What’s the difference between a band that wears its influences on their sleave and a copycat band? We got into this point while talking about grunge, being on of the simpler genres musically there are a large amount more copycat bands than many other genres. It’s a hard one to distinguish sometimes, but I think most of the time it comes down to image. I mean its one thing to sound exactly like another band, as Steve pointed out with his story about the guy who sounded like Mark Knofler, it’s possible to do without even hearing anything from the other artist. Generally however if you both sound and look exactly like, or very similar to another band you are well aware of who they are and what they do. I think copycatism as I will now call it can come from two main things,
a.) Not having a wide enough range of influences. This one you can tell pretty easy, if their favourite band has never written a song using an Amin7 chord, don’t expect them to even know what it is. Sometimes in this case they discover new music and their style changes and starts to develop… sometimes they go on sounding like Green Day forever.
b.) Wanting to be just like the other band or a member of that band. Grunge suffered pretty heavily from this one. The worst part about this one is the songs lack any kind of realism as they aren’t based on the experiences of anyone in the band. People idealise someone and basically try to model themselves around them.
While I would like to list some bands that might fall under these categories I can’t really think of any of note, as they generally aren’t very successful if at all. If you’re not being something new at all to a genre or style you generally won’t succeed. If I wanted to listen to Green Day I’d just put on a Green Day C.D. If…
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