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"Walken" a soundalike to some Spoon tune?


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Yeah, that's totally stupid. So both songs have piano. That doesn't mean they're similar otherwise.

 

I think it's unfair to the Spoon song, which I love. I don't much care for "Walken."

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Several of the "sound-a-likes" on RS's list are pretty out there, but the Spoon/Wilco thing is the craziest. Both feature piano and similar rhythms, I guess, but the overall tone of the two songs are drastically different. I guess they share some similarities if you only consider the breakdown part of "Walken" towards the end, but even then the similarities seem slight at best -- certainly not enough to warrant being on this list (like say Pearl Jam's "Taken to Fly" and Zep's "Going to California.") I've always thought that "Sister Jack" from "Gimme Fiction" sounds like it could have been on "Summerteeth," though (but I'm not implying it's a sound-a-like to anything of Wilco's).

 

Speaking of Spoon, the new album is fantastic and has now displaced "Sky Blue Sky" as my favorite release of the year so far. The more I think about it, I'm amazed at the consistency of their output. From "A Series of Sneaks" to "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga," every album has been brilliant. Hell, even "Telephono" was pretty darn good.

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That list is a little weird. The two examples that bother me are the Nirvana/Boston one and the Sublime/Beatles one.

 

It's (I though) common knowledge that Cobain modeled his song after Boston's

 

And Bradley Nowell from Sublime used the melody line from Lady Madonna to write What I Got, among other things. Bradley borrowed a lot of stuff.

 

I thought Rolling Stone would know that...

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That list is a little weird. The two examples that bother me are the Nirvana/Boston one and the Sublime/Beatles one.

 

It's (I though) common knowledge that Cobain modeled his song after Boston's

 

And Bradley Nowell from Sublime used the melody line from Lady Madonna to write What I Got, among other things. Bradley borrowed a lot of stuff.

 

I thought Rolling Stone would know that...

 

The Nirvana/Boston one bothered me as well . . . not because of any idea out there that Cobain intentionally modeled "Teen Spirit" on more than a feeling (though, whether it's true or false, I've heard that somewhere, too), but because the only thing similar is the rhythm and strum pattern (which differs on the fourth chord anyway) of the four chord pattern -- the chord progression itself is different and gives the two songs entirely different feels. As with so many songs on the list, Rolling Stone found one common element between two songs and then decided that this made them almost the same. If that makes two songs the same, then the list could go on endlessly -- just think of every song with a I-IV-V chord progression or with a 12 bar blues pattern. I don't know why I'm acting so surprised at Rolling Stone, though -- it's not exactly the publication it once was.

 

Oh, welcome to Via Chicago, by the way -- I noticed that was your first post.

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I thought Rolling Stone would know that...

 

Umm. I'm on a global quest to expose exactly what music critics know.

 

FUCK ALL. :shifty

 

 

I swear to God, my son can be whatever he wants to be in life; but if he becomes a music critic, I might have to disown him. Perish the thought.

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