Mini-mini-rant about "Cups."

I love the movie Pitch Perfect. Anna Kendrick is super attractive and can sing pretty well. Rebel Wilson is seriously funny :P I enjoy music, and I definitely love a capella. I've spent plenty of hours watching college a capella group performances on YouTube over the years.

So when this movie was announced, I was definitely looking forward to it. Eventually, I watched it, and it was great. Definitely what I expected. Not the best a capella performances ever but still really good. Storyline, nothing new. I really just wanted to listen to the performances and mainly ogle Anna Kendrick because that's just what I do hahaha.

Now, the song from the movie that got most popular was the cup song that Anna's character performs during her audition. It was fun and cool. My first thought when I saw that scene was "Oh hey! I recognize that cup beat from HappySlip!" and I continued to enjoy the rest of the movie.

For months after the movie was released, people have copied the cup song and all on YouTube. Understandable. It was something relatively new to the masses.

Critics started saying that Pitch Perfect ripped off the cup beat and song from a YouTube video (http://youtu.be/DWCOYJg9ps4). Others claiming rip-offs from HappySlip's "HappySlip Jingle," Full House/The Cup Game, Lulu and the Lampshades, Charlie Monroe, and The Carter Family.

Really, my only response is this: No one related to the movie ever claimed credit for the song or beat. While they didn't name the YouTube video that inspired the scene, to me, it was pretty obvious they didn't come up with it. In a movie FULL of a capella covers, I don't think it would have made sense to have a character perform an original piece and not cover an already established song. But that's just me. Also, this song has gone through a string of covers over the past near-century, and Pitch Perfect just added one more to it.

I think I'm just peeved that people have been trashing Anna Kendrick and the movie for "stealing" other people's music. It's a movie about a college a capella group that performs medleys and mash-ups of song covers. There is no original music performed. Anna Kendrick even admitted in an interview that she learned the song and beat from a YouTube video via Reddit and the producers of the movie thought it would be great if she could incorporate it into the movie. I don't know why she or the movie is still getting flak from people. But whatever, they're coming out with Pitch Perfect 2 :D And I'm excited for it.

Some people say, "More cowbell!" I say, "More a capella!" or "More harmonies!"


I know I'm really late on responding to the critics or whatever, but I just realized every video remotely related to this song (The Carter Family, Charlie Monroe, Lulu and the Lampshades, HappySlip, Anna Burden, etc etc) has people talking about how Pitch Perfect stole the song. My mind was just boggled by the assumptions.