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Entertainment Friday, January 18th 2013 at 2:50 pm

Glee Rips Off Jonathan Coulton’s “Baby Got Back” Cover, Proves They’re a Pop Culture Menace

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We think it’s safe to say that Glee’s propensity for taking classic songs and mutating them into teenybopper renditions that stab away at both our ear drums and patience knows absolutely no bounds, but it’s still — as much as we hate to say this — 100% legit given that the original artists willingly sign away their souls to the show’s executives for their thirty pieces of silver. Today, however, it was discovered by geek culture’s favorite singer/songwriter, Jonathan Coulton, that what Glee wants, Glee will most certainly take without so much as permission and proper licensing. The show has apparently given a take on Coulton’s cover version of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” practically verbatim, and the singer and his army of fans are up in arms over the show’s apparent audacious and ill-conceived move.

The controversy began this morning when Coulton was notified of Glee’s use of his “Baby Got Back” cover for one of their upcoming episodes. Coulton couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of this since the source of the information came from the Glee Wiki — an unofficial wiki site unaffiliated with the show proper and the FOX television network as a whole. Upon listening to a recently uploaded video on YouTube of Glee’s “Baby Got Back” rendition, Coulton noticed that the melody and instruments used were infuriatingly familiar to his own:

Incriminating Glee even further is the fact that they apparently — whether by oversight or sheer hubris — left in the lyric “Jonny C.’s in trouble,” which Coulton had written in to his cover of the song. Coulton’s music is known to be under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial agreement, stipulating that his songs not be used for commercial purposes, though this does not apply to any covers or remixes. At most, he would be fighting for attribution credits to the “Baby Got Back” cover rather than monetary compensation. Whatever the outcome, everyone who despises Glee comes out a winner since we now have even more valid justification for our extreme vitriol.

You can listen to both Glee and Coulton’s covers of the song for yourself and see where the similarities are, with the “Jonny C.” lyric appearing at the 2:15 mark for both videos:

Glee’s Rendition

Coulton’s Rendition

(via Twitter, Jonathan Coulton, image via watsonsinelgin)

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  • http://twitter.com/Mesoian Mesoian

    The answer is yes. The question is, “does it matter in the eyes of american copyright law?”. That’s much more difficult to answer.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520920400 Claire Redfield

    I hate GLEE!

  • Rollin Bishop

    The whole thing’s a complicated mess legally, but it’s certainly not morally ambiguous.

  • http://twitter.com/javakoala javakoala

    Ryan Murphy is lazy and a bad writer.

  • Idlethoughts

    I don’t have many music idols, but Coulton is one of them, so I am all kinds of pissed a glee and Fox right now. Somebody better make a full public apology for this.

  • rga

    Richard Cheese does a better version than both of these.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002083157424 P.j. R. Thomas

    He didn’t used to be, I loved Nip/Tuck, Glee is a legitimately poorly written show, who rips off people with or without their permission.

  • ben0

    As I understand it that form of CC reserves commercial applications for the author. Meaning he could absolutely get monetary damages.

  • itstimetobegin

    Okay, listen guys. I’m a very big Gleek and, even though I love Glee, yes, that was a very shady move of the Ryan Murphy and the rest of the team. You really can’t say you hate “Glee” itself just by that, but you can say that you hate Ryan/Fox for doing this/letting them do this. I’m pretty angry about this myself, though I’ve never heard of Jonathan Coulton until this whole thing started, but I don’t disagree with you guys that it was a terrible thing for them to do.
    And to be clear, Glee ALWAYS asks for the rights to other’s songs before using them. This has been the FIRST incident where they’ve done it. So please, also don’t say that they rip off everyone’s songs without permission.
    So, in conclusion, to be honest, I’m on your guys’ side, but I’m still going to defend Glee.