I’m not just grumbling about the ‘good old days’ or something like that … as we have spent a good amount of the summer listening to the local pop radio station or the ’80’s, 90’s and Today’ station on Slacker I have commented repeatedly how so much of the pop music sounds like it was written by committee … and that the committees seem to share many common members! Now someone has looked at three of the hottest songs of the summer – Ke$sha’s Tik Tok, Katy Perry’s California Gurls, and Miley Cyrus’ Permanent December – are basically the same song. A little pitch shift on one, a little tempo boost on another and BAM! Here you go!
Someone else already realized this, and did a spliced together remix that intermeshes TikTok and California Gurls in an amazing mashup!
Of course, like I said this isn’t limited to just today’s pop music, as the ‘Axis of Awesome’ shows us how the ‘four chord’ song structure has dominated pop and rock since the late 70’s. (the inclusion of the Beatles and Waltzing Matilda which predate the Journey opening can be easily forgiven in the context of the awesome video!).
Naturally, if we went back to the 3 chord, 12 bar blues format we could easily put together a massive video of sound-alikes!
I’m not sure if anyone actually believes these pop singers when they talk about how they ‘write songs from their heart’ or whatever … but I think this makes it clear exactly WHERE these songs come from!
Source: Buzzfeed