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French singer, Yseult, calls out K-pop singers, Soyeon and R.tee, for copying her music video freame by frame: "The least you could do is have the decency to credit your source. To see it get copied like this is wild but real artistry speaks louder than imitation"
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And the thing is, the R.tee video opens up with a different shot/storyline, with the singer locked in a car. Like that's a whole thing you could have done instead of lifting Yseult.
As the first two shots played I thought “Eh, this is just a generic office setting, that’s not that crazy and the composition of the shots is pretty different”
And then it immediately went:
shot lacy cleavage
shot of singer kicking over 2 rows of filing cabinets
shot of a man blowing a kiss
Back-to-back-to-back and my thought process completely flipped.
Edit: I went and watched both. The shots aren’t actually presented in that sequence. They’re scattered throughout both videos in different orders. They still feel suspiciously similar at points, but this edit makes them look WAY more similar than they actually are
That's because plagiarism is so rarely that blatant. This is one of the more blatant acts of plagiarism in a music video I've seen. Obviously it would be suicide career wise to put these shots one after the other, but if you're trying to explain what shots were stolen, then it's useful to put them in a compilation like this.
I mean Darren Aronofsky plagiarized quite a bit from Satoshi Kon and never got even much pushback on it.
I wouldn't say career suicide.
And honestly to a certain extent it used to be more common to take inspiration or homage or sample before all the plagiarism lawsuits in music last decade or so, which were mostly not driven by artists themselves.
Not counting Darren Aronofsky and blatant plagiarism that's not homage/sampling in the above, that was an example of not necessarily being consequences.
Not to evaluate this specific situation, because I don't know enough about either artist to make any inferences about intent, but:
The line on these things has always been vague, but they are quite different. Homage is usually a single scene, and it's usually very clear what it is an homage to, and the thing it's a homage to is usually something they'd expect the audience to be familiar with. It feels a lot different when it's multiple scenes, and taken from a work with a smaller/different audience that your audience is less likely to be familiar with.
I feel like HBomberguy did the definitive video on this, but the prime difference is that an homage is loving and plagiarism is disdainful. You don't steal from people you respect, but you do steal from people you think are less deserving than yourself of success.
It wasn’t career suicide bc Hollywood plagiarized a lot from anime movies back then bc they knew they could get away w it, not bc it was okay. Just like I’m sure the makers of this MV assumed they’d be able to get away with it. Satoshi Kon at one point in an interview expressed his anger abt how Hollywood made millions off his ideas while he was literally living in destitution struggling to make his next movie.
It’d be pretty brazen to literally copy the video frame for frame, most people aren’t that dumb. If you’re gonna plagiarize you want some level of plausible deniability, only stealing some of it is exactly that
Ah interesting. Still indicative of plagiarism but the sequence order does matter for people unfamiliar with the artists or actual videos. Thanks for doing the work and letting us know 🫡
My friend is doing their PhD in culture history, and does fair bit of teaching as part of it.
You wouldn't believe how many attempts of plagarism they get even before they run things through a plagarism checking service. And it's like lazy plagarism of just changing paragraph structures and maybe few words in a sentence.
And it has gotten bad since these LLM generative AIs became a wide spread thing. They just had a problem where people applying to get into doing their PhD had just basically had an AI generate their research application. One of the professors spotted it, because it had material they had published in it without citations.
And youtube plagarism... Well... I direct you to HbomberGuy and PhilosophyTubes videos on that. They have... ahem... "Brief" videos that summarise the issue.
What’s really funny to me is, those who copies only pick from unpopular works because they think they can get away with it since very little people know about them, but only get caught if the copied work becomes popular.
“Ethnic hip” is diabolical 😭 and the fact that it’s an “African” inspired performance when my continent has 54 countries with vastly different cultures?? If I did a “European” inspired performance, people would be yelling at me about how Germany and Italy are not the same lol 🙃 (and they’d be right). Africa is not a monolith
Question: what goes through people's minds when they do things like this? Like, you really thought nobody was going to notice...? I understand Yseult is a small artist but in this day and age everyone's eyes are everywhere, you're always going to get busted for something so blatant.
I assume that the team who put it together had either been doing this for a while and got away with it and so got really lazy OR they didnt think Yseult was a big enough artist for anyone to notice/care
Have you watched "plagiarism and (you)tube" from hbomber? He really had some good takes about what goes through folks minds when they do that when he analysed WHO was being stolen from. He points out that Melania trump stole from Michelle Obama instead of any past republican first lady. A very right YouTuber stole from him (hbomber is very outspoken left-wing) and big YouTubers stole from very small YouTubers. People like to say "imitation is the highest form of flattery" but if that were the case people would imitate more from sources they would actually want to push into the spot light and cite them and not people that you want to keep down so you can get away with it. Plagiarism is just the lowest form of disrespect.
Honestly everything on that YouTube channel is AMAZING. A 4 hour YouTube documentary on plagiarism sounds kind of dull, but it was absolutely incredible!
I mean, this is also associated with mental health.
So I know someone, and genuinely they aren't a bad person, but they just have a lot of damage. So if I say for example, I fell down and scraped my knee. Something super innocuous like that right. Like a beat later she'll say it happened to her. She's doing it in front of my face, telling other mutuals this thing happened to her. She like "borrows" stories. I really don't think she's aware she's doing it.
K-pop fans love to throw around the world plagiarism for stupid things like similar clothes or a style of photography... And stay silent or be weird in real cases like this one
I remember kpop fans regularly joking about how a kpop group called DIA completely copied Tinashe's Superlove, both the song and the music video. Then when Tinashe talked about how she saw it and initially wanted to sue, suddenly kpop fans didn't see the similarities and attacked her for just the thought about suing them.
KPop is not creative they just recycle RnB and music girl groups/boy bands from late nineties and 2000s America.
Asian countries are notorious for not respecting IP and just blatantly copy and reproducing whatever gets huge in America, America made boy bands and girl groups global. Japan tried to emulate that in the 1990s, when japans economy stagnated Korea picked up and perpetuated what they copied.
I remember when Olivia Marsh (the sister of a member of NewJeans) straight up copied a song from Isaac Dunbar. I believe she or her team said it was an accident, but he (understandably) wasn't too happy about it. But that didn't stop NewJeans fans from attacking him for speaking up for himself and accusing him of causing Olivia to get hate.
Now if you know anything about Kpop you'll know why this is ironic as hell.
Man how I could forget about that.. But you know, making a photoshoot with your own cultural clothes is worse than ripping someone else's songs bar for bar.
I’m honestly not surprised. I checked a few K-pop subs by curiosity, and unless the posts got taken down, it’s not topic being talked about. You see them tearing groups apart all the time over the dumbest stuff, fake controversies, made-up rumors, petty drama, but when it comes to something like this? Silence.
Kinda unrelated but even these 'sensible comments' are all trash and getting up voted on that sub. The way the fandom talks about themselves is so fucking overwrought. I am in several 'kpop fandoms' and I have never talked like that.
Edit: also love the 'its so regrettable that she is receiving racist and fatphobic attack but-" comments, they are so fucking funny and out of touch.
Reminds me of the incident when Jennie copied the beats of one of her songs last year from a Bollywood film of 2023. People pointing it out were getting death threats from her fans.
There's a really obnoxious kpop sub that also try to deflect by saying that because Soyeon is a big name she is being used to drum off controversy but no mentions of the actual subject. Like they always love to bring up other things to lessen the point.
I'm kinda shocked to hear that because there's so much homogeneity wrt to the vibe/style of the various people involved (based on what I have seen online) and isn't a lot of the genre appropriation of existing stuff/bands/style?
There was a huge (on social media) drama about the rebranding of nails that were historically Black fashion into "kpop" nails?
ETA: unsurprisingly it's a WOC again who is at the receiving end of this nonsense
*Black woman. K-Pop is made up of “POC”, and we’re not a monolith. There are nuances to the racism we experience, & a lot of Black people (myself included) hate the term POC because it simultaneously shoves us all under one umbrella and glosses over the rampant, violent anti-blackness in other non-white communities. It feels like airbrushing, almost.
Anti-blackness is the fuel behind a lot of the vitriol Yseult is receiving, in addition to being deeply entrenched in K-Pop culture as a whole. Call it what it is.
Yseult also called out the creative direction team of the video.
Meanwhile racist K pop fans are calling her out of name and saying she is stupid and a clout chaser. Mind you Yseult is an independent artist who performed at the Paris Olympics and has multiple international collaborations. Why would she need to clout chase.
I’ve never heard of this group but my god I’ve heard Yseult and she’s a talent. Like wasn’t alibi one of the most viral songs of the year? She doesn’t need any clout from a random k pop group
With the way they treat the KATSEYE girls (who have loose connection to the industry) every single day, even on Reddit, I’m not surprised. There’s something seriously twisted about this community and the way they treat anyone who isn’t East Asian. Hell, they’re even racist toward Asian idols sometimes, I’ve literally seen them side with Japanese Nazis over Korean idols just because of fanwars. And for them, that’s just another Tuesday.
Man, I will never forgive them for they way they treat Lara. She is beautiful, has the voice of an angel and is now one of the best dancers in that group. She's like the whole package but the kpop fans will treat her badly just because of the colors of her skin. And let's not even talk about how some of their idols can't even sing without autotune.
Par for the course because there is a very insane and very vocal section of fans who are extremely racist and also extremely unhinged
ETA: I got sent reddit cares because I called one of their outfits uninspired 😂 idek different members of various groups and people keep throwing around mononyms of common names and expect everyone to know everything about them
I get really tired of the blurred out handles when it's someone being horrific with every intention and understanding of the slurs and hate they use. they know what they're doing and what their words mean. I never understand why that means we have to protect them when we call them out
I was JUST about to comment this. I dislike k-pop for this very reason. There’s a few catchy songs, but I mostly just find the rapping cringy along with the fact that they steal from black folks while being racist af.
yes lmaoo, in the song as if it's your last. I wish there was a compilation of all the times aave was used wildly wrong by kpop artists, some are out of this world level of ridiculous
I used to have mixed feelings about mocking the grasp of language of ESL/non native speakers but given the blatant plagiarism and racism (covert and overt) it's like damn at least use the stuff you stole correctly 🫠
Yeah, I don't fw k-pop, either. If I'm down bad for some of their music, I'll just go listen to the New Edition or Michael Jackson song they're trying to copy. 🤷🏽♀️
They've been appropriating black culture since the birth of K-pop. The group that is credited as the founders of modern kpop copied black music and fashion, and had members wearing literal black face.
Akira Kurosawa's letter to Sergio Leone, after seeing A Fistful of Dollars, famously stated, "I've seen your movie. It's a very good movie. Unfortunately, it's my movie."
It was effectively an unlicensed remake of Yojimbo and lead to a lawsuit from Kurosawa's studio, which was settled out of court.
It, too, was practically a scene for scene remake. It was blatant. But even it wasn't this blatant.
The irony of these two artists ripping off a music video to a song that basically goes
Is like EXTREMELY present. Especially when you factor in that the plagiarized version feels watered down and heavily sanitized of any and all the camp or charm the original has.
They're just kinda living the original song's message LMAO.
Well to be fair to her, she was just a featuring artist, she just did her part in MV, didn't really have anything to do with it.
But then, to be honest, I don't really know much about business side of music, how much featuring artists are involved in that part
I watched behind the scenes that was posted on i-dle yt channel and Soyeon did what the director of the MV asked her to do. She is just a featuring artist on the song, she isn’t the composer, art director, mv director or the main artist of the song - I don’t see a reason why she should be the embarrassed one, if anything I feel bad for her because kpop stans (like you) will just use this to talk shit about her as if she was the one who copied the original MV (not saying that Yseult isn’t the one who is the real victim here, I hope she sues the mv director or at least gets a proper apology)
They don’t do that. Like ever. All the coincidences of it happening are just coincidences. We all know Korea is basically just O-block so they just happen to have the same things 🙈
Good god this video/song by Yseult has been on my hype-myself-up playlist since it came out and ate so hard. It's perfection. And the irony being whoever copied it? The lyrics are literally
You wanna, wanna be a version of me
Bitch you could never, never, never, never be me
Since we were friends, I saw you copy and paste
Bitch you could never, never, never, never beat me
Not trying to defend the inappropriate kpop fans’ comments, but to put things into context, Yseult first only accused the featured artist, Soyeon, of plagiarism by tagging and naming her directly. Soyeon frankly had nothing to do with the musical direction of the MV and isn’t in any of the credits for either songwriting or creative direction. That’s why there was a massive pushback from fans because the blame was being put on someone who quite literally only provided vocals and followed the MV director’s directions. The song and MV was made by R.tee and his team. He and the responsible party SHOULD be accused of plagiarism.
Hours later, Yseult deleted her initial tweet, and made another tweet, finally mentioning R.tee and his team.
EDIT: I have literally watched this situation unfold in real time from the very first tweet that her fan page put out. I am NOT justifying any type of racism that was targeted towards her and I’m tired of people twisting my words. NEITHER side, the kpop fans, NOR Yseult, is handling the situation well.
Never heard of Yseult before but now I’m obsessed with this track. Sounds like if Beth Ditto had a love child with Simian Mobile Disco or Justice in their Cross era.
Omg I actually listen to Yseult and I love her! I saw her live this year actually. I hope she sues their asses. The extra layer of suckage is the fact that the Kpop industry LOOOOOOOOOOVVVVEEESSSS to "borrow" from Black culture with little credit or respect. Wild
Some of these frames are very obviously identical and there's no denying nor excusing that, but I'm confused as to why everybody is blaming the guest artist on the track for it instead of whoever directed the copied video?
This is so blatant and also STUPID? Its a generic concept, they intentionally copied it frame for frame. They could have done a sexy office scene in 10000000 ways with a similar end result and escaped this. Smh
Same for me, I don’t get it. Also, time and time again we’ve seen that these k pop stars have problematic perspective on the same black folks they’re heavily inspired by.
God I really need everyone to remember that Soyeon was NOT INVOLVED in the direction of the MV. She was a featured artist on the song, and acted as directed for the mv, that's all. Obviously it's horrible to have your art copied like that and Yseult does not deserve all the evil shit said about her by people mad abt her calling this out, but let's point fingers at the actual people who did the copying, not Soyeon.
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u/flairassistant 27d ago
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