September 18, 2009 07:00 PM
C&L's Late Nite Music Club - Friday Night Ripoffs (?) with The Airborne Toxic Event and Radiohead
On Friday nights, we take two songs with questionable similarity and put them side by side for some musical forensics. Have any plagiarism suspicions in your iTunes playlist? Post suggestions for next week's Friday Night Ripoffs (?) in the comments.
The Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight" is a fantastic song, and it's great to see this LA band's hard work over the years pay off. As fantastic a song as it is (and the lyrics and impassioned performance from singer Mikel Jollett are what really make it great, not the melody and feel, to me at least,) said melody and feel bear an uncanny resemblance to the verses of Radiohead's "High and Dry". What do you think? Lift or coincidence?
Radiohead - Creep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6ZZG3UFKs
is remarkably similar to
The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMSAnZR2Q8Q
Both are great songs.......
I generally only listen to classic rock but I have embraced Radiohead as one of only a handful of post 80's bands I will listen to.
National Anthem jams.
Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity. Albert Einstein
Everything is "borrowed" at one point or another..
Zeus=Jupiter
Aphrodite=Venus
Mercury=Hermes
Saturn=Cronus
Neptune=Poseidon
Pluto=Charon
Mars=Ares
As for modern-day examples:
Larry & Balki= Laurel & Hardy (though the former did do a tribute to the latter so they at least were honest about their influences..)
I could go on, but you get the idea..the fact remains that you are wasting valuable space that could be better dedicated elsewhere.
Like reading a good book..
Chaplin was high on her list, and so were the Marx Brothers (she did the mirror scene from Duck Soup with Harpo on I Love Lucy, iirc).
Listening to an old Fresh Air interview with Larry Gelbart today, and in the course of the interview he talked about how he and Burt Shevelove simply mashed up a lot of scenes from the Roman playwright Plautus (d. 183 BC) to write A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...and that Plautus cribbed them from earlier Greek comedy writers. Over 2000 years, and the things that were funny then are still funny now.
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
This is a real stretch. It's a fairly common used pattern
TOXIC: Eb / Cm / Ab
H&D: F#m / A / E
I'm really not hearing the melodic similarities with these two.
... I don't think there is much similarity at all. In fact, I found the Airborne Toxic to be rather insipid. Yet another LA band with way too much air of self importance and not enough talent to back it up.
Yawn...
Sugar Sugar
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
1,2,3 Red Light
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
Superman
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
I agree with elenerenerex; I'm not seeing a lot of similarity here, IMHO.
Red Rubber Ball
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
The Rain, The Park & Other Things
Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust.
The supposedly ripoff song sucks. Maybe it should be limited to songs that attain a level of success somewhere close to the "original." Otherwise it's pointless.
too much. If I concentrate on it, I guess there is a vague similarity with the tempo and the way the singer(s) sing it.I don't hear the melody.
Don't get all Satriani on our ass now. JK!
I'm Happy Just to Dance With you
Tell Me Why
I've Just Seen a Face
You've got to hide your love away
Across the Universe. Ga nite. Be well.
This Bird had Flown, Norwegian Wood
You're Gonna Lose That Girl
What is your conceptual, continuity?
Get a copy of Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down," and start singing "You Can't Do That" by The Beatles along with it.
It tracks pretty well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXcQGsoDkDk
go ahead and listen, you know i'm right.
-s
Song doesn't sound the same, but glad to have this band back in my head - thanks to Airborne Toxic Event:
http://www.vh1classic.com/view/artist/1177718...
I don't really buy into the rip-off thing. There are only seven notes, after all, not including sharps & flats. And since the mid-50s, most pop music has been performed on guitar, bass, drums, and/or keyboards, with the occasional sax or trumpet thrown in, and mostly in the pentatonic scale, but also major & minor scales on occasion. If, over the course of several decades, musicians perform the same chords & scales on the same instruments, there is bound to be some repetition. Beginning & intermediate guitarists stumble upon the same licks, not so much because they are copying earlier guitarists, but rather because they are making the same discoveries that earlier guitarists have made. Comparing similar songs is fun, though, especially when the songs come from different genres or eras. Richard Thompson does this well with his "1,000 Years of Popular Music" shtick.
Richard Thompson - "Oops, I Did It Again"
I'm a huge Radiohead fan and must have listened to High and Dry >200 times. I think it's quite a stretch to call Something Around Midnight a rip-off but I do hear "kill yourself to never ever stop" in this song over and over again.
For the true Radiohead fans, check out the best fan-page ever @ http://www.ateaseweb.com
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