Hahaha, I just reminded you of the existence of Captain and Tennille, with zero remorse.  I believe I told y’all “stop me before I kill again,” and nobody stopped me, so you only have yourselves to blame.  Today I’m going to play the intellectual property narc.  The Cap’m is relevant.

Remember New Kids on the Block?  Jesus, I’m full of fun cultural references today.  Anyhow, I haven’t intentionally listened to them.. ever, that I recall, yet I have a number of their hits partially memorized.  And looking back, I’m starting to realize their jams may have been plagiarized.  First I noticed that Right Stuff recycled the music of Klymaxx’s Men All Pause.  More recently I’m feeling like I’ll Be Loving You Forever rips off Do That to Me One More Time.  What other secrets lurk in their discography?

It could be their writers got permission to rip – cleared the samples, as they say.  Or it could be I’m hearing things, since I’m no kind of musician.  You be the judge…

Anyway, not as much of a jack move as the band Elastica who got real big real fast in the UK until people realized they’d heard these songs before.

That was a whole-ass thing.  I think the gal from Elastica dropped out of music and located jesus.

Here’s another one that isn’t a thing yet, but I wonder.  The Moldy Peaches were a severely drug-affected anti-folk band from NYC with a farcically lo-fi aesthetic, who randomly got a ton of money from their songs being heavily used in the movie Juno.  Probably their biggest hit was I Don’t See What Anyone Sees in Anyone Else But You, which has an alternately twee and revolting look at young weirdos in love.

Now a hard drug-affected countryesque band with a farcically lo-fi aesthetic called The Viagra Boys have released a duet about alternately twee and revolting young weirdos in love, recruiting Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers fame to make it happen.  How do these compare, and do the Boys owe the Peaches money?

I love the getty images and shutterstock logos on that video.  Fucking brilliant.  But back to the point.

How much are you allowed to copy somebody else’s work?  Since the Chiffons sued George Harrison (or more accurately Bright Tunes Music Corporation sued Harrisongs Music Limited, Apple Records, and Broadcast Music Incorporated), not much.  Since then, things have gotten much worse.

There was a time before this when it was a given that musicians could all cover each other’s work wilson-nilson.  This meant more successful artists could ride the talents of the less privileged to the bank.  There are ugly anecdotes, mostly along racial lines, and one could read the Chiffons case as black folks finally getting justice for some amount of that.  Well, their record labels anyhow.  Who knows if the artists saw a dime of it?

I’ve said before, if somebody ripped off my creative work, I couldn’t afford to make suit against them, and would just have to accept that.  We also live in a postmodern world of pastiche where every idea ever has already been done, and we’re remixing whether we want to be or not.  So who’s to say I’ve even been ripped off if it happens?  A more overt rip like that Emily the Strange case removes some of the mystery, but in the end, what does it matter?

IP law benefits nobody but IP lawyers and megacorporations.  People were looking to Disney to save them from the AI-pocalypse and what did they do?  Push to make copyright more onerous in their favor, then turn around and lay off literally thousands of people from their studios this year – to make room for AI production, no doubt.

No points here, only vibes and weird memories.  This is a postmodern post here.  I don’t give answers, just point at questions.  Point, point.

–