(current mirror of Newport State of Mind – try here if it gets pulled like the original)
Thanks EMI! If you hadn’t pulled this Jay-Z parody video I’d have never heard of it, just like you’ve never heard of the concepts of ‘cover’ ‘fair use’ ‘parody’ ‘humour’.
Sadly in the UK unlike the US, parody and fair use isn’t enshrined in law, so even a parody cover (it doesn’t sample any of the original track as far as I can hear) like this can get aggro and a DMCA from a humourless EMI (the publishing arm), whereas if this was created in the States there would be nothing they could do.
Anyway the track by Alex Warren and singer Terema Wainwright is genius especially the bits ‘Newport – access from the A402!’, rhyming hamster with rapstar, ‘Josie D’Arby is from Newport, yes we didn’t know either! Thank you Wikipedia!’ and ‘Bugger off Alicia, Shirley Bassey is our queen!’.
Of course the success has lead to responses, one from Goldie Lookin’ Chain alleging that they aren’t from Newport and doesn’t know what they are talking about (the performers are from Newport it seems, but the video director who wrote it is from London). I wonder if they’ll get pulled too?
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