New age tamil cinema music directors they are called.. many of them like harris jayraj, yuvan shankar raja.. and some oldies like deva, all had or have or with all possibility will have copied song tunes in their albums.
I was devastated some years back when I realized the music score for all songs in the film Mugavari by Deva, were just a copy of all songs in the entire album of backstreet boys. I don't how he lived with it.. but wouldn't it pain everytime you hear that song you created copying something else. what you earn money for so much of copying..
just because backstreet boys aren't going to sue somebody copying their records in chennai.. doesn't mean it is happily getting away.
They give reasons these days like "i am remixing it", or "its not a copy, but inspired by that song".. and all that.
Being genuinely inspired is different.. everyone learns their tricks of trade from somebody's else's work or book or on inspiration and admiration for someone or their stuff. But just reproducing the exact same thing is not what you should happily do.
The thing is, it lets the listeners happiness go out of them as soon as they realize it was a copycat. There's this secret set of music directors in tamilnadu i think, who consider some amount of music as open source.
Copying requires skill.. i don't know, but i tend to believe that atleast in music it needs real skill to reproduce what you hear.. so if that kind of skill is there to copy backstreet boys and make its tamil music a success then why not get to tune your own.
Not that deva, or harris or yuvan produce only copies.. 80% of their work is personal creativity.. or at least I will assume so until I listen to some similar tune from an oldie english or punjabi or hindi song.
yuvan transformed the international hit "who let the dogs out" to "enga area ulla varathe" for the film pudupettai.
Today I heard a punjabi song which is exactly what yuvan has reproduced in his latest hit in the film 'chennai 6000028'.. the song that goes 'jalsa pannu da.. gilma kaatu da'.. or whatever.
The irony is.. even the bits and pieces of auxilliary musical instruments in the song at places were exactly there in the punjabi song.
Even some film directors do this.. copying scene ideas from popular films.. as far as I remember director selvaraghavan.. his first hit kadhal konden itself had almost all scenes (except songs ofcourse) lifted from a collection of many english films with the psycho concept.. particularly the climax was lifted from an english film called 'Good son'.. the original had a mom holding her son and a friend's son hanging from a cliff to both her hands, and lets go her bad son at the end.
Many startup programmers in software, do this same thing.. no not letting go sons. :o)
but Googling.. they google for a particular logic of code, a task they are asked to program for a software, and copy it from some website to use it in their development.. and we nuts have to pay them high costs for doing the google thing. Thing is, atleast if they understand what they are copying and can handle errors or convert them to fit the slight differences in our actual requirements it would be great. These guys will particularly fight and argue a lot that some implementation is not possible because they don't know about the code they copied and can't change a thing because if it screws up they have to confess to plagiarism.
I only remember how, one NRI girl in the USA (from harvard i think) was a few months back caught for plagiarism for her successful best selling book.. she was internationally humiliated by the media everywhere, because she was paid hight for that book. She later accepted to plagiarism and returned the money her publisher paid her for the book.. which was close to half-a-million US$.. imagine.. happily copying some portions of work even if somebody is ready to pay that much of money.. and happily enjoying their moment of fame until embarrassingly getting caught.
Probably this is a concept indian kids are forced to inherit by parents and teachers when they are at school.. mugging up stuff and reproducing it on examinations is what 90% of children do in schools.. i did too, except for physics, biology and english. not many teachers teach with interest of driving the knowledge and understanding of the subject to the students.
and the effects of it.. yuvan shankar raja grows up to copy an english song.
