‘Song Stealing’ Avril Deserves A Break

Perez Hilton is reporting that Avril Lavigne (refered to as “song thief”) ripped off Peaches, of Fuck the Pain Away fame, in one of her latest compositions. Every few years some pop star gets accused of being a song thief, which is a ludicris idea in itself. One recent example is the Ice Ice Baby/Under Pressure riff tiff or accusations that Bob Dylan took lyrics from the poet laureate of the Confederacy. When something like this happens, blogs, fans and news organizations almost always get it wrong.

While Avril certainly should admit that she lifts melodies and beats, there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so and there’s precedent for it in most popular music. For example, the melody of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land is taken note for note from The Carter Family’s When The World’s On Fire. The ironic thing is that the Carter Family song was probably also lifted from a preexisting melody, as AP Carter was a “songcatcher” who would take songs from rural areas, songs that were at the time in the public domain, and then secure copyrights for them.

In 1930 the Carters had begun to put African-American sacred songs on record… Maybe the best was When the World’s on Fire, which had been recorded as Rock of Ages by Blind Willie Davis, a black singer-guitarist from McComb, Mississippi. On the Carter record, Maybelle played in Davis’s bottleneck-guitar style. Woody Guthrie would be so taken with that melody that he’d make it the basis for his American anthem to inclusion, This Land is Your Land¹

Then there’s the classic example of the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA which borrows extensively from Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen.

When the song was released in 1963, the original pressing listed Brian Wilson as the sole composer of the song. But according to Brian, as soon as the song became a hit single, ‘Chuck Berry claimed the melody was his, an inadvertent copy of Sweet Little Sixteen.’ According to Brian though, there are ‘plenty of musicologists who’d argue otherwise.’ Then after Chuck Berry accused Brian Wilson of stealing his melody, Murry Wilson ‘gave Berry the copyright’ without ever informing his son Brian. But what Brian Wilson didn’t realise[SIC] for more than twenty-five years was that Murry also ‘gave away [Brian’s] royalties for writing the lyrics, which clearly weren’t Berry’s’ [although Brian Wilson’s lyrics list several geographical locations in a very similar fashion to Chuck Berry’s original lyrics]. Despite there being tensions over the incident at the time, Chuck Berry later claimed that he actually liked the song. According to Carl Wilson, the band ‘ran into Chuck Berry in Copenhagen and he told us he loves Surfin’ USA.²

In almost any genre, be it sampling in hip-hop or Leadbelly’s song library, there are countless examples of musicians borrowing from other musicians, often with extrodianary results. More examples of good things from borrowing…

My Sweet Lord by George Harrison

Fight Test by the Flaming Lips

Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

The Work of Robert Johnson

Right at the outset it must be pointed out that Robert Johnson was no innovator in the true sense of the word. All his music was rooted in the music he heard and learnt from older musicians of his times. If you want to be polite, you say he borrowed from Son House, Charlie Patton, Willie Brown. If you want to be blunt, you will say he stole all the great licks from them. No man is an island, we all draw from influences. But like all great musicians, Robert Johnson borrowed music from others and made it his own.

The Grey Album by Danger Mouse

Even though Avril is less of an artist than a Bob Dylan or a Danger Mouse, she has a right to reclaim musical history in her own compositions. Or, at least, should have that right.

UPDATE: Check out Sampling Law Annex for more examples of the troubled morass of copyright we live in.

1. BlogJazz ↩
2. Wikipedia ↩