looking at Dave Grohl walking by
There goes my hero! Watch him as he goes!
Can’t they just use like Ted Nugent or something, he wouldn’t mind them using Cat Scratch Fever I’m sure.
the could’ve sued him to stop…
They could, but unless they own their own catalogue and license the music in a way that lets them decide the context for its usage, the lawsuit probably wouldn’t go anywhere.
Fun fact, the Foo fighters own all of their music. They’re one of the few if only bands that actually do. The main reason is the fact that after Nirvana Dave grohl had fuck you money. This is one of the reasons why that band is so special. For them it is all about the music. It didn’t start out as a struggle. All of their catalog is a passion project, and that’s pretty cool.
That said, I doubt a lawsuit would really go anywhere.
There’s also something in copyright law called moral rights which can’t be transferred, although they can be waived. It’s possible to retain moral rights even if you sell your music to someone, and moral rights allow you assert some control over your works where you think misuse of it would cause harm to your reputation, amongst other things. I’m not a copyright lawyer or anything, but I’ve dealt with a bit of this stuff through open source software licensing, and it’s come up a few times when I was transferring licenses from companies I used to work for. If they didn’t waive moral rights then that would perhaps be an avenue to prevent misuse, but again, an actual copyright lawyer would be able to better determine that.
Edit to add: I did some reading on this and more rights are not quite a thing in the US, but it’s a thing in Canada and other Berne Convention countries, but the US does have something similar but separate from copyright. The US has moral rights in some states but not others, and they have something called the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 that intersects with the idea of moral rights but is more narrower than general moral rights and only covers certain visual arts. In any case, I still haven’t gotten my law degree since this morning, but the basic gist of it is that the US has a different spin on moral rights than I’m familiar with in Canada, so they’re not equivalent, but there still may be standing for such a move by a musical artist.
They did this for McCains campaign also I believe. It all equates to nothing as one time public playing of a recording amounts to nearly nothing in royalties, and nobody magically decided they were/weren’t voting for a candidate based on hearing Foo Fighters in the background.
As a sidenote, the Foo Fighters have probably 30+ songs that are better than “My Hero” so why is that one played so damn much?
Because 90% of people only recognize the chorus of most songs, or even just a few words from the chorus.
Republicans in particular have a history of using ‘Born on the 4th of July’ even though the entire song is very critical of American society. The chorus, alone, isolated from context, seems to be about patriotism though!
Similarly, My Hero has a chorus about My Hero, so when played near Trump, that means he is their hero. Don’t think about the rest of the lyrics, they don’t matter.
There are a substantial amount of Republicans that think RATM is raging against what they are raging against.
All they heard was ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’ and … well literally none of any of their other lyrics apparently.
