Older Than They Think/Music

""Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did use the word "grunge" (to describe our style of music) back in the early days. I don't know if anybody picked up on it. I wonder.""

- Kim Salmon of The Scientists, Long Way to the Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll


 * If you hear the song "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, you might be compelled to think the "poem" recited by the eccentric vox pop interviewee in the song was written by himself...if you've also heard "Virus" by Iron Maiden, however, you'll know this "poem" merely plagiarized the lyrics of that song. Even Godspeed themselves seemed unaware of this at the time.
 * This is especially common in music, when songs from previous eras get covered or sampled, and are known to a new generation for the first time. For example after Nirvana played "The Man Who Sold The World" on MTV, David Bowie complained about the young people who came up to him and said 'It's so cool you're covering a Nirvana song'. This is especially striking for songs which have been covered multiple times over the years. See Covered Up and Sampled Up.
 * "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" derives from the Catch Phrase of To Tell the Truth, an American gameshow, "Will the real ____ please stand up?" Most non-American fans assume Eminem coined the phrase, as do a good portion of the American fanbase as well, due to a lot of them not having been born yet when the show was popular.
 * One episode of The Monkees (probably before Eminem was even born) included a sketch in which the band are shown in silhouette, an announcer says "Will the real Davy Jones please stand up?" and he (he was evidently a bit short) replies "I am standing up!". The phrase is probably Older Than Steam.
 * I'm Spartacus!!
 * Nowadays, most people associate using the term "ice" when referring to diamond jewelry with modern rap artists. However, back in 1953, Marilyn Monroe used the term in "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend. (Around the 2:25 mark.)
 * The Nokia ringtone is a guitar piece by Francisco Tárrega, written in 1902.
 * Since Michael Jackson's death, numerous comments have been made on the YouTube copies of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It" and "Fat" music videos decrying how "disrespectful" it is to be making fun of Jackson so soon after he died, regardless of the posted dates of the official videos to Youtube (3/17/2007) the ostensible copyright (1984 and 1988 respectively), the fact that Jacko was a fan of Yankovic and allowed him to studio-record all but one (Snack All Night, of Black and White, which he is allowed to perform.) of his Jackson parodies.
 * It can be as true of bands as of songs; one example is Pulp, who started in 1978 but had most of their mainstream success in The Nineties.
 * Similar for Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of Underworld, who had hits in the 90s and are still touring but started working together in 1980 and started Underworld in 1987. Consequently they're probably Older Than They Look for many people.
 * The Rickroll was not the first time that Rick Astley's '80s hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" was used in a humorous context; it has featured in comedy routines by Joel and the bots and Peter Kay, among others.
 * Nobody knows how old the Londonderry Air (the tune for "Danny Boy") is, to the extent that Julian May decided to assign authorship to the Tanu in the Saga of the Exiles series.
 * She pushed it back a bit too far. Recent music scholars are pretty well satisfied that it was first transcribed in 1792, from a performance at the Belfast Harp Festival by harper Denis O'Hampsey (Denis Hempson), who was about 97 years old at the time. O'Hampsey's repertoire contained melodies that he asserted dated back to the 17th century, but it's unknown whether this melody was one of them. The earliest known words were published in 1814.
 * This also applies to the song best known as Greensleeves. It's quite possible that the famous lyrics were written by Henry VIII, but the tune itself -- the Dargason, as it's called -- goes back way further.
 * Another is "St. James Infirmary", which a lot of people know as "that jazz tune Van Morrison/Louis Armstrong/(fill in the blank) recorded". It's a modern adaptation of "The Unfortunate Rake", an old English folk song that dates back to at least 1531, the year St. James Infirmary was seized and shut down by Henry VIII. In the earliest transcribed version (dating from the late 1700s), the subject of the song is dying of syphilis; however, it's likely that the original was a girl dying of leprosy, since St. James Infirmary was a leper hospital for maidens and nuns.
 * "The Unfortunate Rake" served as the basis for a number of songs, including "The Streets of Laredo", "House of the Rising Sun", and "Minnie the Moocher" (verses only--Cab Calloway added the "Hi-De-Ho" chorus).
 * Let's not forget "The Anacreontick Song" or "To Anacreon in Heaven", written by one John Stafford Smith as the official song of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in 18th century London. With different lyrics adapted from a poem by Francis Scott Key, its better known as "The Star Spangled Banner", the United States national anthem.
 * Oh, and in an interesting crossover with Younger Than They Think, "The Star Spangled Banner" was not adopted as the national anthem of the United States until 1931.
 * "Froggy Went a-Courtin'", generally thought to be a 19th-century American folk song, actually dates back much further, to 16th-century Scotland.
 * Stone Temple Pilots were often derided as cheap Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains/Nirvana ripoffs, despite having actually been formed before any of them. STP was formed in 1986. Pearl Jam was formed in 1990. Nirvana and Alice in Chains were both formed in 1987.
 * Also the mainstream success of Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam tends to overshadow the many American bands we now call 'alternative' that were around in the 'eighties like Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Government Issue, etc. - Meat Puppets were comprehensively Covered Up by Nirvana's unplugged album.
 * Everyone on the SongMeanings page for Babyshambles song "There She Goes (A Little Heartache)" agreed it was written about Kate Moss, supermodel girlfriend of Pete Doherty, until someone pointed out the song was around since before the two of them even met.
 * The music now best known as the German national anthem (since 1922) originated in 1797 as an anthem in honour of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804 also Emperor Francis I of the Austria). The music was written by none other than Joseph Haydn, who incorporated it into one of his string quartets. The German anthem's lyrics come from a 1841 poem. This also serves to explain the dissonance between the lyrics (a call for unity, democracy and liberty) and the very slow, solemn music (the original lyrics for the Austro-Hungarian anthem were in praise of their emperor, basically their "God Save the King").
 * A few songs that sometimes appear on "Best of the '80s" compilations and get played at radio stations' and dance clubs' "80s nights" were recorded in the late 1970s, including the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," M's "Pop Muzik", Plastic Bertrand's "Ça Plane Pour Moi", the Cars' "Just What I Needed", and the B-52's "Rock Lobster".
 * Similarly, the song "Ain't We Got Fun" became popular during The Great Depression, but it was first published in 1921.
 * Massive Attack recorded "Teardrop" before House got hold of it. How anyone manages to miss this when the credits say "Theme song by Massive Attack" is a mystery.
 * There are a lot of people who think Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was first released in 1992 with Wayne's World (Freddie Mercury died the year before).
 * On the subject of Marilyn Manson:
 * "He has a woman's name and wears makeup. How original." -- Alice Cooper.
 * As comedian/talk-show host Dennis Miller once said, "I love Marilyn Manson's music! In fact, I've been a fan of Marilyn Manson ever since the days when he called himself Alice Cooper!"
 * It should be noted that there was another singer who adopted a similar style in the time between Cooper and Manson: Roger Painter, known by the stage name of Rozz Williams, who was one of the pioneers of the American '80s deathrock scene.
 * And one before: Screaming Lord Sutch (especially Jack the Ripper, from 1963).
 * When Manson covered "Tainted Love," eye-rolling teenagers would chastise fans for being unfamiliar with the "original" Soft Cell version, oblivious to the fact that it was originally recorded as a northern soul song by Gloria Jones in 1964.
 * It was written by Ed Cobb, formerly of the The Four Preps. One of his bandmates was future TV superproducer Glenn Larson.
 * Many fans of modern Goth music are unaware that the scene has its origins in the late 1970's, beginning with bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie & the Banshees, far before the genre's popularity surge in the mid-1990's.
 * Press any kid growing up in the 90's or 00's when they think Ska started and most will say that it was started in America in the 90's with bands like Reel Big Fish and No Doubt and that it's "punk with horns". In fact, Ska is a Jamaican music that's only slightly younger than rock n roll. It actually predates Reggae (Bob Marley and the Wailers started out as a ska band).
 * Furthermore, the fusing of ska and punk itself is older than the early 90's and dates to late 1970's England and artists like The Specials and Madness.
 * Most people (in America anyway) are very surprised the first time they learn that music videos existed before MTV started in 1981. Although when you think about it, the alternative makes no sense...if videos didn't already exist, how would MTV have had anything to show? Many people today don't even realize MTV dates back to '81 (or that it used to show music videos).
 * Similarly, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975) is often claimed to be the first music video, despite the fact that many '60s groups (such as The Beatles and The Monkees) were doing them ten years earlier. Perhaps "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first one actually shot on videotape, as opposed to film, but it wasn't the first by a long shot.
 * The distinction is that the video performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was specifically intended to stand in for the group on a TV performance spot (an appearance on Top of the Pops that they couldn't make, to be precise). The idea of having a group shoot a video to promote a single on TV spots (sending out as many copies as required), rather than have them jetting from studio to studio to appear (often miming) in person arose from this. A number of groups (Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP and The Rolling Stones also spring to mind) did indeed appear in moving pictures during the '60s and '70s. However, these were intended for release as theatrical features in cinemas, or for internal music industry promotion, or were just the group messing about. Many of the feature films had limited releases at the time, and most of the other examples remained hidden for years before the general public got to see them (David Bowie's Love You Till Tuesday was made in 1969 as a promotional featurette but not screened until 1984, for instance).
 * Actually, several of the short clips The Beatles made were used as stand-ins for television appearances they couldn't or were unwilling to make ("Rain", "Paperback Writer, "Hello Goodbye", etc.)
 * To set the record straight: The first thing that can be truly considered a Music Video is the one for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," made in 1965 as a lead-in to a documentary. It isn't a performance video - but is quite.
 * Here's another early one, from Lesley Gore.
 * Soundies (a combination jukebox and film projector) were around in the 1940's.
 * If you're looking for an Older Than Television Ur Example, music videos are about as old as sound film itself if you consider cartoons such as Silly Symphonies and Cab Calloway's appearances on Betty Boop cartoons to be music videos.
 * Michael Jackson gets a lot of hype from his estate and fans as the originator of the story-driven Concept Video, a point also argued in this article: "Jackson turned the low-budget, promotional clips record companies would make to promote a hit single into high art, a whole new genre that combined every form of 20th century mass media: the music video." But concept videos existed in the late 1970s and early '80s, while Jackson's Thriller videos didn't arrive until 1983. The Jacksons (which included Michael) did have a Concept Video in 1980's "Can You Feel It", but even then they're predated by David Bowie at least, as his Lodger concept videos date to 1979. Often forgotten is the fact that the first winners of the MTV Video Vanguard Award (in 1984) were The Beatles and Richard Lester (due to the influence of the films they made in The Sixties) and Bowie. (Jackson didn't win until 1988; the award was actually renamed after him in 1991.)
 * When They Might Be Giants came out with "Why Does The Sun Shine", most people didn't know that the song came out 40 years earlier.
 * "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" has a similar lineage.
 * "Wham, bam, thank you, Ma'am!" is nearly always a reference to David Bowie's "Suffragette City"; the phrase had been around since well before World War II.
 * Many people think that the saxophones are rather new instruments. While they became ubiquitous in The Roaring Twenties, the instrument was invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s. Of 19th-century musical works requiring a saxophone, the most commonly performed is Bizet's L'Arlésienne suite for orchestra, No. 1 (1872).
 * Of course, by the standards of classical music, the saxophone is quite new (and also unusual in that it was purposefully invented). The next-newest instrument in common use is the clarinet, which was developed in the early 1700s from an older instrument called the chalumeau. And of course it gets even older than that -- the oboe and harp can trace their lineage to ancient Greece.
 * "Avantcore", a song by Busdriver, includes a sample of the song "Turtles Have Short Legs" by Can. One of Parappa the Rapper's songs sampled it before then. People on YouTube were wondering why Busdriver would sample Parappa.
 * Can themselves pioneered a number of musical techniques that are now common today. Looped break-beats, for example. Most people would associate with Rap and Hip-hop, though Can first used the technique (in combination with live drums) on the 1971 epic "Halleluhwah".
 * Lots of people think that the Backstreet Boys and N Sync were the first mainstream pop boy bands. In fact, The Monkees were manufactured in 1966 as a knock-off of the Beatles. Menudo is a long-running Puerto Rican boy band famous for its rotating roster of singers, who are replaced as they age (Ricky Martin was once a member, well before he was famous as a solo artist). Kids Incorporated had a TV series running nine seasons on the air in the '80s, with a rotating roster (including Stacy Ferguson 20 years before she started flaunting her lovely lady lumps). Musical Youth is another early boy band, formed in 1980 and known for their "Pass the Dutchie" single; a few years later New Kids on the Block were one of the hottest acts of the late 80s.
 * The earliest synthesizer album was not Switched-On Bach -- Morton Subotnik's Silver Apples of the Moon was released a year earlier. In fact, synthesizer music is older than L.P.s themselves. The first public performance of music on a synthesizer took place in Russia in 1920.
 * According to The Other Wiki, the first synthesiser was invented in 1876(!).
 * Many people think that the song "Hurt" was originally recorded by Johnny Cash, not Nine Inch Nails. The Youtube 'debate' on this is cringe inducing.
 * A large number of Beyoncé fans are upset that Lady Gaga's robot suit in "Paparazzi" got more attention than the similar one Beyonce wore in "Sweet Dreams". However, Brigitte Helm did it first, she did it best, and she did it 80 years before either of them did. While it's understandable that these fans aren't familiar with the original silent film, they've also forgotten that similar costumes have been used in popular music videos and live performances for at least two decades, some of which came out only a couple years ago.
 * If you were to ask anyone where the line "Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end" is from, if they knew, chances are they'd say it's a line from "Closing Time" by Semisonic. But it's actually a direct quote from the Roman Philosopher Seneca the Younger, making it Older Than Feudalism.
 * After Ace Ventura was first released, some moviegoers believed the Mission: Impossible theme (which is used in the movie) originated from it.
 * Pachelbel Rant anyone?
 * How about a four-chord song?
 * One youtube video of a certain elder statesman of Rock doing a version of "All Along The Watchtower" drew several indignant comments about this "old geezer" covering Jimi Hendrix. The "geezer" in question? Bob Dylan.
 * Dave Van Ronk tells a tremendous story about "House of the Rising Sun." The song itself is a traditional -- it dates back at least a hundred years and was first recorded by Alan Lomax in 1933. Somewhere around 1960, Van Ronk did his own arrangement of the song (many others had been done previously) that originated some of the today-common melodic features of the tune. At the time, Van Ronk's friend and protege was none other than a very young Bob Dylan. When Dylan was signed by Columbia Records in 1961, he recorded (without asking) Van Ronk's arrangement. When the record came out in 1962, Van Ronk had to stop playing the song because people started accusing him of stealing it from Dylan. The two of them stayed friends, but Van Ronk would get a measure of revenge two years later -- when the song became a huge hit for The Animals, and Dylan had to stop playing it when people accused him of stealing it from Eric Burdon.
 * Speaking of Hendrix, before he unleashed his slowed down cover of "Hey Joe", Tim Rose made a version that had a similar tempo. Hendrix himself would say that this Rose's rendition was the one that inspired the Experience to record it.
 * The The Sarah Connor Chronicles rendition of "Samson and Delilah" is generally cited as being a cover of the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. Believe it or not, Springsteen did NOT create the song; gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson did, and back then it was called "If I Had My Way, I'd Burn This Whole Building Down."
 * Similarly, "In My Time of Dying" is not a Led Zeppelin original; it's a cover of Blind Willie's "Jesus Makes My Death Bed."
 * The Britpop band Space is best known for the song "Female Of The Species" (1996), with the lyric "The female of the species is more deadly than the male." Rudyard Kipling, who may have originated the sentiment, wrote The Female of the Species almost one hundred years earlier.
 * It's not even the first song to use the phrase. The Walker Brothers recorded the remarkably similar Deadlier Than The Male in 1966.
 * That scene-transition theme from SpongeBob SquarePants? Sure, I know that. "What do you do with a drunken sailor"? Never heard of it!
 * Stand and Deliver may sound like an anti-grunge song at first. Then you realize it's from the early 80's.
 * Go to YouTube and look up Twilight by Vanessa Carlton. Now look at the comments for the video. I guarantee you that you'll encounter in the first page someone who thinks it's connected to the Twilight movies, or more likely, someone complaining that there's no connection and the earlier poster is an idiot for thinking there is.
 * Pay close attention to any TV commercial that advertises a band's "brand new single". The single might be new insofar as the band hasn't performed it before, but it's surprising how often it's a cover or remix of an older song. Though not universally true, Pop music seems to be especially prone to this.
 * Some Kate Bush fans are adamant in claiming that she was the first quirky keyboard-playing female singer-songwriter, and that every female musician with a penchant for weirdness to come after ripped off of her. What they don't know is that Nico predated Kate by 12 years.
 * Some people seem to think that the refrain from Ke$ha's song "Take It Off" is original, this is not true the melody is from a song called "The Streets of Cairo" which dates back to the late 1800's. You might also know it as that Standard Snippet that's associated with snake charmers and belly-dancing, or as that schoolyard chant about a place in France where the naked ladies dance. Given the subject matter of the song and the fact that both mention "a hole in the wall", the Ke$ha song was probably alluding to the latter.
 * Play the Westminster Quarters on THE Ohio State University's campus, and the students will look towards Orton Hall. Play it in a Columbus bar, and Ohio State football fans will be ready to sing the school's alma mater, Carmen Ohio. The bell chimes actually didn't even originate at the Palace of Westiminster; they were written for the new bells at St. Mary the Great Church in Cambridge (England) in 1793.
 * Ditto for "Le Regiment de Sambre et Meuse." I was watching a WWII documentary and my friend looks over and ask straight face, “Why is the French army doing Script Ohio?” Uggg!
 * "Up On The Housetop" sounds like something that might have been written around the same time as other novelty holiday songs like "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" or "Frosty The Snowman": late 1940s-early 1950s. It was actually written before the end of the Civil War, (1864, most likely).
 * What about people who think "I'm A Believer" was written by/for "Shrek"?
 * Or even if they think they know better, believe the song was written by The Monkees.
 * Many people, when asked about the history of the Concept Album, will date it to mid-to-late 60s rock bands, possibly naming Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the first of the genre. These people are wrong. Serious historians of music generally mark Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours, released in 1955, as the first true concept album (with the thoughts of lovelorn men in the wee small hours of the morning being the concept).
 * A possible ancestor of the concept album is the song cycle, dating to the early 19th century, as That Other Wiki defines it as having "Unification achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs."
 * Don McLean didn't write "Babylon". It's generally credited to 18th-century American composer William Billings.
 * Inverted with the Lady Gaga hatedom who love to point out that some female musician (usually Madonna) 'did it first'. And then played straight as most of the haters of the Madonna loving variety seem to forget that Madonna faced very similar criticism in her early career.
 * Golden Earring, of "Radar Love" fame (1973), formed in 1961. Fleetwood Mac formed in 1967 and Rush formed in 1968 along with Yes. Journey formed in 1973.
 * The iconic title song from 1994's Pulp Fiction is an accelerated version of a much slower Greek song of the 1930's, called Misirlou, known as "Miserlou" outside Greece.
 * And, of course, there are people who know it solely as Black Eyed Peas's "Pump It"...
 * A lot of romantic music of the 19th century were re-adaptations of earlier works and medieval music. Tchaikovsky was quite fond of delivering this, most notably in his symphonies drawing themes from Russian or Ukrainian traditional music. Perhaps the best example is the final coda of his ballet "Sleeping Beauty", featured in Disney's film of the same name, which is a direct rearrangement of the national anthem of the Kingdom France, "Marche d' Henry IV" (prior to the French Revolution).
 * Most musical concepts in general fit this trope
 * Musical tablature notation is Older Than Feudalism, existing in China in the Warring States Period (475 BCE - 256 BCE), though it was a little different than the modern guitar tabs you see.
 * Western notation dates back to around the 12th century.
 * Sampling is Older Than Print in Western music. Motets are generally mashups of various sacred and secular songs dating back to the 13th century.
 * Recorded samples for musical effect in the modern sense is generally attributed to Pierre Schaffer in the late 1940s (called "Musique Concrête")
 * Composers as far back as Johann Sebastian Bach have been caught using tone rows.
 * Leave it to Cracked.com to take this one on.
 * Industrial music -- invented in the early '80s, or in 1969?
 * Radiohead's "groundbreaking" electronica-rock album Kid A sounds surprisingly similar to the album Love Without Sound by the '60s psychedelia band White Noise.
 * Daft Punk in 1970. Or, better yet, in 1958.
 * Even more impressive is that some of those sounds existed as early as 1919, as seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
 * What if Billy Corgan was around in 1964, and was a French chick named Françoise Hardy?
 * New Wave music... in 1968!
 * You could even say that Joe Meek did it nine years earlier with his 1959 album I Hear A New World.
 * And last but not least... what was the first rap record, the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, or this track by comedian Pigmeat Markham from '68?
 * Neither. It was the Jubalaires back in 1937!
 * Barney's "I Love You" song is most often misattributed to the creator of Barney, Sheryl Leach, and is often thought to have been created in the 90s with the TV show. As it turns out, the song was actually written by Lee Bernstein in 1983 for a childrens book.
 * Which is based on an even older traditional children's rhyme,This Old Man.
 * Elvis is often (mis)attributed as the writer of Love Me Tender (he didn't even write the song, he just performed it), which debuted in 1956. But in actual fact, the tune itself was lifted from an old Civil War ballet called Aura Lea, written over a hundred years prior in 1861, by George R. Poulton.
 * Most new listeners are surprised to learn that Yellow Magic Orchestra released their first album in 1978, which had the same synthpop sound that would come to dominate the 1980s.
 * Same can be said for Kraftwerk.
 * Two Dropkick Murphys songs, "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" and "Gonna Be A Blackout Tonight" are actually covers of two previously unrecorded sets of Woody Guthrie lyrics (with new music written by the band).
 * Meanwhile, "Tessie", their famed 2006 Red Sox World Series song, is actually Newer Than They Think - parts of the chorus are adapted from the original Royal Rooters chant from the turn of the 20th century, but the verses are original to the Murphys' version, and tell the story of the Rooters themselves.
 * Many younger people think that the idea of a graduation song dates back to Vitamin C in 1999. The Four Freshmen did it in 1954.
 * Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress? The Undertones' 1983 compilation album All Wrapped Up did it first.
 * And the indie musician Brittany Brazil donned a meat bra a few years before Gaga did in her video "Piece of Meat" (which is probably best known for having a cameo by The Angry Video Game Nerd).
 * Metallica's For Whom the Bell Tolls is a quote from John Donne's Meditation 17, via a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
 * John Williams's film music abounds with homages. For instance, some sections of the more "jazzy" battle music sections in "Star Wars" are straight out of Stravinsky. The Bearded One is honest and cool about these borrowings, of course, but younger fanboys can get a bit hot under the collar when this is pointed out. (Also, the famous "Jaws" cue sounds a lot like the theme of the Doomesday Machine in the original Star Trek.)
 * Listen to this piece of music. Now listen to this one. Even to this day, people are still confused as to who ripped off who's music. (If only they checked out the dates: Leviathan came out in 1989, whereas Record of Lodoss War came out in 1990.) And to even ask if the veteran composer like Jerry Goldsmith ripped off music from an obscure (at that time anyways) anime series is kinda unthinkable.
 * Norwegian Wood wasn't the first Indian classical music influenced song by a pop-group. That's probably See My Friends by The Kinks, recorded a few months earlier. The first pop song to feature a sitar was the Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren novelty record Goodness Gracious Me, from 1960.
 * The "Flying V" and "Explorer" type electric guitars. They're usually associated with late 70's/early 80's heavy metal acts and Japanese guitar companies creating modern "shredder" guitars. They were actually limited production models from Gibson released in the 1950's (although selling for less than a year due to low popularity).
 * The lyrics to "Turn! Turn! Turn!" are taken nearly word-for-word from The Bible -- ironically, from the same book where we get the saying, "There's nothing new under the sun."
 * Lots of people know Eric Prydz's hit "Call On Me". However, years earlier, a house track of the same name was made by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk) and DJ Falcon. However, they decided not to release the track, as they felt it sounded basic and uninspired. Similarly, the Freeloaders' "So Much Love To Give" is based on another track by Bangalter and Falcon (under the name Together), which also has the same name.
 * Look to most YouTube clips of Skillet's "Monster" and Three Days Grace's "Animal I Have Become" will have fans of the opposing band claiming that one ripped off the other. "Monster" was released in 2009, "Animal I Have Become" in 2006.
 * Some Gaga YouTube viewers Christina Aguilera have commented on how she is "ripping off Lady Gaga" especially on "Dirrty" - a song released in 2002, while Gaga didn't become active until 2005.
 * Many born in after 1990 mistook “All Through the Night” by |Cyndi Lauper as a sample of “Sugar Rush” from the | A Teens when they heard it in the early 2000s. This is due to the similar tune of both songs though the Lauper song came out in 1984 and the A Teens song came out in 2001.
 * When comes to Daft Punk, "Get Lucky" isn't their first successful song despite becoming a Grammy win. Ever hear of "Stronger" by Kanye West sounding a lot like "Harder, Faster, Stronger" from  Discovery, better yet the 2001 film? How about "Around the World" from 1997? Yep, all from the same group, who been in the industry since 1993. Hey, when it comes to a Grammy, better late than never and hard work pays off.
 * When one wants to research the art of “twerking”, the term has been in use since the 1990s but the first time it was show on TV was in 1982 on Top of the Pops. It was done by Haysi Fantayzee after the British duo was inspired by similar dances from West Africa.
 * However, works to encourage hip shaking goes far back even further. There are some videos featuring music groups like Peaches & Herb and ABBA in such dance. On the other hand, for the Swedish group, this was an unintentionally side-effect partly due to the  some of the costume being wore, while the American duo was more deliberately as “Shake Your Grove Thing proves. KC and the Sunshine Band had songs that try to invoke this such as, “Get Down Tonight” and “Shake, Shake, Shake”.
 * Better yet, there were other songs, like “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, released in 1960, also had this kind of encouragement though just like the others… it tamed in comparison to Miley Cyrus.
 * The concept to dance rather than fight in order to have an edge in warfare has been around before the Bible... You can thank the Polynesian natives such as the Maori for that. In fact, the idea of dance has been around is old as time itself.