Friday Night Music Club: There’s no business like stealing bits from others

Let me repeat the immortal (and utterly unoriginal) words of The KLF as memorialized in The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way):

Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested.

And I presume you’ve heard Happy Xmas (the War is Over):

We really should give the last word to Negativeland:

There still is nothing new under the sun. So what is originality?

Is Coldplay original? As Paste reports, “Back in December, . . . guitarist Joe Satriani was accusing Coldplay of plagiarizing his song, “If I Could Fly,” with their undeniably catchy, monster hit, “Viva La Vida.” Coldplay has now responded, claiming Satriani’s song is not original enough to be infringed. Of course, Satriani’s lawyer disputes the legitimacy of this defense:

Coldplay and its lawyers saying Satriani’s song doesn’t even deserve protection because it “lacks originality.” So, they’re basically saying that because the song blows in the first place, it doesn’t deserve shielding of the law. Fair enough.

But that’s a straw man’s argument, says Satriani’s lawyer Howard E. King, replying that this sort of response is “typical” in copyright infringement cases. According to King, Satriani would like this matter settled out of court, but Coldplay isn’t ready to budge.

It is not, of course, the first time Coldplay has been accused of stealing the tune to Viva la Vida, and it is not the first time Coldplay’s apparent plagiarism has been explained as the coincidental replication of a common pool of pop music moves. Because we so worship the creative artist, though, we tend to recoil from the idea that so much genuine artistry is merely the repackaging of formulas with which we are familiar and comfortable. The KLF, though, understood the formulaic foundation of pop music, publishing The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way), a how to? guide to the method they used to construct British pop hits. As they explained:

Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested.

Thus, they instructed the pop star wannabe:

The first of the component parts you are going to need to find is the irresistible dance floor groove.

Before we go any further we had better define “groove”. It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or singalongable to. . . .

Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove. These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the altar of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot. A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them. This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

As the Authorship Collective in the English Department at Case Western Reserve explains (footnotes omitted):

With its emphasis on originality and self-declaring creative genius, this notion of authorship has functioned to marginalize or deny the work of many creative people: women, non-Europeans, artists working in traditional forms and genres, and individuals engaged in group or collaborative projects, to name but a few. Exposure of these exclusions — the recovery of marginalized creators and underappreciated forms of creative production — has been a central occupation of cultural studies for several decades. But the same cannot be said for the law. Our intellectual property law evolved alongside of and to a surprising degree in conversation with Romantic literary theory. At the center — indeed, the linchpin — of Anglo-American copyright as well as of European “authors’ rights” is a thoroughly Romantic conception of authorship. Romantic ideology has also been absorbed by other branches of intellectual property law such as the law of patent and trademark; and it informs the international intellectual property regime. In patent it survives today both in figurations of the inventor and in the emphasis, which this body of law shares with copyright, on the “transformative” moment in the creative process.

The Authorship Collective goes on to cite examples of “biopiracy,” the appropriation by pharmaceutical companies of native knowledge in medicinal plants. The companies then patent synthetic versions of the plants’ effective ingredients and profit from the sale of the “new” drug. For example:

The Hoodia cactus, native to South Africa, has recently come to the fore of the debate surrounding bioprospecting and intellectual property rights. The Hoodia cactus, native to the Kalahari Desert, has been used for centuries by the hunter-gatherer San speaking tribes of the region (in the past they were commonly referred to as “Bushmen”, although now this designation is recognized as being pejorative, inaccurate and outdated). The San peoples have long recognized the appetite suppressant qualities of the Hoodia cactus, and have traditionally chewed the stem to stave off hunger and thirst during long hunting expeditions in the desert. Scientists from the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Affairs learned of the Hoodia’s properties and began to study the cactus. In scientific tests, animals given the cactus lost weight rapidly without any apparent negative side effects. According to scientists from the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Affairs (CSIR), the Hoodia works by “mimicking the effect glucose has on the nerve cells in the brain, in effect telling us we’re full…thus curbing the appetite.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondant/2947810.stm) Scientists at the CSIR dubbed the appetite suppressant molecule in the Hoodia “P57″. Recognizing the enormous potential market for the Hoodia outside South Africa, CSIR placed a patent on P57 and sold the licensing rights to an English biopharmaceutical firm, Phytopharm, in 1997. Phytopharm then sold the license to American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for 25 million dollars. Throughout the whole process, however, the San peoples were completely unaware of what was occurring.

So, is Viva la Vida merely a reworking of old formulae? It sure seems it might be:

So maybe Coldplay is not a group of plagiarists; rather, it is a group of pop hacks working on tropes that the entire pop music industry since the 1950′s has stolen from elsewhere. Originality is a tricky thing. Just ask Shepard Fairey.

The KLF knew bankers were pushers

Lawyers can be creative, and artists can have profound insights into matters legal and financial. An earlier project of mine on copyright and fair use grew out of a work by the KLF, a couple of musicians and artists from the U.K. who are worthy of even greater recognition than that they have received in their native land. Among other things, they wrote The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way), a how-to guide on creating a number one pop hit. While The Manual is a work of brilliance at many levels, I was taken aback again today by the timeliness of one more aspect of the wisdom they impart therein:

Banks are in the business of making money by lending it. The more they lend the more they make. They want us, the punter, to become addicted for life to the false sense of security it gives us. Banks will go to extremes thinking up new and ingenious ways of getting us to borrow money from them. First and foremost they want us to get into property: “Buy a house,” because with your property as security they can always lend you more and more money. If things were to go badly wrong and you weren’t able to keep up the interest payments they can always force you out of house and home and get their money back that way.

Of course, it would be bad for the banks if they were seen to be throwing too many families onto the street or forcing businesses to the wall in order to redeem their loans. They would always prefer to lend more money so as to help pay off the interest on the earlier loans. Banks have spent millions over the past few years trying to destroy the public’s old impression of the bank manager in bowler, brolly and pinstripe, to the approachable and amiable sort of chap who will attempt at all times to say “Yes!”. They have only done this, not because they like being nicer, but to seduce you into coming in and borrowing more money. Remember, when you are going in to see a bank manager you’re going to see a pusher; a pusher dealing in one of the purest, most addictive drugs – money.