I will say this.
If they didn't write what they are playing, that doesn't make them lazy or untalented. It just makes them not the composer of the music. Not everybody is a writer. Some people are instrumental performers. If you're a session musician and the producer is telling you "Yo give me B# and I want it to go bummm bummm bumm bummmm" and you do it, that's not stealing, that's fulfilling an artist for hire contract.
Now, if that person goes around saying, "Yo, I wrote Stairway to Heaven." Instead of saying, "Yo, I played that guitar piece on Stairway to Heaven" then yes, they would be a fraud for trying to take credit for something they didn't do.
However, playing a guitar, if somebody else wrote the shyt you're playing is still a musical endeavor. It's not your music. But what you're doing is still playing music.
Pressing buttons on an MPC that controls already composed music assigned to the pads, and chopping, editing samples and all that so that they fit a time structure or fit right with the BPM, is really more of a programming endeavor.
There's nothing wrong with being just a session guitar player or being an MPC Sample King. Just like there's no problem with being a C.O. The problem is when that session player starts to call himself the song-writer, that C.O. starts to call himself a drug kingpin, or that MPC Sample King starts acting like he is responsible for a song with a lifted melody.
When really, the public at large is eating up that song because of the lifted melody that dominates the track, not the kick/snare and crying baby that were added to the loop.
