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Ariana Grande sued over lyric from “back into time”

By | Published on Friday 13 December 2013

Ariana Grande

Nickelodeon star and occasional Justin Bieber support act Ariana Grande has been hit with a copyright action by UK-based Minder Music over her big song of the year (in the US at least), ‘The Way’.

Universal Music and publisher Sony/ATV are also listed as defendants on the lawsuit, which claims that Grande’s hit lifted a line from a song Minder represents, a 1972 track by American funk group The Jimmy Castor Bunch called ‘Troglodyte’. The offending line is “What we gotta do right here is go back, back into time”, which Minder reckons rips off the ‘Troglodyte’ lyric: “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time”.

And while it is just that lyric that the Grande track seems to borrow, Minder’s lawsuit says: “the [two] songs’ phrases are strikingly similar in several ways, including but not limited to: nearly identical lyrics; similar enunciation speed with a fast and consistent pace for ‘what we gotta do right’ and a slightly slower pace for ‘here is go back’; and substantially similar placement at the same places in the respective compositions”.

The legal papers go on: “The deliberate compositional decision to place the ‘Troglodyte’ phrase at the beginning of ‘The Way’, as it appears in ‘Troglodyte’ itself, not only shows a deliberate attempt to copy ‘Troglodyte’ compositionally, but to also evoke ‘Troglodyte’ to the many fans of it”.

The legal action will likely lead to a new debate over how few words a copied lyric can include to still constitute copyright infringement, though Minder will be hoping that the other similarities in the way the line is used and delivered by Grande will aid their case. Meanwhile the Hollywood Reporter notes that the lawyer representing the London firm previously prevailed in a copyright infringement case that centred on the single line “bow wow wow, yippee yo, yippea yea”.

Grande et al are yet to respond.



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