Creative Bankruptcy

Nobody wants to admit it, but some of the world's biggest artists are completely creatively spent and they're fully aware of their predicament. How do they rectify this? By ripping off underground and foreign artists hook, line, sinker and copy of Angling Times.

Until recently, i hadn't been aware of the Major Lazer tech-dancehall track "Pon de Floor", but i guarantee that 95% plus of the people who hear it would say it was Beyonce's 2011 hit "Run The World (Girls)". Producers Switch and Diplo collaborated with Vybz Kartel on the track in 2009 and it was a high profile hit on the dancehall scene, although attracted little in the way of mainstream attention.

Now i'm fully aware that sampling is an accepted part of the modern music industry and some really inventive cover-remix hybrid tracks have been produced over the past decade, but Beyonce's wholesale theft of the Major Lazer track is shameful, especially as she couldn't add anything aside from her asinine, rhythmless warbling vocal. Total effort made? A couple of hours at most. The only saving grace is that Beyonce's version was re-produced by Switch and Diplo.

But this new age of plagiarism isn't just an American phenomenon. Ben "Plan B" Drew recently started airing "Ill Manors", the first musical offering from his forthcoming film of the same name. To say it is not an original composition would be an understatement - the music on the track is lifted wholesale from Peter Fox's 2008 German language hit "Alles Neu" (Everything is New). Fox first found mainstream success as part of dancehall act Seeed, then moving on to record his own massively successful solo album "Stadtaffe" (City Ape).

Drew has added little to the original instrumental save for some crappy broken dubstep beats. The lyrics are far more inventive than Beyonce managed, harking back to Drew's pre-Stickland Banks rap album "Who Needs Actions When You Got Words", but to anybody who knows Peter Fox's broodier and far more menacing original, the words don't matter because its a pale immitation of a great original.

It comes as a sad day when the likes of Nicki Minaj and her ADHD lyric style over some weak sampling of early 90s european hardcore dance isn't as repugnant as it should be. Her latest single "Starships" is just one long collection of disjointed sounds and a complete mess. It'll probably be a huge success.