Last week, Plies sued Megan Thee, GloRilla, Cardi, and Soulja Boy for copyright infringement. The complaint is here, if you’d like to read it. Plies’s twisty claim seems to be that Soulja Boy’s “Pretty Boy Swag” (2010) infringes on Plies’s “Me & My Goons” (2008), and then Megan Thee Stallion, GloRilla, and Cardi B’s “Wanna Be” (2024) contains an authorized sample of “Pretty Boy Swag.” So, Plies sued everybody.
But Megan and Company have little to fear here.
I wasn’t going to spend much time on this. After scanning the complaint, listening, and finding the logic flawed, I expected to be done. But there’s possibly a teensy bit of daylight at the end. So, what the heck?
Here are all three tracks.
So, we all hear that.
But where, if anywhere, is the wrongdoing? I’m inclined to assume Plies never sued Soulja Boy way back when but now has a new reason and a second crack at it. I’m not a lawyer, I’m a musicologist. I’m very familiar with copyright law, but my expertise is musical, not legal. That said, I suspect what happened here is that while the statute of limitations on Plies suing over “Pretty Boy Swag” had run out, a new clock starts up if “Pretty Boy Swag” was licensed for use in a new work, like “Wanna Be.”
As I read it, that was the logic behind this complaint. Here’s the broad claim…
From the complaint:
“The Defendants unlawfully sampled, interpolated, replayed, and/or
reproduced distinctive and protected elements underlying the Copyrighted Material,
including its melody, rhythm, and/or lyrics.”
That’s a lot of defendants and “and/or” claims. We’ll have to narrow this down a little.
Musically, this is reminiscent of Joyful Noise and Dark Horse.
Like Dark Horse, all of these songs have a mostly static, repeating, uniform melody emphasizing one pitch. When the melody moves, it moves scale-wise to the neighboring scale tones. When a musicologist says “static, repeating, and scale-wise,” it generally correlates to an element being neither very distinctive nor very protectable.
On the other hand, in a similar situation, Katy Perry needed to appeal the very wrong initial jury decision. I sympathized with the jury; the songs sounded a lot alike. I also think they were charmed by what I think was a likable plaintiff and musicologist. I’d have a beer with that bunch anytime, but they were quite wrong on the musicology.
This case is more complex than Dark Horse, as presented at least. Plies is suing along a chain of copyright offenses. “You copied me and then licensed your product to them.”
The complaint says “sampled, interpolated, replayed and/or reproduced,” but those all have meanings that matter. In short, sampling involves the recording itself, whereas interpolation is akin to a musical quote, and replayed applies best as producing a replica that mimics a sample but doesn’t require licensing the recording. If that’s confusing, Musicologize has an article that explains it more thoroughly.
What has actually happened here?
Well, here’s what didn’t happen. “Pretty Boy Swag” didn’t infringe the copyright to the composition of “Me & My Goons.” They sound similar, but not “significantly” or “substantially” so in the context of an infringement case. Think about it this way:
Scales go “Do re mi fa sol la ti do,” right? Right. Now, since I don’t feel like typing out mi’s and fa’s, please imagine for me that “do” is 1, “re” is 2, “mi” is 3, and so forth. These two songs both go “mi mi mi mi” pretty much all the way home, which is fairly damning by itself; it’s those musicologist’s terms: static, repeating, etc., but moreover, they’re also different.
Here is how both songs go if I use numbers to represent the mi’s and fa’s and sol’s.
Pretty Boy Swag 33333334 33333334 33333334 33335554
Me & My Goons 33333333 33333444 33333333 33333444
(Theory majors, don’t come at me with minor solfege; this gets the point across, and that’s paramount.)
“Me & My Goons” is a two-measure phrase that repeats. “Pretty Boy Swag” is a longer four-measure phrase, and not a single measure is the same as Goons.
For claimants, the less music you’re talking about, in general, the more distinctive and identical it had better be. That’s just sensible. Here, the music we’re talking about is brief, simple, common, and not even all that much the same, a very poor basis for an infringement claim on the composition.
If it were sampled, that would be quite different. Whether you sample an inch or a mile, you need a license. But I also believe that this wasn’t sampled, and enough that I can’t be bothered to look.
Net net, the premise that Megan, GloRilla, Cardi B., and “Wanna Be’s” infringement rode in on what I’m saying was not a “Soulja Boy” infringement, therefore, doesn’t hold up.
But we’re not quite done. As if that were not enough twists, in the wake of this lawsuit, Lil Wil reminded everybody that “Pretty Boy Swag” sounds a lot like “My Dougie” (2006).
And the chain of arguable custody continues. “My Dougie’s” groove is pretty much the same as an earlier record that I think Nitti Beatz was involved with called “Don’t Blow My High.”
And now, let’s get back to the headline issue. According to the “Wanna Be” page on Genius.com, “Pretty Boy Swag” appears to be credited as a sample. Of course, one would think they’d know if they did or did not sample the Pretty boy record, wouldn’t they? But someone is wrong here. First, it’s almost certainly not a sample. Why on Earth would it be? Unless you find value and want the association with “Pretty Boy Swag” there’s no reason to sample that. It’s a sine wave. A sine wave is what comes out of synthesizers after you’ve accidentally initialized the memory or dropped it down the stairs. It’s arguably the most default synthesizer sound in the world.
AND YET…
Remember those do re mi’s and one-two-threes? If you were to whistle or hum the groove to “Wanna Be,” it would sound exactly like only one other song we’ve discussed here, and it’s not Pretty Boy Swag.
Wanna Be 33333333 33333444 33333333 33333444
Me & My Goons 33333333 33333444 33333333 33333444
Goddammit. That might, MIGHT, be worth something in litigation. Might does not equal should.
What do you think? Change my mind.
