Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Posted byEthan 4 Comments on Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

Lorde did not apparently intend to borrow from George Michael, but she does cite “Loaded” by Primal Scream as an influence.

This track is so similar to “Freedom ’90” that it might as well be a remix. But Lorde’s song sounds more like “Faith” in its guitar-centrism.

So let’s talk about “Faith.” The strumming pattern is an Afro-Cuban rhythm called son clave. George Michael was hardly the first person to use it. His song is an explicit homage to the many 50s rock songs that used that groove. It’s been nicknamed the Bo Diddley beat because Bo Diddley used it a lot, for example in his song aptly titled “Bo Diddley.”

I first heard it in “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly.

The 50s rock and rollers didn’t invent this groove either. It’s ubiquitous across the African diaspora, and is incredibly ancient. I learned from Godfried Toussaint that son clave appears under the name “al-thaqil al-awwal” in the Kitāb al-Adwār, a 13th century music treatise by Safi al-Din al-Urmawi.

And by the way, George Michael wasn’t the only person to have a hit in the 80s with an homage to the son clave grooves of the 50s. U2 did exactly the same thing with “Desire.”

The similarities between Lorde’s song and “Freedom ’90” are more broad. They have a similar laid-back sixteenth note funk groove. George Michael didn’t invent this either, it’s a sample of “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown. Here’s a list of 1,700 other songs that sample it.

And what about that chord progression? In “Solar Power,” it’s B – A – E – B. In “Freedom ’90” it’s a half step higher, C – Bb – F – C. Once again, this is not exactly an original idea on George Michael’s part. Other songs that use it, off the top of my head: “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns N Roses, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, “Can’t Explain” by the Who… there are dozens if not hundreds of others.

The logic of intellectual property is an awkward fit for the reality of creating the grooves in pop songs. Those grooves come from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, which are based on signifying on tropes. The idea of a work of music as an autonomous entity coming from the mind of a single individual is specific to modern Western Europe. The Romantic idea of the lone genius governs our copyright regime, but it’s ideological, not an objective description of how music gets made.

It makes me sad that people are getting sued over vague similarities in grooves, because there are just not that many different grooves or chord progressions that sound good, and all the good ones have been used over and over again. I want creators to be able to protect their livelihoods, but a hyper-litigious environment only benefits the people with the resources to hire lawyers. The law only protects everyone equally in the most abstract and idealistic sense. If you actually want to sue someone, or defend yourself from a lawsuit, it is going to cost you (unless you can find a lawyer who will work on contingency, which… good luck.)

What would happen if George Michael’s estate were to successfully sue Lorde? Then should Buddy Holly’s and Bo Diddley’s estates sue George Michael’s estate? Should a bunch of Afro-Cuban drummers’ descendants sue Buddy Holly’s and Bo Diddley’s estates? Where does it end? It would be nice if we could just recognize “strumming son clave on a guitar” to be community property. Same goes for laid-back sixteenth-note funk and the I-bVII-IV-I chord progression. I don’t believe that it’s even possible for a genuinely original piece of music to become popular. If you want to hear music that isn’t broadly similar to existing music, you have to go to the furthest fringes of experimental and avant-garde music, and that stuff is not popular by definition.

If we think that copyright law should actually cover instrumental backings and grooves, that’s a debate we could have, but as of now, it doesn’t. I do want less-privileged artists to have legal protections against more-privileged ones, but so far copyright law has been wildly ineffective for that purpose. In the meantime, it’s not like originality has ever been much of a virtue in mainstream pop music. Maybe we should just recognize that songs sound like other songs and relax about it.

Update: this Twitter thread has some good links about copyright protection for grooves.

4 replies on “Did Lorde rip off George Michael?”

  1. The main difference in the Blurred Lines case is that the defendants admitted to starting with the other song as a basis. I agree the decision was ridiculous, from a factual basis of comparing the two songs. But I think the courts were saying intention matters.

    1. They intended to imitate the vibe, but not the copyrightable elements (the top line melody and lyrics.) That musicological distinction escaped the jury, and maybe it’s not a meaningful one. But that’s the law on the books. Every pop songwriting and beatmaking session I’ve been part of starts with a conversation about the vibe we’re going for. Maybe we aren’t as specific or overt as Robin Thicke was about the Marvin Gaye song, but that is pretty much how the process works.

  2. Very good point by point explanation!

    This whole thing feels reminiscent of the Marvin Gaye v. Thicke/Pharrell plagiarism lawsuit in which “feel” was the only (somewhat) common point between the two songs – and maybe the cowbell?! The chord progressions were different, the bass lines were different, and even the melodies had nothing in common! It used to be that only melodies were supposedly copyrightable. So what happened to that?

    Everybody becomes a self-entitled “expert” in those cases and they certainly should not be evaluated by non-musician juries and/courts.

    Thanks for your thorough presentation.

    –Bruno

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