Did Francesco Gabbani Plagiarize US Rock Band Train?

When I first listened to Francesco Gabbani's "Occidentali's Karma," the winner of Sanremo 2017 — the most prestigious song contest in Italy — and now contestant in Eurovision 2017, I couldn't help but noticing an affinity with the 2009 song "Hey, Soul Sister" by US rock/pop band Train.

Francesco Gabbani winning Sanremo 2017

Specifically, the pre-chorus of Gabbani's "Occidentali's Karma" is interestingly similar to the second verse of Train's "Hey, Soul Sister."

In the following comparison the clips have been digitally processed in order to match the songs' pitch and speed.

First, the two sections in their entirety.

Here is Train:




And here is Gabbani:




And now a side-by-side comparison of the two sections:




What do you think, did Gabbani plagiarize Train or is it just a coincidence?

Twenty-First Century Fascism in the USA

...the merging of corporate and political brutalism into a war culture were on full display in the savage beating of a United Airlines passenger who refused to give up his seat because the airlines over booked. Couple this with the Star War spectacle of the United States dropping a 21,600 pound non-nuclear bomb on the Achin district in Afghanistan, which has a population of around 95,000 people. Nobody on the plane came to the aid of the passenger as he was being assaulted and dragged from his seat as if he were a dangerous criminal suggesting that brutality, fear, and powerlessness have become normalized in America.

Henry Giroux, "Toward a Politics of Ungovernability: Shutting Down American-Style Authoritarianism," Counterpunch, April 17, 2017.

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