Artists and Parasites
In adland’s creative departments, if creativity is king then originality is most certainly queen.
You may come up with a brilliant creative answer to a brief completely, utterly and 100% honestly unaware that the same idea was used in Argentina in 1982.
It is truly your own original idea and it is dead.
If your Creative Director doesn’t say so then the community at large will.
It’s silly given that your consumer audience will neither know nor care that the same ad idea had already been done in a faraway land – originality has nothing to do with whether or not it will be an effective ad in your market – but that’s the way it is.
It happens all the time which is not surprising given that there are very, very few briefs that are truly original given the glut of me-too products and strategies-by-committee.
And then there is the music world.
Musicians have always been inspired by those that came before them.
There would be no rock without the blues.
Bands have often covered other bands’ songs – with appropriate credit given.
Many artists have also admitted to writing an entirely new song by starting with a “stolen” bass line here or a guitar riff there.
Then in the 80s, sampling started – the wholesale lifting of a recorded piece of music and mixing (or re-mixing) it into a new track.
I don’t see anything creatively wrong with sampling when the sample is relatively small. And especially not when the sample is creatively used.
(Mick Jones, for instance, sampled himself, taking his opening yelp from The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go and incorporating it as a loop into BAD II’s The Globe.)
But then there are those who just willy-nilly steal the entire song, graft their own dopey lyrics overtop and then try to pass it off as an original work.
Pisses me off to no end.
And with this in mind, I present the gallery of Artists and Parasites.
Some you probably already know.
Others may be eye – and ear – openers.
Rick James: ARTIST
M.C. Hammer: PARASITE
David Bowie + Queen: ARTIST
Vanilla Ice: PARASITE
Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra: ARTIST
The Verve: PARASITE
Warren Zevon: ARTIST
Kid Rock: PARASITE
The Clash: ARTIST
M.I.A.: PARASITE
Fun fact: The Andrew Loog Oldham tune is actually an extensively reimagined cover of The Rolling Stone’s The Last Time. Loog Oldham was the Stones’ manager who wrote all those crazy liner notes on the Stones’ albums in the early 60s.
- Craig Cooper
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