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Vanilla Ice Analysis

Decent Essays

Have you ever heard about how an artist gets his work copied by another artist? It could either be a popular artist who has their work plagiarized by another lesser-known artist.
In this essay, you will read about an artist in the name of Robert Matthew Van Winkle, known professionally as Vanilla Ice who became famous for a while, not because of his talent, but because of the copyright of someone else baseline. He thought changing the rhythm of David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” baseline and not giving him credit would avoid him from any questions. In this essay I will provide you my opinion of Vanilla Ice’s song “Ice, Ice, Baby”as an example of plagiarism, with evidence provided of what he did wrong, and what he could have caused.

In 1990 Vanilla Ice came out with a new song called, "To The Extreme", that included the number one hit "Ice, Ice, Baby.” This song had the same baseline as the song"Under Pressure" by David Bowie without giving the band any credit for it. The band was really upset when they heard almost the same identical guitar rift in Vanilla Ice's top hit song "Ice, Ice, Baby”. This cause David Bowie and lead singer Freddie Mercury, to sue Vanilla Ice for copyrighting their beat. Now the question that everyone asks and has a different opinion on is Does Vanilla Ice's song “Ice, Ice, Baby” is an example of plagiarism? Some people said that since the words were not the same, then it wasn't plagiarism. It was just an artist sampling another artist's music, and this happens all the time. To me, I believe and for sure that this is an example of plagiarism. Vanilla Ice can't go change someone else's music beats and call it his original song, without giving the band any credit. I believe In the end that copying is wrong, especially when profit is being made off of another person’s hard work.

I can imagine people copying someone else's homework, but I really can’t imagine plagiarism in a career. I genuinely can’t believe it until now that there are people like Vanilla Ice in this world that can copyright songs baseline, and let the people in this world hear it as it is his own song. What Vanilla Ice did wrong is that he tricked billions of people into believing that it was his own work, where he also

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