For anyone who doesn't play the guitar, 'Creep' and the Hollies track is is derived from come feature a rather obvious chord progression. Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhere find in their second month of guitar mastery.
It shouldn't even be copyrightable. The guitar is full of things like this that are not great feats of musical theory but simple physical movements that are bound to happen. This is why guitar music generally sounds so derivative, because there are a number of obvious steps that all players will find quite quickly.
Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
If I was a lawyer I'd strum those 4 open E chords on a guitar then play all three songs.
The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe,
Radiohead - Creep,
Lana Del Rey - Get Free
Then maybe I'd make some argument about anyone who made 3 left turns and a right turn to get to the court house today owes me a royalty for using my elegant route without my permission. If you want to get to the court house tomorrow you have to figure out any other permutation but mine.
> Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhere find in their second month of guitar mastery.
E major, G# major, A major, A minor
The song is in E major, yet G# major and A minor are not chords in that scale.
> Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
Firstly, no. All the white keys are consistently in one key, e.g. C major
Secondly, although Lana's infringement may have honestly been accidental, the progression and melody are extremely similar to Creep.
The progression is I / III / IV / iv. "Get Free"'s verses (not chorus) is in this progression in B. "Creep" is in G.
Not the most common progression, but a Google on it led to Reddit where a few other examples came up -- part of the chorus of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" ("this is ground control to Major Tom") or ELO's "Tightrope".
One problem with "Creep" is that it is a simple four chord loop, unlike the above songs. Nothing wrong with a four bar chord loop, but four chord loops alone really aren't unique enough to be copyrightable (MHO). Four chord loops are a staple of basic rock and roll (garage rock and punk etc.). Because the scope of triad movement is limited in these styles, the chords you are playing (and even to some degree the melodies that come from this) have probably been done before a long time ago. Think for instance what would happen if the "12 bar blues" progression or the "doo wop progression" (I-vi-IV-V) which dominates 1950s music was placed under lock and key.
Inevitably bands in four chord loop mode step on each other and produce similar sounding songs. When I played in a cover band, we played with this sort of thing to deliver "two songs at once" moments. For example, Puddle of Mudd's "She Hates Me" has the exact same chords (and pacing!) as Suicidal Tendencies' "I Saw Your Mommy" -- both are Emaj Amaj F#maj Bmaj. The chorus of the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" and the Troggs' "Wild Thing" (I-IV-V-IV in Amaj, somewhat similar rhythm) are also similar enough where you can swap between the two mid song. In modern times, enough modern country songs used the exact same chord loops and pacing (roughly IV-I-V in Bmaj) for someone to make a mashup of six of them playing simultaneously. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o) It would have been fun to cover this mashup. :)
Radiohead has a stronger case on the melody, but there's a point where I wonder where the threshold of uniqueness should lie. Due to the relative complexity, it would be IMHO pretty difficult for someone to accidentally come up with "Space Oddity" or "Tightrope" chorus. On the other hand, I personally can easily see accidentally coming up with the Creep melody with these chords (this seems like a very similar situation to the Tom Petty "I Won't Back Down" / Sam Smith "Stay With Me" situation). IMHO, if something is easy to accidentally create, it shouldn't be unique enough for copyright protection.
It doesn't matter that they're not musically in the same key. It's their physical position on the fretboard that is being compared to the physical position of the white keys on the piano
You're missing the point. He's not claiming that musically sliding a chord and playing the white keys are the same, he's saying physically they're the same. Both are physically natural and so could be chosen for physical rather than musical reasons. There are, of course, also musical reasons to select those options -- like you said, the white keys are C major -- but that is not necessary to motivate the choice in either case. If I didn't know that the white keys on a piano were C major, I'd still be likely to play them because they're physically convenient.
> The song is in E major, yet G# major and A minor are not chords in that scale.
Guitarists learning scales? I mean like the names of the notes rather than the shapes they make on the neck? I am suggesting that knowledge of musical theory had no part in this at all. You need to think in the terms of an indie guitarist of average ability like Thom Yorke. Open, the fret after the one with the dot on, the next fret with a dot, now take your little finger off. That is how I learnt to play Creep in the mid-ninetees! That is how (non-classical) guitarists tend to learn, and why so many people can play guitar.
> Firstly, no. All the white keys are consistently in one key, e.g. C major
Try not to judge a musician's talent and knowledge based off of their popular hits. John Mayer is a phenomenal guitarist whose commercially successful songs require few of his actual abilities.
I find that Radiohead creates quite interesting music from a theory perspective. Learn to play songs like "no surprises" and "paranoid Android" from Ok Computer. They venture outside of normal key in various ways.
Being able to learn an existing song via memorization without understanding does not imply that the creator didn't have a clue.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression here. I base my supposition about how Radiohead constructed their early hits from learning to play them. I like 'No suprises', which I learned for the vocal challenge, but I think this bears me out. IIRC the song opens with an arpeggio using a simple open-D shape behind a capo high up the neck which gives that interesting tone. The second chord just involves shifting a finger to change the bass note, and the D shape can be maintained right through to the little ditty before it repeats. It sounds pretty but I can't believe he wrote that on a score and then found a way to play it. It seems to be that he had been fiddling around with the classic guitarists trick of holding a chord shape and moving the bass note around, noting what sounds good. The skill is surely in taking that little ditty and translating it into a song.
From the same album IIRC was 'Fake Plastic Trees'. I remember being staggered by the exotic chord names and the amazing sounds it made. then I set out to learn it, and again they are classic chord shapes with shifting bass notes etc.
So I wont credit Thom Yorke with having been a great guitar player back then, or even having somehow composed those songs with the aim of trying out interesting theoretical concepts. I will credit him with a great ear for turning those little tricks into songs.
Since this is HN I will note that his wiki says he does not read music[0] and that the rest of the band take his little sketches and develop them harmonically.
So he is a musician creating original (even amazing, surprising and exotic) music by playing with and exploring ideas on a musical instrument. And you consider this as something less valuable than trying out "theoretical concepts".
Excellent point. Also, who cares if someone is 'a great guitar player' in the sense of mere technical virtuosity. Youtube is full of guitarist videos with GREATEST and !!!! in the titles, a million notes a minute, sound and fury signifying nothing.
Your comment reminded me of Hendrix - most if not all of what he did seems to fit under 'stuff found by messing around on a guitar, moving chords/bass notes around, experimenting with sounds', mostly with no 'theoretical base' whatever except for developing what sounded good, what was fun to explore. In a word, playing.
Personal note: Someone played me Radiohead a few years ago for a while, I'd never heard them before. I remember thinking - I can see why this would sound amazing/mindblowing to someone who'd never heard anything but mainstream/charts/popular/etc rock. Like someone who'd only seen Hollywood movies discovering the whole world of movie-making for the first time. (I'm into jazz, classical, funk, reggae, indian classical etc etc)
No idea what you meant by that sorry. And now there's that other meaning..something about metrosexuals with beards or something. But either way, not clear to me at all what you could mean.
Hipsters care a lot about signaling that they prefer fringe/niche/"non-mainstream" culture. Since it is all about social signaling rather than actually enjoying a wide variety of culture, it is just as important for them to signal what culture they don't associate with, and that is decided not by the quality of the music/film/food itself, but rather based on whether other people why enjoy it are "down with it" or "mainstream".
Radiohead is a pretty popular and well-known band, so you have to pretend you don't know them, while at the same time disparaging them - not for anything related to their actual music, but for the people liking them not being hipsterish enough. This is the epitome of hipsterness.
I think I may have got the tone wrong here, but it was more self deprecating than trolling. I am a competent guitarist, but know little musical theory. The same was true of many of my friends. The guitar is easy to start out on and impress some non-players with. You can get a very long way with a few chords and tab.
However I would never claim to be a musician. I don't read music, I don't think in scales. I used to hang round with music students who marvelled at my solo improvisations, but I couldn't compete with them when it came to music theory. I learned the blues scale shape and added the interesting notes which my friends had proper names for..but it didn't stop me playing songs.
Those who do learn music theory have my utmost respect, they could do harmonic things I can only marvel at, but I knew 20x more guitarists that just learned songs from the magazines (before the internet), song books and each other until they had enough building blocks to do their own thing
With a few jazzy exceptions, you can play any pop/rock song by sliding an open E chord up and down the neck and sometimes taking a finger off. All you're saying there is that the song is constructed of major and minor chords, which I'd guess a comfortable 95% of pop/rock songs are (guitar-based or otherwise).
Edit: Also you can write any computer program by simply pressing the buttons on a computer keyboard in the right order.
> Also you can write any computer program by simply pressing the buttons on a computer keyboard in the right order
But you couldn't write many useful programs by simply typing the top row of the keyboard in ascending order and repeating for 3 minutes 59
> you can play any pop/rock song by sliding an open E chord up and down the neck and sometimes taking a finger off.
Exactly, why do we allow them to copyright them? The point with 'Creep' is that they are physically close together and in a simple order. Its a great beginner song for someone learning barre chords
My point is, you're negating any kind of craftsmanship by reducing it to the mechanical actions involved, which is basically equivalent to saying programming is just typing.
I thought your comment was saying that Creep inparticular is just a series of major and minor chords, not that songs ingeneral are just series of major and minor chords. If the argument is that songs in general shouldn't be copyrightable then fair enough I guess.
(Fellow guitarist here) I agree, there are only so many chord progressions that work in a pop song.. perhaps 30 or even less? But the chords are not the only problem here.
Listen to the voices‘ melodies of „my modern manifesto“ (Lana) vs „I‘m a weirdo“ (Radiohead) - that’s so blatantly copied I almost can’t believe it. If she were a hobbyist, I might believe that her subconscious sneaked it all in without her noticing, but I don’t believe all the producers and test audiences this has been run by haven’t noticed.
Yeah, I think there's more similarity than just the chord progression. Part of it is the vocal timbre. Lana Del Rey's relaxed, under-enunciated consonants is similar to the vocal style in grunge when Creep came out. But she does that in almost all her songs.
The chorus is completely different, and so is the instrumentation and musical style. It is a close call whether I'd call that plagiarism.
What's really awesome is that when you become "good" at guitar you realize the mind melting shredding you hear is also super obvious. Your fingers just do it because you're on a guitar. All lawsuits involving guitar should be settled on stage. Every other instrument knows guitarists are cheaters.
The judge doesn't need to play guitar. S/he could just summon in court an independent party that can play guitar and ask questions relevant to the case.
Not only that - they wrote at least two songs that referenced how much they hated "Creep" and how it had become a crutch. It's why I find it hard to believe that "Radiohead" are making the infringement claim here and it's much more likely the record label who own the rights to the recording who are making the claim.
Which as the article states is astonishingly similar to the Hollies song.
Pick up a guitar and strum that progression in the rather obvious way that it appears on either record (like someone who is rather less than a virtuoso). Now add some words so the syllables fit with the strumming pattern...If you are not now singing that dreary melody you are a true musical genius.
But of all the millions of random experiments you can make while a learning an instrument, only a few of them sound "nice" - and I would argue they sound nice because they sound like something you've already heard. There's a vast universe of truly original music waiting to be discovered - the future of music - for adventurous musician brave enough to embrace truly ugly sounds.
That's not the future, that's the past. Check out atonal music, almost a century ago. Turns out no one wants to listen to it even after repeated exposure.
The future of music is stuff that sounds good but not because you've already heard it. To create it you need a vivid musical imagination, not randomly messing around with an instrument. Read about Michael Jackson's creative process. He would imagine a song fully in his head and then sing each note of each part to his band: "here's the first chord, first note, second note, third note. Here's the second chord..."
a piece of music has four elements : harmony, melody, rythm and sound.
you gave only one similarity, the truth is that the rythm and melody are also 100% identical, and one would argue the sound is pretty similar as well ( but it's more due to both songs being western rock/pop).
Listening to the Lana Del Rey & Radiohead tracks just now, I noticed that to my ear they also resemble yet another song, "The Impossible Dream". Similar chord progession and similar melody in some places.
Does the copyright infringement focus on the chord progression or the chord progression + melody? The melody being sung over the chords is a combination that seems subject to license.
It shouldn't even be copyrightable. The guitar is full of things like this that are not great feats of musical theory but simple physical movements that are bound to happen. This is why guitar music generally sounds so derivative, because there are a number of obvious steps that all players will find quite quickly.
Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
Edit: typo