Raymond Walker5
Active Member
79 messages
joined Jul 2017
Honestly, to me, blatant theft is just a pathetic attempt at making music. Of course, you can always have accidental similarities in keys, harmonies, or rhythms, but intentionally stealing something and then claiming "this is mine" is honestly just a bit much.
It’s one thing when someone clearly incorporates someone else's musical snippet into a song, provided they actually credit that part on the album.
But to blatantly rip something off, play dumb, and insist that it’s "MY" creation? That’s truly sad.
Maybe there's a rule in certain genres where borrowing is somewhat acceptable—take the blues, for example. You can hear a million tracks that all follow the exact same formula, so if an identical melody pops up somewhere, it’s hard to tell because everything is so incredibly generic that you wouldn't notice if something was repeated for the millionth time. That's why I'm not particularly big on the blues, nor am I a fan of repetitive dance tracks; I just can't stand those generic things that feel like they were all stamped out from the same mold.
That's why thefts in pop music are so much more obvious. Perhaps that's also why it gets away with more than it would in rock or blues, where everyone is constantly lifting riffs from one another. Though, strictly speaking, the term "riff" doesn't even really apply outside of rock and metal.
The more original a melody is, the easier it becomes to spot a plagiarism. There are legendary musicians out there who have composed tens of thousands of pieces over their careers without anyone ever questioning if they stole anything; if there were ever suspicions, they were just minor, coincidental similarities.
When Paul McCartney dreamed up the melody for "Yesterday," he was actually worried it might be a plagiarism—that he had heard it somewhere before, forgotten it, and just happened to pick it up in his head. Before releasing it, he used to go around playing it for people just to see if the tune sounded familiar to anyone else.
And as for that argument that "all the riffs have already been played"—I think that's just nonsense. If a genre is truly that limited and all its riffs are "spent," then it either says a lot about the "quality" of that genre or suggests that many musicians are just terribly uninspired and unable to compose something good on their own.
The reality is that nothing in music can ever be truly "spent" because the number of possible combinations is infinite.
Personally, a riff itself isn't my main focus since I don't listen to that type of music all that much, but sticking a catchy riff onto a mediocre melody just results in mindless music to me. So, when I'm listening to a track with a stolen, relatively decent riff paired with a weak underlying melody, the bad melody is actually a much bigger issue for me than the stolen riff.
