When Prince’s half-sister tried to sue him for plagiarism
Plagiarism in music is tricky territory. It’s an inherently artistic and subjective medium, but when performed in the confines of a theoretical structure, there’s bound to be crossovers. After all, only a finite number of notes can be used in music. Hence, originality can’t be valued in terms of technical execution, but rather in its emotive response, especially in the case of Prince, who has such an innovative career arc that it’s nearly impossible to remove his imprint from the work of other artists.
Perhaps it’s worth noting that the great chameleons and innovators of our industry are the ones you defend. The names most likely to be ripped off from the world of rip-offs, protected in the knowledge that it is a necessary part of art. As Nick Cave said, “The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation—everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music—the great artistic experiment of our era.”
That’s why it feels pointless to sue Prince. It’s like trying to sue McDonald’s for inventing the burger. Prince’s influence on music has provoked nothing but admiration from his contemporaries because he is so firmly rooted in the essence of modern arrangement. But when it comes to family dynamics, genius has never been easy to comprehend, particularly from siblings who live in the gargantuan shadows of their celebrated others. In the case of Prince, the shadow cast would have undoubtedly been large, not least considering that his sister was a musician herself.
Many of Prince’s family members were involved in the industry in some way, but his half-sister, Lorna Nelson, was fighting for her own sense of space as an artist. But in 1989, she felt as though her brother’s accolades came from work he stole from her lap, and she sued him for copyright infringement.
Nelson wrote ‘What’s Cooking in This Book’ and felt her half-brother’s later track ‘U Got the Look’ was similar enough to trigger infringement clauses and drag him to court in 1987. Ironically, the courts demanded a payout from her multimillionaire half-brother, who eventually ruled against her bid to accuse of copyright.
It was up to US District Judge David Doty to determine the similarities between the two tracks, which he swiftly didn’t see. Unhappy with the decision, Nelson took her case all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately decided not to hear it. This left her without any payout, a questionable attempt at a hit, and a ruined family relationship.
While in 1987, nursing the bruised feeling of living in her half-sibling’s shadow was a legitimate source of pain, the legacy Prince subsequently cemented speaks for itself. And upon his death, it’s rumoured that there is a vault of roughly 8000 unreleased songs, collecting dust, frustrating hungry fans worldwide. Back then, Nelson might not have known the sheer breadth of her half-brother’s creativity, but the revelation of that much material has only gone on to prove his creative genius and sheer inability to copy someone else’s work.
