Oct 20th 2014

Why Does Bob Dylan Steal?

Dr. David W. Galenson is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; Academic Director of the Center for Creativity Economics at Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires; and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His publications include Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2009). David W. Galenson, picture aboce. Derek Walcott, picture in the text.

Bob Dylan likes to use other people's words, and images. Some people object to this. Robert Warmuth called him "Bob Charlatan." Joni Mitchell called him a plagiarist: "Everything about Bob is a deception." Michael Gray found Dylan's paintings unimaginative: "It may not be plagiarism but it's surely copying rather a lot."

Bob Dylan, ca. 1991. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Others don't mind Dylan's appropriations. Suzanne Vega explained that "it's modern to use history as a kind of closet in which we can rummage around, pull influences from other eras." Robert Polito observed that criticizing Dylan ignored the fact "that we've just come through some two and a half decades of hip-hop sampling." (Note to Robert Polito: my dictionary's definition of "borrow" includes repayment. How exactly is Dylan repaying his debts?)

Large-scale plagiarism, or "borrowing" from the dead, is not unique to Dylan. Louis Menand recently wrote that T.S. Eliot "made poems out of the poems of other people," and described The Waste Land as a collage of allusion, quotation, echo, appropriation, pastiche, imitation, and ventriloquism." David Sterritt described Jean-Luc Godard's films as "virtuosic in their kleptomania."

Jean-Luc Godard visiting Berkeley, 1968. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Debates on whether Dylan, Eliot, and Godard should be considered plagiarists have not devoted much effort to explaining why they steal. Eliot himself gave a high-minded rationale: "Authors elect their own precursors, by allusion, quotation, imitation, translation, homage, at once creating a canon and making a case for their own inclusion in it." This could explain Eliot's borrowings from Dante, Donne, and Shakespeare, but the cagy Old Possum didn't mention why he also quoted the Ziegfeld Follies, nursery rhymes, and bartenders. Godard dismissed the problem: "we have the right to quote as we please." But why do they please to quote so much? And why do they quote so many obscure sources?

T.S. Eliot in 1959. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Dylan is tired of this whole subject: in 2012 he told Rolling Stone that only "wussies and pussies complain about that stuff." But he also said that he was only following "the rules and limitations" of songwriting:

It has to do with melody and rhythm, and after that anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.

One of Dylan's scholarly defenders, Christopher Ricks, opined that "it's characteristic of great artists and songsters to immediately draw on their predecessors." Dante, Donne, Shakespeare - no problem. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters - ditto. But Henry Timrod? Dylan himself dissed Timrod: "have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately?" The obvious answer: Bob Dylan has. But why? And why Junichi Saga, Léon Busy, and Dmitri Kessel? Are these really members of a canon that Dylan wants to join? There has to be a better explanation than "we all do it". I just can't imagine what it is.

More Essays

Freeing America from the Quagmire of Inequality

by Sam Ben-Meir

Mar 17th 2023

EXTRACTS: "The intensifying concentration of wealth, and unjustifiable level of income inequality is proving disastrous in many ways. Here are just a few of them. First, less equal societies typically have more unstable economies, and this country is no exception." --- "Second, there is an incontrovertible link between economic inequality and violent crime. The fact is that rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies." --- "Third, the undeniable fact is that the greater the economic inequality that exists, the worse it is for general health outcomes. What is sometimes overlooked is that income inequality is bad for health outcomes across economic strata, not just for those in poverty. To be sure, poor health and poverty are closely linked; but the epidemiological research shows that high levels of economic inequality “negatively affect the health of even the affluent, mainly because… inequality reduces social cohesion, a dynamic that leads to more stress, fear, and insecurity for everyone.” People live longer in countries with lower levels of inequality, as the World Bank reports. In the United States, for example, “average life expectancy is four years shorter than in some of the most equitable countries.” "

Four common misconceptions about quantum physics

by Alessandro Fedrizzi and Mehul Malik

Mar 10th 2023

EDITOR: "Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light on quantum mechanics, it sparked excitement and discussion. But debates about quantum mechanics – be they on chat forums, in the media or in science fiction – can often get muddled thanks to a number of persistent myths and misconceptions. Here are four."

Ecology as New Enlightenment

by Corine Pelluchon

Mar 7th 2023

EXTRACT: "....the destructive logic of the false dualism of man and nature continues to threaten our civilization. The new Enlightenment would overcome this dualistic perspective, by bringing about a deep reconsideration of our moral duties to animals and future generations, and transforming how we inhabit the Earth. Instead of thinking of ourselves as separate from nature, we must recognize that we are embedded in it, and that even our most mundane actions have far-reaching consequences."

A Farewell to Russia

by Anastasia Edel

Feb 28th 2023

EXTRACT: " It has now been a year since Russia, my birthplace, invaded Ukraine. For 365 days, we have been waking up to news of Russian missile strikes, bombings, murders, torture, and rape. It has been 365 days of shame and confusion, of wanting to turn away but needing to know what is happening, of watching Russians become “ruscists,” “Orks,” or “putinoids.” For 365 days, the designation “Russian-American,” previously straightforward, has felt like a contradiction in terms. For those in my situation, some methods of adapting to the new circumstances have come easier than others. Russian books still crowd my bookcase, but I no longer have any wish to re-read them. Chekhov and Nabokov cannot be blamed for the aggression against Ukraine, but it nonetheless has stolen their magic and their capacity to teach. These authors were my friends, as were the old-country rituals like Russian Easter vigils and New Year’s screenings of the Soviet classic Irony of Fate. I feel the loss acutely, but perhaps it is for the better. It helps me concentrate on the present."

How my selective horrors spice up the ‘French type’

by Michael Johnson

Feb 18th 2023

EXTRACTS: "Like the United States, France has gained strength through immigration, a fact often overlooked by opponents of open borders. Science, industry and the arts have clearly benefitted. And I found the local color in the population to be a rich source for artwork."

Insects are vanishing worldwide – now it’s making it harder to grow food

by Stuart Reynolds

Feb 17th 2023

EXTRACT: "Insects are by far the most numerous of all animals on Earth. The estimated global total of new insect material that grows each year is an astonishing 1,500 million tonnes. Most of this is immediately consumed by an upward food chain of predators and parasites, so that the towering superstructure of all the Earth’s animal diversity is built on a foundation of insects and their arthropod relatives. ---- If insects decline, then other wild animals must inevitably decline too."

Self-Portrait of an Experimental Songwrite

by David W. Galenson

Feb 14th 2023

EXTRACT: "When Bob Dylan and the Beatles were creating a conceptual revolution in popular music, producing works that were highly personal, obscure, and often incomprehensible to listeners, Bacharach was the greatest composer who continued the experimental tradition of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the other giants of the Golden Age."

Light and Obliquity: Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum

by Sam Ben-Meir

Feb 7th 2023

EXTRACT: "Many of Hopper’s most famous works – Nighthawks (1942), for example (not in the exhibition) – have become so ubiquitous that we are in danger of no longer being able to see them. The corrective for this over-exposure is to engage with the artist’s less familiar work; that is, to come to the artist through another portal – obliquely, if you will – and thereby trace a new path into the world that his oeuvre represents. Hopper observed, “I think I’m not very human, I didn’t want to paint people posturing and grimacing. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” It is as telling a description as any of Hopper’s painterly fascination with New York City."

From Frank Lloyd Wright to Edwin Lutyens, why do unbuilt buildings continue to fascinate us?

by Nick Webb

Feb 3rd 2023

EXTRACT: "The built environment we inhabit is just the residue of a much greater imaginative world that never saw the light of day, evoking what might have been or still could be..."

Are the Clintons actually writing their novels? An expert uses ‘stylometry’ to analyse Hillary and Bill’s writing

by James O'Sullivan

Jan 18th 2023

EXTRACT: "In 2018, former US president Bill Clinton coauthored a novel with James Patterson, the world’s bestselling author. The President is Missing is a typical “Patterson”: a page-turner of a thriller, easy to read, with short chapters and large font. Patterson is accustomed to collaborative writing ..... He is as much a producer as he is a writer, using a string of junior collaborators to run his factory of novels. Patterson outlines the plot, the coauthors write the story, Patterson offers feedback. While he doesn’t seem to do much writing himself, it is a system that has made Patterson a rich man."

Sympathy for the Algorithm

by Barry Eichengreen

Jan 14th 2023

EXTRACT: "With hindsight, 2022 will be seen as the year when artificial intelligence gained street credibility. The release of ChatGPT by the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI garnered great attention and raised even greater questions. In just its first week, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users and was used to write computer programs, compose music, play games, and take the bar exam. Students discovered that it could write serviceable essays worthy of a B grade – as did teachers, albeit more slowly and to their considerable dismay."

What Prince Harry’s memoir Spare tells us about ‘complicated grief’ and the long-term impact of losing a mother so young

by Sarah Wayland

Jan 14th 2023

EXTRACT: "The thought of her, as always, gave me a jolt of hope, and a burst of energy. And a stab of sorrow."

The Three-Front War on Academic Freedom

by Tom Ginsburg

Jan 14th 2023

EXTRACT: ".....if academic discourse and campus debate are shut down every time a person feels offended, how can universities possibly examine controversial topics? Without intellectual freedom – one of the great achievements of American civilization – they can’t."

Rediscovering Walter Sickert

by David W. Galenson

Jan 5th 2023

EXTRACTS: "London's Tate Britain and Paris' Petit Palais have collaborated to produce a wonderful retrospective exhibition of the art of Walter Sickert (1860-1942). The show is both beautiful and fascinating. ----- Virginia Woolf loved Sickert's art, and it is not difficult to see why, because his painting, like her writing, was always about intimate views of incidents, or casual portraits in which individual sitters momentarily revealed their personalities. ------ Sickert's art never gained the status of that of Whistler or Degas, perhaps because it was too derivative of those masters. But he was an important link between those great experimental painters and the art of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, ...."

What’s the point of art?

by Derek Hodgson

Dec 5th 2022

EXTRACT: "One of the great paradoxes of human endeavour is why so much time and effort is spent on creating things and indulging in behaviour with no obvious survival value – behaviour otherwise known as art. Attempting to shed light on this issue is problematic because first we must define precisely what art is. We can start by looking at how art, or the arts, were practised by early humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, and immediately thereafter."

The portrait artist at work: The mind behind the face

by Michael Johnson

Dec 3rd 2022

EXTRACTS: "As a portrait artist, I am an amateur at this compared to the technology gurus and psychologists who study facial recognition seriously. Their aplications range from law enforcement to immigration control to ethnic groupings to the search through a crowd to find someone we know. ---- In my amateur artistic way, I prefer to count on intuition to find facial clues to a subject’s personality before sitting down at the drawing board. I never use the latest software to grapple with this dizzying variety.

Review: ‘King Pleasure’ Lives Up to Its Name

by Sam Ben-Meir

Dec 1st 2022

EXTRACT: "In the exhibition catalog Lisane Basquiat writes: 'What is important for everyone to understand… is that he was a son, and a brother, and a grandson, and a nephew, and a cousin, and a friend. He was all of that in addition to being a groundbreaking artist.' "

How the philosophy behind the Japanese art form of kintsugi can help us navigate failure

by Ella Tennant

Nov 24th 2022

"The art of kintsugi is inextricably linked to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: a worldview centred on the acceptance of transience, imperfection and the beauty found in simplicity.....nothing stays the same forever." --- "The philosophy of kintsugi, as an approach to life, can help encourage us when we face failure. We can try to pick up the pieces, and if we manage to do that we can put them back together. The result might not seem beautiful straight away but as wabi-sabi teaches, as time passes, we may be able to appreciate the beauty of those imperfections."

It matters that Rishi Sunak has become the UK’s first prime minister of Indian descent

by Parveen Akhtar

Oct 25th 2022

EXTRACT: "The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, was quick to congratulate Sunak, referring to him as “the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians”. In the difficult waters of British and indeed international politics, all eyes will be watching to see how well the bridge stands."

Understanding Jean-Luc Godard

by David W. Galenson

Oct 5th 2022

EXTRACTS: "In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw eulogized Jean-Luc Godard as 'a genius who tore up the rule book without troubling to read it.' This is a fundamental misunderstanding." ----- " As had been true for Picasso - and Eliot, Joyce, Dylan, and Lennon - it was Godard's mastery of the rules of his discipline that made his violation of those rules so exciting to young artists, and his work so influential. But perhaps these innovators' mastery of the rules can only be seen by those who themselves understand the rules."

Why Does Bob Dylan Steal?

Browse articles by author

More Essays