CIARA TELLS HONEY MAGAZINE SHE ISN'T COPYING & JACKING BEYONCE DIVA STYLE SWAG

Ciara is defending herself against style jacking accusations burning up the blogosphere. Cici says that she was inspired by designer Thierry Mugler and not Beyonce.

The blogs are buzzing today about the similarities between the videos for Ciara's "Love Sex Magic" and Beyonce's "Diva," along with leaked footage of choreographer Sheryl Murakami's demo version of B's upcoming clip for "Ego." To put it bluntly, they're claiming that Ciara jacked Beyonce's swagger. Is it true? Reps for both singers declined to comment, but it's awful hard to deny when you look at this composite image of screen grabs from all three videos that's floating around the Internet. What say you, Music Mixers? Is Ciara a Sasha Fierce copycat? Is she capital F fierce in her own right? Or is this all much ado about nothing? [EW]

We must mention that Beyonce looks to the past for inspiration in her videos. Beyonce and her choreographer frequently use Bob Fosse's original style and choreography for inspiration. Is Beyonce's copying different from Ciara's style jacking?

In the past, I have argued stealing for inspiration is good -- there are no original ideas any more -- but a bright and dangerous line has been crossed by Beyonce into what I believe is "choreographic plagiarism." [URBAN SEMIOTIC]

People are talking about the similarities between Beyonce’s choreography and your choreography. I know what you were going for... Right, I got inspired by the Vegas show, but go ahead. What do you want to know? How do you even address that? Have you seen the screen grabs? I don’t think there’s really anything to address. I think it’s very, very funny. And you know what my response is to that? For the ones that have something negative to say? They must have really enjoyed it that much to go and nitpick it, because it’s something they pulled up and was like, “Yo!” There were a couple of things in there that I’ve never seen. I think that it’s important for us as artists to be original and to create something new, so it would be really silly of me to go and create something you’ve already seen. So not one time were any of my references another artist. My references were clearly inspired from shows that I’ve actually seen. It goes to show how creative we can be and how close the worlds are. I did my first video with my metal outfit. I was inspired by Thierry Mugler. Now, from my understanding, Beyonce is using Thierry Mugler for her tour. It just is what it is. It’s very petty to me. When people nitpick something and they say negative things, my response to that is they really must have liked it that much. They just said, “This just can’t be! We gotta find something!” That’s also the definition of a person having too much time on their hands to do nothing. That’s how I look at that. [HONEY]