You're Stealing My Moves
On Copycats, Dirty Rats & Musical Accidents
Upon first hearing Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 hit song Brutal I was a little confused. Was that a sample of the iconic guitar riff from Elvis Costello’s 1978 hit Pump It Up or was the song a homage or a mashup…or what?
I was not alone.
Some fella called Billy Edwards tweeted his thoughts about the similarities and in return Elvis Costello tweeted this sensible and generous response “this is fine by me. It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand-new toy. That’s what I did.”
Elvis meant that he was inspired to write Pump it Up because of the existence of Bob Dylan’s brain busting quicksilver talking Subterranean Homesick Blues, released in 1965, when Elvis Costello was a formative 11 years old.
Dylan has said that Subterranean Homesick Blues came from listening to Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business, released in 1956, when Bob was 16.
In this 1969 live version below from the Toronto Peace Festival, you can see by the faces of the kids in the audience that Chuck is still blowing minds here with his unique vocal delivery style, and you can clearly hear the genesis of all these songs that followed in its wake, interestingly all of which express the narrator’s disdain for societal expectations.
The similarities become pointedly obvious listening to this recording of the time John Lennon mashed Chuck & Bob’s songs together while messing around on his acoustic at home in the Dakota.
In a Teen Vogue interview, Rodrigo said “Every single artist is inspired by artists who have come before them. It’s sort of a fun, beautiful sharing process. Nothing in music is ever new. There are four chords in every song. That’s the fun part — trying to make that your own.”
Olivia is absolutely right. I remember my dad pointing out how many songs utilised the same chord structures or combinations of chords when he first started teaching me to play guitar when I was a teenager. It was a total revelation to understand that all these distinct, individual songs that all hit me in their own different ways, were all built upon variations of the same structure.
Australian comedy trio Axis of Awesome illustrated the point in their massively popular 2009 video where they performed multiple hit pop songs over the same four chords, using the 1 5 6 4 chord progression.
Musician, music educator and YouTube personality David Bennet made similar connections between Johann Pachebel’s Canon in D, composed over three hundred years ago, and the many modern pop songs that use its 8 bar chord progression 1 5 6 3 1 4 5.
Hit producer Peter Waterman, of Stock Aitken Waterman fame, who was behind Kylie Minogue’s 1987 monster hit I Should Be So Lucky - inspired by Canon in D, describes the song as ‘almost the godfather of all pop music, because we’ve all used that in our own ways’.
Other songs riffing on/inspired by Canon in D include The Beatles Let It Be, Go West by The Village People, Don’t Look Back In Anger in Oasis, Memories by Maroon 5 and Graduation (Friends Forever) by Vitamin C that is played at every school graduation ever, despite the eminently forgettable lyrics (So if we get the big jobs and we make the big money/When we look back now, will our jokes still be funny?/Will we still remember everything we learned in school?/Still be trying to break every single rule (every rule)/Will little brainy Bobby be the stockbroker man?/Can Heather find a job that won't interfere with her tan?). Remind me to write a graduation song sometime then sit back and reap those sweet mailbox royalties!
Rod Stewart claimed he ‘unconsciously plagiarised’ song Taj Mahal by Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor for his 1978 hit song Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? The song was blaring from radios everywhere on heavy rotation when he attended the Rio Carnival and hadn’t realised it was still swimming around in his head. In his biography he says ‘clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced when I was trying to find a line to fit the chords’. This practise is known as cryptomnesia in psychology circles.
Sir Rod says he consciously stole - or ‘lifted’ - the synthethizer hook from Bobby Womack's (If You Want My Love) Put Something Down On It for the same song but ‘the rules are that you can lift a line from an arrangement - as distinct from a melody line - without infringing copyright. So you can’t touch me for that’.
Lana del Rey denies cryptomnesia is what happened with her 2017 song Get Free, which she has described as her ‘personal manifesto’ but which bears uncanny similarities to Radiohead’s 1993 song Creep. That didn’t stop Radiohead’s publishers from apparently requesting all of the song writing royalties be reassigned to them, according to a tweet from Lana stating ‘Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing - I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100’. The dispute never went to court and appears to have been settled.
Strangely/ironically, Radiohead themselves had been successfully sued by the publishers of The Hollies 1974 song The Air That I Breathe, for the similarity of the melody and the chord structure, which the band agreed they had noticed and leaned into when they were writing the song and amicably gave songwriting credit to the Hollies songwriting team.
David Bennett again goes deep on identifying the distinctive 1 3 4 min4 chord sequence in question - also used for signature riffs in Bowie’s Space Oddity and Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire - and exploring these connections.
Tom Petty’s publishers noted that Sam Smith’s hit Stay With Me bore an extraordinary resemblance to Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. Smith said he was ‘shocked’ because ‘I just go into the studio, and Stay With Me was me just writing a song about me sleeping with too many people, and wishing they would stay over. That was my mindset when I was writing that song, and I was very shocked to find out that the melody was similar, because again, I am 22 and I've never heard the song’. Nevertheless, the publishers reached an amicable agreement to pay 12.5% of the songwriting royalties to Petty, who released a statement saying that ‘these things happen’, it was ‘a musical accident’ and he had ‘no hard feelings’.
A friend recently pointed out the incredible resemblance/total ripoff of this 2019 song by young LA band Hollows to Mazzy Star’s 1993 classic Fade Into You a while back. There doesn’t seem to have been any legal action or even much notice taken - just comments about the Mazzy Star ‘vibes’.
The concept of ‘ripping off’ versus homage is fairly obscure and blurry. Robin Thicke and Pharrell found this out the hard way after a judge ruled they had to pay over $5 million and half of future royalties to the Marvin Gaye Estate for the similarities between Marvin’s Lets Get it On and their hit Blurred Lines, which they agreed they had aimed for a similar ‘vibe’, although disagreed they had intentionally copied.
Often when I’m writing a song in my head I’ll think I’ve hit upon something really original and unique sounding only to discover when I start strumming my guitar or team up with Sam to try to work out what the chords are that it’s just minor variations on your stock standard C G F. I’m always disappointed by this - but if it feels right don’t fight it I say! And I guess that’s where the melody line comes in - the chords might be familiar but if you sing something different on top you’ve got yourself something special.
I recently got myself a songwriting app for fun that allows you to build the backing for a song with beats, keys, guitar and bass in different styles and I thought it might inspire me to go in some different and unusual directions. Instead I found it stuck me in loops of standard structures and feels and kind of took all the mystery out of it and made me feel like songwriting was just a matter of pairing A + B + C = D - a theory I will never subscribe to. But maybe I just haven’t understood the intricacies of manipulating the app, which was developed by a small group off songwriters so presumably does have some heart and soul built into it. I felt similarly when discovering that rhyme dictionaries existed years ago - it kind of takes the fun out of wracking your brain for a word that’ll work. I don’t use them.
It’s almost impossible to be original, but there’s no doubt that some songwriters can still manage to make two or three chords sound like nothing that has ever come before…
That was very good -- Copyrighted material as we understand it today is relatively new and until the 1950's and the emergence of juke boxes etc music was something that was handed down from generations to the next and most blues songs etc had been played for decades before they were recorded. Then once the labels got involved they decided they did not just want compensation -- they want every possible compensation. So even if just a part sounds similar they want money.
Like if you found a blown tire by the side of the road. Made a rope swing with it and the tire maker came to you asking for money. They already made all the money they could with it. Like so many times in our lives Elvis Costello gets it right.
It's a fascinating topic and somehow I've never come across the term cryptomnesia - so thank you for that! Almost every time I write a song, I spend hours afterwards trawling You Tube and Soundcloud etc thinking that there is a lyric or portion of melody I recognise from somewhere else...crossing my fingers that I'm mistaken. Sometimes I do find tiny snippets blended with other tiny snippets...usually in a different key...and usually it's from something I've only heard once or twice in the past. Certainly not deliberate! But I haven't released anything much yet so no law suits! I do like the concept of building on our musical heritage and I actually enjoy mash ups and hearing echoes of songs past in new releases. :-)