Every riff you’ve ever thrown horns to is a hand-me-down. Every chorus you’ve ever screamed at the top of your lungs is somebody else’s ghost wearing new leather. That’s the dirty little truth of rock and metal: it’s all borrowed, stolen, ripped apart, and reborn louder than before.

Music isn’t original. It’s immortal.

Take Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Carry On.” Gorgeous harmonies, that golden California glow, but underneath?

It’s Davey Graham’s “Anji.” No shame in it.

Zeppelin? They cannibalized Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon so hard they got dragged into court and still became gods.

Metallica built half of “Kill ’Em All” on riffs they lifted straight from Diamond Head. Nirvana took The Pixies’ soft-loud blueprint and weaponized it into a grunge anthem.

The “Burn” riff in G minor wasn’t just a Deep Purple opener, it was an embryo. Ritchie Blackmore lit it, Coverdale and Hughes sang it into history, and Glenn Hughes carried it forward like DNA in his bloodstream.

You can hear its shadow in Hughes/Thrall’s “I Got Your Number” (1982), sharpened in Gary Moore’s “Run for Cover” (1985), and reborn in John Norum’s “Face the Truth” (1992). Same pulse, shifted into F♯ minor, but undeniably the same bloodline.

Coverdale didn’t leave it buried either. With John Sykes, he bastardized the Burn riff into “Children of the Night” on Whitesnake’s 1987 juggernaut.

Sykes doubled down a year later, repurposing the same DNA into “Black Hearted Woman” with Blue Murder. Different bands, different contexts, but still the same riff in a new disguise.

What we’re looking at here isn’t plagiarism, it’s a dynasty. A single riff spawning offspring across decades, mutating as it jumped from band to band. Hughes carried it soulful and elastic. Coverdale and Sykes weaponized it for arenas. Each branch different, but every branch unmistakably part of the same tree.

This is how it works. It’s always how it’s worked.

We’ve been spoon-fed the myth of originality, the idea that every classic song is lightning in a bottle. But peel back the layers and you see the skeleton:

Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”? Just a blues riff flattened and played like a war march.

KISS made a career Frankensteining Chuck Berry’s DNA into glam rock fireworks.

Motörhead was Little Richard played through a chainsaw, Lemmy spitting gasoline on the mic.

Mötley Crüe swiped Sweet’s glam strut and Aerosmith’s sleaze, turned it into Sunset Strip debauchery.

Whitesnake borrowed Zeppelin’s swagger wholesale and polished it for MTV.

Kingdom Come? They didn’t even pretend, just straight-up cloned Zeppelin and dared you to complain.

And it goes deeper.

Black Sabbath slowed down the blues until it sounded like an earthquake.

AC/DC took Chuck Berry riffs, plugged them into a Marshall stack, and built an empire.

Guns N’ Roses was Aerosmith if they grew up on heroin and nihilism. Every “new” sound is an echo chamber of something older.

The bands that matter don’t deny it, they double down. They take, they mutate, they make it their own:

Motörhead never apologized for playing Little Richard at 200 bpm.

Nirvana admitted the Pixies blueprint but twisted it into generational rage.

Metallica wore their Diamond Head influence on their denim vests and built a movement around it.

Even Deep Purple’s Jon Lord said it out loud: they were just a classical keyboardist and a blues guitarist smashing their worlds together.

That’s the alchemy. You take with intent. You stitch together parts until the monster lurches to life and crushes cities.

The irony?

The more derivative, the more universal. That’s why your brain locks into a riff before you even realize it’s been done before. A familiar structure, dressed up and set on fire, is irresistible.

KISS concerts didn’t sell out because they were original, they sold out because they gave you rock ’n’ roll you already knew in a stadium-sized package. Motörhead didn’t endure because Lemmy invented something brand new, they endured because he made rock’s ugliest roots sound like the apocalypse.

Music survives by being contagious. Like a virus, it spreads, mutates, infects. Sabbath to Metallica to Pantera to Slipknot, it’s all one family tree, just different branches twisting toward the sun.

So let go of originality. It’s a marketing gimmick. What matters is whether the riff hits your gut, whether the chorus feels like a mob chant, whether it makes you want to smash a beer bottle and howl at the night sky.

Because nothing’s original.

And nothing’s ever hit harder.