Joe Satriani accuses Coldplay of plagiarizing "Viva La Vida"

What an excellent example of how nobody in pop music can write a good melody anymore (not since the 80s and a little bit into the 90s did mainstreamers of great success write good melodies). Essentially, the digital/computer age at the hands of record company execs steeped in capitalist dogma has ruined pop music. Faster, faster they drive the market until the next pop hit is no more diverse or interesting than a hot dog bun. It's so fast and easy to record on computers and compress the crap out of everything, so it reduces artistic dialogue to a limpid conformation to marketing standards driven by the profit-machine. Gone are the days of Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson - at least for now. Twitter me when our maturity (i.e. sense of artistic integrity) kicks in. As with all technology, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

This is really ridiculous. I don't really see Chris Martin as the type who would listen to Joe Satriani, nor do any members of the group. People who listen to Joe Satriani are those stupid kids who suck at guitar yet claim they can play a song like that. Really, without an infinite number of pitches and notes, isn't it inevitable that someone's going to accidentally use the same kind of progression?

All fair points, Dave, and I should know; I used to be one of those stupid kids that sucked at guitar and listened to Satriani. But watch this and I think you'll agree it's a little more than just an incidental chord progression:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofFw9DKu_I

Sorry, I'm afraid that I don't see what the big deal here is. If you've ever spent time trying to write songs, you'll find that most chord progressions that don't sound atonal have been used 100 times or more, and that some melodies naturally spring out of certain progressions.

Not that I'm a very original songwriter [trust me, I'm not], but I've written a few songs in my day that ended up sounding like elements from other popular songs, even though I'd never heard those songs when I wrote mine. I wrote a song in college that had the exact same melody to a Blink 182 song a few months before they came out with their first album. I hit myself in the head the first time I heard it on the radio. Trust me, they weren't copying me, nor I them.

A few years later I wrote another song, and lo and behold a month later I heard 'The Scientist' by Coldplay. Exact. Same. Song. Different lyrics. Again, I didn't copy them, and they certainly didn't copy me.

My point is, when people try to make anthemic music that resonates with a wide variety of people, they tread in waters that are well traveled already. It's inevitable that similar melodies would spring from the same chord progression. Does it make Coldplay plagarists? Hardly. Does it make me some sort of musical prophet of pop? Not at all. We're all just unoriginal guys writing unoriginal songs.

Don't need contact lenses to see Coldplay ripped this song off.