Art, whether it music, literature or painting, invokes a spiritual connection to our soul that can inspire us entirely through emotion. Jonathan Lethem is a modern writer who is known for being able to bend and blend styles of fiction not because he was obsessed with being original, but because those were the styles that inspired him to do so. Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism explains and defends the idea that we all essentially steal our inspiration from something that catches our eye and sets our heart on fire.
You see this more often with music, when different genres are mixed to create a whole new and inspiring sound for someone else. One must understand that all humans subconsciously store in our brains, everything that influences and stimulates us in a positive way. Any artist will agree and tell you that imitation is the best form of flattery, but the problem today, is that we are bombarded with so much cookie cutter crap that imitation has turned into a money machine; void of any real emotion behind the ambition. Record labels are fixated on their awesome failing formula of so-called success: Find one artist that works, then run out and sign every other artist that sounds similar, with the hopes of being able to reincarnate the original fortune.
Fortunately for us, music is going back to a more grassroots style, by using technology and the internet to create new and original ways to compose, record and most importantly distribute their art. Music is returning to the “open source” style that Lethem refers to and instead of using imitation for monetary gain, once again has become about inspiration and emotion.
Plagiarism is just another necessary form of illumination into the inner soul, which sparks our primitive and creative juices. Even the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson, admitted to lifting the “Billie Jean” bass line from the Hall and Oates song “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”. Hall told Jackson that he had lifted the bass line from another song himself, and it was “something we all do……”
Just for fun here is Every song you know in 4 cords (video)
Nice video! It’s pretty amazing how music is almost no longer ‘completely’ original since everything is sampled from a sample, that was probably once part of an actual song! I do, however, still think its awesome that Skrillex (love him or hate him) sampled a sound clip from a cup-stacking video on YouTube…
I love me some Skrillex, along with Bassnectar, Nero, The Glitch Mob, NiT GriT, Mau5, Feed Me and many many more. The new “rock stars” are producer/Dj’s. They are making the new fresh music, they are making the money, and they are selling out stadiums worldwide.
I like the way you set up your ideas about plagiarism. It’s all a bit of “inspiration.”
When you mentioned the meshing of music beats and styles, it made me think of fusion. I was watching Diggy Simmons’ “Copy Paste” video on YouTube earlier today and thought how edgy sounding was his song rather than more traditional hip-hop so I can definitely see what you say.