Far East Movement — Rocketeer
(LA Dreamer Short Film)
This is a song from one of my favorite films, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain.
It’s called La Valse d’Amélie. Composed by Yann Tiersen.
Played on my keyboard because the version used in the movie has a synthetic sound to it.
Have you ever wondered where the “infectious” beats you hear in pop music come from? Most are the result of heavy audio sampling.
In some cases the sampling is blatant and direct, e.g., every song on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but in others, indirect.
Indirect i.e., the shameless theft of another artist’s “intellectual” property; a nonconsensual disregard of the wishes of the original musician.
Credit is rarely attributed, and even where it is — royalties aren’t.
So that leaves an uncredited, unpaid musical genius with two options: either sit there and listen to a distasteful reinterpretation of his work take over the airwaves, or file a lawsuit.
Either option gets him nowhere, because sampling rarely unlawful.
Sometimes the original artist is completely oblivious of what his work was taken and misconstrued as, because samples are taken from good songs. Good songs are made my good musicians; good musicians don’t listen to garbage.
This song was released in 1996.
It’s by French composer Yann Tiersen and is purely instrumental.
Entitled La Fenêtre, French for, “The Window”.
By 40 seconds in you’ll hear arpeggiations (broken chords), the very same chords reproduced in Rihanna’s Te Amo.
By 1:17 you’ll hear strings; violins, cellos, replayed on synths in Rihanna’s song as well.
I’m probably not the first person to notice the correlation between the two songs, but I very well may be, given that it’s not documented anywhere online.
Here’s Rihanna’s song, produced by StarGate so you can revel in the musical defalcation yourself:
/end rant.
I just refuse to condone plagiarism in any shape or form, is all.
L’amour; c’est la joie de vivre.