Nicking lyrics
After hearing about Howard Devoto and him taking lines from Dostoevsky. It must be an old Mancunian scam because Morrissey has been doing it for years.
http://www.oz.net/~moz//nicked.htm
I love that he does this because it creates back stories to most of his songs, but if you're someone that thinks that everything that an artist creates must be purely original you might not see this in the same light.
Seeing that Morrissey spent a lot of years alone in his room reading kitchen sink dramas and Oscar Wilde poems it most of affected the songs. Which probably made most the Smiths songs more interesting then if they were about hanging around down the Arndale.
I know that the Clash took a few line from Orwell and Symphony for the Devil is meant to be based on The Master and Margarita but can anyone think of other bands or songs that take lines from books, film and the like.
(interesting that Morrissey "borrowed" a line that Devoto "borrowed")
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Richard Ashcroft / William Blake
Read William Blake's poem 'London'
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
then read Richard Ashcroft's 'History'
I wander lonely streets
Behind where the old Thames does flow
And in every face I meet
Reminds me of what I have run from
In every man, in every hand
In every kiss, you understand
That livng is for other men
I hope you two will understand
Was going to make an Andrew Oldham joke....
but hasn't Richard already learnt his lesson?
Hand the Rocks the Cradle
is my favourite as he admits it in the next line - "see how words as old as sin fit me like a glove".
That's skill and confidence.
not to mention Cemetary Gates
Some of my favourite Morrissey lyrics are on the subject of plagiarism
"If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
don't plagiarise or take on loan
there's always someone somewhere with a big nose who knows
who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall"
and also
"you say 'ere long done do dost did'
words which could only be your own
and then produce the text from whence was ripped
(some dizzy whore 1804)"
Are you going to the Scarboro/"North Country" Fair?
Mr Trad Arr has lost more royalties than everyone else put together. Mind you , probably most of his songs fall without the time rulings, so is it Arr who gets the money, courtesy the "new arrangement"?
I reckon
Messers Jagger & Richards would probably pip Mr Arr to the moolah.
The Happy Mondays album Bummed
borrows significantly from the weird 1970's movie "Performance" and even includes some sampled dialogue from the film on a couple of tracks.