The Sincerest Form of Flattery

This inquiry is inspired by "Paper Tiger", a track on the new Beck album, Sea Change. It is an exact imitation of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. The instrumentation, the production, the (very distinctive) style, are all directly lifted from the latter album. If you took Beck's vocal track off of it, it could easily be an outtake from Melody Nelson. This is all I could think about while listening to it, and it's really been bothering me for the hour or two since I first heard it.

Now, I have no particular reverence for "originality" as a concept. Half of me wants to say that this sort of slavish, detailed and single-source imitation goes too far - that there is nothing about it that takes it beyond or away from the source, and that this is completely distracting and overpowering. The other half, which will probably turn out to be the stronger half, wants to congratulate Mr Hansen for being so audacious and causing me a bit of anxiety (which I always welcome).

Have you ever heard anything which caused you similar anxiety, and how did you resolve your feelings about it, if at all? Does it all have to do with your estimation of the lifter, or with your estimation of the liftee? (i.e. I like Gainsbourg better than Beck, overall -> maybe this is why it bugged me so much, and why that break on the last Stereolab album which could have come straight off Jean-Michel Jarre's Equinoxe didn't bug me very much at all). I'd definitely feel differently about this if, say, this had been the first Beck song I'd ever heard, and if Melody Nelson weren't one of my absolute favourite albums.

On the other hand, the sound is one that it would take an awful lot of hard work to imitate, so you might have to assume that the perpetrators of the imitation knew what they were doing..

Anyway, I think this track is the most sonically imitative (of a single source) thing I have ever heard, so it gave me cause for considerable reflection... What do you think?