Allegations come forward that pop singer Katy Perry’s new single ‘Roar’ (the first off of her upcoming album entitled Prism) bears a striking resemblance in sound to singer Sara Bareilles’ song ‘Brave’, and DJ Dillon Francis’ video for the track “Messages”.
In terms of similarity, “Brave” and “Roar” are remarkable right down to the staccato keyboard (in the same time signature), and the pattern on the drum machine that provides the beat. Due to this, (or maybe in support of this) many amateurs have uploaded mash-ups of the two songs that sync together perfectly.
Also worth noting is that Perry has most definitely heard Bareilles’ song, due to the fact that she tweeted about it months ago.
And while first inclinations might be to brush off the resemblance as just an overlap between two pop ‘girl-power-anthems’, closer inspection reveals a strange correspondence in the lyrical content as well; listen to Brave, and then Roar, and it almost seems as if Roar is Perry responding to Bareilles in the lyrics.
It’s an odd parallel to be sure, especially considering the song Brave resounded with Perry on some level, due to the fact that she tweeted about it, and embedded the link within the tweet.
Addressing the issue of the two music videos becomes a little more complicated; there are some striking similarities for sure (most notably in the first thirty seconds of Messages), but where Messages makes a move to the abstract early on, Roar stays with the one central theme of ‘texting lyric video’. It is definitely visible that the video for Messages is an inspiration for the video Roar, and the director of Roar may have taken the entirety of their idea from it, but in terms of outright plagiarism there are definitely some points that can be made for both arguments.
It should be noted though that strangely enough both videos chose to use the iPhone text bubble style of conversation, which strikes one right off the bat as linking the two videos, and that’s without delving into the heavy, heavy use of emojis in both as well
Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/13/katy-perry-accused-plagiarism-roar
http://music-mix.ew.com/2013/08/12/katy-perry-roar-sara-bareilles-brave/
https://mobile.twitter.com/katyperry/statuses/334851857967104001