In The THICKE Of It

I finally feel vindicated. After all the years of arguing with my daughters that this particular riff in this particular rap song was stolen from David Bowie's "China Girl", or the obvious rip-offs of the Stylistics and the Chi-Lites - among others - by the 90s boy bands like New Kids,etc., someone has finally gotten their wrists soundly slapped for musical theft.

The first few times I heard Blurred Lines my general reaction was: " Ah yes, another white dude stealing  Motown riffs ". This would make me ruminate about the hundreds of old blues and R&B artists whose tunes are routinely stolen without them earning a dime (My favorite being the often repeated nugget that Bob Marley sold the rights to "I Can See Clearly Now" for $75) before reaching the conclusion that everybody steals from everybody else so that's that. The more the song started cropping up, the more I began getting seriously pissed , muttering "Marvin Gay" every time I heard it. It sounded just like "Got to Give It Up", which is a supremely funky, move your feets to the beat type get down party tune.This egregious rip off would be bad enough if it was just the beat itself, but Thicke sounds almost nearly just like Marvin Gay, which is why Gay's family apparently sued Thicke over the curious similarities - and won. True , it was buried alive in the news, an out of court settlement , but the point has been made. 

Please note that I didn't say Robin Thicke was a bad singer or that some contemporary rappers routinely rip off choruses and  never credit the original artist. The ongoing dialogue over copyright and sampling won't ever be easily resolved, but the issue here is credit where credit is due. In Privacy Law, you call theft of someone's name, likeness, or voice appropriation. This case, like so many others in the music biz, comes very close. I think of Bonnie Raitt's laudable efforts to help legendary blues giants like Sippie Wallace or Mississippi Fred McDowell get the recognition they deserve, or, at the other end of the spectrum, Chuck Berry's piano player suing the R & R legend because he claims he wrote a lot of Berry's songs.

Does this mean Marvin was so good that imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery ? Or does this mean that the technology of mixing, mashing, scratching, over dubbing and "skanking" is now comparable to - gulp! - music ?