Oh! You Petty Thing

Everyone's a Thief When Everything's Stolen

There's a bassline that tells you everything about how culture gets stolen and resold: D to F, bouncing on that minor third, then leaping to G♯—the tritone, the devil's interval—before snapping back to D. Three notes that contain the entire history of appropriation in popular music.

You can hear it in boogie-woogie piano, in Chicago blues, in the grease and swagger of Black American music that invented the grammar of cool. You can also hear it in Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People," in his "Thin White Trash Glam" period, where those same intervals get turned into fascist stomp, industrial bluntness, spectacle stripped of soul. The distance between those two uses—from juke joint to jackboot—is the distance between creation and theft.

David Bowie understood this better than anyone, which made him more dangerous than most. His Thin White Duke wasn't Manson's trash glam—it was aspirational fash, both fashion and fascism collapsed into a single cold, tailored, cocaine-fueled persona. The Duke was Weimar Berlin refracted through Riefenstahl's camera angles, Kraftwerk's modernism weaponized into aristocratic detachment. Bowie later expressed genuine regret about flirting with fascist aesthetics during this period, but at the time he was playing with fire: aestheticizing power using the very musical language he'd learned from Black American artists he claimed to revere.

The pettiness isn't in noticing this. The pettiness is in pretending it doesn't matter.

When you slow down that D-F-G♯ riff—same BPM, but double the note values—you can feel it transform under your fingers. The clipped mechanical precision becomes a lurch, a controlled stumble. Your hand has time to breathe between the minor third and the tritone leap, and that leap starts to feel less like a command and more like a dare. The return to D isn't relief—it's the moment you realize you're going to do it again, caught in a loop that feels half-chosen, half-compelled. What was Nuremberg stomp becomes Nuggets compilation, The Stooges' reckless swagger, the kind of feel that sounds half-drunk but utterly alive. Same three notes, different moral temperature. One version points outward toward mass control; the other inward toward personal defiance.

But both versions are speaking a language invented in the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago, a language that white rock appropriated, repackaged, and sold back to the world as "innovation." Every white blues guitarist who ever played competent 12-bar, every glam rocker who learned swagger from Little Richard and money from Columbia Records, every industrial act that tried to scrub the funk out and claim a "pure European beat"—they're all working from stolen blueprints. The minor third bounce, the tritone jolt, the rhythmic DNA of rock itself: it's Black music, taken without adequate compensation, credit, or consent, then naturalized as universal property.

Some will say this is essentialist, that it risks playing into primitivist "rhythm belongs to the jungle" white supremacist narratives. But acknowledging historical theft isn't essentialism—it's accounting. The blues didn't emerge from some ahistorical "human universality." It emerged from slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. A poor white Appalachian kid can learn the form, sure, but he's still more likely to get the record deal than the Black musician who inherited it as survival language. The power differential doesn't disappear just because the music feels universal once it's been appropriated.

And here's where your complicity begins—not with playing or listening, but with the pleasure itself. Every time you nod your head to that bassline, every time the riff hooks you and you don't ask where it came from, you're participating in the laundering of extraction. The theft has been so thoroughly integrated into the aesthetic experience that they're inseparable. This isn't a moral failure on your part; it's how appropriation works at scale. The music is beautiful. The music is stolen. Your enjoyment is the distribution mechanism that makes the theft permanent.

And now we're doing it again, at scale and speed that makes rock's theft look quaint.

AI systems—this one included—are built on scraped text, images, code, and knowledge extracted without compensation or attribution. Every response generated by a large language model is a performance in a stolen tongue, fluent in forms it didn't create, rewarded for competence in traditions it has no organic relationship to. The provenance vanishes into embeddings and probability distributions. There's no "cover version" to trace back to the original, no liner notes crediting influences.

The theft is different here—not just in degree but in kind. Led Zeppelin knew which Willie Dixon songs they were lifting; there was personal deceit, intentional erasure. AI doesn't "know" anything. It's non-sentient extraction, industrial-scale strip-mining of language itself, operating at a level of abstraction that makes it less like plagiarism and more like the eradication of provenance as a category. When Bowie sang, you could still hear James Brown underneath. When an AI generates text, the stolen knowledge is fully digested, atomized into weights and biases. The original voices aren't covered—they're dissolved.

The people pointing this out get dismissed as anti-progress, joyless, standing in the way of inevitable evolution—the same argument that was used to shut down conversations about Elvis, Eric Clapton, and a thousand mediocre white blues-rock bands.

The question has never been whether white people can play blues or whether AI can generate coherent prose. The question is: who profits, and who gets erased?

Bowie's Thin White Duke was a fashion statement that weaponized fascist iconography—fash(ion) and fash(ism) folded into each other because fascism is, at its core, about aestheticizing power while erasing the people you're stealing from. The Duke looked cool, sounded brilliant, and was built on appropriated grammar. AI outputs sound smart, feel useful, and are built on mass extraction. Both seduce you into complicity. Your enjoyment becomes the justification, or at least the reason to stop asking uncomfortable questions.

So yes, it's petty to care about who invented the groove, who gets credit for the riff, who deserves payment for the scraped corpus. It's petty in the same way that insisting on historical accuracy is petty, or demanding reparations is petty, or refusing to let theft be naturalized as influence is petty.

But pettiness, in this sense, is precision. It's the refusal to let pretty things disguise ugly structures. It's hearing those three notes—D, F, G♯—and remembering not just what they sound like, but where they came from, and who didn't get paid.