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Richard Ashcroft as the writers.
- George Harrison‘s first solo No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 occurred in December 1970 with My Sweet Lord. However, a court ultimately decided Harrison had "subconsciously" copied the Chiffons song He's So Fine.
-
Ray Parker, Jr. was nominated for an Oscar with his theme song to Ghostbusters. However, Huey Lewis sued Parker and Columbia Pictures, claiming the song was basically stolen from Huey Lewis and the News' I Want a New Drug. The parties settled out of court, though Lewis' alleged breach of the confidentiality agreement—he discussed the case on VH1's Behind the Music in 2001—led to Parker suing Lewis. Discussing the film in Premiere magazine years later, the film's producers admitted that Lewis declined their offer to write the theme song and, upon hiring Parker, they gave him a copy of I Want a New Drug and asked for something that sounded similar.
- Brazilian musician Jorge Ben Jor claimed that Rod Stewart's 1979 No. 1 hit Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? steals from portions of his song Taj Mahal. The two settled out of court, and in his 2012 autobiography, Stewart admitted to "unconscious plagiarism."
- In 1973, Chuck Berry's publishing company sued John Lennon. They claimed some lines and melodies for Come Together were taken from Berry's 1956 track, You Can't Catch Me. As part of a settlement, Lennon agreed to record three songs owned by publisher Morris Levy, including a cover of You Can't Catch Me for Lennon's 1975 covers album Rock 'N' Roll. Ultimately, this created even bigger messes and more lawsuits between Levy and Lennon, culminating in the release of the rare Lennon bootleg Roots: John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits.
- After Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up in 1972, frontman John Fogerty owed eight more albums to his label Fantasy Records. Fogerty gave up his Creedence publishing rights to Fantasy head Saul Zaentz in exchange for getting out of his contract, but was later sued by Zaentz, who claimed that Fogerty's song The Old Man Down the Road plagiarized CCR's Run Through the Jungle. So John Fogerty was in essence being sued for plagiarizing John Fogerty. Fogerty ultimately won the lawsuit, but was forced to settle a defamation charge out of court by Zaentz for his track Zanz Kant Danz, a thinly-veiled attack on the label owner that was later changed to Vanz Kant Danz.
- Although they have different chord progressions, similarities have led some to claim Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit borrows from Boston’s More Than a Feeling. Kurt Cobain acknowledged that Teen Spirit uses a “cliched riff” that was “close to a Boston riff or ‘Louie, Louie.’”
- 1970s singer/songwriter Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) sued the Flaming Lips, claiming Fight Test, the Lips' opening track from 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, was too similar to his 1970 song Father and Son. Lips frontman Wayne Coyne basically admitted to it in interviews, and apologized to Stevens while telling the Guardian: "There was a time during the recording when we said, this has a similarity to 'Father and Son.' Then we purposefully changed those bits. But I do regret not contacting his record company and asking their opinion ... I am ashamed. There is obviously a fine line between being inspired and stealing." Stevens now gets 75 percent of all royalties from the song.
-
In October 2014, Tom Petty’s publisher contacted Sam Smith’s publisher about similarities in melody found in the choruses of Petty’s I Won’t Back Down and Smith’s Stay With Me. Smith and his co-writers claimed they had never heard I Won’t Back Down before, but after listening to the two songs, conceded a similarity. In interviews, Smith said: “It was a complete accident. I am 22 years old. I’ve never listened to that song.” In the end, Smith and his co-writers settled the dispute, accepting the similarities and giving Petty and co-writer Jeff Lynne writing credit on Stay With Me, along with 12.5 percent of the royalties from the song, which was one of the biggest singles of 2014.
-
The opening guitar riff for Green Day’s Brain Stew has a striking resemblance to elements of Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4. While Chicago’s riff is slower, Green Day’s intro has a nearly identical three-chord progression. Something similar is also true for The Police’s Message in a Bottle and Rihanna’s Love Without Tragedy, with the intros to both tracks being almost the same.
-
One Direction fans were outraged when it was suggested that the band’s Best Song Ever sounds suspiciously similar to The Who’s Baba O’Riley. The producer of Best Song Ever acknowledged in interviews that it took “inspiration” from The Who’s track. And Pete Townshend didn’t seem bothered about it when he was asked.
"No! I like the single. I like One Direction," Townshend said. "The chords I used and the chords they used are the same three chords we've all been using in basic pop music since Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry made it clear that fancy chords don't mean great music – not always. I'm still writing songs that sound like 'Baba O'Riley' – or I'm trying to!"