If you've listened to the radio at all in the last two weeks, chances are you've heard U2's "Get On Your Boots." (Many, many times, if your radio stations are anything like mine.) It's also entirely possible that at some point during the song, you may have found yourself singing "I'm on tenterhooks, ending in dirty looks..."

It's not the first song that has ganked Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" for inspiration; any child of the late '80s can probably recall the Escape Club scoring a #1 hit with the soundalike "Wild, Wild West."

But even with a radically different instrumental track and a chorus that veers off completely, it's hard not to hear Costello's song in Bono's vocal. It's most obvious when you compare Costello's snarl "You wanna torture her, you wanna talk to her" with Bono yowling "I got a submarine, you got gasoline." Same rhythm, same inflection.

Why Coldplay has the right to roll its collective eyes, and some thoughts on why nobody minds lifting when Bono does it, after the jump...

 

None of this would be especially noteworthy if it weren't for Coldplay, which has been getting pilloried over the past few months for much, much less. Thanks to similarities between the chords and melody for "Viva La Vida" and "If I Could Fly" by guitar whiz Joe Satriani, the band has been jumped on as talentless hacks and plagiarists, even more than usual.

And while it certainly raises copyright questions, which may or may not require the courts to resolve, I can't personally get behind any accusations of outright theft. To me, it's pretty clear that if it's not simply an instance of independent invention of the same thing, then at worst it's an inadvertent copying of something that Chris Martin and his anonymous bandmates didn't realize they had already heard. It's too bad George Harrison isn't around to empathize with them on that.

But U2 is getting no such rancor, despite the fact that there's exactly the same amount of copying going on in "Get On Your Boots." Certainly, the similarities are being acknowledged by publications like The Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone.

Rob Harvilla of the Village Voice says that "Bono's delivery [is] stolen wholesale from 'Pump It Up' for some reason," but that's about as harsh as it gets. Mostly, it's talk about how the song "reinvents Costello" and "playfully echo[es] the riffed-up rock and roll poetry cadence of Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' mixed with Elvis Costello's 'Pump It Up.'" For its part, the Telegraph U.K. says that Bono "may have to get down and kiss the boots of Elvis Costello."

May have to kiss his boots? Reinvents "Pump It Up"? "Playfully echoes"? Where are the brickbats? The howls of outrage? The cries to string them up? Coldplay was raked over the coals for being thieves, and U2's being patted on the back for coming up with a cheeky homage. Such is the antipathy towards Coldplay and the desire for an underdog like Satriani to triumph. (Costello may not be on quite the same level of success as U2, but there's far less of the power disparity between the two that might make him look exploited.)

But here's the thing: I'd be willing to bet that the similarities between "Get On Your Boots" and "Pump It Up" were far more intentional than the ones between "Viva La Vida" and "If I Could Fly." Bono and company probably knew exactly what they were doing when they came up with their song. Does that make them despicable scoundrels who deserve the scorn of critics and listeners alike? No, that makes them pop artists like all others in history, who have spent their lives surrounded by music and who occasionally want to put their own affectionate spins on the songs they love.

And so U2 gets a pass for deliberately doing something that Coldplay, one way or another, most likely did by accident. Next up: Bruce Springsteen v. Kiss. No mention on whether Fleetwood Mac or Blondie have decided to get involved.