G-Dragon accused of plagiarizing KYLE’s “iSpy” due to one of those dumb YT channels

Oh hey guys, it’s another plagiarism controversy in K-pop, where people throw out vaguely similar sounding things and everybody just assumes that a soundalike is for sure plagiarism, even though like 99% of these accusations end with nothing happening because it is actually nothing.

This time it’s G-Dragon and his song “Intro: Middle Fingers Up” accused of plagiarizing KYLE‘s “iSpy“, thanks to an EXCLUSIVE REPORT by Segye Ilbo.

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And by exclusive report, they mean they found one of those YouTube channels that accuses everybody of plagiarizing hoping that one will eventually stick, then a “journalist” wrote about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T7iEhosNLk

There are a ton of these accounts floating around for Korean music for whatever reason, and on just this one alone, they’ve accused Bolbbalgan4, Taeyeon, EXID, TWICE, and BEN of plagiarism. If that’s not controversial enough for you, then you can check out the only account that account is subscribed to, which accuses basically every mainstream Korean artist of plagiarism.

Hooray!

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Anyway, as usual, I’m not going to pretend I know for sure if this constitutes plagiarism or not, but I will note my usual skepticism because the history with this kind of stuff shows that any other position is basically indefensible. Also because it seems to me that the piano intros aren’t even exactly the same (and the rest of the song certainly isn’t), and I would bet there are a ton of songs that use similar piano chords/loops anyway.

We’ll see, but the next time one of these accounts finds something credible will be the first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l51aQM2_2DI