Other Suspiciously Similar Songs:
Just a few I've uncovered...
- "Long Stick Goes Boom" by Krokus → "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)" by Beastie Boys
- "Panama" by Van Halen → "The Heat is On" by Glenn Frey (the choruses specifically)
- "Good Times Roll" by The Cars → "Turn Up The Radio" by Autograph (most notable in the intro)
- "Need You Tonight" by INXS → "Break My Heart" by Dua Lipa (in the choruses)
Why is this YMMV? As far as I see there are two distinct tropes here:
- Intentional reference to a song, with a few notes tweaked and the lyrics changed to avoid copyright problems (e.g. "Disco Girl" from Gravity Falls being a parody of "Dancing Queen" by Music/ABBA). This is not subjective and shouldn't be YMMV.
- Accidental similarity between two songs, which is either YMMV (since how similar they are is subjective), Just for Fun, or not tropable at all.
True. And the pages are cluttered with purely unintentional examples.
There's a difference between something like all of Kenji Yamamoto's Dragon Ball work, and Weird Al's "Virus Alert" sounding like an image song from Gaoranger (???), but... I guess many didn't get the memo.
Does anyone know roughly how far you can go with making two songs similar before it's considered copyright infringement? (In court, at least)
Hide / Show RepliesI think the distinction between "suspiciously similar" and "the same" should be made clear too. Is "suspiciously similar" where a piece of music is intended to evoke another work, or where a song has literally been used and not copied exactly?
Maybe it's listed, but I find no mention of Thrills that I Can't Forget, sung in 1925 by Edgar and Boaz, I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, by the Carter Family in 1929, That Great Speckled Bird, sung by Roy Acuff in 1936, The Wild Side of Life, by Hank Thompson in 1952, and It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Women, by Kitty Wells in 1952. These 5 songs all used the same melody. How did they bypass infringement issues?
Does anyone find Jimmy Hart versions of songs jarring to listen to? To this troper, they're basically the musical equivalent of Uncanny Valley, or at the very least, like an off-key rendition of the song that they're a Jimmy Hart of.
Hide / Show RepliesYES. You are not alone in this, the cognitive dissonance can be headache-inducing to this troper as well.
https://robvincent.netI don't know which is worse either, if it's a Jimmy Hart of a song you like, or of a song you don't like. The best examples I can think of for both are these two sketches from Robot Chicken (which is one of my favorite shows despite being a big offender of this trope). For songs I like, there's the sketch where Spawn engages in a fiddle duel with some demon (I don't read Spawn, so I don't know any character names), the song being a Jimmy Hart of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". For songs I don't like, there's that sketch with King Arthur and his knights were getting advice from Sir Mixalot that they need to make their table round to the tune of an off-key "Baby got Back".
It's called Megatracks (or maybe Megatrax, I forget). When I was in TV, we had like, 100 C Ds full of Megatracks. If you wanted AC/DC, there was an AC/DC soundalike. If you wanted Hendrix, there was Hendrix-esque. So on and so forth.
What is THE best soundtrack ever heard in a Zelda game? An early trailer of Twilight Princess featured a pastiche of Basil Poledouris' Conan the Barbarian. It's the definition of this trope, it's Conan, with a few changed notes.
Interesting note, but this trope is about music, not lyrics:
- In a bizarre case of Truth in Television, "change a word, take a third" (referring to the way writing royalties are calculated) meant that often changing a single word in the lyrics was enough to justify a writing credit, a proportion of the writing royalties, and a share of those for any covers that happen to include your word.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1983) and The Burning Wild Man (1988):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIb6AZdTr-A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sDu4erWYAg
Saturday in the Park (1972) and Love Song (2007):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjylD7esXDo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi7Yh16dA0w
Edited by SoaringStarman