If you have paid even the tiniest bit of attention to mainstream music and Billboard charts this year, there is a name you are likely to have noticed: Olivia Rodrigo. Originally known for her portrayal of Nini Salazar-Roberts in the Disney+ show High School Musical, The Musical: The Series, the now-eighteen-year-old dramatically rose to fame after she released her first single, drivers license, a ballad about adolescent heartache. Since then, she has exploded all over the pop music landscape, performing at the BRIT Awards, going on Saturday Night Live, receiving three VMAs only last week, and breaking a wild amount of streaming records in no time, including the biggest first week for a song on both Spotify and Amazon Music. Her debut full-length, SOUR, came out in May and is rumoured to receive Grammy nominations in 2022.
The reason why Olivia Rodrigo's name and music seeped into an alternative scene that generally pays little to no attention to the mainstream lies in the third single she released, good 4 u. An eviscerating track about an ex-significant other who, despite claims of loving her, left and feels nothing at all following the split while she is suffering, good 4 u strikes as one of the most energetic songs on SOUR, complete with electric guitars and a true pop-punk feel to it.
Which is what certain people have had an issue with.
Ever since its release, early in May, good 4 u has been heavily compared to one of the biggest classics in the pop-punk universe, Paramore's Misery Business. Rodrigo has then been accused of plagiarism by many angry fans, and the conversation has only increased since the track's songwriter credits have been granted to Hayley Williams and Josh Farro, the minds behind Misery Business. They now receive a share of the royalties, which were rumoured to have amounted to over a million dollars.
Before we go any further and dissect what's going on, I will admit one thing: I personally do not hear the resemblance between Misery Business and good 4 u. Maybe it's a shortcoming on my end, but when I first heard Olivia's song, I thought it was fun and catchy- watch me play this on loop for the rest of forever. My brain never thought about Paramore. Yes, both tracks showcase pop-punk energy and are both sung by women with impressive voices, but that's as far as the similarity ends for me. I do love the mash-up, though.
So...Did Olivia Rodrigo steal from Paramore?
I am no music specialist, nor can I play Wonderwall to save my life, but from research, my understanding is that both songs share the same chord progression. For the non-musically inclined like myself, a chord progression is a series of chords in a specific order, based on a scale. As pointed out by many people across the planet, you cannot copyright a chord progression. Since notes and chords are not infinite, it's more than likely that artists will use similar chord progressions in their careers. In this video I watched, it was explained how the progression used in the choruses of both good 4 u and Misery Business represents approximately 2% of all songs from Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 from 1990 to 2016, meaning that they are not the only songs you will have heard on the airwaves that share the same chord progression and maybe vague melody. The list includes artists such as Gavin DeGraw, Fergie, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Green Day, or Nickelback. The specific examples pointed out by the video were Green Day's Boulevard Of Broken Dreams and Taylor Swift's We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. Seeing as Boulevard Of Broken Dreams is sung by a man to a slower tempo, we don't associate it with any of the other songs on the list. The same goes for Taylor Swift's pop number. The main reason why good 4 u and Misery Business are linked is that they belong to the same genre and share a similar vibe, aesthetic, and electric guitars.
Did Olivia Rodrigo draw inspiration from Paramore? She could have, especially if we take into account the fact that both her team and Paramore's were in contact prior to the album release. But technically, good 4 u can hardly be called an example of plagiarism.
Before we start shouting about plagiarism for every tiny thing, we need to remember that inspiration and trends are everywhere. If we stick to Olivia Rodrigo's music, resemblances have been pointed out between her song brutal and Elvis Costello's Pump It Up. Costello responded on social media, declaring it was "how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make it a brand new toy. That's what I did."
Olivia, a self-proclaimed Taylor Swift fan, has also credited her as well as long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff as songwriters on two different tracks.
The first one is 1 step forward, 3 steps back, in which Rodrigo interpolates part of the song New Year's Day, originally found on Taylor Swift's reputation. Here, interpolation, the re-recording of a melody or part of it, is likely used so the royalties go to the authors of the song as opposed to its owners, the Shamrock Holding Group. As we spoke about previously, Taylor Swift is still caught in a legal dispute regarding the ownership of the masters of her first six records, which reputation is a part of.
The second one is deja vu, which credits Swift and Antonoff as songwriters, as well as Annie Clark (more widely known as St. Vincent). The album's second single reminded many a Taylor Swift fan of the song Cruel Summer, particularly in the bridge, and Olivia herself admitted she had drawn inspiration from it. ("It's one of my favorite songs ever. I love like the yelly vocals in it, like the harmonized yells that [Swift] does, I think they're like super electric and moving, so I wanted to do something like that.")
If we dissected every album under the sun the way the world is currently dissecting SOUR, we could likely pick apart every bit of inspiration and celebration of another artist's work. But would we call it plagiarism too?
It is safe to assume such songwriter credits have been retroactively added to the songs to avoid potential lawsuits. However, it is also reasonable to wonder if those would have been taken to court. Taylor Swift has shown nothing but support to Olivia Rodrigo ever since she put out drivers license, sending her presents and hanging out with her at award shows. Would her team really sue Rodrigo over inspiration?
On the other hand, it is common knowledge Hayley Williams doesn't like the song Misery Business. Paramore has officially retired it from setlists back in 2018, after Williams said: "We feel like it's time to move away from it for a little while." Last year, she reiterated her opinion by saying: "Though it'll always be a fan favorite, we don't need to include it on new playlists in 2020." This begs the question: would Paramore really sue someone over a song they don't like?
Throughout our lives as music fans, we are likely to have heard about big-name court cases of plagiarism, but what about the alternative scenes? How do we deal with various levels of inspiration? The only somewhat famous case I can remember involved Yellowcard and the late rapper Juice WRLD. The band accused him of copying their song Holly Wood Died on his hit Lucid Dreams. I mostly remember it leaving a sour taste in the scene's collective mouths when Yellowcard declared they were prepared to go ahead with the lawsuit, even after Juice WRLD's tragic passing in December 2019. (The case was then dropped in July 2020.)
The bulk of the pop-punk scene is full of inspiration dotted around songs, lyrics, artworks, and I rarely ever see anyone talk about plagiarism. Bands are named after each other, refer to each other in their lyrics, quote each other. A recent example of obvious inspiration is Knuckle Puck's track Earthquake, in which the intro sounds similar to Jimmy Eat World's Authority Song. Seeing as Knuckle Puck have never made their appreciation for Jimmy Eat World a secret, I don't think anyone was surprised by the move, and most Jimmy fans I know never used the word plagiarism. We said it sounded similar, complimented the song, and moved on with our merry lives.
We could also raise the case of WSTR, a British pop-punk band that has always drawn inspiration from Neck Deep. From what I remember, their debut record, Red, Green, Or Inbetween sounded similar to the Welsh pop-punks' early material. The artwork of their second full-length, Identity Crisis, was also reminiscent of the cover of Neck Deep's Wishful Thinking. Did we point it out? Yes, of course, we did. Did the scene start calling WSTR "kings of plagiarism" like a part of the Internet is doing with Olivia Rodrigo? No. Like I said before, we pointed it out, and then, we moved on with our lives.
It's not about not caring for artistic integrity. Everybody does. It's just that we all have understood the concept that all art draws inspiration from somewhere. Personally, I love hearing my new favourite bands say who they've been inspired by, and listening to their music with this knowledge, trying to figure out where the inspiration lies and put the pieces together, is a fun game to me.
Recently, I heard about Ed Sheeran's multi-million euro plagiarism cases and reports of copying other artists' songs. I found four so far: Thinking Of You copying Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, Photograph reusing parts of Matt Cardle's Amazing, Strip That Down reproducing Shaggy's It Wasn't Me, and Shape Of You interpolating TLC's No Scrubs. I'm not here to analyse every single one of these tracks and question whether Sheeran plagiarised everyone he could think of. I am also not here to criticise Ed's artistry. I'm here to raise a question: why do we not hear about this as much as we have recently heard about Olivia Rodrigo's case, which didn't even go to court?
We could have heard about it all. After all, Ed Sheeran is one of the most popular singer-songwriters on the planet. He has collaborated with everyone, he sells out stadiums wherever he tours, and he is universally regarded as one of the greats of our generation. There are four cases against him, and three of those are about some of his most popular singles. It is also worth pointing out that the Gayes were involved in the Blurred Lines scandal a few years ago. The late singer's family accused Pharell Williams and Robin Thicke of copying the "feel" and "sound" of Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up. Surely, after a lawsuit so public and important for the industry, which raised questions about the limits of copyright infringement, we could have also heard of a dispute with someone as famous as Ed Sheeran. However, the first I heard of any of this was about a month ago, as a friend and I were talking about plagiarism in the wide sense of the word. Believe me, I am interested enough in pop and the music industry to regularly hear about Ed Sheeran. Why haven't I come across these cases before?
Maybe I am drawing conclusions a little fast, but here are my two cents about it.
As mentioned before, Ed Sheeran is one of the most popular singer-songwriters on the planet, and he is universally regarded as one of the greats of our generation. Olivia Rodrigo is an eighteen-year-old woman of colour who started her career in a Disney + show. See where I'm going with this one?
It is the only reason I can think of. On the grand scale of the history of pop music, Ed Sheeran is wildly more known than Olivia Rodrigo, and the songs he allegedly plagiarised, tracks by Marvin Gaye, Shaggy, or TLC, have gathered thousands of times more radio play than Paramore. But even with four court cases to his name, he has yet to see anyone going up in arms about his artistic integrity or what have you. On the other side of our story, a young woman of colour is catching all the heat and giving away songwriting credits left, right, and centre, not reaping what she should earn through her music, and getting called names on social media. In some parts of the music world, she is not pop music's darling anymore, the girl who is going to achieve big things and receive well-deserved Grammy nominations at eighteen years old. She has been dubbed the "queen of plagiarism" and not much else.
Could this be another layer to the way the media, and now social media, treats women, especially young women, especially women of colour, in the music industry? As much as I don't want to, I believe so. The media has blood on their hands and a dirty history of being absolutely disgusting towards women in the arts. The list of media bullying cases is endless, even if we just want to stick to music, and even if we don't involve the paparazzi in the process.
See, I was a child in middle school when Britney Spears released her then-heavily anticipated third record, Britney. All I remember reading about in teeny-bopper magazines, which quoted known names such as Entertainment Weekly in their sources, was: "Britney's going sexy! Look, she's wearing a thong over a pair of jeans! She's being physically close to a man! She is performing in a skimpy outfit with a snake draped around her shoulders! The song is called I'm A Slave 4 U! She's not innocent anymore!" But no one talked about her music or artistry anymore. It took me years of unlearning deeply ingrained behaviours to appreciate how brilliant a pop album Britney is and, to this day, I believe it's one of the most underrated pop records of my generation. The same happened when Christina Aguilera came back into the limelight with the excellent Stripped. It was a lot more fun talking about her looks, her piercings, her briefly renaming herself "X-Tina," and her having a song called Dirrrty than it was celebrating her art. The world spent years calling Taylor Swift every name under the sun because she wrote songs about heartbreak, as if it isn't one of the most popular topics in every genre of music. The list is positively and sadly endless.
The heavy and sometimes overbearing presence of social media in our everyday lives has undoubtedly impacted the way we react to artists' music. What we used to talk about with our friends, in private, is now shared on public platforms all over the world, to be saved forever by the magic of the Internet, for better or for worse. While, for a lot of fans, social media networks are a way to share how much they love their favourite artists and encourage others to listen to their music, it has led to bullying and violence. Shall we remind everyone of the Taylor Swift Is Over Party, a hashtag that trended worldwide after Kim Kardashian-West shared an edited video clip of the singer supposedly approving of Kanye West's lyrics about her? As Swift said, much later on, imagine how many times you have to tweet something for it to trend worldwide. Maybe we can also mention the online bullying experienced by Dua Lipa a few years ago after a video of one of her live performances went viral. In an interview with the magazine Attitude, she declared the reaction to it "gave [me] anxiety" and "messed with [my] mental health."
Contrary to what we tend to believe, famous people are human beings, just like us, and chances are, they come across the things that are being said about them online in the same way they used to see tabloids covers. Do we want to be on the wrong side of history again? Maybe the next time we listen to Olivia Rodrigo's good 4 u and think it sounds like Misery Business, we can let go. We can remember that no one owns chord progressions and that inspiration is present everywhere in life, in all forms of art. Maybe we can give her the grace we give most white male artists across the planet, even those with four plagiarism cases to their names, and even those who pursue lawsuits after the other person passed away. Maybe we can see that she is an eighteen-year-old girl just starting out, a still young woman who's going to make mistakes and experiment and figure it out through trial and error, and build her up instead of tearing her down over a series of chords and electric guitars.
Let's not ruin the music industry for yet another young woman.