Exposing the Rip-offs!!!!

frogkopf

The music world is full of so called "artists", who do nothing but rip off the style of other well established, real artists. In the interest of exposing these charlatans, I'm starting this thread.

Here's some offenders that come to mind:

(1) These guys ripped off Jeremy Messersmith, even being so shamelessly bold as to name themselves after a character in one of his latest songs!

(2) These Poseurs blatantly plundered the songbook of Knickerbockers.


(3) These Thugs totally stole from Michael Bolton. The guy is bald for Chrissakes - LEAVE HIM ALONE!!!!


more to come....

Dr. Mutex

Don't forget These Copycats shamelessly lifting the rhythm section and the strings from Sean Kingston. Write your own damn song, thieves.

Germanprof

These guys are serial offenders. They managed to steal this from Coldplay, and unapologetically lifted this (song and visuals!) from the Black Eyed Peas, and totally ripped off this rhythm and this melody from Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force. There was no end to their perfidy. In fact various younger youtube commenters have felt compelled to display a finely tuned sense of historical progression by pointing out their shameless thefts from recent artists' work. Thank goodness they took up cycling.

Rudie

Very funny GP. By the way, I read somewhere the other day that a new Kraftwerk album is supposed to be released this year. Based on their history, I'm not holding my breath or anything, but that would be great if it actually happens. My friend and I were amused when Florian quit the group. The cycle daily, play around in the studio, release an album every 7-8 years...guess it was too stressful!

Germanprof

LOL. I just finished reading Wolfgang Flur's autobiography. It does not come across as hugely self-aware, and is certainly far from profound, but it had its interesting moments. I'm actually teaching a course on German culture and intercultural communication this semester, and plan to teach Kraftwerk for a couple of weeks. There's a ton of interesting stuff to go at. The influence on the development of American hip hop and techno; the connection to the post-war attempt to find new forms of distinctly German cultural output untainted by the Nazi past; the references to Fritz Lang's Metropolis; the whole playing with the man-machine relationship and its precursors; the graphical debts to El Lissitzky, the development forward to folk like Alva Noto (who references them in one track) [/incursion of professional musing]...so if they could just get their new album out to coincide with the latter part of this semester that would be nice of them.

And on that same note, and with the drift of this thread, if anyone can tell me any other direct borrowings from Kraftwerk in other songs by other artists, I would be most grateful. I find that most of my students have never heard of them, let alone have any idea how much they influenced the music that my students listen to.

frogkopf

Not to mention Devo..... I doubt they would have come up with this song without Kraftwerk.

Which in turn inspired this!

Doofy

So has any Hip-Hop artist ever sampled the intro of Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"? Because if so, that would be a swipe once removed of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father"! To this day when I hear Song for My Father, it triggers the hard-wired "Rikki" in my brain.

From the "Rikki Wikki" page:

In the March 24, 2006 issue of Entertainment Weekly, in an article titled "Back to Annandale", it was revealed that Rikki Ducornet was the apparent inspiration for the song due to a friendship songwriter Donald Fagen had with Ducornet while he attended Bard College. Ducornet was pregnant and married at the time, but recalls Fagen did give her his phone number at a college party while attending Bard and said that she believed she was the subject of the song. Fagen would not confirm the story.

frogkopf

I was doing some surfing and came across a quote by Jerry Casale, Devo's bass player in which he referred to Devo as Kraftwerk with pelvises.....