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Updated January 23, 2018 10:35:11

Last week, in typically colourful fashion, the country musician Justin Townes Earle weighed into the controversy over a lawsuit involving Radiohead and Lana Del Ray.

"If we as musicians are gonna start going to court over chord progressions," he said on Twitter, "then the f***ing blues and country world better watch out.

"I guarantee that Radiohead was not the first to use that progression or melody."

Odds are he is right

Look over the history of Western popular music - a melding of rock and roll, punk, country, blues, hip-hop and other genres - and you'll notice a recurring element: four chords.

Or, more specifically, a four-chord progression a musicologist would notate as I-V-vi-IV. In the key of C, that would include the chords C, G, Am and F.

Those four chords, or the same progression in another key, are the backbone of literally thousands of songs that have charted over the past 70 years. (The exception these days is hip-hop, the most boundary-pushing of the popular genres.)

Think about Let It Be. Think about Take On Me. Think about Fall At Your Feet.

It's a progression that gives you a feeling of optimism and completion. "The minor fall, the major lift," as Leonard Cohen sang on his much-covered ballad Hallelujah (same four chords).

Part of it is historical: you can draw a direct line from early 12-bar blues and country to Chuck Berry in the 1950s, The Beatles in the 1960s, Tom Petty in the 1970s, U2 in the 1980s, Alanis Morrissette in the 1990s, Coldplay in the 2000s, and Lady Gaga in the 2010s.

Nowhere is this more clearly (or cleverly) illustrated than in the above skit by comedy trio Axis of Awesome.

But if the history of pop music is one of reinvention - of building, as in all art, on what has come before - then what does that mean for originality?

This is where it gets tricky

The past week has seen several instances of musicians taking other musicians to court for the alleged theft of a musical idea.

Lana Del Ray and Radiohead are in talks over whether Get Free is too similar to Creep. Ed Sheeran is being sued by two Australian musicians over a song he wrote with country stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.

And the legendary songwriters Harry Vanda and George Young are taking the writers and publishers behind the Glass Candy song Warm In The Winter to court, claiming the song is a rip-off of Love Is In The Air, the mega-hit they wrote with John Paul Young.

After Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke were successfully sued in 2015 by the family of Marvin Gaye over the pair's song Blurred Lines, the academics Nicolas Suzor and Kylie Pappalardo, of QUT, argued copyright law was starting to act like a tax on creativity.

"Copyright law focuses only on similarities when assessing infringement," they wrote. "This ignores the way that all creativity builds upon the past."

As Dr Pappalardo, a lecturer in intellectual property, explained to the ABC:

"It makes sense to restrain people from coming along and copying the song exactly as it is, and sticking it up for people to download for free or whatever.

"But it doesn't make sense to restrain the kinds copying that we saw in Blurred Lines, and that we are seeing in all these other cases, where it is not a straight-up copying of the entire work, it's taking elements of that work to create something new."

It's not diminishing the earlier work in any way, she said, and it's fulfilling the purpose of copyright law: to encourage people to create.

Harlan Howard, a country music songwriter, famously said the genre was just "three chords and the truth".

That sums up pretty nicely what's at issue here.

Even if the chords are the same, the soul of the piece - "the truth" - is what allows artists to create originality by building upon what came before.

But judges are asked to make rulings on sheet music, notation and the testimony of musicologists, not - as in the criticism of the Blurred Lines case, which went to a jury - the "vibe" of a song.

That's where, some argue, our current copyright law is letting us down.

And it's where, as Earle suggested, the four chords of popular music start to look problematic.

Topics: music, music-industry, copyright, information-and-communication, australia

First posted January 16, 2018 06:00:00

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Updated January 23, 2018 10:35:11 Last week, in typically colourful fashion, the country musician Justin Townes Earle weighed into the controversy over a lawsuit involving Radiohead and Lana Del Ray. "If we as musicians are gonna start going to court over chord progressions," he said on Twitter, "then the f***ing blues and country world better watch out.

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