Blog 5

FAIR USE IN MUSIC

The song that I chose for this blog is Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." This song title is very common and I personally don't think that if anyone has these words in their song, they're not stealing; unless you're Kanye West, in which case, you are stealing. In the music video on whosampled.com, Kanye depicts Daft Punk, themselves, and repeating their song title, "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Kanye's song, "Stronger," is in no way, shape or form an innovative creation. With the use of Daft Punk's title, I'm assuming there was some sort of collaboration between Kanye and Daft Punk. I mean come on, I would have tweaked the sample just a little bit. Kanye just overlapped the sample, slowed it down and provided rap lyrics. I could have made a song called "Harder," which talks about how hard work pays off in the long run. Kanye decided to just use the word, "Stronger" (how original). Is it a coincidence? I think not. The ego of Kanye is really big, but the creativity he has is small. I have seen Kanye and Daft Punk perform together before, so I'm hoping that he got permission from them. In any case, it would be considered stealing otherwise. Being that Kanye didn't take the sample from Daft Punk and create something brand new with it, I personally don't believe it's under fair use. However, Kanye most likely got permission.

Despite Kanye's poor creativity skills, there is another song that intrigues me. This song is the Blsck Eyed Peas', "Boom Boom Pow." There's a line in this song where one of the members says, "harder, better, faster, stronger," however, the line after that was, "texting ladies extra longer." After hearing this, I don't think that there was anything flawed by the black-eyed peas. The member of the group was simply rhyming with their subsequent lyric. In this specific case, I don't think the use of "harder, better, faster, stronger" is creative nor original. It's not like the words, "harder, better, faster and stronger" are copyrighted. There are songs that mention those words and I have heard about a big lawsuit coming from Daft Punk at all. Because of this, I think it's covered under fair use. I'm not sure if the black eyed peas had to credit Daft Punk, but I personally don't think that they have to because they're  just using the words to rhyme with. I believe anyone should be able to use that sample in their song; it's just four simple words. It's like like they took the entire melody of the song and put it on replay while they start rapping over it...(*cough* Kanye *cough*)