Joshua Perahia riff nearly identical to a Bon Jovi song

My son just loves Mpire, which was Joshua Perahia's band back in the 90s.Today he put on their song You Want It All. When the opening riff played, it sounded so familiar. I finally found it...the riff is nearly identical to Bon Jovi's Tokyo Road. Listen to the opening to the two songs. The riff is so close!

He may have done it intentionally to give a tip of the hat to Bon Jovi.  He may have accidentally done it as there are only so many notes and riffs are sometime going to be similar.

I've borrowed riffs intentionally before.  With my first Mission Of One CD, I used a piece of KISS's "She" in one of my songs.  I also used a little of that quick track that is just a few seconds long from Bride's "Snakes In The Playground".  I took it and wrote a whole song from it.  LOL

On my upcoming album as Big Chris & D'Bare Bones Band, a blues/rock project, I am using a little of Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" during my guitar solo.  This way, I can tip my hat to one of my early influences without having to cover one of their songs completely.  The rest of the song is my own but I am intentionally using this riffage.  If done right, it can be a cool way to pay homage to musicians you admire.

Using "Talk Dirty To Me" should raise some eyebrows as this is a Christian blues/rock project!

It could also be quite unintentional.  I had riffs I came up with (or so I thought) that I'd jammed on at home for years, only to discover 4-5 years after the fact that one was essentially the intro to GnR "It's So Easy", another was "Blood and Fire" by Type O Negative, and a third ended up being out of "The Nameless" by Dagon (and much like alldat, I decided to leave THAT one in my song as an intentional shout out to my friends) Never set out to learn the songs, I'd just listened to them enough years ago that they came out in my playing naturally.  There's only 13 notes in Western music. It happens.

How about this? Queensryche ripping off Mpire, ripping off Bon Jovi?

Things like these happen all the time. The latest Theocracy album also proved that Matt Smith listens very closely to Edguy (and Avantasia).

exo wrote:There's only 13 notes in Western music.

I got to wondering recently what the amount of combinations there are with just 13 notes. Certainly millions. Perhaps billions?

Not a guitar riff, but a lot of similarity between a portion of Project Aegis - Angel in the Ashes and This is Halloween from A Nightmare before Christmas

https://thecmr.forumotion.com/t9311-project-aegis-angel-in-the-ashes?highlight=aegis

Thread title changed. I realized that the title I had sounded like an accusation. I don't believe Joshua deliberately did this. But the similarities are striking.

New Creation wrote:

exo wrote:There's only 13 notes in Western music.

I got to wondering recently what the amount of combinations there are with just 13 notes. Certainly millions. Perhaps billions?

When you factor in things like time signatures, note values, chords (which are combinations of multiple notes", the potential combinations are pretty near limitless.  It's just that when a bunch of people have the same influences or are going for a similar "feel", that narrows things down several orders of magnitude.  There's only so many things one can do if, for example, you're playing a pentatonic scale in A minor at 80 BPM trying to play a shuffle groove......multiple people doing that are going to naturally sound similar because of the restrictions, and out of 1000 people doing it, it really isn't a surprise that 5-6 of 'em come out sounding almost identical.

These opinions here are revolting. I have never listened to Bon Jovi in my life. I don't listen to party bands. MY song sounds nothing like Bon Jovi, as that is an insult. Hundreds of bands wrote songs with a riff, followed by a whammy bar descending before the verse. That is what you are all hearing. MY chords are completely different. I just heard the Bon Jovi song just now, as my son played it for me. We both started laughing instantly as they are nothing alike. I think you people need to have your hearing checked.