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But I'm great at karaoke!

By "Milbarge" and "Fitz-Hume"

E. McPan had a post the other day about coming up with brilliant ideas, only to discover that someone beat you to the punch. Mine aren't as interesting or creative as hers, but this sort of thing happens to me all the time, too. Recently, for example, I was shuffling through my iPod, and landed on Dwight Yoakam's version of Johnny Cash's "Understand Your Man." Listening to it, I got to thinking, This sounds a whole lot like Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." Here, compare for yourself:

Naturally, I decided to write about this discovery. Now, I wasn't planning on any kind of startling expose' about how Johnny Cash is a big plagiarist or anything. I was just going to point it out and maybe riff on musical influences, and perhaps find a way to work in one of my favorite music industry anecdotes, about how John Fogerty got sued for plagiarizing himself.

At some point, I decided to do a little investigating, since I never really thought my idea was all that original. In fact, I assumed that someone, somewhere must have commented on the great similarity between the songs. As it turned out, a few seconds of googling turned up hundreds of mentions of the similarity, ranging from those aligned with my thoughts, i.e., that the two artists collaborated and influenced each other, and the overlap between "Understand Your Man" and "Don't Think Twice" is totally understandable, to the bizarre rants that Dylan stole from Cash even though Dylan's song appeared first (and was itself probably a take-off of an older song).

Anyway, I didn't think I was breaking any major new ground here, but it was kind of disappointing to realize that the connection I had just hit upon was glaringly obvious to darn near everyone who ever heard the tunes. Maybe there's just something about me and music, though: It was only a few weeks ago that I discovered that Katy Perry's mega-hit "I Kissed a Girl" was not a cover of Jill Sobule's 1995 song of the same name.

I think I'll go crank my Victrola now.

Full post as published by Begging the Question on March 12, 2009 (boomark / email).