The Bible and Music

Along with our discussion of the creation story in class on Monday, we explored the idea of originality in the music world today. I found the parallel between these two ideas to be interesting, considering we collectively agreed there is no real original music anymore. Everything we hear is just a new way that an artist has decided to arrange the chords that make up all of the music we listen to. I attempted to counter this argument with the example of “Sleeper” by Snarky Puppy. Although the example is different from most modern music, it is not completely original. There are elements of it that are similar to those heard before. This started me thinking about songs with eerily similar sounds. As discussed in one of my previous blog posts, “Big Lie” by Post Malone and “Love Lies” by Khalid sound too much alike for it to be a coincidence. Some other examples of this include “Baba O’Riley” by The Who and “Best Song Ever” by One Direction as well as “Under Pressure” by Queen and “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice. With them sounding so similar, it could be easy to question how this continues to happen. The answer lies in the fact that chords can not be under copyright. They are the meat of the music we listen to, so must treat them as such.

From: March 7, 2018