Copy-and-paste songwriting for a switched-on world

It’s called interpolation – when you sing a riff from someone else’s song over your own – and it’s the sound of pop in 2016. But is it laziness or a clever response to the global playlist?

Over the last couple of years, there has been a terrible trend in pop music. It most commonly manifests itself in a dance-pop track that lifts a hook or refrain from a well-known song and – with the aid of mind-numbing repetition and a house beat – transforms it into something just far enough removed from its source material to be classed as an original. See 99 Souls’ The Girl Is Mine, which takes samples from Girl by Destiny’s Child and Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine to form something painfully derivative of both, or Duke Dumont’s No 1 hit I Got U from 2014, which took bits of Whitney Houston’s My Love Is Your Love, put them in a different order, and gave them to Kelli-Leigh to sing.

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