Joe Satriani is sueing Coldplay for plagiarism!!!

United States
December 5, 2008 8:25am CST
Satriani is claiming that one of Coldplay's songs, "Viva La Vida" has "substantial original amounts" of his own song, "IF I Could Fly". (msnbc.com) I never liked Coldplay myself, but I think Satriani is undoubtedly one of the greatest guitar virtuosos there are today. I find it hard to believe that anyone has the talent to mimic his playing to the point of plagiarism. So, I had to check it out for myself and decided to listen to both songs. I had never heard either and decided to go to playlist.com that way i could hear them both and open two pages and play them over each other. Listening to both separately and together yielded no true similarity to me. Honestly, I didn't even want to listen to the Coldplay song after hearing the Satriani song. Now being the fan that I am, I decided to give Satriani a stretch at best on this one and looked into it further. If you carefully listen to the rhythms one might draw the conclusion that they sound similar, but there are tons of songs that sound kind of like others. I decided to look up the tablature for both songs to compare the actual notes being played in the rhythm. Not even close. Coldplay used an odd form of tuning first of all and second the notes are not the same. I'm not sure why Joe drew the conclusion of plagiarism, but if I was on the jury I would have to disagree. I'm still not a Coldplay fan and I still respect Joe for his guitar work.
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