We can probably all agree, Glee is pretty shitty. Season one was alright, season two was passable, and any program that has Matt Bomer as a guest star will avoid receiving a “Cancel Yourself” letter direct from me. Even if we ignore the fact that this show is incredibly awful to it’s target audience, and contradicts itself every other episode, and doesn’t actually use “Glee Club” style music considering almost every song has been auto-tuned within an inch of its life, there’s still that pesky fact that whoever is in charge of getting permission to use another artist’s music is seriously slacking.
In a recent post on his blog, Geek-Rocker Jonathan Coulton posted that an upcoming episode of Glee may be slated to include a version of “Baby Got Back” that sounds suspiciously exactly like his cover of the Sir-Mix-Alot original. Coulton has been extremely careful with what he says on his blog, admitting the information comes from the unofficial Glee Wikipedia , and cross-checking his sources where he can, but his tweets on the subject have been slightly more agressive.
Hey look, @gleeonfox ripped off my cover of Baby Got Back: bit.ly/WME9Ho. Never even contacted me. Classy.
— Jonathan Coulton (@jonathancoulton) January 18, 2013
Sure, the Glee producers MIGHT have had some case that the songs are just really really similar in style, if it weren’t for two damning, undeniable facts:
1. JoCo re-wrote the melodies of the song to fit his typically soft-rock style and
2. They left in the original line “Johnny C.’s in trouble”, which probably doesn’t even make sense in the context of the show.
Good job, guys.
After listening, I think that @gleeonfox may have even used parts of my recording. Do I hear a duck quack? And of course they say “Johnny C”
— Jonathan Coulton (@jonathancoulton) January 18, 2013
Coulton is concerned that the Glee recording goes so far as to use his original instrumentation as well, and if they did, they may be facing legal action from Coulton himself. He explains on his blog that he is currently discussing the matter with his lawyers. If you want to compare the recordings yourself, you can do so on soundcloud, where someone has mashed the two together so that one version plays through the left speaker and the other through the right. I don’t hear the duck quacking in the Glee version, but I may just be missing it.
Glee, for all the shitty things you do, this may be one of the shittiest.
Jen Schiller
Staff Writer
twitter.com/Jenisaur