This week, Lana Del Rey stated that she is being sued for copying Radiohead’s 1992 song Creep in her 2017 release, Get Free.
It’s true about the lawsuit. Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing – I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless, so we will deal with it in court.
— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) January 7, 2018
First, some facts…
- Both songs use the same chord sequence: | I | I | | III | III | | IV | IV | iv | iv |
- Creep is in G major, so | G | G | B | B | C | C | Cm | Cm |
- Get Free is in Bb major, so | Bb | Bb | D | D | Eb | Eb | Ebm | Ebm |
- They are both mid-tempo (Creep is around 92 BPM; Get Free is around 102BPM).
- They both have a similar rhythmic feel – straight 8s 4/4 time, in 8-bar sections (this is a similarity but an unremarkable one, given that it applies to a huge number of songs).
…and some history…
- Creep is part-borrowed from Albert Hammond’s The Air That I Breathe (1972) – later a hit for The Hollies. According to The Guardian, Radiohead gave Hammond and his co-writer Mike Hazlewood a credit in the Pablo Honey album liner notes.
Here are the three songs in reverse order of release: [Read more…]
Abstract: In my presentation, I will explore differences and similarities in the creative agency of the producer in the production process of urban pop music produced in a home studio, rock music produced in a conventional studio facility and classical concert hall music produced in a concert hall setting. Starting from the premise of record production being a collaborative effort, I approach agency as the capacity to make and effect decisions within a structure or even to alter it to some extent, and creativity as contributing to the domain of existing works through exercising aesthetic decision-making. Based on these understandings of agency and creativity, I will examine how different cultures in different production settings and different studios conceived as cultural spaces affect the construction of the producer’s agency within creative communities in the production process. Furthermore, I will discuss how differences in understandings of the ontology of the music contribute to the level of creativity, i.e. the contribution to the domain of existing works, that a producer agent can possess. I base my presentation on extensive ethnographic fieldwork of three case studies on production processes, which took place in the course of 2015-2017. The presentation will summarize and discuss some of the central findings of my forthcoming PhD dissertation. This presentation is intended to be in the short presentation format.
Abstract: In his introduction to The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field (Frith & Zagorski-Thomas, 2012), Simon Frith proposed that producers in pop and dance music genres have a significantly different role to music producers in other music genres such as rock. A prominent difference is that pop music producers are often part of a production team that involves direct collaboration and participation with songwriters, programmers, musicians, artists, management and record company representatives. Pop music songwriting and production teams are therefore more frequently part of a larger creative collective (Hennion, 1990) in creating a musical product. The following paper describes the creative production workflow system at Pete Waterman Ltd. (PWL) Studios during the 1980s and investigates the way in which Phil Harding and Ian Curnow (P&E) worked with manager and entrepreneur, Tom Watkins in the 1990s. Drawing upon a series of interviews and data gathered during an extended ethnographic and auto ethnographic study, this paper presents the pop music ‘service’ model, which underlines collectivist rather than individualist thinking and illustrates how evaluation is present (and co-current) at the ideation stage in the generation of creative ideas (Sawyer, 2003) at various stages of the commercial pop songwriting and production process.
Abstract: Research into popular music record production and its associated creative practice has highlighted that a song’s production is often influenced by a multitude of stimuli and these can be musically, sonically and socio-culturally diverse. Technology’s influence on musical aesthetics is also at the forefront of scholarly investigations because the democratization of recording technology suggests that the musical spaces producers operate in have changed. Artistic direction however, is still the producer’s responsibility and the current landscape for record production is filled with a multitude of creative practice options that shape the recording aesthetic. These can include live or overdubbed performances and electronic programming versus acoustic instrumentation and when combined with technological choices these decisions ultimately frame the creative stages of pre-production, recording, and mixing. So how does the producer ensure a production process that engages appropriate influences, and subsequently manifests a suitable musical result?
