The queen of summer music is now under fire. As I lied naked in my bed today mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, I encountered this article, which essentially told me about how Olivia Rodrigo’s banger “good 4 u” is a rip off of “Misery Business” by Paramore, and I’ll admit it, the two songs are pretty similar. Rodrigo has had to pay a bunch of money to Paramore as well as Taylor Swift and others because of their “song writing credits” on some of her songs. Overall, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me, but there are many people out there who are seriously offended.
I’ve read and watched videos about other songs that ripped off music. “Stay With Me” by Sam Smith is pretty much a clone of “I Won’t Back Down” by the late-great Tom Petty, “Blurred Lines,” “Viva La Vida,” and “Girlfriend” are all songs that have been accused of plagiarism, and there’s varying degrees of actual theft in each. You shouldn’t steal music, that seems pretty obvious, but I mean c’mon. If you look hard enough at any song, I’m sure you can find one that sounds similar. And, yeah, I know Olivia Rodrigo gave people writing credits, but do we really think she sat down to write “good 4 u” and turned on “Misery Business” to try and see how close she could get without straight up copying it? No. She sat down and wrote us a song that we would all end up playing at full blast in our cars with the windows down every chance we got for an entire summer. She is a fucking queen, and I won’t have her name slandered. Adam Levine defended her, and so should you.
A quick side note to Adam Levine: you should work with Olivia Rodrigo and give her a feature on a Maroon 5 song. It’s what the people want.
