Virtualized Voice

So El Parroto is heading to the subway in Bay Ridge yesterday morning when he spies a pile of new Village Voices in their Red Box, sporting a picture of Bobby (he of the Nobel Prize in Literature) on the front cover, and worrying that something has happened to our leading folk poet, even though he the Parrot had not yet read the previous issue and was still hauling it around in his backpack, picks it up, hustles down so as not to miss the R train ( a transportation disaster) and has a quick look, when lo!, what is the meaning of this: Final Edition??

Well, I hadn't heard the news, though it was reported by the NY Times several weeks ago that the Voice would cease printing, but not when. No doubt there will still be plenty of copies when I get home, I will pick up a few more... not! By midday every box in the wide city had been cleaned out by "souvenir collectors", or to put it in the Parrot vernacular, fucking lowlife thieves who no doubt came along in vans or trucks right behind the distributors, scooping up entire boxes and throwing them in the back, to be sold on Craigslist for $100@ - the ultimately irony, as that is precisely who gobbled up the classified ad business that used to be the Voice's bread and butter.

Included in the issue is a 50-page photo spread of current and former Voice writers, photographers, and staff members, and as if almost half a century of reading it weren't enough to move me, what jumped out was how many writers in even this grossly incomplete album were familiar names, people who had continually given me reason to cheer, scream or shake my head in sympathy over so many years. Even more than the muckrakers were the music and film reviewers, people I would rarely agree with wholeheartedly but whose sense of engagement always motivated one to think, react, care about the latest indie film or unknown punk rock band.

That is was incomplete was driven home to me when I noticed they did not have a photo of my fellow philosopher Peter Kivy, who I distinctly recall having told me he was the Voice's classical music critic before he became the world's leading philosopher of classical music. Just to make sure, I checked his Wikipedia entry, which sadly did not have much of a bio and did not confirm his tenure at the Voice. So someone who knows for sure one way or the other, please correct that or correct me.

Meanwhile, after all the great photo spreads in the ultimate hard copy, it's that cover that sums the whole thing up. You see, Voice photographer, Fred McDarrah snapped the photo outside the VV offices one day some 52 years ago, clearly a candid shot, when Dylan was not yet Dylan and might still hang out on a bench in public without being mobbed, and he just gives McDarrah a casual salute, "Yo", as he raises his camera. But now the gesture comes to symbolize both a salute to the journalists of the Voice, which is largely what this issue is, and a way of saying "Goodbye" to the newspaper, from someone who became all but a stand-in for the very concept of Greenwich Village. Now, that is an absolutely brilliant use of an archive photograph, as it works in half a dozen ways: as an alluring cover photo, a representation of the neighborhood that gave the Voice a raison d'etre, a nod to the photographers, writers and editors who made it matter, a wistful farewell to the classic version of the paper, a recognition of the symbiosis between Dylan, music and journalism, and a final nod to the man himself who rose to greatness on the same wave of Sixties culture that the Voice did.

This final print edition also reminds me how different the newsstands of New York City were when I was a kid. Then, you would not only find daily editions of The New York Times, the Daily News, and the very liberal New York Post for sale, but also the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American and the World Telegram & Sun - each of their names signifying the collapse or merger of two or more formerly independent New York newspapers. Half of them have been gone for a while, and those that remain are ever more dependent on web-based revenue and ancillary enterprises to survive. The Voice was the only tabloid I had much use for any more, and now it's gone from the sidewalks. I still get the Times delivered on weekends, much to my considerably younger wife's consternation. If they give up the ghost - or rather, become virtual ghosts of their former physical selves - it will be the not very happy end of an era.

So I'm sad to see the print VV go... I like to hold things in my hand, like books and newspapers and worms and... well, okay, not worms, except when I've got the munchies. But yes, matter matters, and virtual voices are never as rich as real ones. Squawck!

No Bells for Dylan?

Stephen King and Salman Rushdie say "yay". But Gary Shteyngart and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Dockers) say "nay". Jodi Picault says "huh?" And their respective fans say, why not Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami?

And all I want to say is that the Swedish Academy's “ill-conceived nostalgia wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile-gibbering hippies” (Welsh) shows that they understand American culture better than a lot of Americans, and literary culture better than many writers.

Prizes like the Nobel should not go to writers just because they are good. They are supposed to have done something with their work, brought about a cultural revolution or at least a better world through their gift of writing. Dylan has done all that and more. He took something that had not been considered an art form since at least the great English and Scottish ballads collected by Frances James Child, if not since ancient times, and he made it an art form and set a new standard by which the writing of lyrics is judged.

In the process he influenced an entire culture, becoming, even if unwillingly, the bard of an entire generation and the poet of American popular culture. Because Dylan wrote songs like "Gates of Eden" others would find the straightjacket of "straight" songwriting lifted, and John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen and so many others could exercise their extraordinary talents in a way that might not have happened if Dylan had not set the stage for it.

Dylan prepared the audience for the idea that poetic freedom belonged to the songwriter as to any other writer. Now the lyrics were not just a backdrop for musical creativity, of which there has always been plenty, but an art form in themselves that had to be listened to, aesthetically appreciated and intellectually interpreted. It is really hard to overestimate how deeply this penetrated into the culture, knocking down walls between high and low, popular and "fine" art in the same way that Andy Warhol did; and is anyone still questioning whether Warhol is really a great artist?

Dylan also stands at a great cultural nexus, a meeting of the folk tradition, Beat culture, the antiwar and Civil Rights movements and the hippie generation. He is just there, wherever there might be, the center of it all. That is why he is such an important figure. Not because he wrote a lot of songs, many of which (at least in his early work) utilize existing folk and country song melodies; because he channeled the spirit of so many cultural trends and made many of them matter more through his lyrics.

And let's not forget Tarantula, which among other things pioneered the concept of microfiction before microfiction was a thing; and the Chronicles, Vol. 1, which is probably the backdrop to a more aesthetic as well as more personal turn in rock memoirs, before Patti Smith and Keith Richards and many others got on that bandwagon.

There is nothing funny or overstated or off base about Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for literature; what is pretty funny is the sour grapes and snide comments from people whose contributions, not to be slighted in themselves, are barely a shadow of Dylan's work. That is not to say that authors like Don DeLillo are not deserving of such a prize; that all depends on who else is in the running. Plenty of great authors have failed to receive a Nobel Prize, and even more will fail to do so since the committee's horizon has been expanded beyond Europe and the Americas and now includes writers from all over the world. Those who do will have to stand out more. DeLillo, Murakami, Alice Munro who got it in 2013, they stand out. But none moreso than Dylan.

Gary, you are probably not in the running, and your diagnosis is a bit off: it is not hard to read books, it is hard to listen to funny authors pouting. Irvine, compared with your gallbladder those Swedish prostates don't bother me much. Jodi, sure, you can get a Grammy, just set your books to music as well as Dylan set his music to lyrics. A cinch.

Let's keep in mind that the prize has not always gone to writers of fiction or poetry. The second Nobel Prize in Literature went to a historian. Several times the prize went to a philosopher. Quite a few went to playwrights. Dylan correctly asks whether Shakespeare imagined that in his plays he was creating "literature". Probably not, he surmises. Point well taken.

Enough second-guessing already. Something great has happened, a deserving artist has gotten the recognition he deserved, in whatever form it came. We knew that Dylan was world-changing and life-changing and now the world knows it too. His acceptance letter is more proof of that, a text of deeply moving and intellectually deep observations about himself, literature and Nobel Prizes. If he gets a prize for his artwork no one should regret that either. Ring them bells, as Gordon Lightfoot put it. A towering figure in every way.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no telling who that it's naming
For the loser now will be later to win
Cause the times they are a-changing


[Re-posted on 9/28/2018 after correcting several typos, including a reference to Alice Munro receiving the Nobel Prize in "1913" - 18 years before she was born.]

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize, and the Parrot Wins Prescience Prize

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature! This was worth getting up early for!

Dylan, who already won a special award from the Pulitzer Prize committee, has been mentioned before in connection with the big magilla of literary prizes. So it would not be especially interesting if I had squawked it again. But on September 19th I sent a letter to the editors of Poets and Writers magazine in response to a reference to Dylan in one of their features. Since they have not responded, much less shown any sign that they would publish it, I'm reproducing the entire text here:

Dear Editor,


Poets and Writers is a source of essential advice and deep insights into the writing process - the reason I have subscribed almost continuously since the time I first thought about trying to publish my creative writing. But as with any forum that dispenses literary advice it is also sometimes a source of narrow-minded prejudices. Such dubious views are sometimes found, for example, in "The Aha! Moment", where agents, editors and others point to what they did or didn't like about a story, a query letter, or in the latest (Sept/Oct) issue, an MFA admissions essay. Commenting on a candidate's use of an alleged quotation from Bob Dylan - "The purpose of art is to stop time" - Kate Daniels of the Vanderbilt University MFA program writes: "...I'm thrown off a bit by the reference to Bob Dylan at the end of the paragraph - why didn't she find a poet's quote on this rather frequent topic in literature[?]..." This comment just about stopped my breathing, if not time. First I had to find the source of the alleged quote, which, as far as I can tell, is an interview conducted by Allen Ginsberg in the journal Telegraph (#33, Summer 1989) on the subject of Dylan's film, Reynaldo and Clara. Ginsberg begins by asking Dylan, "What attracts you, as a poet, to movies?". Well, there's "a poet's quote", if you will. The Dylan quote itself does not actually exist, though it is a close paraphrase of some things Dylan had to say about his film. Next, I wondered if Daniels is simply ignorant of the existence of Tarantula, Dylan's 1971 collection that interleaves experimental poetry, micro-fiction and memoir; though an even greater worry is that she may be implying a  critical judgment of that book that would end up removing the label "poetry" from an awful lot of work whose poetic credentials we take for granted. Furthermore, is Daniels judging prospective (and current?) MFA students on a definition of poetry so narrow that verses like Dylan's do not count as poetry? That would be a pity, for I strongly suspect that history will not sustain her view. The "extraordinary poetic power" of Dylan's "lyrical compositions" has been cited by the Pulitzer Prize committee; his writing has been the subject of an in-depth literary analysis by Christopher Ricks and various philosophical works and the like. In the end, though, whatever may be the status of Dylan as a "poet" in some formal sense, the notion that he is not a sufficiently respectable literary artist to be a fine source of a quote on the purpose of art is very hard to accept. I should think there are few people on earth more qualified to offer their two cents on that subject than Bob Dylan, who is not only considered one of the greatest musicians and lyricists of all time but has also published six books of drawings, many of which have been exhibited in galleries and museums. No offense to Tennyson, Baudelaire, Stevens or whoever Daniels might be thinking of, but few people in the history of the arts carry quite the same authority as Bob Dylan.

No, I did not sign it "Sincerely, Parrot". I guess they don't need to publish it now anyway, since the good old Swedes have said it so elegantly for me.

Cold Plagiarism, or Your Grammie's Calling

The parrot was looking around for an opening to reclaim his spot in the cultural jungle, when what does he espy from his new lamppost in Bay Ridge but a New Yorker blog regarding the alleged filching of a certain guitar intro to the usual top contender for Greatest Rock and Roll Song of All Time. That would be... think carefully... Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator"? Warm... Blue Oyster Cult's "Stairway to the Stars"? Warmer... Traffic, "Heaven is in Your Mind"? It seems to be on the tip of your tongue. Give up? Okay, think of Led Zeppelin's 10 best songs and you will probably, towards the bottom of the list, recall a tune called "Stairway to Heaven".

Now, think of Zep's 10 most plagiarized songs, and you will probably, towards the bottom of the list... (you can finish that one).

So I read this piece by Alex Ross and I can't help feeling that he misses the whole point. What he wants to do is give us a $2 music lesson on why the guitar intro of STH is not actually plagiarized from Spirit's "Taurus", and a list of other songs and classical sources that use the same chromatically descending bass line. Whereas my take on this and every other musical plagiarism case is basically, if it sounds like one is a substitute for the other with a few musically insignificant changes, and there is a history that demonstrates the later composer had access to the earlier composition, then it is plagiarized, and if either of those are not true, then it's not. The second condition is certainly met, in the STH case; the first is certainly not. You would not notice more than the vaguest similarity between the two intros if someone had not filed a suit hoping to win something slightly better than the lottery.

This is clearly a case of bandwagon litigation: Zep's generous borrowings are legendary by now, and they have in some cases been forced to give credit where credit is definitely due. The only thing due to Spirit or Michael Skidmore is a historical glance over the shoulder for being among the numerous users of a common bit of counterpoint. Compare Page's "Black Mountain Side" with Bert Jansch's considerably earlier performance of "Black Waterside" and you can hear what sounds like note for note copying of the arrangement for extended passages. (I heard Jansch play it in Brooklyn a few years before he died and it was cleaner than he was on this YouTube video, which brought out the similarity even more.) Page said somewhere that the tune was "going around the clubs" at the time. Regardless, he copied Jansch's arrangement without giving credit. Jansch never sued, though. Skidmore's attempt to spirit away part of the fortune Page & Plant made on Stairway is just crass golddigging.

Now, I could stop there, but I won't, and here's why. As I was thinking about contributing a few words to this glittering debate I went through my earlier posts to see if I had written anything on plagiarism in rock before - mainly to make sure I didn't grossly contradict myself (though parrots tend to be forgiven for such things). But all I found was this unpublished draft, which I found so funny at points that I figured let me just go ahead and publish it.Timely it's not - seems to have been written in 2009 or not long after - but then again, in light of the present plagiarism shindig, it almost is. Ross also mentions the similar spat between the Marvin Gaye family and Robin Thicke-Pharrell Williams' over "Blurred Lines". I don't get much out of that comparison either. Not like Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy", which a YouTube poster called out as sharing a melody with 4 Non Blondes' "What's Going On?" No lawsuit there yet, as far as I know. There seems to be a pattern here.

Well, if you like this sort of f stuff, read on. Here, more or less unexpurgated except for a few comments [in brackets] is what I wrote on this general subject a few years ago.

[Begin earlier draft] 
Let me start with a trivia question: In what year did Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Metallica, Robert Plant, B.B. King, George Strait, Randy Brecker, The Eagles, Bela Fleck, Al Green, Mickey Hart, They Might Be Giants, Peter Gabriel, John Williams, BeauSoleil, Burning Spear, George Carlin, Bernard Haitink and Peter Bogdanovitch all win Grammy awards? 1979 you say? A little too early for Metallica. 1989? Come on, be brave. Try 2009. Um, deep catalogue, anyone? Or, as the judicious Ben Sisario put it for the Times, "the awards followed a familiar Grammy pattern, in which soft, reverent material beats out more aggressive and youthful music". [Metallica?] Read: the music your Grandma listens to beats the music you listen to. Isn't that why they call them the "Grammies"? [I guess this formula would not apply so well to Kendrick Lamar!]

So what could be more soft and reverent than Chris Martin and his band of Christmas carollers? Or is that snow angels? Well, as it turns out, the sandman is softer than the snowman. So Raising Sand, the odd, willowy, unclassifiable collection of soporific songs by the former Zep frontman and the country music's femme fiddle Alison Krauss got a whole lotta love from the Recording Academy, at the expense of Coldplay's Viva la Vida, which had to settle for Best Rock Album (which it certainly isn't), Song of the Year (which it probably is) and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group (which is so impossible to define that it could have gone to any n-some under the sun, where n > 1). At least Coldplay, though they've been around for a decade, is only on their 4th album, and at least it is probably their best, though you may infer that I don't think that says very much. Radiohead, who allegedly played their first gig in 1986, and recorded their one solid album (The Bends) in 1995 [yes, I know Kid A has its fans - I'm not one of them], walked off with the Alternative award, their third nomination and second award in that category. If there are any Academy members listening, please note for future reference that this category is supposed to identify tasteful alternative music, not music that is an alternative to taste. Perhaps selling out Madison Square Garden is now a quid pro quo for acceptable "alternative" offerings. OK, The Mars Volta got some yellow metallic object for Hard Rock Performance, as did the Kings of Leon (a safer bet) for Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. At least it wasn't the Killers, whose trite little pop number about humans and "dancer" has "we wants a Grammy" written all over it (you're welcome for the missing "s").

Okay, Grammie is stuck in a ditch, and where does that leave Coldplay? Helping to dig her out? But they have some digging of their own to do. With shovel number one they will have to try to convince the judge that they did not swipe the tune from "Viva la Vida" from Joe Satriani's wordless guitar piece "If I Could Fly". Shovel number two may be just a playground scoop, enough to bury the claim by the Brooklyn band Creaky Boards that Coldplay's hit tune borrowed some ideas from their song "The Songs I Didn't Write"(!). Shovel number three is a mere teaspoon, all they'll need to deal with my suggestion that their song "Clocks" bears more than a passing resemblance to Dylan's well-known "You Ain't Going Nowhere" (on his Greatest Hits Vol.2, at least one Dylan tribute album, The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and also on The Basement Tapes, though that version is more chanted than sung). Of course there is the obvious nod in U2's direction with some of Coldplay's recent rhythm tracks, and the fact that they frequently sound like a poor man's Moody Blues. Influence, you know...

What is very striking here is that while the RIAA is out filing suits against 12-year-olds for copyright violation, their friends in the Recording Academy are perfectly happy to hand out awards for material whose originality has been challenged - very publicly in the case of the Satriani tune.

Is there a smoking gun here? Is there anything to worry about here? You can state the case for a negative answer very simply. If every case of obvious similarity in popular music resulted in a plagiarism charge and maybe a copyright infringement lawsuit, there wouldn't be many artists left standing. Not every ripoff is as famous as George Harrison's rather blatant adaptation of "She's So Fine" for the Indian mysticism market, or Zep's numerous assaults on the blues and folk repertory, or Dylan's liberal use of standards from below the Mason Dixon line, or Johnny Cash's hommage to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice..." in "Understand Your Man"... There was, for example, 10CC's pretty shameless copying of Jacques Brel's "Sons of..." in "The Film of My Love", an obscure tune at the end of The Original Soundtrack. There's a ton of this stuff going on. And you can extend that to literature, going all the way back to St. Augustine, apparently, or Anthony Trollope if you prefer. This is a way of writing off plagiarism as a moral issue in general, and in pop music in particular. You just look at the volume of it, and say it's common practice, and that's that. Kind of the way, when I was teaching, some students from old Soviet-bloc countries used to tell me about plagiarizing their papers: it's normal, everybody does it, why do you have a problem with it?

The other way of looking at it is this: there's a hell of a lot of room left for creativity in popular music, even if it sometimes doesn't seem that way due to the endlessly repetitive nature of major label releases and the volume of imitations ("Is that the All American Rejects on the radio or is that some new release from Green Day?" "Did he say this song is by the Stone Temple Pilots? Gee, it sounds just like Pearl Jam!" etc.) There is really no good reason even for copying riffs and tunes in a way that doesn't meet the cutoff for copyright infringement; it may not be illegal, but it's unethical and embarrassing. No author has to copy existing texts to say something, and allusion is of questionable value to the masses who don't get it, so why not stick with originality all the way through?

Well, there you have the two poles, what to do, what to do? To me, the first and most important step is simple, honest and more or less painless: credit your sources. "So I was listening to this Satriani album right after I dropped in on a gig by the Creaky Boards and suddenly I started putting together in my head what I heard and it came out as this song. Thanks to Joe and Creaky." Second, if there is any doubt whatsoever about how close you are to what came before, pay the mechanical rights. It costs very little to pay the rights to a couple of songs on an album; it's good for the artist you (may have) borrowed from, and it keeps you honest. Third, make sure you are really adding value to the material you started with, otherwise just call it a cover, or get your own music.

The first two of these are simple. It's the third that creates all the ruckus. When an artist thinks he has added enough value to some existing material, the tendency is to call it his own, reduce the appropriated source to "influence", and forget the niceties. But when is that the case? It can be a very tough judgment to make. For example, I don't think Billy Bragg adds much to Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" in his song "Ideology"; it's a ripoff, to my ears, same tune with lyrics that repeat the idea if not the exact content of Dylan's song. So, should Bragg have credited Dylan? Probably, but... then there is the possibility (actually just presented as fact in the Wikipedia entry on "Chimes of Freedom") that Dylan got the basis of the song from Dave Van Ronk... who got it from his Mom... who got it from who knows where... To my knowledge, Dylan has never sued anyone for copyright infringement.
[End original post]

And to that I only have to add: how many artists have ripped off Led Zeppelin and not given them credit? That list goes on and on. My point, finally, is that these petty, vague, ultimately very subjective claims of copyright infringement are morally and aesthetically contemptible. I once knew a photographer who sued an artist who had taken one of his photographs, painted the scene, and sold that painting. That is pretty obnoxious, but even photographs of other photographs have been upheld as original works of art. You've got to do better than that to demonstrate mere copying. I am not convinced that most cases of alleged musical plagiarism amount to much.