Artists Don't Steal, They Synthesize
opinionjournal.com
Bob Dylan, a plagiarist? Much ado about nothing.
BY LUKE TORN
Wednesday, July 16, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." So wrote T.S. Eliot in a 1922 essay on now-obscure playwright Philip Massinger.
Bob Dylan's illustrious and prolific career has been built on clear influences and antecedents, and it's up to listeners to decide whether he has transformed those influences into something better. But it's clear that his songs have frequently spoken eloquently, metaphorically, perhaps even prophetically of the times in which they were written. The recent plagiarism flap over Mr. Dylan's work has set the world chasing its own tail in a futile attempt to present the illusory impression that all creations must consist of "original" ideas, cultivated only in the vacuum of their creators' minds.
The discovery last week (first reported on the front page of The Wall Street Journal) that Mr. Dylan may have lifted as many as a dozen lines for his remarkable 2001 album, "Love & Theft," from Japanese writer Junichi Saga, and his 1989 book "Confessions of a Yakuza," is a nonstory. The singer, as anyone with even a passing interest in pop music and American culture of the last 40 years knows, is both playful musical archaeologist and sly trickster--a man of many masks.
From the very beginning of his career, and an "original" tune from 1961 called "Song to Woody," which borrows liberally from Woody Guthrie's populist narrative "1913 Massacre," Dylan has cut and pasted bits and pieces of history, literature, cinema, musicology, folklore, the Bible, nursery rhymes, fables and half-heard conversations into an innovative and kaleidoscopic tapestry, a "tower of song," as Leonard Cohen put it in one of his more evocative recordings. It's the breadth and depth of resources he draws from, and his mastery and talent at transforming them into unique, utterly timeless expressions, that's newsworthy, not the technical nuts and bolts of their construction.
Don't get me wrong. Plagiarism is serious business, and in some areas--scientific research, academia and journalism, among others--it's important to be scrupulous in crediting one's sources. But art is different.
"All pop music is love and theft," as influential music critic Robert Christgau put it, and Mr. Dylan's album, which borrows from F. Scott Fitzgerald, country music pioneers Johnnie & Jack, and folk music's holy grail, the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music, to name just a fraction of its inspirations, is subtle commentary on that truism. If you rummage around in the history of the popular song, you'll find innumerable instances of lyrics and musical passages appropriated and misappropriated willy-nilly.
The truth is, though, even if Mr. Dylan did borrow a few lines from Mr. Saga's work, they not only appear in a different medium (music) and a different milieu (far from Mr. Saga's oral history of Japanese gangsters), they also represent only a fraction of the mosaic that is "Love & Theft." Even Mr. Saga himself seems to understand this as, in the interviews that have been published he has praised Mr. Dylan's work.
The intimations of plagiarism represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of art, the dialog that takes place between sources and the artistic imagination. The charges are emblematic of a destructive type of cultural dissonance, wherein no one can be trusted. The reflex attitude toward politicians is now, it seems, being directed at artists.
I would suggest that artists, especially instinctive, intuitive artists like Bob Dylan, are above all the people in society who should be trusted most. Unwittingly released on September 11, 2001, "Love & Theft," in its poetry, tension, and tone, captured something of the mood of America in the grim aftermath of 9/11. Though the songs were written and recorded months in advance of that awful day, Mr. Dylan's muse intertwined (not for the first time, I might add) with current events to produce a haunting, entirely pertinent work. On "High Water (for Charley Patton)," to cite just one example, Mr. Dylan delivers prophetic lines that clearly resonate with the sense of helplessness that gripped America that autumn: "Don't reach out for me," he sings, "can't you see I'm drowning, too?"
"Do not create anything," Dylan once said sarcastically (and prophetically). "It will be misinterpreted." It is ironic that one of the most eloquent and moving works, from one our most esteemed artists, would face scrutiny in a pop-culture landscape (particularly TV and film) dominated by remakes, retreads and novelty "reality" shows. But Bob Dylan's masterful synthesis on "Love & Theft," an album whose artistic daring asks the question "What is truly original in this day and age?," will live on long after we all are gone. |
