I like Bob Dylan’s music a lot, and I do agree that there’s a history of lifting from other musicians in the folk and blues traditions that have inspired him. However, it makes me squeamish how many people in this article are working overtime to excuse Dylan for lifting large portions of his (National Book Critics award finalist) memoir Chronicles from other authors. (It’s funny that Jonah Lehrer’s crime was, in part, inventing quotes for a man who seems to have a hard time inventing them for himself.) The simple question is, would this behavior be excused if he wasn’t Dylan? What if it were some much less successful, much less famous songwriter? What if Chronicles was instead some debut novel? Wouldn’t they pull the copies from the shelves? Forgive the cliche, but if this was a kid writing a term paper, you’d have to fail him, right?
I’m not saying I think this is for sure unforgivable or wrong. I’d have to look at specific examples in the book and how they relate to the source material. And I recognize the difficulty in wanting to make allusions to other texts without explicitly spelling out that you’re doing so, which almost always ruins the artistry of such references. (When I alluded to Porfirio Diaz’s line “So far from god, so close to the United States” in my n+1 piece on Hartford, someone accused me of stealing it.) I just don’t think that this conversation would be happening nearly the same way if it were me who had acted this way, and not Dylan.
Of course, some will respond to this controversy by insisting that “everything is a remix.” Which isn’t wrong– it’s not even wrong.
The article is confusing in that it keeps insinuating that it’s plagiarism, while also noting the apparent intricacy of the plagiarism, and the possible meanings/interpretations which cascade from it, which gives the impression that its knowing, intentional, etc.
http://www.taiyo.ws/taiyo16.html
I think maybe there’s different standards if you’re writing for the New Yorker or a book with footnotes and a bibliography, vs. poetical stream-of-consciousness pop music. I mean, probably you never rushed down to the store to get a copy of “some kid’s” next term paper. You have to say that Dylan’s work works in a way that Lehrer’s doesn’t even aspire to.
… and I wonder about the notion that creativity has to be fresh, new, breakthrough stuff (but please no electrical amplification) to be valid. Look here, that there n’est pas no pipe.
Sure. But again: what matters to me is not whether people decide that this is a fair bit of collage and playful appropriation. I could dig that. It just bothers me to know that what will matter most for making that determination is that Dylan is Dylan.
If Dylan weren’t Dylan the question would never arise.
We could argue anyway about art as always cultural bricolage filtered through a uniquely brilliant mind. A unique response to new circumstances, assembled mosaic style from broken pottery. I know for sure ordinary people are much less creative than they present themselves.
“different standards”…aka a double standard. Why does copying other people’s work become okay when done by hip cultural icons but not students?
“I wonder about the notion that creativity has to be fresh, new, breakthrough stuff…to be valid.”
But that’s the definition of creation.
Sure, artists can creatively riff off other artists’ work. Britten’s “Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge” makes its nature pretty clear. But when blatant violation of copyright or failure to give credit is at hand, any talk of bricolage or stream of consciousness starts to sound like after-the-fact rationalization.
“And I recognize the difficulty in wanting to make allusions to other texts without explicitly spelling out that you’re doing so, which almost always ruins the artistry of such references.”
This is what jumps out at me. I work with reception and allusion a lot in the classics, and it occurs to me that if Catullus or Horace were to write today, they’d be accused of cribbing from, say, Ennius or Vergil, while they saw that “cribbing” as a homage to prior masters of the form.
Of course, they took care to make it work within the context of that reception. But the sense that they would be considered samplers, or possibly even plagiarists, doesn’t escape me.
By the way, Freddie, I liked your linked article at Medium. Thanks to you, we can now say that “Everything is a remix” is the John Edward of critical theory!
Yes, I think he gets to do it because he is Dylan. The book is good and does not pretend to be anything but memoir. If someone else writes that book and it is good enough to withstand charges of plagiarism, that’s fine too. But Dylan is a truly great artist, one of those people I feel lucky to be alive at the same time as. He can create whatever he wants and it will be judged against his best work, not a culturally useful idea that is relatively new and kind of silly. Worrying about plagiarism in the work of artists seems off the mark to me, especially with the ones who are still going to be talked about after the rest of us are forgotten. The more interesting questions to me are why he stole the stuff and what it means aesthetically that he did so.
Right. Goethe believed in using others’ material when it was the best solution to an artistic problem (“Everything that is, is mine” was advice he gave to Lord Byron). Likewise, our modern obsession with originality would seem very odd to a Renaissance artist, since lifting material was the norm at the time and the most important question was, “Does this show good taste or not?”