Project Hammer Time - Der Super Kommissar

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Lately everything has been somewhat serious, so to lighten up the mood, some fun from the 80's.

The other day my friend was singing this 80's song in German, I recognised it and it reminded me of an American song. We set out to find out WTF is the deal.. It turns out I was thinking of MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This and she thought she was singing Der Kommissar (she had all the words wrong).

None of those pages mention each other yet the base of the songs are the same. However it is mentioned that MC Hammer did get sued by Rick James for having copied Super Freak. This must have been the best moment in time ever to be a music copyright lawyer.

The weirdest thing is that there is almost nothing to be found on the Internet except this old Usenet thread that brings Falco's Der Kommissar and Rick James' Super Freak in the same conversation ! And then it gets even stranger as both songs were released in 1981. So who copied who ? Or who highly inspired who ? And why is nobody talking about this ?

To try to figure this out I did a sloppy montage of images from both clips Der Kommissar and Super Freak (and bonus semi subliminal stuff) using the soundtrack from Falco's version. You might notice that Rick James is almost in sync with Der Kommissar's lyrics. It's not arranged, I superposed both clips, aligned them to the right as Der Kommissar is longer due to the intro and simply flipped from one song to the other.

Anyway, here goes:

This video is not under any copyright in it's current status. It's probably even illegal for me to do this even though it is just for fun and I am not making any profits from this.. Au contraire. Anyway, they all copied each other, I'm just mixing them together. :]

Update: I must note that if MC Hammer had not "stolen" music from Super Freak, Rick James would have never won a Grammy in his life. Indeed, the only Grammy he got was as a result for having co-written U Can't Touch This.

Update 2: I just found this remix done a few years ago, the soundtrack mixes both Der Kommissar and Super Freak.