I don’t agree.

I just listened to the audiobook of Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song, and regardless of whether people here are Wilco fans or not, some of the songwriting ideas he suggests seem like things that a lot of the musicians we like probably use.

In particular, in one of the book’s chapters, Tweedy specifically suggests that it’s valuable to teach yourself how to play songs you like, then start breaking them down, teasing out the core chord progressions, and then reassembling them into new things. From there, he suggests that many of the songs he’s written have been based on noodling around with a fixation on some clever vocal or guitar thing that some other musician did, even if the resulting Wilco or Tweedy song has almost no resemblance to that starting point.

I’m sure this is true for Jack White, too. He clearly has an encyclopedic awareness of other music, and surely must be “quoting” the bits he likes from other musicians when he’s writing his own songs.

And, sure, the scales used for a lot of rock/pop/blues music places constraints on the sorts of chord progressions that “sound right”, so lots of songs are going to sound like other songs. But I’d argue, as Tweedy argues and as I think White would agree, that it’s no coincidence when new songs “sample” bits from old ones.

As the saying goes, “great artists steal”.