The Sincerest Form of Flattery

As I cruise about my hometown in my mighty Nissan Altima, I enjoy tuning into our local popular music stations. While I will be the first to admit that popular music isn’t my favorite genre, I do find a song or two to be worth the listen. That being said, I am finding that popular music is becoming increasingly uncreative, more so than ever before.

From a simple music standpoint, many of the songs today are complete rip offs of other songs. Eminem’s “Mockingbird” and ” Jibbs’ “Chain Hang Low” take melodies from the children’s songs of “Mockingbird” and “Do your Ears Hang Low?” respectively. Lloyd, in his song “You,” and Nelly, in his song “N Dey Say,” directly steal the hook from the 1983 song “True” by Spandau Ballet. Apart from directly stealing melodies, many popular songs today consist of three of four notes modified with a synthesizer.

Even if you focus on the lyrics of these songs, you find that they are becoming increasingly repetitive. Take for example the song Buy U a Drank by T-Pain featuring Yung Joc.In the bridge of the song, T-Pain sings “Lets Get Gone / Walk it Out,” which is directly stolen from Unk’s Walk it Out. In the same bridge, T-Pain says “You can do it all by yourself,” which is taken from Lil Jon’s Snap Ya Fingers. Basically the entire bridge of the song is taken from other equally popular songs.

Apart from the bridge, the refrain of the song is basically stolen from the G-Unit song Money in the Bank. The G-Unit version of the song says “I got money in the bank / shawty what ya drank?” while T-Pain merely inverses it, saying “I’mma buy you a drank / I got money in the bank.” But T-Pain isn’t the only one using the four-word phrase, as Fergie uses it in her song Glamorous.

I understand that to a certain extent all music copies off the music before it, with Rock being based on Blues and Blues being based on Gospel and so on and so forth. I just wish that artists would use previous music as a basis to do something different and creative, instead of directly copying it in the hopes of making a hit. I wish that record labels would help artists to be creative and make music that is meaningful by not emphasizing profit margins and marketing ploys. For the good of everyone, listener and artist, lets do something different.