Four months ago, I got a job. In that job, our office is an open space, and every single day, we listen to the same exact radio station. Every. Single. Day. I have two observations:

1. music rotation in radio is way slower than I thought, and it's always the songs that I like that get removed.
2. I fucking hate remakes.

"But Chris! Everything's been done already! Everything references all that was before it!" I hear you shout, and I say to you: yeah! It is true. Nothing is truly original, and probably more than half of the music I listen to uses samples as a core element.

There is a difference, however. When someone uses a sample of something, it's often easily recognisable, and usually is either just a part of the composition or is the main centerpiece of the song. Meanwhile, these songs are made up only of a borrowed, well-known composition. Take a short listen to "I Don't Wanna Wait" (which is a clear rip-off^[1] of Dragostea Din Tei), or I'm Good (Blue) which "remixes" Blue (Da Ba Dee).^[2]

I'm not going to mention how this is just a cynical, lazy trick to have a guaranteed hit (darn it! I mentioned it!!), what ticks me off is this sounds close enough to the original songs to make your mind immediately go "hey, I know this", but! they are not direct samples! So you recognize the song, but something feels... off. Kind of an uncanny valley of music.

When I noticed this first a few years ago, I thought to myself "eh, this is probably just another iteration of that. Probably many songs I know are remixes as well, and I just don't know it..." The usual example I gave myself was Cupid's Chokehold which I very late found out references Breakfast in America, but what I missed (besides the fact that the former definitely only references the latter and is not a straight-up copy) is what is the key here: I didn't know the original song. This is definitely not an obscure song, but not one that would be well-known in the late 2000s unless you were specifically interested in the music (I think? Feel free to correct me).

Everyone knows "Blue". "Numa numa" was a goddamn worldwide meme in the 2000s. I don't know a single person that wouldn't know these songs, and due to the internet culture referencing the early internet culture over and over again they may as well never completely die - at least these 20-25 years was not enough for them to become forgotten by most.

TL;DR: Not-so-old man shouts at cloud worth more than he'll earn in a lifetime.