"Andy Kaufman" Bunny Ranch PLUS Lana Del Radiohead Hollies "Get Free Creep Air" AND Living 9/11 big apple Pandemic: Thai fashionmonger Dresses LALISA Emergence By Poeciliid Fish Jong-Fast Creative person (in keeping with 1964 oil, charcoal, plumbago)
“Lana Del Radiohead”, the internet scoffed recently, after Lana Del Rey’s song Get Free was found to have more than a passing similarity to Radiohead’s breakthrough hit Creep. It was all there: the moody chord changes, the even moodier, downward-turning melody. Radiohead noticed, and requested that they be added to the song’s credits – a dispute that, according to Del Rey, has been brought to an end.
Creep had, of course, been subject to its own plagiarism dispute in the 1990s, with the songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood added to the credits thanks to a similarity with the hit song they wrote for the Hollies, The Air That I Breathe.
So how similar are Get Free and Creep, and did Radiohead have a legitimate complaint? The Guardian spoke to a professional composer, Ed Newton-Rex, to analyse the pair of songs.
"Nevada's the last of the live and let live states," says Dennis Hof, the self-described "Brothel King" and owner and proprieter of Nevada's Moonlite Bunny Ranch, made famous as the setting for the HBO documentary series, Cathouse (2005-2008). "I don't care if you smoke weed. Don't bother me because I have a safe full of guns and I'm in the sex business."
Reason TV's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Hof in his brothel for a wide-ranging interview about sex, prostitution, black markets, politics, and more.
Hof acquired the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in 1992 and systematically pushed it into the public eye through a blend of showmanship, attention-seeking, and media outreach he calls the "PT Barnum/Andy Kaufman" school of marketing and publicity.
In fact, he claims that Andy Kaufman gave him the initial idea to buy the Bunny Ranch when they partied there together in the late '70s.
"In about '78, Kaufman said, 'Dennis, let's buy this place and make it our den,'"says Hof (1:30).
Since then, Hof has gone on to acquire six more brothels, giving him a huge share of a national market that only includes 17 total brothels. This is because Nevada is the only state in the U.S. that has legalized prostitution, and only in counties with populations of less than 400,000. This, of course, rules out Clark County, where Las Vegas is located.
"It's illegal in Las Vegas, and look what you've got," says Hof. "You've got 2,000 girls a month being arrested. Lots of guys being arrested, lives being ruined... Las Vegas is the sexual cesspool of America." (24:20)
He also points to the remarkably high rate of HIV infection among prostitutes in Las Vegas. By contrast, he says, under the state's regime of mandatory STD testing, there has never been a documented case of HIV among licensed workers in Nevada's brothels.
Watch the whole interview above to hear Hof talk more about what it's like to run some of the country's only legal brothels, as well as stories about his run-ins with Sen. Harry Reid (7:10), his advice for Anthony Weiner and Elliot Spitzer (17:45), and why he started the group "Pimpin' for [Ron] Paul" (18:17).
The chords heard in Creep are rare in pop music
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creative person, in keeping with What, 1964, oil, charcoal, and plumbago on canvas with objects (six panels), eighty eight× 191 3/4 in. (223.5 × 487 cm) overall.
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The chords heard in Creep are rare in pop music
He starts his analysis by pointing out that the two songs use the same sequence of chords to accompany the melody throughout the track.
While this is not unusual in the industry – some chord progressions appear in hundreds of songs – the chords heard in Creep and Get Free are relatively rare in pop music. According to online database Hooktheory, only four out of 17,000 popular hits of the last decades have used this specific sequence.
Furthermore, the songs in question employ those four chords in exactly the same fashion, repeating them throughout verse and chorus with no differences in rhythm whatsoever.
The melodies bear an uncanny resemblance
Many listeners have also claimed that the parallels between the two songs are not limited to the chords. Newton-Rex agrees, noting “the melody is where the similarities become really apparent”.
When musicologists assess a plagiarism claim, they will often split the melody of each song into a number of shorter phrases to compare them one by one.
In the case of Get Free, many of the phrases found in the verse and chorus use exactly the same notes as their counterparts in Creep, often in the same order. In other places, the exact set of notes or their order might differ, but the general outline or “contour” of both melodies remains the same.
“When you analyse [the phrases] one by one, you find a pretty astonishing degree of similarity,” Newton-Rex says.
Creep
Radiohead
Get Free
Lana Del Rey
transposed to G
However strong they may be, the parallels between the two songs don’t necessarily imply that Del Rey intentionally copied Radiohead’s work. Del Rey herself said: “I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep.” Newton-Rex imagines the similarities in Get Free are unintentional, despite calling the two pieces “the most obviously similar pair of songs I’ve heard”.
It’s not the first case of its kind
The “Lana Del Radiohead” case is far from isolated. In 2017, Ed Sheeran settled a claim over his hit Photograph after similarities to the Matt Cardle song Amazing were found, and he quietly added the songwriters of TLC’s No Scrubs to the credits of his hit Shape of You. Two years earlier, the same lawyer representing the songwriters of Amazing had won a $7.4m (£5.1m) settlement against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for the estate of the late soul singer Marvin Gaye – last week the US court of appeal refused a new trial in the case.
So if you’re a songwriter, it might be worth double-checking your melodies if you want to avoid a lengthy, costly legal battle – even if it’s just your subconscious leading you astray.