Music Battle Round Two: Guns N’ Roses vs. Ulrich Schnauss

Music industry lawyers never sleep these days. Though it seems like yesterday that Coldplay and Joe Satriani were fighting over similar chord progressions, the endless music copyright battle has moved onto legendary 80’s rocker/prick Axl Rose and German ambient techno artist Ulrich Schnauss. Though I could go on ranting for ages about how pointless the Satriani/Coldplay case was, this fight for musical ground appears to be much more legitimate. The story goes a-like so:

• Artists who collaborated on the GNR album Chinese Democracy, Brian “Buckethead” Carroll, Tommy Stinson, former Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, and Axl Rose himself are being sued for using two of Shnauss’s songs in a strange ambient intro to a song off of Democracy titled “Riad N’ the Bedouins.”

• The labels Independiente and Domino (American) claim that the band used the songs “Wherever You Are” and “A Strangely Isolated Place” illegally, both of which can be found below, along with the GNR song.

• In true GNR fashion, the band is completely denying everything. Their manager, Irving Azoff, says the band “vigorously contests these claims and intends to respond accordingly,” and continues to say they “believed when the record came out, and still believes, that there are no unauthorized samples on the track. The snippets of ‘ambient noise’ in question were provided by a member of the album’s production team who has assured us that these few seconds of sound were obtained legitimately. Artists these days can’t read the minds of those they collaborate with and therefore are unfortunately vulnerable to claims like this one. While the band resents the implication that they would ever use another artist’s work improperly and are assessing possible counterclaims, they are confident this situation will be satisfactorily resolved.”

In contrast to the Coldplay/Satriani case, there actually seems to be a legitimate party foul committed on GNR’s part here, in my opinion. When actually listening to the beginning of all three songs, the stealing seems almost laughably obvious. Wanna decide for yourself? Check em out down below!

Wherever You Are A Strangely Isolated Places

Riad N’ The Bedouins

Veedeo: The Twilight Death Cab Song, Modest Mouse

“Meet Me At the Equinox” by Death Cab for Cutie

Well well well.

It seems you won’t have to spend an arm and a leg to sit in a theater packed with tweeny-boppers just to hear the ear-gasmic soundtrack to New Moon.

At least not for the Death Cab For Cuite one. The video for Death Cab’s contribution was released on MTV last night for all the world to see and hear.

It’s a bit of a strange mixture indeed, at least as far as videography goes, with shots of the band simply playing the song in a living room (and then not half-way through) and shots from the movie woven together. The song is fairly simple as far as Death Cab standards go, but is very catchy and fun to listen to nonetheless.

It ever so slightly worries me, personally, how fitting the lyrics are to the movie however; I may just lose faith in humanity if the band wrote “Equinox” specifically and solely for New Moon. Artists like St. Vincent and Bon Iver who also appear on the tracklisting have specifically said that their contributions were written before the movie’s production however, so maybe I can give the human race another chance.

Anyways, here’s video number 1:

Death Cab For Cutie |MTV Music

“Whale Song” by Modest Mouse

Another music video, another disturbingly graphic blood-and-guts scene from Modest Mouse.
Well, alright, its really only at the end of this one, but it still seems to be a recurring theme for the Seattle-based band: The other video from their recently released EP, No One’s First and You’re Next, titled “King Rat” (which, interestingly, was directed by Heath Ledger almost immediately before he kicked the bucket) had a pretty brutal ending to it as well.

This one has a much trippier vibe to it, however. The beginning of the video features singer Isaac Brock attaching a weird machine thing, sort of like an elaborate compass, to his arm and just drawing a bunch of circles on a sheet of paper. However, from there, the video goes, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. It’s a very interesting creation from director Nando Costa, and you can check it out here. (Sorry I couldn’t get the actual video up on here, the production team is being really stiff about sharing it with anyone except visitors of Vimeo…hope you like it though)



Thanks for checking in everyone!
And make sure you check in tomorrow for the Showtime! post from the Manchester Orchestra & Brand New show :)

Y!L!N!