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Every poet is a thief


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I scoured back a few pages and didn't find anything quite like this, so...

After deciding to revisit some pleasant high school memories (OK, memory) and listening to my gateway drug to punk - Elastica's first, self-titled album - I realized the album wasn't as good as I remembered it.  It was better.

And, it was also liberally cribbed from other artists, according to a number of news articles and Wikipedia.  I mean, granted, post-punk and Britpop and new wave all tend to draw from a lot of the same wells, but when a band settles out of court with not one but two different artists over the contents of 3 separate songs, there's probably going to be something there.

I'm currently listening to "No More Heroes" by the Stranglers, which does have more or less the same baseline beat & initial chord progression as "Waking Up" off Elastica's album, but...having said that...well, Elastica came up with something a fuckload better, if you ask me (although the guitar & synth solos in "No More Heroes" are pretty boss).  I'll dig into the lifts that allegedly came from Wire later, I suppose.

So, that's what I'm opening this up to: clever, creative, subtle, sometimes unnoticed or lightly noticed bits of musical absconding: What are they? Do people notice?  Let's find out.  I'm not talking sampling; I'm not talking the Millennial Whoop; I'm not talking about Jimmy Page ripping off Willie Dixon; I'm not talking whoever it was that sued about Uptown whatever and all that.  That shit's obvious.  What's the stuff people miss, where you go, "Wait, I've heard that before"?

EDIT: Although on a more obvious tip, fuck Hootie & the Blowfish for lifting a whole chunk of a Bob Dylan song and not getting their tits sued off instantly.

EDIT # 2: Having listened to "Three Girl Rhumba" by Wire now, yeah, the initial guitar riff of both that and "Connection" are the same - but, where Wire just plays those exact same 4 notes and runs them into the ground, Elastica changed it up just enough and layered the crap out of it to turn it into, you know, something that isn't so fucking generic.  "Three Girl Rhumba" is just another Wire song.  "Connection" is one of the handful of tracks people think of when you think "One-hit wonders from the Nineties".  There are good reasons for this.

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EDIT: Although on a more obvious tip, fuck Hootie & the Blowfish for lifting a whole chunk of a Bob Dylan song and not getting their tits sued off instantly.

Ripping off Dylan is only just and fair, plagiarizing mofo that he is.

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