preview

Argumentative Pop Culture

Decent Essays
Open Document

Argument essay

Pop culture is fascinating. Whether it be a popular new movie or an album by an artist, there is always something in store for everyone to love about it. RuPaul once said, “The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There's very little that's brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process—picking up on and sampling things from the world around you, things you grew up with.” What he means by this is that ideas have been reused throughout music, movies, shows, novels, etc. over time. Nowadays it is a rarity to find anything original as many ideas are recycled or borrowed.

Music is a unique way of expressing one’s self, though ideas can become recycled and borrowed by other artists. These days, a particularly older person could hear a newly-released song and find the music to be familiar. An artist can simply borrow the music from an older song and then incorporate it into a new song of their own. Many artists and songwriters nowadays use this technique in their own music. Say an older person was to hear the smash hit “Shape of You” by songwriter and singer Ed Sheeran. They would hear a song that they once treasured from their days in the club. The song “No Scrubs” by a high-selling music trio of the 1990’s, called TLC, once wrote a song that contains that same music. This is a perfect representation of the idea of reused music.

Most of the time, the artist to reuse the music should always have the permission to do so. There is such thing as music plagiarism, which is just what one may think it means, stealing music without permission from the copyright owner. Music can also sound so similar that people would believe that there is some kind of relation to another track. A website called Consequenceofsound.net suggests that there have been plenty of music plagiarism cases in the history of music. Cases that slipped away easily, cases that became so serious that they involved court, and even more serious cases resulting in the deletion of the song overall. Coldplay has always been a top-selling artist throughout the years, with some of the most popular songs within the past decade. The 2008 smash hit called “Viva La Vida” does contain backtracks from Joe

Get Access
Related
Get Access