Back in 2007, pop star Rihanna dropped her hit single “Shut Up And Drive“. While not considered one of her defining works, the song was launched as the second track from her 6x multi-platinum third studio album, “Good Girl Gone Bad“.
A music video for the song was subsequently released, with that video having notched up 136 million views on its official YouTube upload alone. The track itself also went on to obtain 2x multi-platinum status itself as of 2015.
While “Shut Up And Drive” itself essentially reworks the structure of New Order‘s 1983 hit “Blue Monday” into more modern pop fare. But it’s long been thought that the version of that track used was in fact Orgy‘s 1998 hit cover of that song, which propelled their debut album “Candyass” to platinum status.
Appearing recently on the ‘BREWtally Speaking Podcast‘, Orgy frontman Jay Gordon was asked about his thoughts on that and if the sample was ever cleared, as the band may have been entitled to a healthy payday from it. Gordon responded:
“No. Um, well see it’s, even though it’s our version… I mean it Good question. Especially on this, and I don’t really know where would fall into place with this whole thing. I mean, granted that, that New Order did that song first, right?
We just did a cover of their song. But there was never that heavy chorus part in there, and that’s the part Rihanna used. So I am a little bit, you know, curious as to, you know, how does that, how does that work? You know what I mean? Like, that could be a whole revision of some laws right there, as far as I’m concerned. You know what I mean?
Like, I, I would, I would love to. At least, you know, inquire about that just to find out if, like, did we just lose out on a shit ton of money? Or is it like, can we make this better for bands in the future or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, I think if you change a song enough, that you should maybe get a little bit of a…—especially if somebody samples it after that—it’s like, bro… that’s a redub of the redux. You know what I’m saying?
So I don’t know. there might be some considerations, I don’t know, that people could take for other people. I, you know, I’m just saying if, uh, if looking into it would, would, would fix some things. There’s some things like that that should be fixed, uh, on a lot of levels.
And I just can’t think of it off the top of my head. But there’s a lot of things that I know like that happened and… I mean, you should have a clue as far as like, if you’re gonna plagiarize someone’s shit and you’re gonna like straight, you know, ganks somebody’s music like that or whatever, you should at least clear it, you know what I mean?
…And one thing that I will say to, you know, your listeners or whatever is, uh, you can’t copyright an actual drumbeat. So if there’s no music and it’s a drumbeat of any kind, you cannot copyright. I don’t care if it’s Led Zeppelin or if it’s like the Beatles or anything. If you just have like dry drum tracks that you, you could put, anybody could use that…”
He later summed up his thoughts on sampling, “…But yeah, you should, you should at least inquire and get a license.” You can listen to the entire chat below:
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