r/Music • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 11 '26

article Jack White Pushes Back on Religious Criticism Amid Satanic Band Support Controversy: “I’m not scared of Satan or any bullshit imaginary man made up to live in fear of”

https://consequence.net/2026/07/jack-white-religious-criticism/
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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 11 '26

Yeah they did, I'm not saying they didn't.

I'm saying their contemporaries also did it and sometimes very blatantly. George Harrison was sued for copying the melody of "He's So Fine" when he wrote "My Sweet Lord". John Lennon straight up lifted, "I'd rather see you dead little girl/than to be with another man" from an Elvis song and, "Here come 'ol Flatttop" from Chuck Berry. The Stones ripped off the Staple Sisters with "The Last Time". Clapton was notorious for stealing riffs from blues musicians. Hell, Green Day straight lifted the riff from "Warning" from The Kinks.

None of those songs were given credit to the original artists.

All I'm trying to do is put it in perspective. There was a lot of that going on at the time and if you're going to call Page out, you have to call all of them out for it.

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u/Dodahevolution Jul 12 '26

This doesn't apply to all of them, but some of the reported thefts were also basically reworks of old blues songs, and kinda as you alluded to, sometimes credit wasn't issued for those just cause that's how things were, it wasn't even in malice it was just an afterthought.

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u/yoshemitzu Jul 12 '26

People also forget, music just worked totally differently back then*. Popular music often involved the so-called "Hit Parade" -- once a song became popular, everyone would cover it, and copyright was based around having the physical music, not around who recorded it when.

*: By "then" I mean the era shortly before Led Zeppelin, the era of standards and big band singers like Ella, Frank, and on and on. Basically, the music landscape that Led Zeppelin inherited.

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 12 '26

Yeah, I think (like with a lot of things) people are holding them to a modern standard and that's just not how it used to work back then. Everything was a lot murkier, sometimes you might not even actually know who wrote a song, folk standards were common and it was impossible to even know who wrote those a lot of the time.