Stealing Isn't Nice, Nice Baby

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Marc E. Warner's editorial "Lies, Lies Baby" (January 7) misses the point completely with respect to musical "borrowing" of the type exhibited by M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Tone-Loc and other performers (mostly, though not exclusively, rappers). An injustice is not done to the public when these performers sample a riff or fill--rather, the injustice is done to the original artist. Thus, Vanilla Ice's stories about his ghetto youth are almost comical, while his blatantly false claims to writing the bass line to "Ice, Ice Baby" are chilling (his line differs by one half beat from a David Bowie/Queen collaboration).

M.C. Hammer can pretape his shows, and if the audience wants to see them that's fine. But if he samples the bass line to "Superfreak" by Rick James and makes millions from another artist's work while giving James no credit whatsoever, that constitutes plagiarism. Anyone who has heard both "Jamie's Crying" by Van Halen and "Wild Thing" by Tone-Loc can easily see that Tone-Loc in the most obvious sense of the word stole the guitar riff and drum beat (Van Halen, understandably, sued and won).

To put it another way: if Vanilla Ice were a music major at Harvard, he would almost certainly be expelled for submitting the bass line to "Ice, Ice Baby" as his own work. I'm not suggesting that sampling of other artists' songs should be eliminated. But if the sample is a recognizable fragment of the other song, the sampler should seek written permission (and, if the original artist requests, pay something).

Warner rightly points out that much early rock & roll (as well, I might add, as blues and jazz) consisted of white musicians' "outright thievery" of black musicians' work. This hardly justifies the same practice in 1991. After all, when Madonna's "Justify My Love" contains the exact same drum beat as James Brown's "Funky Drummer Beat," we witness the exact same phenomenon half a century later.

To conclude: if Tone-Loc making millions from a riff and beat he took directly from a Van Halen record isn't "outright thievery," then what is? Ron Fein '94