
Jorge Ben was my first introduction to Brazilian music - someone put on his "best of" album The Definitive Collection so they could point out how much "Taj Mahal" sounded like Rod Stewart's hit "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" I'd never heard the Stewart song before, so when I did hear it for the first time later in my life I was astounded, much as Jorge Ben must have been in 1978, at the similarities. A judge eventually ruled that the song did, in fact, constitute plagiarism, as it had, in the judge's words, "been derived" from Jorge [...]