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I’m entirely under the power of Lard!
Unfortunately, S. Alexander Reed got to the history of industrial music before me…
This gets confusing, Raymond Watts considers himself the Lord of Lard.
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Let’s not forget that Zappa lifted a section of (I think) Jupiter for Call Any Vegetable.
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But, if we’re going to talk about “copying” in music, the other aspect of copyright laws is also sampling, right, common in both hip-hop (and thus much of modern pop music, which takes so much from hip-hop production techniques) and industrial music.
Sampling is kind of at the base of hip-hop, as it’s the deconstruction and reconstruction of sound (think the use of Kraftwerk in Planet Rock or that James Brown yell in… a million songs). That changed in the early 90s, after the Biz Markie Case:
Of course, some considered the use of sampling in early hip-hop as indicative of it’s lack of originality - which is of course BS. But going after sampling was a great way to try and bring hip hop to heel. Didn’t work of course, it’s more popular than ever (globally speaking) and there seems to be a resurgence of political active and vocal rappers (Killer Mike, Kendrick Lamar, etc).
But industrial sampling tends to be slightly different (especially bands like Skinny Puppy), as it tends to be from films, speeches, etc. But industrial music was never under fire for sampling issues (even though industrial bands were likely impacted by the decisions of the Biz Markie case). With the except of Ministry and NIN (which didn’t use tons of samplings), industrial generally flew under the radar, meaning it wasn’t a target of copyright frantic people. But it also probably helped that industrial had connections to the art world (or pretensions to it), it was a more obscure subculture, and that it was pretty white. Since the genre had this view of not being “pop” culture, but a higher art form (which, we can debate that all day), while hip-hop was rather unapologetically mass culture (or so I’d argue) and was making inroads into the (generally white) suburbs thanks in part to MTV (not just stuff like Biz Markie or Tone Loc, either, but the early west coast “gangsta” rappers), hip-hop became the preferred target.
But I have to agree with @Melz2 about Blurred Lines… Boring, more than derivative, rapey-ass song. It’s not sampling or creative reuse of hooks, melodies or quotes from films.
OH, and let’s not forget the Stairway lawsuit, which Zepplin won:
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Watts had his fingers in all sorts of pies in the industrial scene over the years, didn’t he? Didn’t he do sound engineering for like Neubauten at some point?
Honestly, I’m not as familiar with his work, outside of his connections to KMFDM, etc.
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Yes he did. Honestly, neither am I, and I have only dipped my toe into the PIG catalog. I do likes some of their songs, and they did a remix with KMFDM which I really liked. Two of the current KMFDM members were musicians for him a long time ago. But he has old school cred for working with many early groups. From Wiki.
From 1984 to 1986 Watts was sound engineer for Mona Mur.
From 1985 to 1989 Watts was a sound engineer for Einstürzende Neubauten.
Watts has occasionally collaborated with J. G. Thirlwell, briefly playing bass in Foetus Corruptus and co-writing songs for Steroid Maximus on the album Gondwanaland. Thirlwell, in turn, has cowritten and remixed songs for PIG.
Watts recorded music for ex-girlfriend spoken-word artist Sow (born Anna Wildsmith)'s 1994 album Je M'Aime and again for her 1998 album Sick and 2010 album Dog. "Je M'aime" was reissued under the name "Pig/Sow" in 1999.
PIG's 1995 album Sinsation was released in the US on Trent Reznor's label Nothing Records. PIG also toured with Reznor's band Nine Inch Nails in the UK.
Japanese-based band Schaft employed Watts as a lyricist/vocalist for the 1994 album Switchblade and companion remix collection Switch.
In 2001, Watts and KMFDM frontman Sascha Konietzko teamed up with Japanese musicians Sakurai Atsushi and Imai Hisashi (also of Schaft and Buck-Tick) to form the project super group Schwein. Schwein released two albums Schweinstein and Son of Schweinstein ; the latter being remixes from the first.
Watts has also provided production, mixing, remixing, and/or vocals for Psychic TV, Chemlab, Haloblack, 2-Kut, Hoodlum Priest, Steroid Maximus, H3llb3nt, The Hit Parade, Brain Drive, Buck-Tick, D.I.E., Sakurai Atsushi, Sprung Aus Den Wolken, The Megaton Men, Mortiis, Judda], Tweaker, Prong, West End and Zos Kia.
Watts contributed an original composition to the soundtrack of the computer game MDK2. It plays on the title screen and one of Max's levels. [1]
Watts has composed music for several Alexander McQueen fashion shows.
Watts has contributed vocals to the track "Second Coming" by Team Cybergeist[11]
I love sampling, both in hip hop and early techno. Paul’s Boutique would never have been made today - at least not in its current form.
The original KMFDM album NAIVE was pulled for unlicensed use of a performance of Carmen of all things. The original orange CD is a rarity I still need to get. ALMOST got it at a record shop for only $10 and I was super broke at college and had them hold it for me until I got paid - but someone snagged it. It later got re-released as NAIVE/HELL TO GO in green.
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chuckles I read Disneyxia. Am I dyslexic now, or is it just my shattered smartphone screen?
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Agreed. That’s just one album in a long list that would not have been made, too.
OH! I did not know that!
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OH wait, I got one more. Grendel got in trouble for covering Zombie Nation’s Kernkraft 400, even though he ripped the entire base line and melody note for note from an old Commodore 64 game (which itself copied heavily from another song by a UK electronicia group in the early 80s). So the Soilbleed EP left if off on further versions of it, renamed Soilbleed Redux.
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Oh, another good one. Around when was this?
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I find it fascinating that the Beasties actually cleared the vast majority of the samples that were used for was they said was “a reasonable sum”. This was of course before Biz Markie unwittingly fucked up casual sampling forevermore.
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Grendels Soilbleed was 2005. Zombie Nation’s Kernkraft 400 was 2000.
Here, they have a sample of the Commodore 64 song from 1984 on wiki and its a note for note copy.
Grendels wiki has just a short mention.
Here is about KMFDM’s Naive album. Note they also sampled/barrowed guitar gifts from Slayer, but that didn’t turn into anything. I still love Godlike.
And I had the song wrong, it was O Fortuna from Carimina Burana.
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Ah! These are all post-Biz Markie. Illustrates how the landscape changed since then.
Thanks!
Also, I love Godlike!
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Somewhat relevant:
Edited to add: According to the article, the musicians suing the composer were hired to help write a theme song. They are saying the composer went ahead and used their work without credit or compensation. It’s not exactly the same thing, but if true, it’s still stealing.
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The more I’m thinking about this, the more interesting I think the role of lawsuits in popular music are. So much going on in these cases regarding how we think about popular music. I mean the entire idea that a song should always be entirely original and lacking in similar phrasing to another song is kind of weird, given how often music used to be shared in the pre-recording (and into the early recording) era. I mean, the music from the Star Spangled Banner (for one well known example) were not unique, but taken from a British song.
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It’s very, very weird. As you said, in the past popular songs often had their own locally produced verses. Many popular old songs have many alternate lyrics and meanings. Like Yankee Doodle Dandy was originally an anti-Colonial song by the British, before the deplorables took it as a bad of honor and made it their own.
Plus, within each genre there are going to be very, very similar sounding groups. Someone who isn’t a fan of a particular genre tends to find most of the songs sound the same - and they do, to a degree.
Hell, I think ALL of our early government related tunes were taken from British tunes.
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Indeed. Of the same song often had regional variants. A good example of that can be found in this little documentary:
http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/5/song.shtml
But sound recording fixed the way we expect a song to sound (generally speaking). There is THE version of, say, Wild Thing or Celebrate or Nobody Speak, instead of many variants.
What’s that line from the Gogol Bordellos song? “Let rest orginality/ for sake of passing it around”?
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The US has always been rather hypocritical when it comes to copyright.
Until relatively recently, the US didn’t recognise foreign copyrights.
For example, Charles Dickens ended up touring the US doing author’s readings because his works were incredibly popular in the US but he wasn’t seeing a penny because the publishers in the US didn’t have to pay him anything.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva75.html
A classic case of ‘America First’ policies in action. 
On the other hand, I gather Lord of the Rings wouldn’t be as huge as it is if Ace hadn’t taken the view that the US copyright had lapsed and published their cheap edition.
Given the history, the rabidity with which the US tries to control intellectual property these days is interesting.
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