And Finally Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #31: Jay-Z v Newport

By | Published on Sunday 15 August 2010

The music industry often gets accused of reacting to things slowly. And it did itself no favours in that regard this week. Okay, like last week’s, the title of this beef is a tad misleading. Jay-Z has not waged war on a small city in Wales. Instead, a publishing company which co-owns the song have forced a spoof of the rapper’s track with Alicia Keys, ‘New York State Of Mind’, offline.

Called ‘Newport State Of Mind’ – I’m sure you’ve seen it – the spoof has been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, managing to reach over two million views on YouTube in its first two weeks on the video sharing site. Basically, pretty much everyone who was going to watch it has already been on YouTube and done so. Hence my suggestion that EMI Music Publishing’s copyright claim against it this week is a little late.

Parodies of popular songs made without the original songwriter’s permission are a contentious issue, especially when their distribution isn’t covered by a so called ‘blanket licence’, as with anything posted on the internet. In the US, parodies are protected by so-called fair use provisions, though it’s a bit of a grey area as to how far a parody is allowed to go.

A recent dispute between US politician Chuck DeVore and Don Henley over two parodies of the Eagles man’s songs posted on the political man’s website has arguably reduced the extent of the ‘parody provision’ somewhat, whereas an earlier ruling over Family Guy’s spoofing of a Disney song was seen by many to widen that bit of fair use.

Either way, there is no parody provision in the UK anyway, and even in the US YouTube has shown to be cautious in this domain when asked to take spoof content down by the content owners who have been spoofed. So there you go. I hope you’re all up to speed with all the legal ins and outs now. I explained it very clearly, did I not?

Anyway, back to this particular video. ‘Newport State Of Mind’ may have been taken down, but the song has already had a big impact both online and offline. Officials in Newport were so impressed that they asked the two people behind it, Alex Warren and Terema Wainwright, to perform the song at the reopening of the Newport Transporter Bridge. It’s possible said officials hadn’t actually listened to the lyrics of the song, though. It doesn’t paint the city in an entirely good light.

In fact, those lyrics have sparked an entirely separate beef. Locals Goldie Lookin Chain recorded their own parody of the parody, accusing Warren and Wainwright of not being from Newport and having no idea what it’s really like there. It’s possible GLC are just annoyed they didn’t think of it first. But, hey, the important thing is that you can still see their video on YouTube, so let’s all go and do that now: youtu.be/Dx8CZyFM4b4

And if you really want to watch the offending video, search YouTube hard enough and you’ll find newer postings of it on there somewhere. Just don’t tell those pesky EMI bigwigs or their humourless lawyers, will you?

This Beef Of The Week comes from this edition of the CMU Weekly. Subscribe to the CMU Weekly here.



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