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Fans of rock star ridiculousness, you're in for a treat. Late this past summer, David Lee Roth's unaccompanied vocal track from Van Halen's "Runnin' With The Devil" popped up online. It was maybe the funniest thing I've heard all year. Freed from the context of his band's hypercharged hard rock, Roth's hammy gyrations achieved a kind of smarmy glory. All by his lonesome, DLR sounded like equal parts squealing baby and Blues Hammer back-up singer. It was great.

Now there's more.

Last week, someone posted a similarly unadorned version of Roth's "Hot For Teacher" vocal. This time around, there's some distracting echo on the vocals, but listening to a solo Diamond Dave gleefully leer, "Yes I'm hot!" and "Oh, my god!" and then segue into falsetto shouting is like having Christmas come early.

Check out both audio tracks here. As they play, try to imagine Roth standing alone in a vocal booth, painstakingly repeating lines like, "I forgot my pencil" until he achieved just the right level of oleaginous charm.

If only all rock stars were as winningly ridiculous as Roth. It was recently reported that guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay for copyright infringement. Satriani claims that the English rock superstars stole portions of their hit single "Viva La Vida" from his 2004 instrumental "If I Could Fly." Listen to a mash-up here.

Chris Martin says he didn't do it. He seems like a nice guy, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But I believe that excepting instances where plagiarism is proved to be intentional, people need to let this kind of thing slide. The fact is, "Viva La Vida" is an incredibly simple song. It uses chords familiar to any beginning music student. Those chords suggest certain melodies. This isn't jazz--rock singers aren't contemplating advanced melodic substitutions when they sing over basic progressions.

Given the musical simplicity of the vast majority of rock, it is inevitable that people will write similar-sounding songs. If you need further evidence, I can point you to ten bands that sound like the Rolling Stones. This is not simply a matter of vocal tone or attitude. This is because these bands (think the Black Crowes or the Deadstring Brothers) use similar stock chord progressions, scales, and rhythm patterns. To put it another way, if you ask people to paint a picture within a given outline, using only primary colors, you will see similar results. Does it constitute plagiarism if those results are sometimes strikingly similar? I don't think it should. And anyway, should really we trust the judgment of someone who titled his last album, Professor Satchafunkilus And The Musterion of Rock? That's almost as bad as Viva La Vida.

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