Plagiarism and Remix (Blog Post #6)

Jonathan Lethem enthuses this theory that essentially nothing is original in his essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence”. I tend to agree with this. Sure, there are wildly creative people with colorful imaginations that create things we might not have ever been able to imagine, but those people had to have had an influence or a spark of motivation originating from something else. To have some level of plagiarism is inevitable.

Early on in Lethem’s essay he speaks of a musical songwriter named Muddy Waters who wrote a song for a folklorist named Alan Lomax. Waters starts by telling Lomax that he had made the song “Country Blues” on “about the eighth of October ’38”. He then explains what he did that day and it just came to him (influenced by what happened that day). Lomax then asks him if there are any other songs written with the same tune. Waters replies with knowledge of one song in particular (that may/may not have had influence on him) called “Walkin’ Blues”. Because the songs sound so similar to each other, does that mean Muddy Waters plagiarized Robert Johnson’s song “Walkin’ Blues”? Probably not. He might have just taken a memory of the tune as his influence and made it his own. However, plagiarism in the music industry is a very controversial topic. There are so many cases of this. For example, wouldn’t you say that the bass in Queen’s song “Under Pressure” sounds remarkably similar to the bass in Vanilla Ice’s song “Ice Ice Baby”? These plagiaristic acts usually end up going to court to settle between artists who have “stolen” similar sounds from another.

In addition to the music industry, there is a lot of pressure for originality in everyday life. I have felt this pressure in my earlier school years. If you followed a trend, you copied it from someone. That was the end of the world for middle school students. God forbid you liked the same style as someone else. If you consider all the ideas, fashions, songs, thoughts, etc. then you will begin to realize that there is very little room for genuine originality. Anything can be influential on your choices or judgments.