Last word

David looks so good in white, anyway rare pix of heavenly king, small heavenly king & a talented musician kekekekekkekekekekekeke, sry just being facetious. Just wanna be clear here, dis not an anti-Jay site cos I really dun haf any comment on his music, but dun mean he is no good. Like I listen to Mozart not Mendelssohn, dun mean Mendelssohn is not as great a music genius as Mozart, in fact sum critics felt even better, just diff taste. The only time I commented on him was abt 'feel good' mv abt war but dis my personal grudge against artists even great ones like U2.
The other thing is anti-David msgs on the net. A strange thing that I observed last yr was the proliferation of these msgs & sum of them bordered & even extended into slander on his character & integrity as a musician. Oso the way they r posted seemed to be by 13 yr olds but no 13 yr old haf the kinda ability to research on music so thoroughly they can post obscure pieces of western music which they then accused David of pilfering. Dun know, maybe I being paranoid but it did haf sum effect on David's reputation cos he was sumtime quite publicly accused of being a copyist. Then there was his exclusion from GMA despite Black Tangerine being one of the best chinese albums ever released. There haf nvr been an explanation & I guess we nvr noe why. But David haf made the comment dat he preferred working wif non Taiwanese musicians cos they bring more freshness to music. Can put 2 & 2 together & come up wif 5 hahahahaha but hope u noe what imma getting at. As I said the reason 4 my blog is to create sum balance, must fight fire wif fire rite heehee.
Oso on the same subject of copying vs creativity, found dis article which said it so much better than I can. Basically its abt Broadway play Frozen being accused of plagiarism. As vry long, I post the relevant bits here:
I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played Angel by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then The Joker by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love and then Muddy Waters's You Need Love, to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played Twice My Age by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine seventies pop standard Seasons in the Sun until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played Last Christmas by Wham!, followed by Barry Manilow's Can't Smile Without You to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then Joanna by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, Last Christmas was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. "That sound you hear in Nirvana," my friend said at one point, "that soft and then loud, kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies." Yet Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's lead singer and songwriter was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And Smells Like Teen Spirit, here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. That's Boston's More Than a Feeling. He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, "The first time I heard Teen Spirit I said, That guitar lick is from More Than a Feeling. But it was different, it was urgent and brilliant and new."
He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, a huge hit from the nineteen-seventies. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook, the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on Taj Mahal by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a d.j. at various downtown clubs, and at some point he'd become interested in world music. I caught it back then, he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of Taj Mahal were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from Do Ya Think I'm Sexy. It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he'd been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.
My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence, cribbing, tweaking, transforming were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn't been free to mine the blues for inspiration we wouldn't have got Whole Lotta Love and if Kurt Cobain couldn't listen to More Than a Feeling and pick out and transform the part he really liked we wouldn't have Smells Like Teen Spirit and, in the evolution of rock, Smells Like Teen Spirit was a real step forward from More Than a Feeling. A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative...
Reposted from New Yorker
But I will leave last word to David - "There are only so many notes, chords and instruments you can play. Things will always sound like someone else, but the important question is, are you trying to copy somebody, or are you doing your own thing but just happen to sound like somebody else?"