When A Summer Hit Is Plain Plagiarism
All About That Plagiarism
I knew nothing about this Meghan Trainor girl, who had apparently a big hit this summer with her song ‘All About That Bass’, but I saw her once on TV when I was randomly switching channels. The morning show host was praising the girl and her pastel-color video, all about giving confidence to chubby girls with a catchy pop song, and they insisted a lot on the catchiness of the tune, for a good reason…. According to Buzzfeed, the song is currently number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, a not too shabby spot for a totally unknown girl!
She co-wrote the song with Grammy Award-nominated songwriter Kevin Kadish, but unfortunately for the two, there is now a big controversy: she and Kadish may have simply stolen the tune from K-pop band Koyote, who, as many people have pointed out, carries a wild similarity with another tune by the popular band Phish. And I am not talking about vague similarities here, the three songs have been put side by side in a YouTube video (below), and they sound really identical, although to be fair there is only a 30 seconds of them each time. But these are simple songs, there is no a lot going on after 30 seconds. The two other songs in question are Koyote’s ‘Gippeummodeu’ (Happy mode) written in 2006 and Phish’s ‘Contact written in 1989.
Plagiarism happens all the time in the music world, there are famous examples written all over the music history, recently Led Zeppelin got a lawsuit and Tame Impala almost got one… the most famous songwriters have been sued for the same reason, from the Oasis’ Gallagher Brothers, to Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Still I can get over that these three songs are really identical!
Koyote’s Joo Young Hoon has tweeted he was consulting a lawyer, but what about Phish? They have the oldest (and probably) original song that Koyote may have also plagiarized, so Hoon should swallow it and be a bit less arrogant.
