Rip-offs?

Despite the effort of many local artists to compose new songs, there will always be a few who would attempt to simplify the process by lifting the tunes of foreign or older compositions. It's one thing to have a Tagalized or Filipinized version of songs like those made for Japanese and even US compositions that had quite popular localized versions. I believe those got permissions from the composers for the Filipino versions. In many cases, it was just a matter of translation and the original theme of the songs were not lost or replaced. It's entirely another matter when artists attempt to pass off plagiarized material as originals or worse, their own.

Two songs have caught my attention the past few years and it is disappointing that the band and the interpreter associated with the songs maintain they did not plagiarize the material. Here is the more recent one that is sadly also often used as a cheer or a celebratory song in sports events including the last time the country won the SEA Games. The original song is "Chandeliers" by The Change, classified as new wave and probably obscure to many, especially those of the younger generations. In fact, perhaps only the new wave aficionados were probably able to recognize the tune, which is quite catchy as evidenced by the success of the song by local band Orange and Lemons. The original song and the band is shown in the first part of the YouTube video below.

Another song that I myself noticed to be quite familiar the first time I heard it over the radio early last decade. It was quite new and for a country that was riding the wave of J-Pop before K-Pop came to town, I was expecting that more people could have noticed the rip-off immediately. The original song "First Love" is a top hit in Japan during the late 1990's and comes from a sensational album by Hikaru Utada that broke a lot of records and even grossed enough money that could probably could keep a small country afloat. The local artist's song is less obvious as a rip-off because some people even tried to defend it as a Tagalized version when they were running out of arguments. Toni Gonzaga, who delivered the interpretation seemed innocent enough in interviews where she maintained she was not aware of the original. The original is featured in another YouTube video below showing the original music video.

It is quite obvious and one cannot deny that the tunes were ripped off and the local artists continuing denial of such only worsens their cases in as much as my respect for them are concerned. Credit should be to the originals and not taken by a few whose objectives were clearly to make a buck here and there but at the expense of plagiarized material. For the latter song by Utada Hikaru, I was really disappointed because I am a fan of the artist and have her CDs from when I was studying in Japan. But I am disturbed by one major network's continuing use of the first song as an anthem of sorts for sports and other events that they sponsor or cover. I believe that a more appropriate theme for such purposes would be an original by Bamboo - "Noypi."