Sean Wilentz: Is Bob Dylan a Phony?
[Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University. His new book, Bob Dylan in America, from which portions of this article are drawn, will be published by Doubleday in September.]
When Joni Mitchell trashed Bob Dylan in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, using words like “plagiarist,” “fake,” and “deception,” the music blogosphere caught fire. In one corner was a beloved singer-songwriter, in the other, a legend, someone who has been described as the supreme poet of rock 'n' roll.
Dylan’s defenders shot back at Mitchell, saying she acted like “a petulant child.” But Dylan’s detractors chortled: At last, a rock 'n' roll heavyweight had the courage to tell the truth about Dylan. “After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records,” wrote the music critic Jonny Whiteside, the time has come “to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony.”
It’s not clear how Mitchell defines “authentic” or what her definition might have to do with Dylan. That he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman is not exactly news, and it makes him no more deceptive than hundreds of other writers and artists ranging from B. Traven to Judy Garland. Nor do the numerous vocal stylizations Dylan has adopted over the years—imitated, mocked, but never replicated—mark him as a fraud.
The plagiarism charge, perhaps the gravest charge that can be leveled against any artist, is the one that matters, and it is important to look closely and calmly at Dylan’s work, if only to see how the charge misses the point of what Dylan has done, especially over the last decade or so.
Dylan would be the first to concede that he has borrowed from other writers and traditional folk and blues musicians from the very beginning of his career. The melody for “Blowing in the Wind” comes directly from an old spiritual “No More Auction Block,” and on a New York radio show in 1962, Dylan played a new song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” and off-handedly admitted that he had stolen the tune from another folksinger, Len Chandler. Only a few folkies complained, and then quickly fell silent—it transpired the complainers themselves had lifted some of their own tunes from others. Dylan’s method was fully in line with what Pete Seeger had called “the folk process,” borrowing freely from others to create something new....
The idea that Dylan is a faker, unless everything he wrote came out of his own imagination—word for word, note for note—is absurd. By those standards, Franz Kafka is an unscrupulous plagiarist as is Aaron Copland and every jazz great. As the music critic Jon Pareles has observed, all art—not just folk art—involves conversations with the past, battening on everything that the artist can find in culture and history rather than pretending that culture and history don’t exist. Pristine originality is not just impossible—it is fakery....
Read entire article at The Daily Beast
When Joni Mitchell trashed Bob Dylan in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, using words like “plagiarist,” “fake,” and “deception,” the music blogosphere caught fire. In one corner was a beloved singer-songwriter, in the other, a legend, someone who has been described as the supreme poet of rock 'n' roll.
Dylan’s defenders shot back at Mitchell, saying she acted like “a petulant child.” But Dylan’s detractors chortled: At last, a rock 'n' roll heavyweight had the courage to tell the truth about Dylan. “After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records,” wrote the music critic Jonny Whiteside, the time has come “to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony.”
It’s not clear how Mitchell defines “authentic” or what her definition might have to do with Dylan. That he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman is not exactly news, and it makes him no more deceptive than hundreds of other writers and artists ranging from B. Traven to Judy Garland. Nor do the numerous vocal stylizations Dylan has adopted over the years—imitated, mocked, but never replicated—mark him as a fraud.
The plagiarism charge, perhaps the gravest charge that can be leveled against any artist, is the one that matters, and it is important to look closely and calmly at Dylan’s work, if only to see how the charge misses the point of what Dylan has done, especially over the last decade or so.
Dylan would be the first to concede that he has borrowed from other writers and traditional folk and blues musicians from the very beginning of his career. The melody for “Blowing in the Wind” comes directly from an old spiritual “No More Auction Block,” and on a New York radio show in 1962, Dylan played a new song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” and off-handedly admitted that he had stolen the tune from another folksinger, Len Chandler. Only a few folkies complained, and then quickly fell silent—it transpired the complainers themselves had lifted some of their own tunes from others. Dylan’s method was fully in line with what Pete Seeger had called “the folk process,” borrowing freely from others to create something new....
The idea that Dylan is a faker, unless everything he wrote came out of his own imagination—word for word, note for note—is absurd. By those standards, Franz Kafka is an unscrupulous plagiarist as is Aaron Copland and every jazz great. As the music critic Jon Pareles has observed, all art—not just folk art—involves conversations with the past, battening on everything that the artist can find in culture and history rather than pretending that culture and history don’t exist. Pristine originality is not just impossible—it is fakery....