I remember way back in 1997 when Puffy dropped, I'll be missing you, my first reaction was,

wow, he sampled the police.

That same year, Will Smith dropped men in black to go along with his movie, and I didn't

even know at the time that he basically lifted an entire song called Forget Me Nots by Patrice

Russian.

But now, 25 years later, I hear this kind of thing happening all the dang time.

Someone did the Rick Roll song of all the songs, last summer there were two songs that

were just like Elton John Classics, won by Britney Spears, won by Duolipa.

That music got a nostalgia, industrial, complex, and we're getting into it on today's

point.

A couple months back, we talked to Jason Green from Pitchfork about how Ed Sheeran got sued

for making a song, but some would say sounded way too much like another song.

Ed Sheeran won the lawsuit, but Jason recently wrote about a similar, but different phenomenon

in popular music when songs sound exactly like other songs by design.

And this is because some very business savvy people have spotted that the value of well-known

intellectual property in pop music has been skyrocketing, and they have bought up with

their significant holdings and power, a huge portion of most of what normal Western,

whatever American listeners consider to be the most beloved pop music and pop songs of

the past 50 to 100 years.

Jason calls this music's industrial nostalgia complex.

I asked him how this is different from what Puffy or Will Smith were doing in the 90s.

What's different?

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