Thicke: Slicke or Dicke?

I'm waiting for the Gaye estate to get round to 'Thrift Shop'. Also 'All About That Bass' and 'Fancy'.

I've never heard either, which amuses me greatly.

You haven't heard either 'Blurred Lines' or 'Happy'?

I don't get it. Even if the basslines and sheet music were key factors in this they're quite obviously different.
http://joebennett.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/gaye1.jpg
http://joebennett.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/thicke.jpg

Top one's Blurred lines, bottom is GTGIU

other way around, lol

haha my bad, thought i c&p'd the other way

gotta say it must be a weird and horrible trip being robin thicke this past year or so. can think of very few songs that have made then ruined a person's life, let alone so quickly...(damages include forever being known as the date rapey song guy, the marvin gaye ripoff guy, the fibbed songwriting credit guy, the guy whose reaction to his own success led to his divorce, the guy whose album-length attempt at getting his wife back -- anchored by the song in question -- tanked profoundly...)

and yet that isn't punishment enough

world's tiniest violin playing a ripoff of some sad song for him

world's tiniest rape anthem

when is the hendrix estate going to get thicke for nicking the cover of BAND OF GYPSYS for PAULA

just saw another IS HOMAGE DEAD piece went up

http://www.playboy.com/articles/defending-the-groove-the-real-chilling-problem-with-the-blurred-lines

And now, as a result of the “Blurred Lines” decision, musicians' lawyers are going to be all freaked out about not just songs that sample or quote other songs but songs that sound too much like other songs. There is no standard for how much one recording’s groove can happen to sound like another’s, because there cannot be a standard for it. And when there’s no standard for what’s legal and what’s not, that’s a textbook example of a chilling effect: there is no degree of resemblance that is safe. Imagine if, after “Rapper’s Delight” came out, nobody had been willing to release a song with the same basic sound for fear of being sued.

it is cracking me up so much that critics are running around in fear that music is suddenly going to become less derivative

everyone just spitting out examples of music that sounds like other music while they still can

before they get sued for copying other critics

like c'mon

The last time something like this happened was the 1992 Gilbert O'Sullivan/Biz Markie lawsuit. Before it, there was an informal understanding that including samples on hip-hop records was fine as long as you didn’t use more than a few bars; after it, lawsuit-fearing artists and labels demanded that every sample had to be cleared, and the result was that the art of sampling was kneecapped. (This is also why, for instance, Karmin’s 2011 single “Crash Your Party” was, absurdly, officially co-written by John Coltrane, who died several decades before several of his “collaborators” were born and didn’t actually write anything heard in “Crash Your Party”: it includes a sample of Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited),” which in turn samples a Ron Carter bass improvisation from a McCoy Tyner recording of Coltrane’s “Impressions.”)

oh yes i remember how the art of sampling disappeared in 1992

ok he said "kneecapped" not "disappeared" but jesus so girl talk has to live off club gigs and karmin has to credit john coltrane I am ok with this

think how much better music would be if people didn't have to credit samples, we'd be living in a world full of mash-ups oh wait

people should only play instruments they invent themselves

xpost tbf that was the end of bomb squad type productions so sure Grand Upright vs WB didn't end music but def changed the course

after it, lawsuit-fearing artists and labels demanded that every sample had to be cleared, and the result was that the art of sampling was kneecapped.

I don't think this is really disputable

"Rapper's Delight" citation is, however, p stupid

Speaking of "Rapper's Delight" it's a shame that when Chic threatened to sue Sugar Hill and successfully forced them to change the songwriting credit, the chilling effect of that ruling put an end to the hip-hop fad of 1979

xpost tbf that was the end of bomb squad type productions so sure Grand Upright vs WB didn't end music but def changed the course

i kinda get this, but at the same time i feel like bomb squad type productions were already on the way out, thanks to the chronic etc. and also there was no world where this wasn't eventually going to be an issue as rap got more and more popular

sorry by chronic i meant dr dre's production style, there's a good window of time between that, this case, and the chronic

it's possible that this case will lead to a more precedent-setting one more explicitly about "feel," but this ain't that case

but Dre deliberately shifted his production style away from his previous sample-heavy approach in order to avoid lawsuits/payment of performance royalties (thus the invention of "interpolations" and Dre getting studio musicians to re-play P-Funk songs)

xpost ("this case" being pharrell/thicke vs gaye, i mean)

rap producers have been paranoid about lawsuits from day one, since Rapper's Delight, often with good reason, and their production methods shifted according to that perception of risk

xp

but Dre deliberately shifted his production style away from his previous sample-heavy approach in order to avoid lawsuits/payment of performance royalties (thus the invention of "interpolations" and Dre getting studio musicians to re-play P-Funk songs)

this is a shift that was already in motion before wb upright, which is my point - it's not like o'sullivan invented saying "hey that's my song you're sampling," it's the legal precedent. and jury cases aren't legal precedent.

Remember too the Turtles vs. De LA Soul case, which addressed sampling re:recording ownership (since the sampled song in question was a cover).

but even if, rather than being overturned (which i find quite-plausible-to-likely), the jury verdict led to a judge saying "intent + vague similarity = infringement", it's still tickling to see record critics freaking out over music becoming less derivative because of it

the 2010s - a decade where the first half sounded like 80s genesis, and the second half sounded like 70s genesis

just two years before the chronic Dre sounded like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiDti_Xnnmo

it's still tickling to see record critics freaking out over music becoming less derivative because of it

agree this is ridiculous, but I think you're under-selling the degree to which legal issues impacted people like Dre's production styles. rap producers didn't make that production switch solely on aesthetic grounds

looking back i wasn't being clear, but i didn't mean to imply dre was doing it solely for aesthetic reasons. when i said the change was already in motion, i meant because smart guys like dre knew you wouldn't get away with rapping over other peoples records for free forever

ok yeah that makes more sense, the writing was definitely on the wall by the time of the Turtles lawsuit

actually before then even - Rick James suing Hammer in '90

as mentioned up thread, chic threatened to sue the sugarhill gang way back when

i will say the bomb squad bricolage style was always going to be a novelty - and there are certainly plenty of examples of the "sample a lot of shit" aesthetic in the twenty years since the court case - it's not like the dust brothers stopped getting work, they just couldn't slap eight obvious beatles hooks together

...and go gold without paying them, at least

i mean fuck dj shadow

as mentioned up thread, chic threatened to sue the sugarhill gang way back when

yeah but that's different than the Bomb Squad/Dre/Dust Brothers/whoever else you wanna throw in there, who were more than likely all thinking they could make a credible legal defense based on *how* they were using the samples (ie not just lifting an entire song outright). I haven't really read anything authoritative on this subject but once sampling started to become central to rap I'd be curious to know if any of the producers were genuinely surprised with what they managed to get away with, however briefly.

i mean fuck dj shadow

amen

my understanding is that there was this window in rap between old school guys figuring out that they couldn't get away with just rapping over/re-creating existing records, which led, in part to stuff like Run DMC and more drum machine+synth heavy compositions, but then shortly after that with samplers becoming cheaper and more powerful DJs were like "fuck it, I'm sampling that break Bambaataa used to play" and then it snowballed from there until enough old dudes smelled money and lawyered up. And then after that that heavy-duty bricolage-style became less frequent and more of a game of hide-and-seek between the producers and the sampled dudes (ie, you could get away with it as long as you could evade detection or made some deal up-front)

yeah i just think it's weird to think bricolage was going to be the fore-front of hip-hop as it got more and more pop, on some level it was always going to lead to girl talk. the court case just confirmed you couldn't make a mint off other people's records without paying them.

and this court case at worst confirms that "feel" vs notes-on-the-page is an issue, and if you push that issue, don't put jackasses in front of a jury

Old Dolph ‏@alshipley 2h2 hours ago

Pharrell issues statement: "Haven't they heard me sing? I'm clearly ripping off Curtis Mayfield, it's his family that...uh don't print this"
3 retweets 10 favorites

I think the thing about all these panic-type Matos/Wolk "chilling precedent" pieces that rubs me the wrong way is that, taken to their logical conclusion, they seem to suggest that musicians don't actually own what they create. I love sampling and homage as much as the next listener. And as a musician myself, I love it even more as I would venture to say every interesting thing I've ever done has its roots in me massacring an imitation of something else.

But at the same time, I find it kind of odd to be arguing that this stuff is essentially in the public domain. It's not. "Rappers' Delight" is one example of a song that, quite simply, wouldn't exist without what Chic did. Same for "Blurred Lines," however much a departure the actual song is from the inspiration. And the Bomb Squad/ Dust Bros. ethos. The idea that the creators should owe something more than "a debt of gratitude" doesn't seem far fetched to me.

One thing worth noting that I didn't know until a few years ago is that advertising regularly addresses the issue of feel and style. If you want to do a car ad in the style of Randy Newman or Leon Redbone, you pay a fee. It isn't as much as using an actual song, but it is something.

None of this is to say that there shouldn't be some updating for the 21st-century. But I would also argue that the Dre examples upthread demonstrate once again how limitations really do breed creativity. And at the end of the day, when you think about how awful the industry has been to the actual creators of music product, rules that require artists to be paid for the commercial usage of their appropriation isn't something I think we want to be backing away from.

If you want to do a car ad in the style of Randy Newman or Leon Redbone, you pay a fee. It isn't as much as using an actual song, but it is something.

iirc, Carlos Santana's lawsuit in 1990 set the precedent/terms for this:
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1990/Guitarist-Carlos-Santana-Sues-Miller-Beer-Over-Commercial/id-d2d871dcb18ffed5fe6403a1d2e7cb3c

tom waits sued frito-lay for the same thing, right? that was in '88

But advertising is different because a sound-a-like tricks people into thinking they're hearing the original artist, and therefore that the artist endorses ad syncs and that product in particular. No artist name is attached. Waits sued Frito-Lay for "voice misappropriation and false endorsement". Neither claim applies in the Blurred Lines case.