How’d this fucking guy not get sued?!
So I’m fucking around, trying to find a live McCartney cover of Two of Us. I stumble on a couple different covers by other artists, and in my haste to just grab a bunch of stuff, I accidently grab a version of Joe Jackson’s Breaking Us In Two. I have no fucking idea who Joe Jackson is. Maybe I do, but I don’t care.
I play all the songs I download, and in comes this song. I’m thinking it’s a cover, or one of those songs I’ve heard before, but didn’t realize what/who it was. So I naturally start singing the lyrics in my head, but… wait, different lyrics. How do you cover a song, but have different lyrics? Wait a second. I go through my library and pull up a version of Badfinger’s Day After Day. This Joe Jackson guy completely ripped off the fucking song. I’m not talking about Vanilla Ice stealing a bass rhythm. I mean he stole the fucking song and put different lyrics to it.
Don’t get me wrong. Musicians rip each other off constantly. McCartney will be the first to tell you the Beatles survived by taking stuff and twisting it. He’s even ripped himself off before. But this is… weird.
I keep listening to these two songs, thinking that I’m insane, that they’re not so similar. If there are any serious audiophiles with a bit of free time and a good ISP, can someone please listen to these two songs and tell me if I’m losing my mind, of if this is just blatant fucking theft?
Joe Jackson should go down in history for writing “Sunday Papers” but he’s more a musical footnote for the “Night and Day” album. He came out of the whole new wave thing of the late seventies/early eighties, completely overshadowed by the Police and Elvis Costello. Good songwriter, quirky, but never quite emerged in the mainstream–kind of like Nick Lowe.
splatt