Glee is the Answer When Questions Are Wrong: That Glee Thing
Forking off a thread now so this discussion doesn't get lost in the JoCo in the Media thread.
If you're joining us late, @BrettGlass gives a good summary of the controversy in the original post:
Twitter and various blogs are abuzz with the news that Glee has ripped off JoCo's setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" without so much as attribution. What's more, it looks as if they used the Karaoke backing track from his Web site, or the similar track from his USB drive!
(I haven't got time to collate links right now, but there's lots of good stuff in that thread. Please feel free to link/crosspost them here.)
Comments
Slate and Salon aren't NBC, but they are about as mainstream as you can get re: online news.
So I'm not sure what a public-interest piece on CNN or MSNBC ("Did Fox's Glee steal from another artist? Come back after the break to find out!") would actually do.
I watched my first 10 minutes or so of Glee ever last night by the way. It seems to be as awful a show as you probably imagined...
It's up to 63 supporters as I type this post.
Yet, in my analysis, I quickly saw that the drum tracks were identical. To the millisecond. And so were the drum pitches. Exactly.
I looked at the banjo part afterward, and, yes, it was the same too. But it's the drum track that really leaves no doubt. They used JoCo's backing track. They mixed in voices, etc., but they couldn't hide this. It's the smoking gun, even more than the muted quack. It's not just one piece of evidence, it's thousands in one neat package.
As Paul has mentioned, regardless of the copyright status of the melody, lyrical alterations, arrangement, etc., JoCo owns his performance. And Fox didn't license it from him before copying it.
That being said, you are absolutely right about the banjo and mandolin parts. They are also the same, slips and all.
If Jonathan wants to assemble a forensics team to document similarities between any of these parts in the two published tracks, I'd be glad to participate. It would not be hard to turn out a really big spreadsheet or database with a list of the note events, their pitches, and their timings showing a correlation that would convince a jury.
I'll also bet that Dr. Demento -- who has credentials as a musicologist -- would be willing to show up and testify that Jonathan's setting was indeed a humorous parody, and that this is why he played it on his comedy music show.
So... CNN couldn't Facebook-message him to get his opinion?
Sorry for all the eta's. I'll stop now.
Or maybe the one sexy nerd character would run a scan on some Fox sound guy's computer and say "I can prove he didn't use new backup tracks, because see, his first save was like 2 seconds after he opened the file but all of these waveforms were already in the save and he couldn't have made them in 2 seconds."
Obviously this is not TV.
But is this the sort of thing that could legally happen?