tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/bob-dylan-18407/articlesBob Dylan – The Conversation2023-08-23T21:22:35Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2114052023-08-23T21:22:35Z2023-08-23T21:22:35ZThe Band’s Robbie Robertson leaves behind a legacy of rich, worldly music<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/the-bands-robbie-robertson-leaves-behind-a-legacy-of-rich-worldly-music" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>When Robbie Robertson died on Aug. 9, his death was well-covered by the media, from <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/robbie-robertson-obit-1.6931772">mainstream news outlets</a> to a wide variety of <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/the-band-robbie-robertson-has-died-aged-80-3480702">music magazines</a>, and across the blogosphere. Robertson died at age 80 <a href="https://variety.com/2023/music/news/robbie-robertson-dead-the-band-1235692172/">after a long illness</a>.</p>
<p>In most cases, Robertson’s legacy was afforded a very appreciative but overall sober analysis. This is not always the case, of course, when a “legend” passes away: in the aftermath of Gordon Lightfoot’s death, for example, critics and commentators piled the praise high and deep, with little care for objective evaluation.</p>
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<h2>Canadian musician, American music</h2>
<p>Robertson was, like Lightfoot, a Canadian-born musician of considerable renown, but it seems to me that his death has provoked a very different response. </p>
<p>While one can readily find references to Robertson as a “Canadian music legend” — and even a tweet from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lauding Robertson as “a big part of Canada’s outsized contributions to the arts” — most eulogies do not dwell or try to force the issue of music and national identity into the foreground.</p>
<p>Even Trudeau’s comments seem rather generic and half-hearted compared to his effusive praise for Lightfoot as <a href="https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2023/05/02/statement-prime-minister-justin-trudeau-death-gordon-lightfoot">one of Canada’s “greatest performers” who “captured the Canadian spirit.”</a></p>
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<p>To do the same for Robertson — <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robbie-robertson-dead-the-band-1234803234/">who made his name in the American music scene</a> — would be ridiculous.</p>
<p>Robertson and Lightfoot were of the same vintage. They were born within five years of each other, in southern Ontario, and had a similar musical pedigree. Both started writing songs and performing quite young. Both were in the orbit of <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/ronnie-hawkins-rockabilly-star-and-the-bands-first-leader-dies-at-87/">Toronto-based rock'n'roll legend Ronnie Hawkins</a> (who fronted The Hawks, the pre-fame incarnation of The Band). And both enjoyed long careers that <a href="https://www.cshf.ca/songwriter/robbie-robertson/">included recognition from the</a> <a href="https://www.cshf.ca/songwriter/gordon-lightfoot/">Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame</a>.</p>
<p>Indeed, both men have been celebrated as great songwriters, but the essential difference, it seems to me, is that Robertson was a more cosmopolitan, eclectic and versatile performer and composer. And unlike Lightfoot, Robertson couldn’t read or write music.</p>
<h2>Touring with Dylan</h2>
<p>Robertson’s stint as part of Bob Dylan’s band through the mid-1960s, as Dylan toured the world with a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-beginnings-of-the-band-getting-started-meeting-bob-dylan-and-music-from-big-pink-91781/">new, electrified sound</a>, was surely part of this cosmopolitanism. After leaving Dylan, this supporting band would become The Band, with Robertson as its chief songwriter. </p>
<p>The Band would go on to make an indelible mark on the history of rock. The group’s loose, raw sound and seamless blending of styles, from rock, soul, rhythm and blues to gospel country and roots, would influence other superstar performers — notably Eric Clapton — to strip down their own musical approach, and develop a new, more authentic aesthetic (Robertson and Clapton would go on to collaborate a number of times). </p>
<p>The Band’s most successful songs — “<a href="https://youtu.be/FFqb1I-hiHE">The Weight</a>,” “<a href="https://youtu.be/-PuC7xyJsBQ">Life is a Carnival</a>,” “<a href="https://youtu.be/00VkP7v-VaM">The Shape I’m In</a>” — were all written by Robertson, and are <a href="https://theband.hiof.no/albums/cover_version_albums.html">the songs most often covered by other artists</a>. </p>
<p>The Band would become famous for its first two albums, 1968’s <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/music-from-big-pink-mw0000189052"><em>Music from Big Pink</em></a> and <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-band-mw0000192897"><em>The Band</em></a>, released the following year. They would go on to record a total of <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/254199-The-Band">10 studio albums</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-band-play-tears-of-rage-at-woodstock-79539/">The Band performed at Woodstock</a> and other major festivals in the U.S. However, Robertson would effectively <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/archives/robbie-robertson-on-why-the-band-bid-the-road-goodbye-1.4734788">leave the group in 1976</a>: he was tired of touring and was reluctant to work with the other members due in part to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/08/robbie-robertson-the-band-dylan-guitarist-heroin">their heroin addictions</a>.</p>
<p>By the time Robertson stopped touring and recording with The Band, he had been producing albums for other musicians — <a href="https://theband.hiof.no/albums/beautiful_noise.html">including Neil Diamond</a> — and was on his way to becoming <a href="https://mubi.com/en/cast/robbie-robertson">a successful film producer as well</a>. The Band would continue recording and performing live well into the late 1990s — without Robertson — finally breaking up for good when <a href="https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/rick-danko-the-band-birthday/">bass player Rick Danko died in 1999</a>.</p>
<p>Robertson undertook <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/90154-Robbie-Robertson">his own solo career</a> in the late 1980s, recording and releasing six solo albums between 1987 and 2019.</p>
<h2>Composing for film</h2>
<p>Of course, Robertson also differed significantly from Lightfoot in that he had a long and successful career as a composer for films. </p>
<p>Robertson collaborated with director Martin Scorsese for nearly half a century, serving as <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/music/robbie-robertson-film-scores-martin-scorsese-1.6932531">Scorsese’s music consultant and composer for many of Scorsese’s movies</a>. Robertson was credited in almost 20 Scorsese films, if you include Robertson’s performance in <em>The Last Waltz</em>, the 1976 film Scorsese made of The Band’s final concert with its original line-up.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film ‘The Last Waltz.’</span></figcaption>
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<h2>A paradoxical figure</h2>
<p>Robertson, ultimately, was something of a paradoxical figure. He was Canadian-born and cut his teeth in the Toronto music scene. But he ended up first backing up the quintessentially American folk music legend Dylan, and then becoming the primary creative force in a group — The Band — whose sound was rooted in American music, and especially the musical traditions of the American south. </p>
<p>Robertson also had a different connection to place than his fellow Canadian Lightfoot, <a href="https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/robbie-robertson-a-transcendent-musician-who-bridged-cultures-but-never-forgot-his-native-roots">having been born on a reserve to a Mohawk and Cayuga mother</a>. Robertson’s love of music was catalyzed by the musical culture on the reserve, and his music continued to reflect these deep roots well into his later years. This happened most notably as part of his collaboration with Indigenous musicians for the 1994 documentary soundtrack <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/6410538-Robbie-Robertson-The-Red-Road-Ensemble-Music-For-The-Native-Americans"><em>Music for the Native Americans</em></a>.</p>
<p>Robertson’s birthplace and ethnic background — Canadian-born, half-Mohawk/Cayuga, half-Jewish — lent itself from the start to what would become Robertson’s signature approach to song composition. Robertson favoured cultural blending and border-crossing, ignoring genre boundaries and creating something new and engaging out of a patchwork of possibilities. </p>
<p>In its obituary for Robertson, the <em>New York Times</em> went so far as to highlight the paradox of Robertson and his music by crediting him as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/arts/music/robbie-robertson-dead.html">“Canadian songwriter” who created the “Americana” genre</a>.</p>
<p>Lightfoot, to my ear, was a songwriter who wrote country-folk tunes that were very much of their time, and that fans and critics sometimes shoe-horned into “Canadiana.” Robertson, by contrast, was a fellow Canadian, and wrote music that was worldly, richly textured and without borders.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211405/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Carpenter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Robbie Robertson, leader of The Band, passed away on Aug. 9. A Canadian musician with a global impact, he never forgot his Mohawk roots. After going solo, he became known for his film scores.Alexander Carpenter, Professor, Musicology, University of AlbertaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2050642023-06-18T11:17:18Z2023-06-18T11:17:18ZGordon Lightfoot’s musical legacy extended beyond Canada to reflect universal themes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531815/original/file-20230613-21-thiwq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4752%2C3165&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gordon Lightfoot's musical impact expanded beyond Canada and into the United States.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/gordon-lightfoot-s-musical-legacy-extended-beyond-canada-to-reflect-universal-themes" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>What does Gordon Lightfoot’s musical legacy mean for Canadians and for the history of Canadian music? In the wake of the singer-songwriter’s death on May 1, it has been hard to answer this question.</p>
<p>The media has been awash in tributes that celebrate Lightfoot’s music as somehow quintessentially Canadian. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, responding to Lightfoot’s death, said he’d “<a href="https://variety.com/2023/music/news/prime-minister-justin-trudeau-honors-gordon-lightfoot-canadian-spirit-1235600917/">captured our country’s spirit in music</a>.” </p>
<p>But these tributes blur the reality that Lightfoot was a musician who had a much wider influence on the popular music scene of the 1970s, well beyond Canada’s borders.</p>
<h2>A powerful nostalgia</h2>
<p>Lightfoot’s voice is undeniably recognizable to many Canadians, and the cluster of songs that have enjoyed <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-1391-a-tribute-to-gordon-lightfoot">a long life on Canadian radio</a> — and therefore in the Canadian consciousness — obviously engender a powerful nostalgia for an earlier time. </p>
<p>With his death, he seems to have been canonized in the same vein as Gord Downie, lead singer of the band The Tragically Hip. Downie died in 2017 and was immediately eulogized as “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/20/canadas-unofficial-poet-laureate-is-dying-hes-giving-one-last-concert-before-he-goes/">Canada’s unofficial poet laureate</a>.”</p>
<p>Like Downie and The Hip, some of Lightfoot’s music is rooted in Canadiana. Perhaps no song embodies this more than “<a href="https://youtu.be/PXzauTuRG78">Railroad Trilogy</a>,” in which Lightfoot romanticizes the building of the trans-national railroad and the history of colonial Canada.</p>
<p>But, <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/gord-downies-dedication-to-indigenous-issues-lives-on/article36673092/">also like Downie and The Hip</a>, Lightfoot goes beyond this romantic narrative of Canada’s history with an <a href="https://maisonneuve.org/article/2017/08/1/putting-centennial-sesquicentennial/">invocation of the country’s deeper past</a>: “Long before the white man and long before the wheel, when the green dark forest was too silent to be real.”</p>
<h2>Nationalistic hot takes</h2>
<p>Such nuanced meditations on the Canadian landscape and Canadian history have been largely lost in the effusive eulogies offered up by the media, politicians and Lightfoot’s musical peers. <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jim-cuddy">Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy</a> said that Lightfoot matters so much because he allowed Canadians to “<a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2023/05/08/honouring-gordon-lightfoot.html">embrace our Canadian-ness</a>.”</p>
<p>Trudeau claimed that Lightfoot “helped shape Canada’s soundscape,” and that he was “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-gordon-lightfoot-death-remembered/">one of our greatest singer-songwriters</a>.” Still other critics and commenters characterize Lightfoot as a storyteller, relating Canadian stories to a homegrown audience: “A Canadian who sang about Canadian things.”</p>
<p>These decidedly nationalistic takes on Lightfoot and his music are curious, given that he is a performer who peaked in the mid-1970s and whose music has long been out of style. How, then, did Lightfoot suddenly become Canada’s greatest musical treasure?</p>
<p>It’s not really so sudden, if we recognize that Lightfoot was a very popular singer-songwriter in his heyday in both Canada and the United States. He enjoyed middling success with his earliest albums in the 1960s, but then broke out with <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/gordon-lightfoot-mn0000667794/discography">several key albums on Reprise Records in the following decade</a>.</p>
<h2>Chart singles</h2>
<p>A series of well-known singles were chart-topping hits in Canada and the U.S.: “If You Could Read my Mind” (1970), “<a href="https://youtu.be/iYuF99VTEdg">Carefree Highway</a>,” “<a href="https://youtu.be/kv8zyBi4ZXk">Sundown</a>” (1974), “<a href="https://youtu.be/phcDgM2Mazk">Rainy Day People</a>” (1975) and “<a href="https://youtu.be/FuzTkGyxkYI">The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald</a>” (1976). These helped to established Lightfoot as an international name in the world of folk and country music.</p>
<p>Other popular American artists of the time, including Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and even Elvis Presley, recorded Lightfoot’s songs, <a href="https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2023/05/02/gordon-lightfoots-music-has-been-covered-by-a-number-of-artists-here-are-10-popular-renditions.html">firmly establishing Lightfoot’s reputation as an important singer-songwriter</a>.</p>
<p>As Dylan once famously observed, <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-songwriter-bob-dylan-thinks-perfect-catalogue/">he could not think of a single song by Lightfoot that he didn’t like</a>. Later in his career, Lightfoot was honoured by the American Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, was a recipient of the Order of Canada and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame <a href="https://www.songhall.org/profile/gordon_lightfoot">by Dylan himself</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan inducts Gordon Lightfoot into the Canadian Hall of Fame in 1986.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Types of nostalgia</h2>
<p>But what about this issue of Lightfoot as a musician who somehow captured Canada’s spirit in his songs? This is a contentious and ambiguous claim. I would argue that contrasting types of nostalgia are at the root of this evaluation of Lightfoot and his oeuvre. </p>
<p>The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym famously identified two distinct — but not necessarily mutually exclusive — types of nostalgia: <a href="http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html">restorative and reflective</a>.</p>
<p>Restorative nostalgia underwrites the kind of nationalistic longing that has characterized the celebration of Lightfoot’s musical legacy — that he is “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/gordon-lightfoot-legacy-1.6829139">typically Canadian</a>,” as fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Murray McLauchlan insists.</p>
<p>Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, does not revel in the past nor attempt to recover it. Rather, as Boym observes, it expresses uncertainty about the past as it “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging.”</p>
<p>Indeed, in surveying the mainstream eulogies of Lightfoot, the tensions and contradictions between these two types of nostalgia are immediately evident: McLauchlan lauds Lightfoot as typically Canadian in the same article that insists the deeply personal and emotive nature of Lightfoot’s music and message make it “universal.”</p>
<h2>A reflective nostalgia</h2>
<p>The very fact of Lightfoot’s popularity in the 1970s, and the attractiveness of his songs to legendary American musicians like Cash, Dylan and Presley, also belies the notion of Lightfoot’s songs as quintessentially Canadian.</p>
<p>At their best, Lightfoot’s songs — ranging from folksy, rambling tunes about riding the rails to tender ballads recounting love and loss to epic narratives about ships and sailors lost in storms — invoke a reflective nostalgia. </p>
<p>His fluid, gentle vocal delivery and simple, direct sentiments lean strongly towards “human longing and belonging,” much more so than they paint a compelling or accurate portrait of Canada.</p>
<p>Simply casting Lightfoot as an exemplar of Canadian-ness overshadows Lightfoot’s legacy. He was a songsmith and a musician who toiled for his entire career — spanning nearly six decades — to bring words and music together in meaningful and enduring ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205064/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Carpenter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After Gordon Lightfoot’s death, the musician was celebrated for his Canadian-ness. But his legacy is more complex than that, and his influence extends beyond Canada.Alexander Carpenter, Professor, Musicology, University of AlbertaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1949962022-12-06T19:03:09Z2022-12-06T19:03:09ZThe folk philosophy of Bob Dylan: riffs, grifters, history – and a terrific playlist<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498887/original/file-20221205-73842-gephkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C22%2C2950%2C1895&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan performing with George Harrison in 1971.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter and Nobel laureate, has spent a career confounding expectations. What, then, should one expect of his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song? Firstly, “modern song” should read “<em>American</em> modern song”, since almost all of the 66 songs discussed by Dylan are American. And by “modern”, we are talking mid-century, mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s. Stylistically and generically, the songs cover the Great American Songbook, folk, rock’n’roll, country, and so on.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Philosophy of Modern Song – Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster, 2022)</em></p>
<p><em>Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs – Greil Marcus (Yale University Press, 2022)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In other words, they are the kinds of Americana that can be found on Dylan’s own records. “Philosophy” is the kind of word that can mean anything in publishing contexts, and it should warn the reader not to expect anything so programmatic as, for instance, a history of modern song. </p>
<p>Dylan’s choice of songs forms a mood more than a method. The book is populated by outlaws, grifters, cowboys, gangsters, con artists, and gamblers. There are also references to hucksters like the Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis Presley’s manager) and the 19th-century showman PT Barnum. And to rubes (or those easily duped). So, reader, be aware: this book is concerned with “modern song” on its own terms.</p>
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<p>Each song is a springboard for two different kinds of riffing. Firstly, there are eccentric fictions that relate tangentially, if at all, to the particular song (though many reconfigure lyrical elements of the song in question). Written in the second person, these pieces have all the allure of someone narrating a dream, which is to say (for me), not much. </p>
<p>Full of Dylanesque imagery, these dream pieces lack the strangeness (and music, of course) of Dylan’s mid-60s period, but they have that period’s semi-prophetic loquaciousness, mixing the everyday with the apocalyptic. </p>
<p>For instance, the chapter on Everybody Cryin’ Mercy by the jazz and blues artist Mose Allison has you </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thumbing a ride on the Ferris Wheel, shooting ducks and winning kewpie dolls, while all of mankind cries mercy – every race, creed, and color – rich and poor from all quarters, all over creation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are some startling moments in these pieces, but cumulatively they have the air of AI-generated prose.</p>
<p>More interesting, are the essays that follow the dream pieces. Like those pieces, the essays are often tangentially related to the song in question. Sure, we learn a little about Townes Van Zandt (his family wanted him to be a lawyer) or the link between <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Clooney">Rosemary Clooney</a>, Armenian folk song, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but these essays are mostly an occasion for Dylan to muse (philosophise) on everything from the movies, polygamy, and lemmings, to language, history, and war. Or, as the dust jacket of the (very nicely designed and lavishly illustrated) book grandly puts it, “the human condition”. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-bob-dylan-used-the-ancient-practice-of-imitatio-to-craft-some-of-the-most-original-songs-of-his-time-187052">How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of 'imitatio' to craft some of the most original songs of his time</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<h2>A gender imbalance</h2>
<p>Like the dream pieces, the essays are associative and riffing in nature, but they are more interested in imparting information. </p>
<p>The essay on Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood begins with an account of the problems that the first sentence of the novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49552.The_Stranger">L’Étranger</a> (by fellow Nobel laureate, Albert Camus) has given translators, then moves onto a potted history of Esperanto, followed by some notable examples of misunderstanding, before briefly landing on Simone’s recording of the song, which in turn becomes an opportunity to talk about the relationship between art and interpretation. On this last subject, it is hardly surprising that the “mercurial” Dylan should assert that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Art can be appreciated or interpreted but there is seldom anything to understand.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>Talking of Simone, she is only one of three female artists covered here. Coupled with Dylan’s thoughts, presumably baiting, on polygamy and feminism, as well as the often-misogynistic representations of women in the dream pieces (climaxing on the Eagles’ Witchy Women), one can only wonder if Dylan doesn’t have a “woman problem”.</p>
<p>But, as always with Dylan, it is hard to know how seriously to take any of this. Is he riffing on the misogyny of his source material or just engaging in it himself? This question brings to mind the arguments surrounding much stand-up comedy (that other source of the word “riff”.)</p>
<p>But all of this makes The Philosophy of Modern Song sound more solemn than it is. The book is filled with genuine, and informed, enthusiasm for many of the songs discussed, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW9cCWm53H4">the Fugs’ CIA Man</a> and the Osborne Brothers’ Ruby, Are You Mad?, the latter of which leads to the unexpected, but not entirely ridiculous, assertion that bluegrass is “the other side of heavy metal”.</p>
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<p>Dylan likes these sort of apothegms: “There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants, and dresses combined”; “There is nothing scarier than someone earnest in their delusion”.</p>
<h2>A lot of fun</h2>
<p>The best parts of the book are when you are in on the joke, or when Dylan is just flat-out funny. Anyone who knows anything about the Grateful Dead would have to laugh at the deadpan assertion that they are “essentially a dance band”. (But since Dylan’s recorded an album with them, perhaps he knows best.) Dylan also does a good satirical side-order in grumpy-old-man-isms. For instance, on food he writes that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There isn’t an item on the menu that doesn’t have half a dozen adjectives in front of it, all chosen to hit you in your sociopolitical-humanitarian-snobby-foodie consumer spot. Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction. Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That observation was from the essay on Your Cheatin’ Heart by Hank Williams. There are lots of instances of gerunds (“-ing’ words) missing their terminal g’s in The Philosophy of Modern Song, and not just when it comes to song titles. Elvis (Presley, not Costello) is described as "backwoods-born but city-livin’, truck-drivin’, hip-shakin’ with a feral whiff of danger”. The fact that the complex adjectives get their hyphens makes it clear that Dylan is havin’ fun with his gerunds.</p>
<p>And this book is mostly about fun (though things get serious when Dylan talks about the plight of Native Americans and war). When I ignored the high-falutin’ talk on the blurb and press release, I got a lot of fun (rather than philosophy) from this book. </p>
<p>If nothing else, notwithstanding the gender bias, the book makes up a terrific playlist. I can’t imagine any reader who wouldn’t discover some unknown gems. Two of my favourite discoveries were the book’s most recent songs (from 2001 and 1986): Doesn’t Hurt Anymore by John Trudell, and Old Violin by Johnny Paycheck, just two of the numerous Johns and Johnnies who populate this work.</p>
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<p>Much of the milieu covered in The Philosophy of Modern Song converges with the American music that Greil Marcus wrote about in his groundbreaking book,<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/574925.Mystery_Train"> Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music </a>(1975). </p>
<p>Being a critic, Marcus is more disciplined than Dylan, but, like him, his technique is based on riffing, on finding unexpected connections amid arcane knowledge. </p>
<p>Marcus has written a number of books about Dylan, including a book on the Basement Tapes that Dylan made with the Band, the second edition of which was called The Old Weird America. The America dealt with in Marcus’s latest book on Dylan, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, might be less old, but it certainly remains weird.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498892/original/file-20221205-12013-lfqzhg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dylan performing in 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Vincent/AP</span></span>
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<h2>A nation’s shared vernacular music</h2>
<p>Like The Philosophy of Modern Song, the title of Marcus’s latest book is a little inaccurate, since it is not really a biography of Dylan, except inasmuch as a biography of America is a biography of its national songwriter. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497868/original/file-20221129-26-iicba8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Just as Marcus did in The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (2014), and Dylan does in The Philosophy of Modern Song, the songs in Folk Music are launching pads for wide-ranging meditations – in this case about Dylan and American history and culture. </p>
<p>Indeed, Marcus generally seems more comfortable when talking about cultural matters rather than specifically musicological ones. If there are any unifying themes to Folk Music, they are race and history. (It is emblematic that the frontispiece to the book is a 1963 photograph of the African American writer James Baldwin and Dylan.)</p>
<p>Given these themes, it is not surprising that four of the seven songs that make up Folk Music come from the 1960s. The 60s was not just the time Dylan became the spokesperson for the folk-music movement (and later his whole generation), but it was also the period when the American civil rights movement became notably active in the face of long-standing oppression and violence.</p>
<p>The two movements, of course, intersected in various ways, not least of all in the “protest song”, of which two of the most important – Blowin’ in the Wind (1962) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) – are discussed by Marcus. (The missing g’s seem less quaint in this context.)</p>
<p>Marcus tends to a hyperbolic style, producing a slightly febrile mood, appropriate to the events being related. He also uncovers, or produces, hidden connections between apparently disparate things.</p>
<p>His chapter on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964) links that topical song (which gives a more-or-less factual account of a white man who killed a black woman and received a six-month jail sentence for assault) with Laurie Anderson’s unlikely art-pop hit, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE">O Superman</a> (1981). These songs have nothing to do with each other, stylistically or in terms of lyrical content, but Marcus brings the two into the same orbit to show how songs can </p>
<blockquote>
<p>come loose from their authors … how songs not only mark history, or even make it, but become part of its fabric.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>This strange dis/connection of song and history is shown in a particularly disturbing way in the chapter on Desolation Row (1965). One of Dylan’s most celebrated songs, Desolation Row begins with an especially arresting opening line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”. </p>
<p>Marcus recounts how when this song was released </p>
<blockquote>
<p>few people knew that in the first decades of the 20th century, there had been a craze of postcards of lynchings of black Americans by crowds of white Americans … postcards sent through the US mail, traded among collectors, sold in souvenir shops and at country fairs. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marcus is not making the case that Desolation Row is about this appalling historical phenomenon, per se, but (in the shortest chapter in the book) he imagines how echoes of that phenomenon might have made their way to the young Dylan.</p>
<p>Marcus ends Folk Music with a chapter on Murder Most Foul, Dylan’s 17-minute ballad on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, from his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). The subject of this song not only returns the milieu to the crucible that was the 60s, but again thematises the strange and complex relationship between history and song. Attending to the way that songs can be in and of history is a way of thinking about that unstable category, the “folk song”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bob-dylan-brings-links-between-jfk-assassination-and-coronavirus-into-stark-relief-135013">Bob Dylan brings links between JFK assassination and coronavirus into stark relief</a>
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<p>Marcus’s Folk Songs doesn’t just deal with Dylan’s folk period; he shows – in a digressive, indirect way – the value of thinking about Dylan in terms of history, and the shared vernacular music of a nation. It is not surprising, then, that Marcus is so sanguine about the accusations of plagiarism that have dogged Dylan since almost the beginning of his career. </p>
<p>This is because Marcus sees Dylan, like the abstract figure of the folk singer, as constantly rewriting the national songbook, giving the old songs “new lives to live”. This is, after all, what he is up to in The Philosophy of Modern Song, which is as much a book of remixes as it is a work of music criticism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194996/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Critic Greil Marcus sees Bob Dylan as constantly rewriting the national songbook. And in his weird, funny new book, Dylan does just that.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1870522022-10-17T12:31:56Z2022-10-17T12:31:56ZHow Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485594/original/file-20220920-3449-34rib1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=979%2C386%2C2016%2C1504&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan’s complex creative process is unique among contemporary singer-songwriters.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/bob-dylan-takes-a-break-during-the-recording-of-the-album-news-photo/74261708?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the course of six decades, Bob Dylan steadily brought together popular music and poetic excellence. Yet the guardians of literary culture have only rarely accepted Dylan’s legitimacy.</p>
<p>His <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html">2016 Nobel Prize in Literature</a> undermined his outsider status, challenging scholars, fans and critics to think of Dylan as an integral part of international literary heritage. My new book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Meet-Imitation-Originality/dp/0817321411">No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan</a>,” takes this challenge seriously and places Dylan within a literary tradition that extends all the way back to the ancients.</p>
<p><a href="https://english.umbc.edu/core-faculty/raphael-falco/">I am a professor of early modern literature</a>, with a special interest in the Renaissance. But I am also a longtime Dylan enthusiast and the co-editor of the open-access <a href="https://thedylanreview.org/">Dylan Review</a>, the only scholarly journal on Bob Dylan. </p>
<p>After teaching and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Raphael-Falco">writing about</a> early modern poetry for 30 years, I couldn’t help but recognize a similarity between the way Dylan composes his songs and the ancient practice known as “<a href="http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Dionysian_imitatio">imitatio</a>.” </p>
<h2>Poetic honey-making</h2>
<p>Although the Latin word imitatio would translate to “imitation” in English, it doesn’t mean simply producing a mirror image of something. The term instead describes a practice or a methodology of composing poetry.</p>
<p>The classical author Seneca <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_84">used bees</a> as a metaphor for writing poetry using imitatio. Just as a bee samples and digests the nectar from a whole field of flowers to produce a new kind of honey – which is part flower and part bee – a poet produces a poem by sampling and digesting the best authors of the past. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Bee collects pollen from a white flower." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485588/original/file-20220920-3660-b2boni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">To Seneca, the poetry writing process was akin to a bee making honey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/honey-bee-is-collecting-pollen-on-a-beautiful-royalty-free-image/1125283046?adppopup=true">K_Thalhofer/iStock via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Dylan’s imitations follow this pattern: His best work is always part flower, part Dylan. </p>
<p>Consider a song like “<a href="https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/hard-rains-gonna-fall/">A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall</a>.” To write it, Dylan repurposed the familiar Old English ballad “<a href="https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/lord-randall/">Lord Randal</a>,” retaining the call-and-response framework. In the original, a worried mother asks, “O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? / And where ha’ you been, my handsome young man?” and her son tells of being poisoned by his true love. </p>
<p>In Dylan’s version, the nominal son responds to the same questions with a brilliant mixture of public and private experiences, conjuring violent images such as a newborn baby surrounded by wolves, black branches dripping blood, the broken tongues of a thousand talkers and pellets poisoning the water. At the end, a young girl hands the speaker – a son in name only – a rainbow, and he promises to know his song well before he’ll stand on the mountain to sing it.</p>
<p>“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” resounds with the original Old English ballad, which would have been very familiar to Dylan’s original audiences of Greenwich Village folk singers. He first sang the song in 1962 at <a href="https://bedfordandbowery.com/2016/12/the-story-of-the-gaslight-cafe-where-dylan-premiered-a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall/">the Gaslight Cafe</a> on MacDougal Street, a hangout of folk revival stalwarts. To their ears, Dylan’s indictment of American culture – its racism, militarism and reckless destruction of the environment – would have echoed that poisoning in the earlier poem and added force to the repurposed lyrics.</p>
<h2>Drawing from the source</h2>
<p>Because Dylan “samples and digests” songs from the past, <a href="https://thedylanreview.org/2022/08/04/interview-with-scott-warmuth/">he has been accused of plagiarism</a>. </p>
<p>This charge underestimates Dylan’s complex creative process, which closely resembles that of early modern poets who had a different concept of originality – a concept Dylan intuitively understands. For Renaissance authors, “originality” meant not creating something out of nothing, but <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Origin_and_Originality_in_Renaissance_Li/1OmCQgAACAAJ?hl=en">going back to what had come before</a>. They literally returned to the “origin.” Writers first searched outside themselves to find models to imitate, and then they transformed what they imitated – that is, what they found, sampled and digested – into something new. Achieving originality depended on the successful imitation and repurposing of an admired author from a much earlier era. They did not imitate each other, or contemporary authors from a different national tradition. Instead, they found their models among authors and works from earlier centuries.</p>
<p>In his book “<a href="https://archive.org/details/lightintroyimita0000gree/page/n5/mode/2up">The Light in Troy</a>,” literary scholar Thomas Greene points to a 1513 letter written by poet Pietro Bembo to Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola.</p>
<p>“Imitation,” Bembo writes, “since it is wholly concerned with a model, must be drawn from the model … the activity of imitating is nothing other than translating the likeness of some other’s style into one’s own writings.” The act of translation was largely stylistic and involved a transformation of the model.</p>
<h2>Romantics devise a new definition of originality</h2>
<p>However, the Romantics of the late 18th century wished to change, and supersede, that understanding of poetic originality. For them, and the writers who came after them, creative originality meant going inside oneself to find a connection to nature. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Natural_Supernaturalism/-ygCZmrJ2E4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=natural+supernaturalism&printsec=frontcover">As scholar of Romantic literature M.H. Abrams explains</a> in his renowned study “Natural Supernaturalism,” “the poet will proclaim how exquisitely an individual mind … is fitted to the external world, and the external world to the mind, and how the two in union are able to beget a new world.” </p>
<p>Instead of the world wrought by imitating the ancients, the new Romantic theories envisioned the union of nature and the mind as the ideal creative process. Abrams quotes the 18th-century German Romantic <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/novalis/">Novalis</a>: “The higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind.”</p>
<p>The Romantics believed that through this connection of nature and mind, poets would discover something new and produce an original creation. To borrow from past “original” models, rather than producing a supposedly new work or “new world,” could seem like theft, despite the fact, obvious to anyone paging through an anthology, that poets have always responded to one another and to earlier works. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Image of New York City street with banner reading 'Gaslight Poetry Cafe.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485905/original/file-20220921-13134-sikp9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dylan performed at New York City’s Gaslight Cafe, a popular folk music venue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/new-york-ny-gaslight-poetry-cafe-116-mcdougal-st-daily-news-photo/514678712?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Unfortunately – as Dylan’s critics too often demonstrate – this bias favoring supposedly “natural” originality over imitation continues to color views of the creative process today. </p>
<p>For six decades now, Dylan has turned that Romantic idea of originality on its head. With his own idiosyncratic method of composing songs and his creative reinvention of the Renaissance practice of imitatio, he has written and performed – yes, imitation functions in performance too – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_written_by_Bob_Dylan">over 600 songs</a>, many of which are the most significant and most significantly original songs of his time.</p>
<p>To me, there is a firm historical and theoretical rationale for what these audiences have long known – and the Nobel Prize committee made official in 2016 – that Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187052/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Raphael Falco does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Because Dylan draws from songs from the past, he has been accused of plagiarism. But this view has been colored by a distorted understanding of the creative process.Raphael Falco, Professor of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1591662021-04-21T10:02:50Z2021-04-21T10:02:50ZPrince: Why, five years after his death, the Purple One still reigns<p>It seems strangely characteristic of Prince that, despite passing away five years ago, it can feel as if he never left. Apart from the sheer volume of his hits on radio playlists and streaming platforms, his performances are a staple of the flow of social media content that conflates past and present. </p>
<p>There’s some irony in that what is probably his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y">most widely circulated performance</a> – close to 100 million views on one YouTube channel alone – is on someone else’s song, where he steals the show with a barnstorming guitar solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps at an all-star tribute to George Harrison. But the moment also perfectly encapsulates why he still seems present all these years after his death, and decades since his dominance of the upper reaches of the charts. </p>
<p>From his sudden appearance halfway through the song, to throwing his guitar in the air and marching off-stage imperiously at its conclusion, it’s a crystallisation of technical mastery, showmanship, supreme confidence (bordering on arrogance) and humour. Pulling grimaces, falling backwards into the security staff, he simultaneously parodies the trope of the “rock guitar hero” while providing a textbook example of it in action – antithesis and apotheosis in one.</p>
<h2>Reinventing the music game</h2>
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<p>This capacity for seemingly winning the game while refusing to play by the rules is what has allowed his persona, as well as his music, to remain salient. For despite his jaw-dropping technique and stagecraft during acts like the Harrison tribute and his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WYYlRArn3g">2007 Superbowl Performance</a>, his legacy retains an air of mystery.</p>
<p>This is partly a factor of his musical range, as well as his distinctiveness. From the outset, Prince was an exceptional multi-instrumentalist, capable of recording entire albums himself, and a hard taskmaster. Indeed, aged 20, on his first album he <a href="https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a35469515/prince-paisley-park-alexis-petridis/">played 27 instruments and clashed with experienced production crew</a>, his creative choices sending the album three times over its budget. His individualism was reflected in a musical output that synthesised the gamut of popular forms – funk, soul, R&B, pop – and at the height of MTV’s power he crashed into mainstream rock on his own terms.</p>
<p>A part of his enigma, though, also resides in his prodigious talent and remarkable work rate. Few artists have matched his ability to produce such a constant stream of releases over the course of his career (Bob Dylan is a possible exception). But what marks Prince out is that the material he made public was the tip of the iceberg. He recorded constantly, taking on all-night recording sessions after gigs, and using mini-studios installed on his tour buses. The 37 studio albums he released in his lifetime are a fraction of his work, the contents of his famed “vault” running to “<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/prince-vault-archivist-michael-howe-interview.html">thousands</a>” of unreleased songs, according to his archivist Michael Howe, including complete albums and finished videos.</p>
<h2>Still in control</h2>
<p>This is the context for the forthcoming release of Prince’s Welcome 2 America album in July, originally recorded in 2010-11 and the first fully realised studio album to come out after his death. Posthumous releases are, of course, nothing new. From Buddy Holly, through Hendrix to Kurt Cobain, they’re a staple of the recording industry. There’s a wide range of types, and quality, of such releases – from works in progress finished off by collaborators to rough-and-ready demos. What distinguishes the prospect of “new” studio work from Prince is his emphasis on control over his output, and frequent capacity for shelving finished pieces. The work will be his own vision, undiluted by latter-day production decisions or guesswork.</p>
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<p>The title track, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJtxSdTL488">Welcome 2 America</a>, is redolent of his blend of smooth funk, angular jazz, pop vocals and a spoken word track that looks askance at his surroundings. With echoes of his 1987 state of society address, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EdxM72EZ94">Sign ‘O’ The Times</a>, it takes swipes at disposable, online culture:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>information overload<br>
Welcome 2 America<br>
Distracted by the features of the iPhone<br>
Go to school to become a celebrity<br>
truth is a new minority.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ten years on, his concerns resonate in an era of anxiety over the effects of the web on political culture.</p>
<p>Indeed, for all that his legacy circulates online, Prince himself was chary of the internet and had a variable and fractious relationship with it, alternatively providing exclusive online releases and <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/2/8882527/prince-streaming-music-spotify-tidal">withdrawing his output from Spotify</a> (until 2017, when his music became available on <a href="https://qz.com/908109/prince-music-is-now-on-all-streaming-services-which-prince-wouldve-absolutely-hated/">most streaming services</a>). This was all part of his lengthy battle to retain control over his music. The same struggle that saw him temporarily change his name to an unpronounceable glyph and inscribe “Slave” on his face in protest at his treatment by his label Warner <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36107590">in the early 1990s</a>.</p>
<p>Ultimately, his steadfast refusal to compromise – even if it meant that there were some erratic releases and an awkward relationship with industry during his lifetime – lends the vast body of work in his vault an unusual authority. As well as the sense that he wasn’t finished, it’s also clear that we haven’t heard the last of him yet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159166/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. </span></em></p>Ahead of the release of the artist’s posthumous album, a sense of awe and mystery around his huge archive of unreleased music remainsAdam Behr, Senior Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1427112020-07-22T04:55:29Z2020-07-22T04:55:29ZTurning to the Code 46 soundtrack: bearing solitude in a time of sickness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347813/original/file-20200716-15-4kdee2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samantha Morton in Code 46.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Films, BBC, Kailash Picture Company</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a> series, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>My ten-year marriage came to an end on the cusp of lockdown. It was amicable – we were “saving the friendship”, we were “taking care of each other” – but it was gut wrenching all the same. We have a beautiful 8-year-old daughter, and little did I know back in early March, but we were about to spend 12 long weeks apart. You see, the in-laws have a property in Portland on the far-flung south west coast of Victoria. Perfect refuge from the plague.</p>
<p>And so, after much discussion, it was decided. They bundled up and got outta Dodge and I moved into one of those concrete cubes in the sky on the outer rim of the city. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348165/original/file-20200717-25-ukqc5t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitch Goodwin</span></span>
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<p>I’m also one of your “vulnerable community members”. Not just because I’m an <a href="https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/756098-mitch-goodwin">arts academic</a>, but because I have a co-morbidity.</p>
<p>Back in 2006, I was doing a lecturing stint in the UK when I was struck down by an acute case of pneumonia. I spent 13 days in ICU in a Birmingham hospice with an abscess the size of a tennis ball in the burrows of my left lung. They killed off the infection and atomised the Slazenger with a fierce dose of drip-fed antibiotics. All I remember was the endless coughing of men – they were all men – many decades my senior, and the horrid stench of ammonia and piss. </p>
<p>I fully recovered and got on with it. But complications occurred in 2012 when the scar tissue from the abscess ruptured and became septic. I was on research in New York, coughing up rancid blood with a stench akin to yesterday’s meat. Two weeks later I had a chunk of lung removed at the Royal Melbourne. Doctors assured me I would have a full and unencumbered life but to this day I require an annual cocktail of jabs to ward off the nastiest of flu variants.</p>
<p>Enter COVID-19.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/art-for-trying-times-reading-richard-ford-on-a-world-undone-by-calamity-142816">Art for trying times: reading Richard Ford on a world undone by calamity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dylan, wicked jester</h2>
<p>If we are going to tip our hat to cultural markers for 2020, this article should be about Bob Dylan. Plague, pestilence, the idiocy of men, playing the minutia of life against some ancient stereoscopic vista. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/27/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-review-jfk-assassination-john-f-kennedy">That’s his bag</a>. Dylan, the wicked jester of mortality and love. </p>
<p>His 17-minute song <a href="https://youtu.be/3NbQkyvbw18">Murder Most Foul</a>, which appeared as if by magic during the depths of Lockdown 1.0, is a genius work of reflexive historical authorship. It spoke perfectly to the perverse conspiracies of our times but also proffered a way out through art and muse. While any Dylan scholar might well cite the lilting dread of <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1qbn6QrHG8XfnqVFKgNzKP?si=KrXRJ-shQuSSUM1lStW7GA">Not Dark Yet</a> as perhaps COVID-19’s most ominous theme songs. </p>
<p>But Dylan sets heavy in the bones, catches you second guessing things; as with all good art, he makes you gulp hard. Like a mad uncle he weasels into your thoughts, skipping about in his pointy leather boots; that joker’s grin. I just can’t do that now. I’m too close to the edge.</p>
<p>What I need now is space. Sometimes you just need some room to fill in your own maudlin lyric. For me, right now, it feels necessary to tap out my own eulogy to the “time before”. </p>
<p>Enter Belfast boy, David Holmes. <a href="https://youtu.be/TMDXTRwAZQ0?t=125">DJ</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/dQdTem-tz9E">band leader</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/0T2MHyyXoVM?t=32">producer</a>.</p>
<h2>Soundtrack to an alternative present</h2>
<p>The setting is a somewhat obscure science fiction film from 2003 by the prolific <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Winterbottom">Michael Winterbottom</a>. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345061/">Code 46</a> is one of those uncanny dystopias – a familiar not-too-distant future – a dream perhaps of an alternative present. Its design consists of a mash-up of locations, from Shanghai to Dubai to Rajasthan, slithers of silver reaching into the sky, interiors framed by neon and chrome, dusty cars sprinting across the savanna. </p>
<p>I won’t go into the plot machinations: themes of surveillance, statelessness and bio-ethics abound. Suffice to say that Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton are <a href="https://youtu.be/9B5_9Hv1-K4">perfectly cast</a> in a story that could be the <a href="https://youtu.be/XPKO7C543ls">Lost in Translation</a> of genetic engineering.</p>
<p>My key takeaway however is the <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/3WS2ZC2lD3g4e8pXgu68qT?si=hMk7Jqd7Q82v0VVWwm90Mw">soundtrack</a>.</p>
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<p>On the eighth floor, in my concrete cube, I have been listening to plenty of electronica and lo-fi lately – <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/5oOhM2DFWab8XhSdQiITry?si=CKcY-PNeQjeWadDNvRGN4g">Tycho</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/2VAvhf61GgLYmC6C8anyX1?si=2gMUw61pSzq9dQ6rqx9Mlw">Boards of Canada</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/47e7SP8MtzYKK8Lm3gEK2i?si=22uL2ntCS9KHRwQybTE4dg">Eno</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/17vHPMmoxN5B8cdhCDeMTe?si=CMDQNjn2QB2JZ0q7AVHxog">Aphex Twin</a> – they’re all in my COVID well-being playlist, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DGpmCMXO0XuZ3QNKY6yUC?si=k11YzXh-TfWczpq44kOaGg">Calm the f..k down</a>.</p>
<p>It is Holmes’ work on Code 46 (under the moniker the Free Association) that resonates the most. It pings off the blank, bleach-white walls and adds a certain shimmer to the quiet brooding of the city beyond. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitch Goodwin</span></span>
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<p>From the opening moments it is both mournful and redemptive. The rhythmic elements are compulsive, evoking escapist thoughts, while mercifully pushing others away. Like the looping hours of quarantine, memories appear, fade and repeat. At once you are riding the sustained echo of a synth progression and then rescued by a melodic chime or a spiky guitar line. </p>
<p>Oh, how I need that room to breathe. To go there and just be, without tracing the progression or measuring the gaps.</p>
<p>David Holmes <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/0yuMGKMei19rQtngxPK4lg?si=9mfBIuhyRTSBJ7tJYtJL1A">has form</a>. His sophomore album from 1997, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/5CVZGhLQA0ndG1tV1G3se1?si=LWN5VFl8S_mWI_Qp_R-XRw">Let’s Get Killed</a>, with its in-your-face <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3tS0GwJmDoPgQaidNPMnLq?si=Vxoik1bETTe6oSqyAobXIQ">field recordings</a> from the streets and clubs of New York city, mixed with crack instrumentation and frenetic break beats is an absolute classic of the genre.</p>
<p>His bold, brash, instrumental remix of U2’s <a href="https://youtu.be/Hu91B_yY2Go">Beautiful Day</a> and his reworking of Rodriguez’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3KzjVgb0rHw9LTwBKaPShi?si=gaP29v-fQoWxomqEYYnd8Q">Sugarman</a> are indicative of his fearless alchemy at the mixing desk.</p>
<p>But Code 46 is that rare compositional work of ambient luminosity. Perhaps I am sentimental, knowing that it tracks the seductive themes of state conspiracy and forbidden love. </p>
<p>And it might be playing to my weaknesses during a time when there is no time. Days seeping into nights like the slow fade of celluloid. A car cuts a course across the desert, the door flings open, a stranger awaits. Sometimes you just have to get in.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mitch Goodwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A somewhat obscure 2003 science-fiction film has a luminous soundtrack, which brings surprising solace to a locked down world.Mitch Goodwin, Faculty of Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1350132020-04-02T12:32:49Z2020-04-02T12:32:49ZBob Dylan brings links between JFK assassination and coronavirus into stark relief<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324668/original/file-20200401-23090-sflu8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C1493%2C1073&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Then – as now – Americans found themselves transfixed by the news.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.readingthepictures.org/files/2013/11/PB_JFK_6.jpg">International Center of Photography</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus has turned the country’s cultural spigot off, with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/sports/sports-canceled-coronavirus.html">sports suspended</a>, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museums-coronavirus-crisis-1815993">museums closed</a> and <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/movies-suspended-delayed-coronavirus/">movies postponed</a>. </p>
<p>But the virus hasn’t stopped Bob Dylan, who, on the evening of March 26, released “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18">Murder Most Foul</a>,” a 17-minute long song about the Kennedy assassination. </p>
<p>Many <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bob-dylan-s-murder-most-foul-17-minute-new-song-ncna1170766">have</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/27/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-review-jfk-assassination-john-f-kennedy">pondered</a> the timing. So have I. <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_y0Sp9kAAAAJ&hl=en">I’m a Kennedy scholar</a> writing a book about <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/11/15/the-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy-and-television-news/">how television handled coverage</a> of the Kennedy assassination over a traumatic four-day “black weekend,” as it was called. I’ve also <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">explored</a> how Americans responded to the sudden upending of national life with the murder of a popular and uniquely telegenic president.</p>
<p>NBC News anchor David Brinkley, as he signed off that first night, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X_z6T9u-tw">called Kennedy’s death</a> “just too much, too ugly and too fast.” The coronavirus crisis may also seem too much and too ugly, though it’s unfolded much more slowly. While a global pandemic is certainly different from a political assassination, I wonder if Dylan sensed some resonance between the two events. </p>
<p>Inscrutable as always, he’s unlikely to ever explain. And yet it’s hard to ignore the poignant similarities in the ways Americans have responded to each tragedy. </p>
<h2>Stuck at home</h2>
<p>As Americans hunker down in their homes during the current crisis, they might assume that, during other crises, people took solace in gathering with others in shared public space. </p>
<p>But that didn’t really happen after Kennedy’s assassination. Most businesses and schools abruptly closed early Friday afternoon following news of the noontime shooting in Dallas. Monday was declared a day of mourning, with Kennedy’s state funeral in Washington. There wasn’t anything for most Americans to do over that long weekend.</p>
<p>So what did they do? They sat at home and watched nonstop television coverage. Over 90% of Americans parked themselves in front of their television sets for an average of eight to 10 hours a day, <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">according to A.C. Nielsen statistics</a>; one-sixth of households had their television sets on for even longer. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">Social scientists</a> noted that television accommodated people who needed to grapple with the trauma alone, as well as those who wanted to be with family and friends.</p>
<h2>Glued to the news</h2>
<p>What did viewers get from their voluminous viewing? Besides occasional actual news, they mostly found comfort. Over and over, in the hundreds of letters sent to NBC in the wake of the assassination coverage, viewers described how emotionally connected they felt to the newsmen, whom they saw as companions in mourning.</p>
<p>“During this time of personal loss,” <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/CHPP">wrote one Lubbock, Texas man</a> to NBC anchor Chet Huntley, “I have come to you as an old friend looking for answers to questions, explanations, and even consolation. I have not been disappointed.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many Americans felt a profound emotional connection to news anchors Chet Huntley (left) and David Brinkley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/promotional-still-of-chet-huntley-and-david-brinkley-for-news-photo/2350594?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>TV viewers today might not describe network anchors as “friendly neighbors who drop in to chat and discuss events in our fast changing world” – as <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">a California letter writer</a> did on Nov. 24, 1963 – but in recent weeks, they’ve turned to NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news in record numbers. According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/business/media/coronavirus-evening-news.html">The New York Times</a>, amid the uncertainty of the moment, traditional nightly network news shows – not the 24/7 cable news – seem to be providing comfort. The paper quotes NBC anchor, Lester Holt, who compared the network nightly news to comfort food – “a broadcast that you remember growing up with as a kid that your parents watched.” </p>
<p>After JFK’s assassination, Americans spent their long days indoors in some of the same ways their contemporaries are doing today, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/style/bread-baking-coronavirus.html">like by baking bread</a>.</p>
<p>In 1963, a woman who described herself as “just a Kansas City housewife” <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">wrote to David Brinkley and Chet Huntley</a> about her inability to tear herself away from the TV to go grocery shopping. So she ended up simply baking her own bread: “I took the task of baking rye bread rather than going out to the store, as I was in need of bread, but I really didn’t want to get out of the house.”</p>
<p>Others felt overwhelmed by the constant stream of news and updates. </p>
<p>“I walked around the block because I felt if I didn’t I was going to scream,” one Minneapolis man <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">told two communication scholars</a>. “I thought I could get away from it for awhile, but [the TV] was like a magnet.”</p>
<p>Americans in 1963 also used television to do what people today have been doing with Zoom: participate virtually, from afar. <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">Ninety-six percent</a> of Americans watched the networks’ ceremonial coverage of Kennedy’s state funeral, and letter writers marveled at their sense of “being there.”</p>
<p>“I, from my home in Cincinnati, was permitted to be there by way of television,” one high school student <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">wrote to David Brinkley</a>. “I was present at the scene of his death. I walked to the cathedral with Mrs. Kennedy and the famous dignitaries.”</p>
<h2>Back to normal?</h2>
<p>In the weeks after the assassination, social scientists confidently asserted that the country would bounce back to stability and quick social recovery. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">Wilbur Schramm</a>, one of the founders of the field of communication studies, declared, “This crisis was integrative rather than disintegrative.” </p>
<p>They were wrong, of course. </p>
<p>The “nightmare on Elm Street,” as Dylan calls the assassination – after the name of the street where Kennedy was shot – continues to haunt many baby boomers. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w16bYZ-4nmE">JFK</a>” and Stephen King’s 2011 novel “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/11_22_63/MJNi0uU8kdoC?hl=en">11/22/63</a>” both portray it as a pivot point that spurred national disaster, decline and unfulfilled dreams.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to know the social, cultural and political legacy of our current crisis. <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/490042-mnuchin-us-will-bounce-back-after-we-kill-this-virus-and-reopen">Some officials</a>, including the <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/03/23/trump-wants-america-open-for-business-with-coronavirus-crisis/">current occupant of the White House</a>, suggest we’ll bounce back stronger than ever. Things, they say, will go back to normal – whatever that means in these already turbulent times. </p>
<p>But Dylan’s evocation of the Kennedy assassination at this moment suggests something more ominous. In the middle of the song, <a href="https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-lyrics">he declares</a>: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> The day that they killed him, someone said to me,
"Son, the age of the Antichrist has just only begun"
</code></pre>
<p>Let’s hope Dylan isn’t the oracle of this new age that’s unfolding.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aniko Bodroghkozy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>During our current bout of collective trauma, many of our coping strategies have mimicked the ways Americans responded to the Kennedy assassination.Aniko Bodroghkozy, Professor of Media Studies, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1056402018-10-30T10:44:36Z2018-10-30T10:44:36ZThe soundtrack of the Sixties demanded respect, justice and equality<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242768/original/file-20181029-76405-t6rnc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Supremes, with their polished performances and family-friendly lyrics, helped to bridge a cultural divide and temper racial tensions.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-International-News-Ente-/0897f662ca564589975e8c01730f5ea4/10/0">AP Photo/Frings</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Sly and the Family Stone released “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7lL2lMWNtzOcf5HnEudNgn?si=Iki3pMgHRYGigF5i_0reow">Everyday People</a>” at the end of 1968, it was a rallying cry after a tumultuous year of assassinations, civil unrest and a seemingly interminable war.</p>
<p>“We got to live together,” he sang, “I am no better and neither are you.”</p>
<p>Throughout history, artists and songwriters have expressed a longing for equality and justice through their music.</p>
<p>Before the Civil War, African-American slaves gave voice to their oppression through protest songs camouflaged as <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197495/">Biblical spirituals</a>. In the 1930s, jazz singer Billie Holiday railed against the practice of lynching in “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/jazz-and-the-civil-rights-movement-2039542">Strange Fruit</a>.” Woody Guthrie’s <a href="https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/woody-guthrie">folk ballads from the 1930s and 1940s</a> often commented on the plight of the working class.</p>
<p>But perhaps in no other time in American history did popular music more clearly reflect the political and cultural moment than the soundtrack of the 1960s – one that exemplified a new and overt social consciousness.</p>
<p>That decade, a palpable energy slowly burned and intensified <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/01/1968s-chaos-the-assassinations-riots-and-protests-that-defined-our-world/?utm_term=.b71ae9680ebe">through a succession of events</a>: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>By the mid-1960s, frustration about the slow pace of change began to percolate with riots in multiple cities. Then, in 1968, two awful events occurred within months of each other: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.</p>
<p>Through it all, there was the music.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.osu.edu/features/2016/the-music-man.html">Coming of age during this time in Northern California</a>, I had the opportunity to hear some of the era’s soundtrack live – James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors.</p>
<p>At the same time, virtually everyone in the African-American community was directly connected in some way or another to the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>Every year, I revisit this era in <a href="https://news.osu.edu/students-learn-a-lesson-in-rock-n-roll/">an undergraduate class I teach</a> on music, civil rights and the Supreme Court. With this perspective as a backdrop, here are five songs, followed by a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/osuprezdrake/playlist/1glThKK9iTE9CRAQ0d9pC4?si=BJgzMNRVR42_cHgRtmhEMA">playlist</a> that I share with my students. </p>
<p>While they offer a window into the awakening and reckoning of the times, the tracks have assumed a renewed relevance and resonance today.</p>
<p><strong>“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/18GiV1BaXzPVYpp9rmOg0E?si=zswsOON-Rqq1mWntenzr5Q">Blowin’ in the Wind</a>,” Bob Dylan, 1963</strong></p>
<p>First made a hit by the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, the song signaled a new consciousness and became the most covered of all Dylan songs. </p>
<p>The song asks a series of questions that appeal to the listener’s moral compass, while the timeless imagery of the lyrics – cannonballs, doves, death, the sky – evoke a longing for peace and freedom that spoke to the era.</p>
<p>As one critic <a href="https://www.npr.org/2000/10/21/1112840/blowin-in-the-wind">noted</a> in 2010: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“There are songs that are more written by their times than by any individual in that time, a song that the times seem to call for, a song that is just gonna be a perfect strike rolled right down the middle of the lane, and the lane has already been grooved for the strike.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This song – along with others such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Chimes of Freedom” – are among the reasons Bob Dylan <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/">received the Nobel Prize in Literature</a>. </p>
<p><strong>“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0KOE1hat4SIer491XKk4Pa?si=s_jCKsCDTV-MPBpQsOcQ4w">A Change is Gonna Come</a>,” Sam Cooke, 1964</strong></p>
<p>During a 1963 tour in the South, Cooke and his band <a href="https://www.npr.org/2014/02/01/268995033/sam-cooke-and-the-song-that-almost-scared-him">were refused lodging</a> at a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana. </p>
<p>African Americans routinely faced segregation and prejudice in the Jim Crow South, but this particular experience shook Cooke.</p>
<p>So he put pen to paper and tackled a subject that represented a departure for Cooke, a crossover artist who made his name with a series of Top 40 hits.</p>
<p>The lyrics reflect the anguish of being an extraordinary pop headliner who nonetheless needs to go through a side door.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242767/original/file-20181029-76393-1opcg8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Singer Sam Cooke stands next to a huge reproduction of his head on the roof of a Manhattan building.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Entertain-/0856cfd19a274ac9a9df38a0520d601c/2/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>Showcasing Cooke’s gospel roots, it’s a song that painfully and beautifully captures the edge between hope and despair. </p>
<p>“It’s been a long, a long time coming,” he croons. “But I know a change is gonna come.”</p>
<p>Sam Cooke, in composing “A Change is Gonna Come,” was also inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unlikely-story-of-a-change-is-gonna-come">According to Cooke’s biographer</a>, upon hearing Dylan’s song, Cooke “was almost ashamed to have not written something like that himself.”</p>
<p><strong>“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/307kcWJQNMdiYYKj1LgClU?si=gTWTLeaHTHGhJZTIHVfRCw">Come See About Me</a>,” The Supremes, 1964</strong></p>
<p>This was one of my favorites of their songs at the time – upbeat, fun and necessarily “unpolitical.” </p>
<p>The Supremes’ record label, Motown, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/arts/artsspecial/motowns-link-to-civil-rights-movement-on-display.html">played an important role bridging a cultural divide</a> during the civil rights era by catapulting black musicians to global stardom. </p>
<p>The Supremes were the Motown act with arguably the broadest appeal, and they paved the way for other black artists to enjoy creative success as mainstream acts.</p>
<p>Through their 20 top-10 hits and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_cBv3wzcGs">17 appearances</a> from 1964 to 1969 on CBS’ popular weekly live program “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the group had a regular presence in the living rooms of black and white families across the country. </p>
<p><strong>“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2rOyqEU3frual4yxJymr0Z?si=5zOXUWbKSv2ThFa7pFfbbA">Say it Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud</a>,” James Brown, 1968</strong></p>
<p>James Brown – the <a href="http://www.jamesbrown.com/bio/default.aspx">self-proclaimed</a> “hardest working man in show business” – built his reputation as an entertainer par excellence with brilliant dance moves, meticulous staging and a cape routine.</p>
<p>But with “Say it Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” Brown seemed to be consciously delivering a starkly political statement about being black in America.</p>
<p>The track’s straightforward, unadorned lyrics allowed it to quickly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/opinion/sunday/james-brown-say-it-loud-50-years.html">become a black pride anthem</a> that promised “we won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”</p>
<p><strong>“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7s25THrKz86DM225dOYwnr?si=WRIrWDZbRpKnMr9v-1aNqQ">Respect</a>,” Aretha Franklin, 1967</strong></p>
<p>If I could choose only one song to represent the era it would be “Respect.” </p>
<p>It’s a cover of a track previously written and recorded by Otis Redding. But Franklin makes it wholly her own. From the opening lines, the Queen of Soul doesn’t ask for respect; she demands it. </p>
<p>The song <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/08/14/how-aretha-franklins-respect-became-an-anthem-for-civil-rights-and-feminism/?utm_term=.0a5db56fd9be">became an anthem</a> for the black power and women’s movements. </p>
<p>As Franklin <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17699170/aretha-franklin-2018-respect-song-otis-redding-feminism-civil-rights">explained</a> in her 1999 autobiography: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher – everyone wanted respect. It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, these five songs can’t possibly do the decade’s music justice.</p>
<p>Some other tracks that I share with my students and count among my favorites include Simon & Garfunkel’s “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2LkaNhCrNVmcYgXJeLVmsw?si=FOV9PY_AS9qN2uqK8gh6Dw">The Sound of Silence</a>,” Barry McGuire’s “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1x95pWB3KeK3evKa1VrW6e?si=TllEVkaFSomi_tzqnXnqgQ">Eve of Destruction</a>” and Lou Rawls’ “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6lE3fTHyZgGtT2adZSLYxW?si=8UKuSQZ_ScyoFxJ8hUw0TQ">Dead End Street</a>.”</p>
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/osuprezdrake/playlist/1glThKK9iTE9CRAQ0d9pC4" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105640/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael V. Drake does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fifty years ago, Sly and the Family Stone sang ‘We got to live together, I am no better and neither are you.’ The words ring just as true today.Michael V. Drake, President, The Ohio State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/947142018-10-26T10:42:43Z2018-10-26T10:42:43ZIn the turmoil of 1968, music failed to seize the moment<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241915/original/file-20181023-169819-18yvdps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">That year, the pillars of 1960s pop music released unfocused, confused albums.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/broken-guitar-neck-748856833">Thitkorn Krireuk/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>While the first half of 1968 was a series of explosive moments – the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/01/29/580811124/military-victory-but-political-defeat-the-tet-offensive-50-years-later">Tet Offensive</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90330162">Paris protests</a>, the assassinations of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/15/kings-assassination-shaped-americas-identity-50-years-ago-and-continues-to-shape-it-today/">MLK</a> and <a href="http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-robert-f-kennedy/">RFK</a>, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/19/the-whole-world-is-watching-chicago-police-riot-vietnam-war-regan">Chicago Democratic National Convention riots</a> – the second half seemed like a car wreck in slow motion. </p>
<p>The pace of the news cycle slowed to a crawl, the shock and surprise followed by the dull inevitability of events already set into motion.</p>
<p>The music of 1968 mirrored its historical moment. </p>
<p>The trends and styles of the previous year – the psychedelic rock born of <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-of-love-sixties">the Summer of Love</a>, the empowerment of Aretha Franklin’s demand for “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/5WndWfzGwCkHzAbQXVkg2V?si=NhW9m-jXRMibXO-vpvf05Q">Respect</a>,” a rainbow coalition of black and white artists collaborating – passed into instant obsolescence, creating a vacuum waiting to be filled. </p>
<p>The three pillars of 1960s pop music – Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Motown hit machine – certainly didn’t rise to the occasion. Each put out music that was adrift and directionless, and each would lose its momentum and see its influence wane. </p>
<h2>Drifter’s escape</h2>
<p>In the last days of 1967, Bob Dylan quietly released “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/2KzCDxKpgLqBffHu1IZ7Kn?si=DNmxv0A3TOCp-pSmsgTKSA">John Wesley Harding</a>.” </p>
<p>The prior year, <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/bob-dylans-motorcycle-accident-1322021">Dylan had been in a motorcycle accident</a>, and his condition was shrouded in mystery. An 18-month period of silence followed, during which Dylan wrote and recorded “John Wesley Harding” with a trio of Nashville musicians. </p>
<p>But the long-awaited album contained none of the piercing anger, wit or wordplay of his white-hot classics “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1lPoRKSgZHQAYXxzBsOQ7v?si=lO9wPjqhT9umbi_G7zMSMw">Bringing It All Back Home</a>,” “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/6YabPKtZAjxwyWbuO9p4ZD?si=FYXa15ipTbaApf00hlXzWQ">Highway 61 Revisted</a>” and the 1966 double-album set “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/4NP1rhnsPdYpnyJP0p0k0L?si=MBSClttbQ5OEgVkn4bPRdQ">Blonde On Blonde</a>.” </p>
<p>“John Wesley Harding” lacked the incisive social commentary of tracks like “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6k9DUKMJpWvu6eFG3O64Lg?si=Q68uFBTXQB-UWYVfzYuUZQ">Subterranean Homesick Blues</a>” (“You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows”) or the razor sharp character studies found in songs such as “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3AhXZa8sUQht0UEdBJgpGc?si=Kt_LNGJnTV6wvdK1ord0Pg">Like a Rolling Stone</a>” (“Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street / And now you’re gonna have to get used to it”). </p>
<p>Instead, Dylan wove perplexing parables couched in biblical imagery in songs such as “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1cbLvt7UrsbVnljXttWUip?si=0p0I8yENTzeIrJv7ozuxfg">I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine</a>” and “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0Fnb2pfBfu0ka33d6Yki17?si=llliBaF_RV6tO_Gzz5Wbaw">All Along the Watchtower</a>,” in which he sang, “Outside in the cold distance, a wild cat did growl. Two riders were approaching; the wind began to howl.” </p>
<p>The album’s darkly mysterious nature set an ominous tone for the year to come.</p>
<h2>The forlorn four</h2>
<p>Like Dylan, the Beatles seemed to be in the midst of an existential crisis.</p>
<p>Following the death of their manager, <a href="https://www.momentmag.com/brian-epstein-the-man-behind-the-beatles/">Brian Epstein</a>, in 1967, the Beatles headed to India, where they studied transcendental meditation with Indian guru <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/maharishi-mahesh-yogi-india-guru-the-beatles-meditation-a8543666.html">Maharishi Mahesh Yogi</a>. When they reconvened in London a few months later, they were no longer bright-eyed youths but four disillusioned men seeking answers and finding none.</p>
<p>After the tumultuous events of the first half of 1968, the group returned to the airwaves with an anthem to the power of positive thinking.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241904/original/file-20181023-169828-gra93q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">George Harrison and John Lennon sit on rocks by a river in Rishikesh, India, where they studied transcendental meditation in 1968.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-India-Enter-/73970b4964e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/5/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>Released in September of that year, the single “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0aym2LBJBk9DAYuHHutrIl?si=B1FwJkhbQBy1_eOugtYOiw">Hey Jude</a>” sat atop the charts for months. The song’s first half urged the listener to take a sad song and make it better, while the second half – four minutes of nonsense chanting, slowly fading into infinity – offered only the notion that “though we may be lost, we are all lost together,” a hymn for a community that defined itself more by grief and resignation than by a belief in a better future.</p>
<p>The double album that followed in late November – officially titled “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1klALx0u4AavZNEvC4LrTL?si=p2VaoAKhR5GWcCkdNLXnJA">The Beatles</a>,” but forever referred to as the “White Album” – brought together splintered fragments of the group’s experiences. It contained none of the audacious discovery and very little of the exuberance found in their previous work. </p>
<p>The track “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3UDmHZcBTQp8Iu8droNtUl?si=5ES_BfHxRmOovpXIP2YPTg">Revolution #1</a>” was the Beatles’ most direct engagement with the politics of the moment. But it was decidedly ambivalent, arriving at the muddled confusion of “count me out in.” It seemed to urge the listener to take up arms, even as the lyrics urged acceptance: “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright.”</p>
<h2>The widening racial divide</h2>
<p>In the mid-1960s, Detroit’s Motown Records had issued a string of singles that rivaled the Beatles for chart supremacy. </p>
<p>But with Detroit in flames <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-detroit-exploded-in-the-summer-of-1967-81065">during the riots of 1967</a>, the label lost its mojo: The upbeat cheer of the Motown sound was at odds with the violence erupting just a few blocks from the studio. </p>
<p>In 1968, the label’s two biggest acts – <a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/thetemptations_islanduk/playlist/1KmAgq98r2vUcHrxUdNdLA?si=nc6_dOfAT52guKvyzG90fg">The Temptations</a> and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/57bUPid8xztkieZfS7OlEV?si=5UwmaYvjTuyH4fVEi1cQSg">The Supremes</a> – barely managed to make the charts, and the few releases that did were dim shadows of earlier brilliance. </p>
<p>The events of 1968 would even more directly effect Stax records, Motown’s biggest rival. </p>
<p>Based in Memphis, Tennessee, Stax artists like Otis Redding and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/2BVYdY4PyfCF9z4NrkhEB2?si=itIAYwifQem-8PUBZGQ-0w">Sam and Dave</a> proudly wore their rough edges and black identity, unlike the polished acts Motown fashioned for The Ed Sullivan Show. </p>
<p>Redding, however, died in a plane crash in December 1967 – an ominous portent for the new year.</p>
<p>On the night of Dr. King’s assassination, just a few blocks from the Stax offices and studio, its legendary integrated house band, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/2vDV0T8sxx2ENnKXds75e5?si=NiDt8UzTRU2MuKfxJWq8hg">Booker T and the MGs</a>, came face-to-face with the racial divisions their very existence had defied. </p>
<p>Fearing for the lives of the two white members, the musicians and staff formed a caravan to escort them safely out of a neighborhood soon engulfed in flames. Though the band continued to work together for another year, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/15/booker-t-mgs-donald-duck-dunn">the bubble had burst</a>: A community fell apart, and the hits dried up.</p>
<p>James Brown was one of the first stars to directly address the year’s racial tumult in his music, issuing “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1sYRkVKdT2ize1HSDCwbEF?si=FCpi_txxTVinsBMGJ4Sayg">Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)</a>” in the late summer of 1968. </p>
<p>For a moment, he would bridge the gap between black and white, soul and pop, <a href="https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/04/05/james-brown-saved-boston-king/">famously holding Boston together with a concert performed</a> the day after King’s assassination. </p>
<p>This night, however, would prove the high water mark for Brown, whose increasingly political music caused him to lose much of his white audience, relegating him to the niche of soul music.</p>
<p>Sly Stone met a similar fate. His 1968 breakout hit, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1MQWtVcs0PKsY4PA6ZvLiy?si=GiAxBHy2Q-WB9qWYQp5U7A">Dance to the Music</a>,” featured a multiracial band of men and women, creating a musical rainbow coalition.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241908/original/file-20181023-169834-1dthivu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">In the 1970s, Sly Stone seemed to succumb to cynicism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-United-St-/69241b44a01c4447a6626929ed4dce93/2/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>But within a year, Sly’s message became considerably less rosy. His 1969 album “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/7iwS1r6JHYJe9xpPjzmWqD?si=dUc555gZQm-0KqD4jBoUCw">Stand!</a>” contained the song “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7EpNtcFGd3yJl0sjgJgqEe?si=rhND2g0FSjWzAK7rcz5IMg">Don’t Call Me Nigger, (Whitey)</a>” while his 1971 follow-up, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/29f2cOueckYE8Nc1pkJjrU?si=zj1iCmQtSqetPeMj_5VkQw">There’s a Riot Going On</a>,” depicted a dystopian view of the future. Like Brown, he would fade from the mainstream.</p>
<p>After the hopeful days of <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-swinging-sixties-london-changed-the-world">Swinging London</a> and the Summer of Love, the events of 1968 triggered classic fight or flight responses. </p>
<p>A few musicians metaphorically took to the streets. </p>
<p>But most fled for cover, going back to the land or looking to God. </p>
<p>Compared to the more radically charged music of 1969, the resigned hymns of 1970, and the escapist fare that dominated the following decades, 1968 serves as a kind of still point, an extended moment of hesitation after a gunshot, just before the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94714/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A few musicians metaphorically took to the streets. But most fled for cover.Alan Williams, Chair of Music Department, UMass LowellLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1038792018-10-02T13:29:55Z2018-10-02T13:29:55ZTom Waits in a cowboy hat: five musicians who were born to be in Westerns<p>As well as being one of America’s greatest songwriters of the past 30 years, <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/tom-waits-9521480">Tom Waits</a>, it must be said, was made to be on screen – and I can’t escape the thought that he was born to be in the Western. He has had a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056827043/">fantastic film career</a> and has even starred in the quintessential (if not so great in my opinion) modern Western: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/19/movies/review-film-rascals-roam-the-new-west-in-cold-feet.html">Cold Feet</a>. Waits has been directed by Jim Jarmusch, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam, Tony Scott, Robert Altman and can now add the Coen Brothers to his already incredible CV. </p>
<p>Waits plays a gold prospector in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/31/the-ballad-of-buster-scruggs-review-coen-brothers-western">The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</a> – which is split up into six separate, but interlinked stories, beginning with the eponymous tale of Scruggs, a Roy Rogers-style singing cowboy who, under a harmless exterior, is a savage killer. Waits stars in a segment called “All Gold Canyon” as a lone gold miner. The film was first shown at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, where it won an award for Best Screenplay. It is set to air on Netflix on November 18.</p>
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<p>Why is it that musicians and Westerns seem so indelibly associated? It all starts with the archetypal singing cowboy, made famous by the likes of Rogers and his fellow singing cowboy Gene Autry in the 1930s. Since then, many musicians have found themselves attracted to the genre. Meanwhile the Coen Brothers are well-known for using music in their movies: from <a href="https://blogs.longwood.edu/musicintheworld/2012/10/17/o-brother-where-art-thou-music-and-its-role/">O Brother Where Art Thou</a> – which showcased the bluegrass of the depression-era West – to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/05/inside-llewyn-davis-review-coen-brothers">Inside LLewyn Davis</a> – which showcased the 1960s folk scene – and even <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/music/the-definitive-guide-to-the-music-of-the-big-lebowski-4168132">The Big Lebowski</a> – where the soundtrack helps form part of the film’s narrative. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks to continue the Coen’s embrace of this musical legacy. </p>
<p>So here are my five picks for actor-musicians you should check out to warm you up for the Coens’ forthcoming release.</p>
<h2>Kris Kristofferson</h2>
<p>One of the most prolific recording artists to appear in a ten-gallon hat is singer songwriter <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/kris-kristofferson-177860">Kris Kristofferson</a>, best known among mainstream moviegoers as the co-star – with Barbra Streisand – of A Star is Born (1976). Early on in his songwriting career, Kristofferson established his country pedigree with songs such as Me and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make It Through the Night. </p>
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<p>When it comes to Westerns his credits include Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (about which more later), Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Heaven’s Gate. The less said about the latter, the better, except that it’s generally thought to have <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/02/how-heavens-gate-killed-michael-ciminos-career---and-almost-dest/">ended Michael Cimino’s directorial career</a> and it didn’t do Kristofferson much good as an actor either, although the film is gradually being reappraised as a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9a7d72e0-f8fd-11e2-86e1-00144feabdc0">misunderstood masterpiece</a>.</p>
<h2>Neil Young</h2>
<p>When Daryl Hannah came to cast her directorial debut, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/16/paradox-review-neil-young-daryl-hannah-western-sxsw-film-netflix">Paradox (2018)</a> she didn’t have to look too far for someone to fill the role of “Man in the Black Hat” – her partner Neil Young. Young feels like a perfect pick in that not only does he look as if he sleeps in his cowboy hat, he’s also got a pretty impeccable country pedigree, despite being Canadian by birth. </p>
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<p>Willie Nelson, one of the all-time greats of country music, also makes an appearance. Worth a look for either of these two in my opinion (less so for the plot, sadly).</p>
<h2>David Bowie</h2>
<p>In both his music and his movies, David Bowie was a shapeshifter, experimenting between genres. Best known onscreen for his starring roles as an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth and a goblin king in Labyrinth, his role as a gunslinger is less well known but no less worth a view for all that.</p>
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<p>It was probably the prospect of working with composer Ennio Morricone that tempted Bowie to into a role alongside Harvey Keitel in Giovanni Veronasi’s 1998 Italian film, <a href="https://whydoesitexist.com/2011/08/25/gunslingers-revenge-1998/">Il Mio West</a> (Gunslinger’s Revenge). Keitel’s retired gunslinger returns home to his son’s farm, only to be followed by his longtime nemesis Jack – Bowie – who insists on a fight to the death and kidnaps Keitel’s son as motivation. This is a little-seen Western in which Bowie’s murderous character performs a macabre Glory Glory Hallelujah that is so outside of what we have come to expect from The Thin White Duke that it really must be seen to be believed. </p>
<h2>Johnny Cash</h2>
<p>Johnny Cash, aka “The Man in Black” – with his southern Arkansas drawl and his catalogue of country songs such as The Greatest Cowboy of them All and The Last Cowboy Song – was practically made for the Western. </p>
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<p>Cash starred in a good many TV roles for Westerns but <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1009052_gunfight?">A Gunfight</a>, for which Cash composed and performed the title theme, is an unsung and under-appreciated gem of a film which has the distinction of being the first Western financed by American Indians, in this case the Jicarilla Apache Tribe. The film received mixed reviews, some greeting it as a good old-fashioned Western, others as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/26/archives/douglas-and-cash-star-in-a-gunfight-with-apache-backing.html">flaccid flick</a> that doesn’t make the most of the Cash songs in the soundtrack.</p>
<h2>Bob Dylan</h2>
<p>Bob Dylan has spent a fair few hours on film, mostly playing himself. But when you read the name Sam Peckinpah you know you are getting a proper Western. Like Heaven’s Gate, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was plagued with problems – and Dylan has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/06/dvdreviews.drama">more feted for his brilliant soundtrack album</a> of the same title than for his acting (co-star Kristofferson’s performance as The Kid was generally better received). Watch the movie if you fancy it, but do yourself a favour and get to know the album which features the classic Knocking on Heaven’s Door.</p>
<p>So Waits is joining a pretty star-studded array of musicians who have donned cowboy hats and boots – and whether they are wielding six-shooters or guitars, there seems to be something about the Western that has drawn in some of music’s biggest names. The likes of Elvis Presley and Nelson deserve honourable mentions, but we all have our favourites, and these are mine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103879/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What is it about Westerns that tempts so many musicians into ten-gallon hats?Martin Hall, Senior Lecturer, York St John UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1023682018-09-06T10:43:01Z2018-09-06T10:43:01ZPlagiarists or innovators? The Led Zeppelin paradox endures<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235069/original/file-20180905-45158-lz4kcn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, performs in Hamburg, Germany in 1973.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/heiner1947/4405597535">Heinrich Klaffs</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago – in September 1968 – the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin first performed together, kicking off a Scandinavian tour billed as the New Yardbirds. </p>
<p>The new, better name would come later that fall, while drummer John Bonham’s death in 1980 effectively ended their decade-defining reign. But to this day, the band retains the same iconic status it held back in the 1970s: It ranks as one of the <a href="https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=top_tallies&ttt=TAA#search_section">best-selling music acts of all time</a> and continues to shape the sounds of <a href="http://www.gretavanfleet.com/">new and emerging groups</a> young enough to be the band members’ grandchildren. </p>
<p>Yet, even after all this time – when every note, riff and growl of Zeppelin’s nine-album catalog has been pored over by fans, cover artists and musicologists – a dark paradox still lurks at the heart of its mystique. How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Led_Zeppelin_songs_written_or_inspired_by_others">plagiaristic</a> – be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential? </p>
<p>How, in other words, did it get to have its <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5cgL1YdlGWR5KfncpAGFQk?si=mkR6CgadTvOE8Dtv3nSExA">custard pie</a> and eat it, too?</p>
<p>As a scholar who researches the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mashed-Up-Technology-Configurable-Culture/dp/155849829X">subtle complexities of musical style and originality</a> as well as the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Piracy-Crusade-Industrys-Liberties-Technology-ebook/dp/B07CHG695Y/">legal mechanisms that police and enforce them</a>, such as copyright law, I find this a particularly devilish conundrum. The fact that I’m also a <a href="https://dubistry.bandcamp.com/">bassist in a band</a> that fuses multiple styles of music makes it personal. </p>
<h2>A pattern of ‘borrowing’</h2>
<p>For anyone who quests after the holy grail of creative success, Led Zeppelin has achieved something mythical in stature: a place in the musical firmament, on its own terms, outside of the rules and without compromise.</p>
<p>When Led Zeppelin debuted its eponymous first album in 1969, there’s no question that it sounded new and exciting. My father, a baby boomer and dedicated Beatles fan, remembers his chagrin that year when his middle school math students threw over the Fab Four for Zeppelin, seemingly overnight. Even the stodgy New York Times, which decried the band’s “plastic sexual superficiality,” felt compelled, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1969/12/07/archives/zeppelin-elvis-butterfield-three-styles-of-rock.html">in the same article</a>, to acknowledge its “enormously successful … electronically intense blending” of musical styles.</p>
<p>Yet, from the very beginning, the band was also dogged with accusations of musical pilfering, plagiarism and copyright infringement – often justifiably. </p>
<p>The band’s first album, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1J8QW9qsMLx3staWaHpQmU?si=wbdRRcoiTRuaRwDy3GevdQ">Led Zeppelin</a>,” contained several songs that drew from earlier compositions, arrangements and recordings, sometimes with attribution and often without. It included two <a href="https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/willie-dixon">Willie Dixon</a> songs, and the band credited both to the influential Chicago blues composer. But it didn’t credit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bredon">Anne Bredon</a> when it covered her song “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/38KeSzb6FZYSogDXpc7xz8?si=4HCMUoNVQdS9-pTWFz62TA">Babe I’m Gonna Leave You</a>.”</p>
<p>The hit “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6hu1f1cXSw7OAqhpSQ2zDy?si=JrIYpuxET4ilAn4fH5Y0-A">Dazed and Confused</a>,” also from that first album, was originally attributed to Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. However in 2010, songwriter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Holmes">Jake Holmes</a> filed a lawsuit claiming that he’d <a href="https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/bad-times-worse-times-led-zeppelin-sued-for-copyright-infringement/">written and recorded it in 1967</a>. After the lawsuit was settled out of court, the song is now credited in the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin/release/5734419">liner notes of re-releases</a> as “inspired by” Holmes.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Dazed and Confused’ by Jake Holmes.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The band’s second album, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1J8QW9qsMLx3staWaHpQmU?si=wbdRRcoiTRuaRwDy3GevdQ">Led Zeppelin II</a>,” picked up where the first left off. Following a series of lawsuits, the band agreed to list Dixon as a previously uncredited author on two of the tracks, including its first hit single, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0hCB0YR03f6AmQaHbwWDe8?si=p5YY3HMKRhOWhpZkzizsCA">Whole Lotta Love</a>.” An additional lawsuit established that blues legend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howlin'_Wolf">Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett</a> was a previously uncredited author on another track called “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5qbVkwfy0RYGFA6hAiIL90?si=UuynT4e_QaW4WS-5lMjsbw">The Lemon Song</a>.”</p>
<p>Musical copyright infringement is notoriously challenging to establish in court, hence the settlements. But there’s no question the band engaged in what musicologists typically call “<a href="http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4194&context=nclr">borrowing</a>.” Any blues fan, for instance, would have recognized the <a href="https://www.lyricsmania.com/you_need_love_lyrics_willie_dixon.html">lyrics</a> of Dixon’s “You Need Love” – as <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7kPohUfkgkASEgy20NQkUz?si=YNW-rBphQraevJBhJNH6lw">recorded by Muddy Waters</a> – on a first listen of “Whole Lotta Love.” </p>
<h2>Dipping into the commons or appropriation?</h2>
<p>Should the band be condemned for taking other people’s songs and fusing them into its own style?</p>
<p>Or should this actually be a point of celebration?</p>
<p>The answer is a matter of perspective. In Zeppelin’s defense, the band is hardly alone in the practice. The 1960s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=W9_8xXf6IeQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">folk music revival movement</a>, which was central to the careers of Baez, Holmes, Bredon, Dixon and Burnett, was rooted in an ethic that typically treated musical material as a “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons">commons</a>” – a wellspring of shared culture from which all may draw, and to which all may contribute. </p>
<p>Most performers in the era routinely covered “authorless” traditional and blues songs, and the movement’s shining star, <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-are-bob-dylans-songs-literature-67061">Bob Dylan</a>, used lyrical and musical pastiche as a badge of pride and display of erudition – “Look how many old songs I can cram into this new song!” – rather than as a guilty, secret crutch to hold up his own compositions. </p>
<p>Why shouldn’t Zeppelin be able to do the same?</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235076/original/file-20180905-45175-155xvvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Willie Dixon’s imprint can be found on a number of Led Zeppelin songs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Willie_Dixon.jpg">Brianmcmillen</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the racial dynamics inherent in Led Zeppelin’s borrowing. Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf were African-Americans, members of a subjugated minority who were – especially back then – <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rhythm-Business-Political-Economy-Black/dp/1888451688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535995309&sr=8-1&keywords=Rhythm+and+Business%3A+The+Political+Economy+of+Black+Music">excluded from reaping their fair share</a> of the enormous profits they generated for music labels, publishers and other artists.</p>
<p>Like their English countrymen <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/6PAt558ZEZl0DmdXlnjMgD?si=ET386SmlTbOvyr3dO9SUcg">Eric Clapton</a> and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/22bE4uQ6baNwSHPVcDxLCe?si=pXw2fD8oR_-kqoXZ3TN5qg">The Rolling Stones</a>, Zeppelin’s attitude toward black culture seems eerily reminiscent of <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/03-04/parthenon-sculptures-british-museum-controversy/">Lord Elgin’s</a> approach to the marble statues of the Parthenon and Queen Victoria’s policy on the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-koh-i-noor-diamondand-why-british-wont-give-it-back-180964660/">Koh-i-Noor diamond</a>: Take what you can and don’t ask permission; if you get caught, apologize without ceding ownership.</p>
<p>Led Zeppelin was also accused of lifting from white artists such as Bredon and the band Spirit, the aggrieved party in <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/if-led-zeppelin-goes-down-we-all-burn">a recent lawsuit</a> over the rights to Zeppelin’s signature song “Stairway to Heaven.” Even in these cases, the power dynamics were iffy.</p>
<p>Bredon and Spirit are lesser-known composers with lower profiles and shallower pockets. Neither has benefited from the glow of Zeppelin’s glory, which has only grown over the decades despite the accusations and lawsuits leveled against them.</p>
<h2>A matter of motives</h2>
<p>So how did the band pull it off, when so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten or diminished? How did it find and keep the holy grail? What makes Led Zeppelin so special?</p>
<p>I could speculate about its cultural status as an avatar of trans-Atlantic, post-hippie self-indulgence and “<a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/45938/">me generation</a>” rebellion. I could wax poetic about its musical fusion of pre-Baroque and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2nVHqZbOGkKWzlcy1aMbE7?si=0skxN_weQ3ii4eTOCkcxFg">non-Western</a> harmonies with blues rhythms and Celtic timbres. I could even accuse it, as many have over the years, of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/the-10-wildest-led-zeppelin-legends-fact-checked-153103/jimmy-page-worshipped-the-devil-153261/">cutting a deal with the devil</a>.</p>
<p>Instead, I’ll simply relate a personal anecdote from almost 20 years ago. I actually met frontman Robert Plant. I was waiting in line at a lower Manhattan bodega around 2 a.m. and suddenly realized Plant was waiting in front of me. A classic <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/293zczrfYafIItmnmM3coR?si=N7X8JJI_Qc-mIbicskrmIQ">Chuck Berry</a> song was playing on the overhead speakers. Plant turned to look at me and mused, “I wonder what he’s up to now?” We chatted about Berry for a few moments, then paid and went our separate ways.</p>
<p>Brief and banal though it was, I think this little interlude – more than the reams of music scholarship and journalism I’ve read and written – might hold the key to solving the paradox. </p>
<p>Maybe Led Zeppelin is worthy because, like <a href="http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/theme/galahad">Sir Galahad</a>, the knight who finally gets the holy grail, its members’ hearts were pure. </p>
<p>During our brief exchange, it was clear Plant didn’t want to be adulated – he didn’t need his ego stroked by a fawning fan. Furthermore, he and his bandmates were never even in it for the money. In fact, for decades, Zeppelin <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/automobiles/like-the-song-love-the-car.html">refused to license its songs</a> for television commercials. In Plant’s own words, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5g9VOUgrn7ozYE3ZQm8w41?si=Z7cuh1OoQvmShb-rjJGUAw">I only wanted to have some fun</a>.”</p>
<p>Maybe the band retained its fame because it lived, loved and embodied rock and roll so absolutely and totally – to the degree that Plant would start a conversation with a total stranger in the middle of the night just to chat about one of his heroes. </p>
<p>This love, this purity of focus, comes out in its music, and for this, we can forgive Led Zeppelin’s many trespasses.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102368/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aram Sinnreich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright plagiaristic – be also considered radically innovative and influential?Aram Sinnreich, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of CommunicationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/869192017-11-30T19:06:13Z2017-11-30T19:06:13ZFriday essay: the art of the pinch – popular music and appropriation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196826/original/file-20171128-28892-fob7n4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Rolling Stones performing in Hamburg during the 'No Filter' European tour: the band's legacy is entwined with the pioneers of black American music.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morris Mac Matzen/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Everything old is new again. Today the Rolling Stones release <a href="http://www.rollingstones.com">On Air</a>, a collection of much-bootlegged BBC live studio broadcasts taped for a variety of programs between 1963 and 1965. The remastered set provides a rare glimpse of the young musicians playing to order the songs that defined their early hybrid sound and telegraphed – much like <a href="https://youtu.be/NO-HK_csGwk?t=2m39s">The Beatles</a> – their love for African-American music. </p>
<p>The recently restored archival recordings map their transition from astute performers of seminal black American blues and roots music to legitimate codifiers of its (mostly white) bastard offspring. From I Can’t Be Satisfied to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, from Route 66 to 2120 South Michigan Avenue. Full circle, full steam ahead.</p>
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<p>The release of these archival recordings, following on from last year’s bristling <a href="https://youtu.be/lrIjMzBr-ck">Blue & Lonesome</a> set and the recent <a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-rolling-stones/2017/u-arena-nanterre-france-3e3c5af.html">nostalgia-laden</a> #NoFilter tour are a reminder of how entwined the band’s legacy is with the pioneers of black American music. From their Delta roots to their electric spirit animal offspring - Chicago and West Coast blues, Stax and Motown soul and early Sun and Chess rock ‘n roll - the old masters had cast a wicked spell over the young lads from Dartford. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the saccharine <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/lfsxC11Rjlppn1kDfNxYBc/how-to-listen-to-radio-2-50s">radio programming</a> Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had grown up with in the 1950s in which appropriating another person’s culture and creative output had turned an artistic endeavour into a form of soft-manufacturing. </p>
<p>Music production became a <a href="http://50spopmusic.com/50snoveltysongsmore/50scoverrecordings.html">lucrative industry</a> with straight-edge white performers like <a href="https://youtu.be/ZgdufzXvjqw">Bill Hayley</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/IEtBdOpM3MY">Perry Como</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/Z8dx0oE--VI">Pat Boone</a> cutting sanitised versions of <a href="https://youtu.be/jqxNSvFMkag">Little Richard</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/Y9wTQsAgktg">Big Joe Turner</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/xbfMlk1PwGU">Fats Domino</a> records when the original renditions were still fighting their way up the pop charts. As Richard explained in the Chuck Berry documentary <a href="http://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article134070984.html">Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then here come Pat Boone. The white kids wanted mine, ’cause it was real rough and raw, and Pat Boone had this smooth version. And so, the white kids would take mine and put it in the drawer and put his on top of the dresser. I was mad. When Pat Boone covered my record, I was mad, I wanted to get him. I said, ‘I’m goin’ to Nashville to find him’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cultural appropriation in a musical context doesn’t have to be at the exclusion of the original artist or the culture from which they carved their path. Pinching musical phrases and stylistic approaches – when done thoughtfully and with a desire to connect with the original work’s unique properties – has always been a part of the <a href="https://austinkleon.com/steal/">art making</a> process. </p>
<p>And yet, as artists like the Stones and the Beatles have demonstrated, it should not be a closed circuit. It should manifest itself as a social and artistic conversation across languages, across media, and across generations - a form of cultural exchange. Although, as Keith Richards discovered when working with Chuck Berry in the late 1980s, getting it right <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/chuck_berry_takes_keith_richards_to_school_shows_him_how_to_rock_1987.html">ain’t always easy</a>. There is inevitably a price to pay, and Richards more than anyone knows the score. For every lift, there is a link to the past – a debt owed and a palm to grease. With every lick comes a nod and a cheeky wink.</p>
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<h2>A medium of social exchange</h2>
<p>The production of culture is very much informed by the technology that enables it.
The Philadelphia and New York disco movement, for instance, were as much a technological evolution as a dance floor phenomena. Legendary DJs such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Knuckles">Frankie Knuckles</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Levan">Larry Levan</a> would isolate, cut, loop and layer sounds using reel-to-reel tapes to create <a href="https://youtu.be/VFjJo4Id0_k">extended remixes</a> to maximise a track’s <a href="http://www.dummymag.com/lists/the-10-best-original-disco-remixes-according-to-joey-negro">dancefloor credentials</a>.</p>
<p>In much the same way, hip hop culture helped facilitate the emergence of the remix as a technological act via turntablism, scratching and later sampling. Inevitably, pinching the break or the intro or a signature moment and re-purposing it would evolve into an art form. By dropping musical fragments into new material arrangements, disco and hip-hop DJs from <a href="http://www.sfweekly.com/music/allshookdown/hey-dj/jim-hopkins-significance-san-francisco-disco-preservation-society-project/">the Bay</a> to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/11/16130976/44th-anniversary-birth-hip-hop-google-doodle">the Island</a> devised an accessible production methodology that would translate seamlessly into the post-analogue world. </p>
<p>Producers like Danger Mouse (<a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/SoulCoolRecords/danger-mouse-the-grey-album/">The Grey Album</a>) and The Avalanches (<a href="https://youtu.be/qLrnkK2YEcE">Since I Left You</a>) and mash-up artists like Girl Talk (<a href="https://youtu.be/HprWyS25um4">Feed the Animals</a>) and Tom Caruana (<a href="https://tomcaruanamashups.bandcamp.com/album/black-gold-11">Black Gold</a>) are the millennial cut and paste inheritors of this practice.</p>
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<p>The digital remix not only accelerated modes of cultural exchange but made possible an almost infinite splintering of sub genres and associated sub cultures. What makes hip hop culture so important – and this is analogous to the Stones – is that in the beginning, DJs like DJ Kool Herc borrowed from music that was not only underrepresented on mainstream radio, but was made by revered funk and soul artists - the so called “<a href="https://youtu.be/Rm3J5640jXo">the sacred crates</a>. Kool Herc championed records by James Brown, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Castor">The Jimmy Castor Bunch</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymande">Cymande</a> (UK), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Bongo_Band">The Incredible Bongo Band</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Huey_%26_the_Babysitters">Baby Huey & The Babysitters</a>.</p>
<p>Music is also a medium of social exchange, we can see (and hear) this in the evolution of not only disco and hip hop but also in Jamaican sound system culture of the 1950s. <a href="http://www.mixdownmag.com.au/musicology-history-sound-clash-culture">Sound clashes</a> were inherently socio-political events organised as mass gatherings around big speakers and big sounds and big ideas. In essence, a sound clash was a competition between sound system crews who marshalled speaker stacks, often on the back of trucks, spinning imported American R&B records and later dub plates of exclusive <a href="https://youtu.be/D3DAHAPLaVI">Ska</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/jPbxW_TAdz0">Rocksteady</a> mixes. It was sonic <a href="https://youtu.be/Emo_R_oiyhw">warfare</a>. DJs and MCs - like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Matchuki">Count Machuki</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxsone_Dodd">Clement "Coxsone” Dodd</a> - became local superstars who cultivated their own sounds. From Jamaican Sound System culture we can mark the emergence of brand new sonic techniques like scratching (Lee “Scratch” Perry), beat boxing (Machuki), the break (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Kool_Herc">Kool Herc</a>) and the remix (<a href="http://www.factmag.com/2015/05/19/king-tubby-beginners-guide-dub-reggae/">King Tubby</a>). </p>
<p>These musical innovations became statements of Caribbean identity. Like African and Cuban rhythms that migrated to the Americas, these sounds became migratory too, travelling with West Indian migrants to the UK, leaking into the sonic palette of predominately white groups such as <a href="https://youtu.be/T_srIE-YAb8">Madness</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/GNglPFYjFGA">The Pretenders</a>, The Specials, <a href="https://youtu.be/zPwMdZOlPo8">The Police</a> and of course <a href="https://youtu.be/nLVJQFJJQjc">The Clash</a>. These would later mutate into more distilled contemporary forms such as Dub, Jungle and Drum & Bass. </p>
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<h2>A cultural awakening</h2>
<p>The release of On Air by the Rolling Stones is indicative of a recurrent theme of the group not only appropriating African American musical stylings, lyrical patterns and performative techniques but pointing audiences to the source. Whether it be in the mimicry of Chuck Berry <a href="https://youtu.be/0Dv_z_99rJg">guitar phrases</a>, the <a href="https://youtu.be/dqiHRYjePBk?t=1m17s">jungle rhythms</a> of Bo Diddley, the vocal mannerisms of Jimmy Reed or the lyrical misogyny of <a href="https://youtu.be/GtRxJDb3vlw">Sonny Boy Williamson</a>, the band has always worn its passion for the source material like <a href="https://youtu.be/gWBS0GX1s9o">a badge of honour</a>. </p>
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<p>The Stones’ breakout tours of the US and Europe (1967-72) are indicative of this dogged commitment to the form. They stacked their support act packages with African American artists such as Taj Mahal (1968), Ike and Tina Turner (upon whom Jagger is <a href="https://www.biography.com/video/tina-turner-mick-jaggers-moves-6816835702">rumoured</a> to have based his raunchy stage persona), BB King (1969), Buddy Guy (1970), and Stevie Wonder (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_American_Tour_1972#Tour_support_acts">1972</a>). As Guy <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/buddy-guy-on-the-rolling-stones-they-were-so-damn-wild-20150707">remarked recently</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They were bigger than bubble-gum … when they came to America, they recognized some of the greatest musicians that I had admired – Ike and Tina Turner, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf – and let America know who we were. They let white America know what the blues is. We owe those guys all the thanks in the world. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The American tours of the early 1970s took place in a politically charged atmosphere of racial division, sexual awakening and inter-generational conflict. A time when white American audiences were still reconciling with the notion that culture was a form of identification, of exchange, a mode of storytelling rooted in race, identity, faith, sex and – after Dylan via Guthrie – politics. </p>
<p>It was also a period of cultural awakening, as a rich lineage of African American music - which had given the world fiercely original artists such as Robert Johnson, Billy Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Chuck Berry - was now being commodified for new audiences by a new industry and a new genre of musical expression. </p>
<h2>An open source ‘cookbook of rock’</h2>
<p>The musical tool kit the latter artists laid bare – open tunings, a swinging back-beat, bending notes, long form improvisation, call and response, vocal phrasings, urban storytelling, spiritual empowerment, stage theatrics and of course overt sexual bravado were all mutated into this musical progression.</p>
<p>Bands like the Stones, The Animals, Fleetwood Mac, Cream and later Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead appropriated many of these elements to design an open source Cookbook of Rock – flexible enough that it would facilitate decades of experimentation and manipulation, yet well-enough defined so that it would require devotion and authenticity to pull off a lick with your chops and dignity still intact.</p>
<p>Bo Diddley, the original “guitar slinger” – and by his own admission, “the man” – was one of rock and roll’s true technical innovators who has a very <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/arts/pioneer-of-a-beat-is-still-riffing-for-his-due.html">different take</a> on this. </p>
<p>Speaking to the New York Times in 2003, he made it quite clear who were the beneficiaries of this process: “I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob”. </p>
<p>Accusations of appropriation have, of course, dogged Led Zeppelin, with several claims that they lifted song parts and lyrics without <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11413242/led-zeppelin-rip-offs">accreditation or acknowledgement</a> (although <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-36611961">a court cleared the band of plagiarism </a>in relation to Stairway to Heaven in 2016). The argument they proffer in their defence, that the pinch was more like a sample and that the result was a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/apr/12/led-zeppelin-other-peoples-records-transformed-borrowed">considerable transformation</a> of the original, is consistent with the conceit of musical appropriation as an artistic prerogative. Yet it would seem that Zeppelin were <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/led-zeppelins-10-boldest-rip-offs-20160622">more brazen than most</a>.</p>
<h2>Cultural forms as fashion accessories</h2>
<p>The brashness of <a href="http://turnmeondeadman.com/led-zeppelin-plagiarism-the-lemon-song/">Page and Plant</a> displays a degree of insensitivity and perhaps white privilege that lies at the heart of the contemporary <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/is-cultural-appropriation-always-wrong.html">cultural appropriation debate</a>. </p>
<p>We have seen recently – from bindis at <a href="http://www.thegloss.com/fashion/selena-gomez-kendall-jenner-coachella-bindis-photos/">Coachella</a> to American Indian regalia at <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/feathers-not-allowed-at-burning-man-2013-9?r=US&IR=T">Burning Man</a> – how racial and cultural forms have been commodified and trashed as fashion accessories to serve bizarre notions of connectedness, freedom and belonging. Most prominently, this is exploited by art directors and marketing departments to window dress pop music by highly visible major label music acts who probably should know better in the Twenty-Teens.</p>
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<p>Indian and Hindu culture gets the full treatment in the ethno-confused art direction of Coldplay and Beyoncé’s promo clip for the song, <a href="https://youtu.be/YykjpeuMNEk?t=2m56s">Hymn for the Weekend</a>, that portrays <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/96505762/artist-challenges-cultural-appropriation-in-coldplay-and-beyonce-music-video">Indian stereotypes</a> – like “levitating gurus, slum dogs, and throwing coloured powder” – in a manner that, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/01/coldplay-beyonce-hymn-for-the-weekend-cultural-appropriation-india">Rashmee Kumar</a>, stifles critical thinking about India’s social and political climate. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Coldplay’s video romanticizes Hinduism to further exoticize India as a westerners’ paradise unsullied by harsh realities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We see this time and again in the mish-mash of Asian referencing in productions featuring <a href="https://youtu.be/YqeW9_5kURI?t=2m12s">Major Lazer & DJ Snake</a> (India), <a href="https://youtu.be/cI1A405jBqg?t=30s">Iggy Azalea</a> (India, again) and Katy Perry’s <a href="https://youtu.be/iXqcjgX-I9E">bizarre appearance</a> as a Geisha at the American Music Awards. </p>
<p>Epitomising this trend is John Mayer’s video clip, <a href="https://youtu.be/NyCst7We6Uw?t=46s">Still Feel Like Your Man</a>, a musical performance he <a href="https://splinternews.com/john-mayer-veers-very-close-to-becoming-woke-before-pla-1793859259">confusingly labels</a> “disco dojo” and “ancient Japanese R&B”. Although the clip is emblematic of this creative clumsiness by major artists, the music press at the time went along for the ride. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/watch-john-mayer-dance-through-colorful-still-feel-like-your-man-video-w475183">Rolling Stone</a> magazine called the clip “colourful” while <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/7751633/john-mayer-still-feel-like-your-man-video">Billboard</a> magazine repeated Mayer’s mixed Japanese metaphor, adding that the Mister Whitmore directed clip is “decorated with kimonos, dancers in panda bear costumes, swordfighting and bamboo trees” despite the obvious contradiction that Panda bears are traditionally from China.</p>
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<p>Music journalist Touré cuts to the chase saying Mayer is “not racist, he is dumb on race”. In just <a href="https://twitter.com/Toure/status/8908255074">one tweet</a> Touré calls out Mayer’s ill-informed approach to not only the video’s production design but even the song’s origins, which evidently have more to do with Katy Perry’s old <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/john-mayer-katy-perry-song-about-hoarding-shampoo-bottles/">shampoo bottles</a> than the origins of global Asian culture. The West’s colonial view of the East however has always been perverted, as Malek Alloula wrote in <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/210962991/Alloula-Malek-The-Colonial-Harem">The Colonial Harem</a> back in 1981, the Orient</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has fascinated and disturbed Europe for a long time. It has been its glittering imaginary and its mirage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pop culture is the messiness between the concentric orbits of personal identity and collective history. When appropriation is done well, with a quest for knowledge or to seek out an emotional core or a narrative truth, this messiness can create new meanings and new partnerships. It might even construct new narratives and spawn new beginnings.</p>
<p>When it is done in an ill-informed, shallow, tokenistic manner, it only serves to perpetuate tired yet stubbornly persistent colonial, racial and patriarchal stereotypes.</p>
<h2>An informed practitioner</h2>
<p>Jagger and Richards are not alone in their quest for authenticity and musical integrity. Many productive relationships were forged between African American musicians and their British disciples in the Sixties. Studious artists such as The Beatles, Eric Burdon, Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mayall">John Mayall</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Green_(musician)">Peter Green</a> well understood the burden of institutional oppression and the insult of segregation that framed the Blues narrative. Eric Clapton in particular, when not flirting with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_(Eric_Clapton_album)">radio schmaltz</a>, has spent a large part of his career trying to perfect the performance stylings and musical arrangements of artists such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_King">Freddy King</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson">Robert Johnson</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Fulson">Lowell Fulson</a>. </p>
<p>Listen for instance to Clapton’s extraordinary <a href="https://youtu.be/70sPbNJt5ZQ">vocal</a> performance and brutal <a href="https://youtu.be/g_WUdmwC9Y8">guitar</a> playing on his late career electric blues covers album <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Cradle">From the Cradle</a>.</p>
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<p>In the swinging London of the Sixties, Clapton’s chariot swung low, he understood better than anyone the importance of cultural exchange – of being in the moment, of finding the sound, of going deep. For Clapton, the moment had to be real. He devised his own version of the power-trio band format after seeing the Buddy Guy trio tear up a club in London in 1965. </p>
<p>A year later, at the Regent Street Polytechnic, the roles were reversed when he witnessed the <a href="https://youtu.be/KPJgtQwtVVA">Hendrix phenomena</a> first hand. At the bequest of manager Chas Chandler, Hendrix was invited to jam with Clapton’s new outfit, The Cream. However, Hendrix’s incendiary version of <a href="https://youtu.be/hMkdhVQMBHY">Killing Floor</a> shocked Clapton so completely that he retreated backstage, later confronting Chandler with the <a href="https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/12/hey-jimi">immortal line</a>: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”</p>
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<p>Clapton was knowledgeable enough, however, to understand the lineage back to Buddy Guy and to Otis Rush <a href="https://youtu.be/j082opb4AZo">and the rarefied realm</a> within which these artists operated. Like Clapton before him, Hendrix’s brief London period was very much about research and experimentation. He grabbed what he could – sounds, rooms, gadgets, people, the air itself – to create the colours he saw in his head and by doing so blowing everyone’s mind in the process. </p>
<p>Keith Altham a writer for the New Musical Express at the time, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/08/jimi-hendrix-40th-anniversary-death">remembers Hendrix</a> as </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a magpie. He would take from blues, jazz – only Coltrane could play in that way – and Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today, if Hendrix were to be studying his Masters at the Melbourne Conservatorium, we would call him an informed practitioner. Back then he was a seasoned professional working in relative anonymity in the hotbed of London with the support of Misters Clapton, Chandler, Jones and McCartney.</p>
<p>Today, magpie extraordinaire Bob Dylan – rock’s first <a href="https://theconversation.com/bob-dylans-nobel-speech-a-splendidly-eccentric-performance-78998">poet Laureate</a>, pirate, cowboy, the joker and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/bob-dylan-nobel-spark-notes-plagarism/530283/">the thief</a> in the night – has spent the last two decades reverting to the ramshackle rhythm and blues template of the old masters. His Never Ending tour has become a quest for authenticity via a re-imagining of his back catalogue through the DNA of rhythm and blues. Purists take note.</p>
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<p>So, it comes down to this notion of being informed and knowledgeable about the origins of cultural idioms that are being appropriated that defines music making and performance. Its evolution is an often lawless and contested process of cultural and technical mutation - a hack of the circuits, a pinch of the code. </p>
<p>In the first instance, something has to be identified as being worthy of emulation or adaptation, and in turn, something then has to be gained from the act of appropriating it. The art form must evolve, diversify, move forward, or – as the case is with Hendrix – take a giant leap into the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86919/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mitch Goodwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Pinching musical phrases and stylistic approaches has always been a part of art making and can be a respectful exchange. But shallow, ill-informed appropriation only perpetuates tired stereotypes.Mitch Goodwin, Curriculum Design Lab, Faculty of Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840932017-09-20T14:16:49Z2017-09-20T14:16:49ZBanning the bootleg: the end of a music era, or the beginning of a new one?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186817/original/file-20170920-920-16nwpgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bootlegs - across formats - have experienced buoyancy within the music marketplace for the last 40 years or so.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The concept of the <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-bootleg-in-music">bootlegged recording</a> has existed for over a century. Bootlegs are unofficial recordings sold without the consent of those who hold the rights to the music. There are many kinds of bootleg, ranging from complete forgeries of the official release to copies that intentionally appear different, for example, through their artwork, pressings and formats.</p>
<p>It was not until the late 1960s that bootlegged music became desirable. This was triggered by the release of Bob Dylan’s 1969 <a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/article/8937-this-little-conspiracy-the-great-white-wonder-and-the-dawn-of-the-album-leak/">“Great White Wonder”</a>. Recorded with The Band, it was the <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/call-me-zimmerman-bob-dylans-great-white-wonder/">first major bootleg</a> of the rock era. The record, which was clandestinely recorded without the knowledge of Dylan’s record label Columbia, was released <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/25-historically-significant-bootleg-recordings.html">rubber-stamped</a> with the title “Great White Wonder”. The two records had blank white labels where the record company’s name would normally appear.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">One of the tracks from the Bob Dylan bootleg ‘Great White Wonder’.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Columbia eventually learnt how to deal with the threat of bootlegs: it released them officially as part of its <a href="https://bobdylan.com/albums/the-bootleg-series-vol-1-3-rare-and-unreleased-1961-1991/">Official Bootleg Series</a>.</p>
<h2>The big bootleg renaissance</h2>
<p>The bootlegged product - whether vinyl, cassette or CD - has experienced buoyancy within the music marketplace for the last 40 years or so. Although its popularity faded with the arrival of <a href="http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/revolutions-brief-history-digital-music/904234">digital downloads</a> and a focus on <a href="http://piracy.web.unc.edu/factsfigures/">data pirating</a> in the noughties, the physical bootleg has more recently been subject to something of a renaissance. </p>
<p>Over the last five years, bootlegged records have been increasingly snapped up by collectors in online marketplaces such as <a href="http://www.juno.co.uk/">Juno</a> and <a href="https://www.discogs.com/search/">Discogs</a>. But a few weeks ago Discogs, which has over 35 million items for sale and “connects buyers and sellers <a href="https://www.discogs.com/about">across the globe</a>”, took steps that could see the sale of bootlegs banned from its marketplace.</p>
<p>In a recent <a href="http://mixmag.net/read/discogs-moves-to-improve-platform-by-blocking-the-sale-of-unofficial-releases-news">article</a> in the dance music magazine, <em>Mixmag</em>, Discogs stated: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We must protect our buyers and sellers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is, presumably, to protect the sellers from legal action for offering an illegal product for sale, and buyers from being ripped-off. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186758/original/file-20170920-905-1qtyi8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Discogs is one of the world’s largest online music marketplaces.</span>
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<p>Discogs Chief Operating Officer Chad Dahlstrom <a href="https://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=39760">said</a> it will be focusing resources on its <a href="https://support.discogs.com/en/support/solutions/articles/13000015000-seller-s-agreement">seller’s agreement</a>. Part of this will be not to list for sale items that violate copyright “such as bootlegs, counterfeit, pirate copies”. These releases will nevertheless remain on the database.</p>
<p>This may seem like an obvious and sensible move for Discogs. But the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/745775?page=4">conversations</a> that the move sparked show that banning bootlegs and unofficial products for sale is not so clear cut. This is apparent when you look into the world of hip hop.</p>
<h2>Hip hop’s cultural drivers</h2>
<p>Hip hop has always drawn strongly and creatively from existing music, and it is this ethos that anchors its cultural value. It’s therefore not surprising that hip hop has a complex history of bootlegging. The <a href="https://medium.com/cuepoint/ultimate-breaks-beats-an-oral-history-74937f932026">“Octopus Breaks” series</a>, <a href="https://cityparksfoundation.org/events/ultimate-break-and-beats-anniversary-breakbeat-lou-special-ed-camp-lo-hosted-by-lord-finesse/">compiled and edited</a> by producers, Leonard “BreakBeat Lenny” Roberts and Louis “BreakBeat Lou” Flores, epitomises the value of the unlicensed product. Described as a “seminal series”, it has been sampled by some of hip-hop’s top producers like Gangstarr’s <a href="http://premierwuzhere.com/">DJ Premier</a>, <a href="https://www.drdre.com/">Dr Dre</a> and Public Enemy’s <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2697271/the-bomb-squad/">The Bomb Squad</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Public Enemy used samples to create some on the most seminal hip hop.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The <a href="https://www.discogs.com/label/848585-Octopus-Breaks-2">“Octopus Breaks”</a> were compilations of those rare and hard to find records, mainly <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/funk-ma0000002606">funk</a>, containing the fabulous percussion breaks which are the foundations of hip hop. </p>
<p>Demand for these compilations was so high that in 1986 the series became legitimate. It followed the acquisition of mechanical copyrights under the new label <a href="https://musicbrainz.org/label/13aa46dc-e630-4431-9472-f773a3950863">Street Beat Records</a> which released 24 volumes between 1986 and 1990. Ironically these were in turn bootlegged throughout the noughties. Their contribution to the evolution of hip hop is undeniable, equipping DJs, beat makers and producers with raw material to develop their practice.</p>
<p>Like The Octopus Breaks, new labels such as <a href="http://www.juno.co.uk/labels/5+Borough+Breaks">5 Borough Breaks</a> and <a href="http://www.juno.co.uk/labels/Originals">Originals</a>, have sought to bring hard to find songs to a broader audience. Releasing the highly desirable currency of 45 RPM (or seven inch) records, the concept is that each release has the original song on side A, and the hip hop song most famed for sampling that break on side B. The Originals’ <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Winstons-Mantronix-Amen-Brother-King-Of-The-Beats/release/2897587">eighth release</a> for example, <a href="https://www.redbull.com/car-en/these-are-the-most-sampled-artists-and-songs-in-music">“Amen Brother”</a> by The Winstons, is backed with <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/910/Mantronix-King-of-the-Beats-The-Winstons-Amen,-Brother/">“King of the Beats”</a> by Mantronix. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">One of the most sampled songs of all time, ‘Amen Brother’ by the Winstons.</span></figcaption>
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<p>A further complexity in unofficial hip hop records come via remixed formats such as the edit, the cut ‘n’ paste, the mega-mix and the mixtape, often having solely a regional or local impact, or given away free as promotional material. In these cases, it is the skill and creativity of the maker that is at stake more than the unlawful recordings. </p>
<p>These productions contain a level of critical engagement that hip hop thrives on – a counter-narrative to the official release and the belief that these bootleggers are, in fact, artists. I would argue that these bootlegged products become true <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/reification">reifications</a> of hip hop’s dynamics. They encapsulate an attitude and document the intangible, in the process filling the cultural gaps left by official releases. As such they are crucial dot-joiners in hip hop, contributing much more to music culture than a traditional bootleg. </p>
<h2>A welcome relief</h2>
<p>Discogs’ decision to retain bootlegs in its database is a welcome relief. Documenting them for historical purposes is essential to the archiving of all music genres. </p>
<p>Of course, there is a darker side to bootlegging. The reality is that bootleggers who are unwilling to approach the original recording artists or record labels and flatly ignore copyright issues are in <a href="http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7724330/phone-recordings-concerts-illegal-federal-bootlegging-laws">violation of the law</a> and liable for prosecution.</p>
<p>On top of this, it’s very unfair when artists aren’t acknowledged on a bootleg. In these cases the releases are often ego driven forgeries and act as a substitute for a lack of artistic output on the part of the bootlegger. </p>
<p>I’m in no doubt that bootlegs will continue to be manufactured, but whether they reevaluate themselves remains to be seen. The forgeries we can live without, but I’m optimistic that Discogs’ move will propel a much more engaging form of bootleg. </p>
<p>If recent discussions are anything to judge by, the future of the bootleg might just reinvent the official release.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84093/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam de Paor-Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bootlegs will continue to be manufactured.
The future of the bootleg might just reinvent the official release.Adam de Paor-Evans, School Lead for Research and Innovation, School of Art, Design and Fashion, University of Central LancashireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837022017-09-14T01:12:26Z2017-09-14T01:12:26ZDuring Vietnam War, music spoke to both sides of a divided nation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185747/original/file-20170912-3792-1v2qib6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Music fans gather for the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' concert at California's Altamont Speedway in 1969.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-California-Unite-/d32c2af99ae5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/9/0">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music is central to Ken Burns’s new Vietnam War documentary, with an original score accompanied by samples of the era’s most popular musicians, from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/09/06/soundtrack-vietnam-rock-music-pbs-documentary/105090768/">According to USA Today</a>, the people interviewed for the film were even asked to provide their 10 favorite songs from the war years. </p>
<p>While it’s natural that a historical film would include period-specific songs, music played an outsized role in the Vietnam War era. Whereas during past wars, musicians wrote songs to unite Americans, Vietnam-era music spoke to the growing numbers of disillusioned citizens, and brought attention to the cultural fissures that were beginning to emerge. </p>
<h2>A unified sound</h2>
<p>World War II influenced an entire generation – many say the “greatest” – but few of those who came of age in the 1940s would probably call music a core component of their collective identity.</p>
<p>Music did play an important role in the war, but only as a way to unite Americans; like the films, radio reports and newspapers accounts of the era, World War II music resounded with patriotism. </p>
<p>Glenn Miller and his lively swing orchestra played hits such as “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBTYcqtaOjg">Tuxedo Junction</a>” <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/%7Eknigh20c/classweb/miller.html">for U.S. troops</a>, while bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and U.S.O. entertainers such as Bob Hope reinforced the government’s promotion of unwavering patriotism to willing and eager listeners. </p>
<p>Young people embraced swing music for what historians <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=W3QYRtA13o8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=david+stowe+swing+changes&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHo9eG8Z_WAhUK94MKHakoBI4Q6AEIJjAA">David Stowe</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Swingin_the_Dream.html?id=VcOk9mrFGJMC">Lewis Erenberg</a> describe as the genre’s democratic ethos – the way Americans of different races and ethnicities enjoyed a new kind of sound with an upbeat tempo and new dance moves such as the Lindy Hop. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A huge crowd fills New York’s West 52nd Street for a swing party to raise war bonds in July 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-NY-USA-APHS399709-WWII-U-S-Defense/330f22f9687f45d392b080cba03fc3f3/6/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I argue in my book “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=VLGYcemVOAYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=black+culture+and+the+new+deal&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9wJXD8Z_WAhVIxoMKHWJ2CYoQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=black%20culture%20and%20the%20new%20deal&f=false">Black Culture and the New Deal</a>,” the government also employed African-American musicians such as Duke Ellington and Lena Horne to boost the morale of black citizens and project democratic values on the home front and for troops. <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-american-gis-of-wwii-fighting-for-democracy-abroad-and-at-home-71780">Many African-Americans</a> hoped a battle against fascism could lead to the end of discrimination in the U.S.</p>
<h2>Songs of resistance</h2>
<p>But Vietnam was different. Unlike the 1940s – when Americans thought the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Nazi aggression in Europe justified the sacrifices of war – young people in the 1960s were deeply suspicious of the government’s decision to go into Southeast Asia. As the military’s commitment grew and the body counts piled up, many couldn’t understand what they were fighting for. </p>
<p>Songs were able to express these feelings of anger and confusion with lyrics that could be abstract – like Bob Dylan’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA">Blowin’ in the Wind</a>” – or explicit, such as Phil Ochs’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv1KEF8Uw2k">I Ain’t Marching Anymore</a>.” </p>
<p>Music also filled a void in the country’s media landscape. Hollywood didn’t release films that probed the complex nature of the Vietnam War until years after the fall of Saigon. While television news broadcasting became more critical after the Tet Offensive, the big networks were hesitant to promote entertainers who were vocally opposed to the war. Popular programs would censor artists who planned to perform protest music; for example, in 1967, folk singer Pete Seeger appeared on “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061296/">The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour</a>,” only to discover that his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dangerously-Funny-Uncensored-Smothers-Brothers/dp/1439101175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505258301&sr=8-1&keywords=Dangerously+funny">would be later be cut due to its anti-war message</a>. </p>
<p>Because Vietnam-era musicians seemed to be the only people talking about America’s failure to live up to its democratic principles, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woodstock-Anniversary-Limited-Revisited-Blu-ray/dp/B00JVFUNBG/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_74_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3XJGBGCBGVTC4X9M6KET">many young people viewed them</a> as “their own.” </p>
<p>Protest music took several forms. There was The Beatles’ more tepid “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw">Revolution</a>” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s everyman anthem “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7qkQewyubs">Fortunate Son</a>.” Groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane excoriated the hypocrisy of American values, shunned commercialism and supported anti-imperial movements across the globe. People chanted lyrics while marching, listened during gatherings like the “<a href="https://todayinhistoryblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/human1.jpg">Be-In</a>” in San Fransisco’s Golden Gate Park or simply absorbed the meaning and messages of these songs on their own.</p>
<h2>Forgotten voices</h2>
<p>Much of the power of Vietnam War-era music came from its connection to the civil rights movement. Young men and women in the black freedom struggle had, since the 1950s, broadened their call for freedom to encompass oppressed people around the world. Artists like Nina Simone, Dylan and Seeger had been chronicling the tragedies of southern violence in their music, so pointing out the wrongs of Vietnam came naturally. </p>
<p>But interestingly, Google searches for “Vietnam Era Music” yield only protest music. This disregards the many who found the protesters abhorrent, who undoubtedly listened to apolitical songs or songs that backed the military.</p>
<p>The Americans that President Richard Nixon <a href="https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/silentmajority.php">dubbed</a> “the silent majority” – those angered by protesters – constituted a huge swath of the country. They had catapulted Nixon to the presidency and fueled a resurgent conservative political movement. The deep-seated resentment felt by so many Americans – against those on college campuses, those who defied military orders, those who questioned American patriotism – cannot be ignored, and they, too, turned to music that provided solace. Merle Haggard <a href="http://theboot.com/merle-haggard-okie-from-muskogee-lyrics/?trackback=tsmclip">said he wrote his 1969 hit song</a> “Okie From Muskogee” to support U.S. soldiers who “were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free.” </p>
<p>“What the hell did these kids have to complain about?” he wondered.</p>
<p>To many, students on college campuses knew nothing about the true meaning of sacrifice. The Spokesmen’s pro-Vietnam ballad “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkGZKOgfOi4">Dawn of Correction</a>” insisted on the “need to keep free people from red domination,” while “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNsXIxBkqs">The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley</a>,” performed by C Company and Terry Nelson, topped Billboard charts. (The song defended <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/calley-charged-for-my-lai-massacre">Lt. William Calley</a> who, in 1971, was convicted of slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese village of Mai Lai.) </p>
<p>The popularity of these songs paints another portrait of the war; politically, the music was much more multifaceted than is often remembered.</p>
<p>Hopes for the era weren’t as simple as the Animals’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJVpihgwE18">We Gotta Get Out of This Place</a>,” which promised “there’s a better life for me and you.” Instead, understanding the music of the Vietnam War era requires indulging a variety of perspectives. The overseas conflict cannot be divorced from the culture war back home – a battle over who gets to define the nation’s identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Musicians were able to connect with confused, scared and angry Americans – including those who supported the war – in a way actors, broadcasters and writers could not.Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Associate Professor of History, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/829112017-09-04T20:14:08Z2017-09-04T20:14:08ZGuide to the Classics: Homer’s Odyssey<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184474/original/file-20170904-17903-1b267s2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Odysseus and his crew escape the cyclops, as painted by Arnold Böcklin in 1896</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Odyssey of Homer is a Greek epic poem that tells of the return journey of Odysseus to the island of Ithaca from the war at Troy, which Homer addressed in <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-iliad-80968">The Iliad</a>. In the Greek tradition, the war lasted for ten years. Odysseus then spent a further ten years getting home in the face of hostility from Poseidon, god of the earth and sea. </p>
<p>Odysseus’s return to his island, however, is not the end of his woes. He finds that 108 young men from the local vicinity have invaded his house to put pressure on his wife Penelope to marry one of them. A stalemate exists, and it is only resolved by a bow contest at the end of the poem, which then leads to a slaughter of all the suitors by Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Peace on the island is eventually restored through the intervention of Athena, goddess of wisdom, victory and war.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1389&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184476/original/file-20170904-17971-1o7zvvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1389&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Penelope, waiting on Ithaca. Painted by Domenico Beccafumi circa 1514.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The quest of Odysseus to get back to his island and eject the suitors is built on the power of his love for home and family. This notion of love conquering fear and hatred is a common theme in Greek quest mythology. </p>
<p>The Odyssey, like the Iliad, is divided into 24 books, corresponding to the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. Within the middle section of the poem (Books 9-12), Odysseus describes all the challenges that he has faced trying to get home. These include monsters of various sorts, a visit to the afterlife, cannibals, drugs, alluring women, and the hostility of Poseidon himself. These challenges resemble those of earlier heroes like Heracles and Jason. In <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-iliad-80968">the Iliad</a>, the hero Achilles faces no such challenges, indicating that the Odyssey has a very different idea of heroism. </p>
<h2>Cunning and courage</h2>
<p>The critical episode on the way home is Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus, a Cyclops and son of Poseidon (told in Book 9). He and his men enter into the cave of the Cyclops, get him drunk on some seriously potent wine, and then stick a large burning stake into his eye. Polyphemus is blinded but survives the attack and curses the voyage home of the Ithacans. All of Odysseus’s men are eventually killed, and he alone survives his return home, mostly because of his versatility and cleverness. There is a strong element of the trickster figure about Homer’s Odysseus.</p>
<p>It is very important in the Odyssey that the hero’s renown as the destroyer of Troy has quickly entered into the oral tradition of the world through which he travels. On the last leg of his return he is entertained by the Phaeacians on the island of Scheria (perhaps modern Corfu), where Odysseus, his identity unknown to his hosts, rather cheekily asks the local bard Demodocus to sing the story of the wooden horse, which Odysseus had used to hide the Greek soldiers and surprise the city of Troy. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184478/original/file-20170904-17903-11yny2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Odysseus resists the Sirens.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/13718823364">Carole Raddato/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Odysseus is more than keen to hear about his own heroic exploits. And so well does Demodocus sing the story of the horse that tears run down Odysseus’s cheeks and he groans heavily. His reaction to the bard prompts his host, the king Alcinous, to ask him who he is and what is his story? </p>
<p>Odysseus can rightly claim to be the conqueror of Troy based on his creative thinking in dreaming up the idea of the horse in the first place, not to mention his courage in going into its belly with the other men. His role in breaking the siege at Troy is a precursor to breaking the stalemate in his own house. He is a kind of “breaker of sieges” in early Greek epic. His heroism is characterised by these two elements – his cunning intelligence, and his courage in the darkness of confined spaces. </p>
<p>This kind of heroism is very different from Achilles in the Iliad, whose renown is built on his use of the spear and shield in single combat in the bright light of day. Achilles never sees the fall of Troy because he dies beforehand (unless one watches the 2004 film Troy). One might say that Achilles wins his Trojan war by killing Hector, with Athena’s support, but it is Odysseus who is the real destroyer of the city by virtue of a new and different kind of heroism.</p>
<p>Just as Odysseus is too clever for the Trojans - and the suitors - so his wife Penelope is a model of cleverness and circumspection. She tries to avoid re-marriage and delays the event by a clever ruse: she agrees to marry a suitor only after she has finished weaving a death shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. The suitors agree to this, but little do they know that she weaves the shroud by day, and un-weaves it by night. She is eventually betrayed by one of the maids in the house, and forced by the suitors to complete it, although the ruse does last for three years.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184477/original/file-20170904-17926-1m6frkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Penelope keeps her suitors at bay by spinning a shroud for three years. Painted by Pinturicchio circa 1500.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Greeks had no illusion that the characteristic cleverness of Odysseus had a sinister aspect to it, not the least in the way that he deals with the Trojans after the war. Some of the atrocities at Troy, notably the killing of the young boy Astyanax (son of Hector and Andromache), are sheeted home to Odysseus by the poets. In late-5th century BC Athens (over 200 years after Homer’s Odyssey) the rise of demagogic politicians, like Cleon, seems to have affected the portrayal of Odysseus in Greek drama. In works such as Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Trojan Women the focus is on his appalling cruelty and duplicity. Likewise, the Roman poet Vergil in his Aeneid (Book 2) emphasises the dark trickery of Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus) in getting the Trojans to drag the Wooden Horse inside the city walls.</p>
<h2>Returning from war</h2>
<p>The Odyssey, therefore, is a maritime epic right up to the point where the focus of attention is the siege in Odysseus’s house. The return journey of the warrior from Troy was a favourite theme in Greek mythology, and we know of another early epic poem (simply called Nostoi, meaning “Returns”) which told a similar story. Even within the Odyssey there is a significant contrast between the careful and clever return of Odysseus, and that of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who is murdered as soon as he gets home.</p>
<p>There are a number of signs that the Odyssey is a later poem than the Iliad, and not necessarily by the same poet (despite the Greek tradition that they are both by “Homer”). The gods are far less prominent in the Odyssey than the Iliad, although Athena in particular has her moments. She is associated with cleverness (metis in Greek) and victory (nike), both of which are germane to the story of Odysseus’ survival, and that of his family. In many ways Odysseus and Penelope are models of the sorts of things that Athena represents.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184480/original/file-20170904-17971-1wa3wb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Odysseus and his son slaughter Penelope’s suitors on Ithaca.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Odyssey also has a more elaborate structure and chronology than the Iliad. The first four books deal with the situation of the house invasion on Ithaca, and the travels of the young Telemachus to mainland Greece. Athena takes Telemachus from the female space of the house to the outside world of male politics. Thereafter, Odysseus himself is the centre of the poem’s attention as wanderer, tale teller, and siege breaker in his own home. The folktale world through which he travels (in Books 9 to 12) is told indirectly by Odysseus on his journey home to a Phaeacian audience, rather than directly by the poet. This notion of Odysseus as tale teller is central to the Odyssey.</p>
<p>In many ways the Odyssey is the most renowned literary work from Greek antiquity, even though some people would say it lacks the radical brilliance of the Iliad. The fact that the word “odyssey” has come into our language from Homer’s poem speaks for itself. The story of the Odyssey is a quintessential quest that relates to the passage through life and the importance of love and family and home. Many readers today find the Odyssey more accessible and more “modern” than the “archaic” Iliad.</p>
<h2>Modern interpretations</h2>
<p>The rich variety of mythical narratives in the Odyssey (especially his wanderings through a world of wonder and mystery in Books 9 to 12) has meant that the cultural history of the poem is astonishingly large, whether in literature or art or film. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2803160-the-return-of-ulysses">Whole monographs</a> have been written on the reception of Odysseus in later periods. When one bears in mind that Odysseus’s name at Rome, Ulysses, is often used by artists and writers, as it was by <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">James Joyce</a>, then we get a sense of how dominant a figure he is in western cultural history.</p>
<p>Creative re-tellings of the Odyssey in a modern context include films such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/">2001: A Space Odyssey</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087884/">Paris, Texas</a>, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190590/">O Brother Where Art Thou?</a> Likewise the theme of the returning war veteran has Homeric overtones in films like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056218/">The Manchurian Candidate</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077416/">The Deer Hunter</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478134/">In the Valley of Elah</a>. </p>
<p>Odysseus, moreover, probably influenced the early comic book superhero Batman in the late 1930s and 40s, just as Greek demigods, such as Heracles and Achilles, help to inform the extra-terrestrial background of Superman. As a human bat, Batman uses disguise to good effect, as Odysseus does, and he thrives on conducting his challenges <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/27325001?q&versionId=44717131">in the darkness of night</a>. </p>
<p>But the last word on the subject of Odysseus and his adventures should go to Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan <a href="https:%20www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html">wrote a lecture in honour of his Nobel victory</a>, focused on some of the literature that influenced and affected him. One such work was the Odyssey, and with echoes of Constantine Cavafy’s magnificent poem <a href="http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=74&cat=1">Ithaca</a>, Dylan reflects on Odysseus’ adventures and their immediacy as a lived experience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it. </p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>Suggested translation: The Odyssey of Homer, Richmond Lattimore.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82911/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Mackie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The story of the Odyssey is a quintessential quest that relates to the passage through life and the importance of love, family and home. Odysseus’s adventures have influenced everyone from Batman to Bob Dylan.Chris Mackie, Professor of Classics, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/796692017-06-19T09:20:29Z2017-06-19T09:20:29ZWhat’s in a name? Writing across borders of poetry and music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174397/original/file-20170619-5799-3566ji.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan in 1991.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Xavier Badosa</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zf04vnVPfM">recent speech</a> to the Swedish Academy led to a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-rambling-glory-of-bob-dylans-nobel-speech">flurry of commentary</a> about the “smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement” of the speech, what Dylan <a href="http://theconversation.com/bob-dylans-nobel-speech-a-splendidly-eccentric-performance-78998">did and didn’t say</a>, and whether he’d <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bob-dylans-nobel-prize-lecture-used-phrasing-similar-sparknotes-1013420">used Sparknotes to quote from Moby Dick</a>. It takes me back to the high feelings and combative discussions that circulated last year, when the Nobel Prize committee announced that it had awarded the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/">2016 Prize in Literature</a> to Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.</p>
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<p>One side of the debate was occupied by those who deny that a songwriter should be identified as a poet. The Swedish Academy, supported by popular opinion, presented the counter-argument, and Dylan is now listed first among the “<a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/">Most Popular Literature Laureates</a>”, ahead of such luminaries as Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus or Toni Morrison.</p>
<p>This is a surprising spot in literary history for someone who once described himself as <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-gives-press-conference-in-san-francisco-19671214">a song and dance man</a>, but Permanent Secretary of the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=2631">Swedish Academy Sara Danius</a> insists that Dylan “can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition”. Dylan himself <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html">seems to demur</a>: toward the end of his Nobel address he says, “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read”.</p>
<p>The <em>sung-not-read</em> distinction has long been a key issue in this debate. Composer Pierre Boulez argues that specialisation has divided speech from music, so that now each must obey discrete and specific laws of semantics and structure. They are <a href="https://archive.org/details/C_1963_06_08">no longer necessarily in harmony</a>, though they still find points of connection, in song. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/after-dylans-nobel-what-makes-a-poet-a-poet.html?_r=0">poet and critic David Orr notes</a>, “A well-written song isn’t just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it’s a unity of verbal and musical elements”.</p>
<p>Orr doesn’t offer the Academy’s argument that a songwriter can be a poet, insisting instead that there is a distinction between a poem and a song. He has a lot of support for this, because though there are songs that are remarkably poem-like; and poems that work better in spoken than in written form, there are distinct differences, in terms of genre and of function, between the two forms.</p>
<p>Poems, generally speaking, behave on the page, and operate against silence. Song lyrics, generally speaking, perform in sound, and operate in a relationship with musical apparatus.</p>
<p>The use of language differs too, in the two forms. Both song lyrics and poems exploit and rely on linguistic devices such as imagery, expressiveness, rhythm, cadence, concision, and word association. Poets have at their disposal little more than grammar, syntax and lexical choices. </p>
<p>Musicians have all that, plus a stack of sonic resources. These include melody, harmony and instrumentation; the stressing or slurring, and stretching or truncating of words, as needed to fit the musical shape; as well as meaningless but useful utterances. While rarely found in any but the most experimental of poems, <em>oo-oo-oos</em> and <em>la-la-las</em> can perfectly punctuate a song, enrich its song texture, and capture its listeners.</p>
<p>Songs also make more use of repetition than do poems: in part because the music may demand that a phrase or line be repeated; in part because the conventions of song include the use of a refrain, which is rare in contemporary poetry, largely because it doesn’t suit the poems though it is often vital in a song. Tom Wait’s Time — a very poetic song — includes a chorus that is all repetition: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / that you love / and it’s time time time. </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>I love this, when Waits sings it, and it provides an important transition between the wild imagery of the verses. But when I read these lines, in the absence of the music and the voice, I feel as though I am in the presence of a mistake.</p>
<p>Does any of this matter — need the boundaries between song and poem be patrolled and policed? Possibly not. After all, as 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggests, we humans came to language through song; and song and poetry together built the linguistic domain we now inhabit.</p>
<p>But there’s more to it than theory; there’s also taxonomy, and the distribution of resources that follows cultural classifications. Musicians can become rich and famous from their work; poets rarely do. Musicians can compete for the distinction associated with what is still called “high” culture, but poets rarely get to enjoy the rewards of “popular” culture. </p>
<p>Bob Dylan, for example, has won a shelf full of Grammies for the same body of work that delivered his Nobel Prize in Literature. Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage has won the <a href="http://www.examiner.co.uk/whats-on/features-simon-armitage-music-lyrics-4992323">Ivor Novello Award</a>, but that was specifically for his song lyrics: his poetry was not eligible. </p>
<p>As long as the river flows in only one direction, it seems likely that poets will continue to resist attempts by songwriters to occupy their patch.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79669/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Bob Dylan said songs are meant to be sung not read, and he has a point. Songs and poems obey different rules.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/789982017-06-07T05:16:38Z2017-06-07T05:16:38ZBob Dylan’s Nobel speech: a splendidly eccentric performance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172653/original/file-20170607-5707-1aczxrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan pictured in 2012: his long synopses of a seemingly random list of books made up the bulk of this week's Nobel Prize speech.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mario Anzuoni/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in late 2016, it <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-honouring-dylan-the-nobel-prize-judges-have-made-a-category-error-67049">ruffled a few feathers</a>. Characteristically, Dylan kept everyone guessing as to whether he would even accept the award. But after a suitably cryptic period of waiting, he did. And yesterday Dylan finally, and in the nick of time, undertook the one hurdle required to receive the $1 million associated with the prize: to give a speech within six months of the prize’s announcement. The speech, which was presented in <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html">written </a> and audio form (but not in person in Sweden, as is customary) is marvellously Dylanesque in its oddness, and worthy of attention.</p>
<p>The recorded version of the speech presents Dylan’s old-timer delivery against the sonic backdrop of a jazzy, cocktail-bar piano. In a speech about Dylan’s musical and literary influences, this is almost comically inappropriate. True, it might have the utilitarian purpose of making it harder for musicians to sample Dylan’s spoken-word performance (and there are some moments that could sound great in the right musical context). Still, the style of the music seems deliberately eccentric.</p>
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<p>But the words are the really eccentric thing about Dylan’s speech. He begins by promising to reflect on how his songs relate to literature, and for those who were critical of Dylan’s Nobel win, this cuts to the chase. But listeners are immediately informed (or warned) that this will happen in a “roundabout way”.</p>
<p>After a brief sketch of his musical lineage (Buddy Holly, Lead Belly, and folk music), Dylan moves on to literature. He name-checks a handful of classics — such as Don Quixote and Ivanhoe — which he describes as “typical grammar school reading”, and from there moves on to three books that have stuck with him: Herman Melville’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-moby-dick-by-herman-melville-52000">Moby Dick</a>, Erich Maria Remarque’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/355697.All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front">All Quiet on the Western Front</a>, and <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html">The Odyssey by Homer</a>. Dylan’s long synopses of this seemingly random list of books makes up the bulk of his speech.</p>
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<p>It is hard to know how seriously we should take Dylan’s retelling of these classics of Western literature, which, one might point out, are a long way from <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-are-bob-dylans-songs-literature-67061">lyric poetry</a>, the mode we might expect to hear about from a song writer. (While The Odyssey was written in verse, it is a narrative poem, and most English speakers would read prose translations of it.) Are we listening to redundant re-tellings of three old books, or do Dylan’s accounts offer allegories of the main themes in his own work? He does vaguely refer to the themes of his chosen books as being related to his songs, but the comparisons are rarely clear. The clearest link Dylan makes is between All Quiet on the Western Front and his anti-war songs (such as Masters of War).</p>
<p>Or are Dylan’s re-tellings in his speech bizarre revisionary prose poems? Are they literary performances in themselves, in which the author takes pre-existing works and fashions, in a quasi-improvisatory way, something altogether new? That is, after all, what Dylan has done throughout his songwriting career (as the title of Love and Theft, his 2001 album, suggests). As many critics have noted, for instance, the question-and-answer refrain of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall owes a debt to the English Ballad Lord Randall.</p>
<p>Just as with his singing, there is certainly something hypnotic at times about Dylan’s delivery in his Nobel speech. And his re-tellings are artful renderings, not really synopses at all, as seen, for instance, when Dylan compares himself with Odysseus, the homeward-bound hero of Homer’s Odyssey. When Dylan says of the hero that “courage won’t save him, but his trickery will”, it’s not just a good (and accurate) description of Odysseus - it could also be a masterpiece of micro self-portraiture.</p>
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<span class="caption">A 4th Century BC pottery wine cup depicting Odysseus at sea on a raft of amphoras.</span>
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<p>And then, in a quintessentially Dylanesque move, he pulls the rug from under us, to say that meaning in literature, in art generally, is not important. The only important things are if songs move you, and if they sound good. This appeal to the affective and aesthetic over the rational is, of course, a literary move. And, almost finally, he casually admits that “songs are unlike literature” after all.</p>
<p>In referring to the multimedia, performative nature of song, Dylan is of course correct. Songs aren’t like the books he’s been talking about. Except, of course, all poetry — the source of literature — was once performed orally, and sometimes it was accompanied by music. </p>
<p>The Swedish academy invoked the Ancient Greek poets Homer and Sappho when awarding Dylan his Nobel prize, and Dylan appropriately ends his acceptance speech with a reference to Homeric invocation — the poet’s request at the beginning of his epic poems for the muse to inspire him. Suitably, Dylan offers his own version of Homer’s famous beginnings: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sing in me O muse, and through me tell the story.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This appeal to inspiration, within a speech that implies the importance of learning the craft of one’s predecessors, brings to the fore the contradiction of creativity itself: that it is both mysterious and individual, and a skill that others teach us. </p>
<p>Of course, I might be taking this all too seriously, as the cheesy piano in the audio version reminds me. Either way, this extraordinarily eccentric Nobel speech might well be the singer’s most Dylanesque performance. It is certainly consistent with the young man who said in 1966 that, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>People have one great blessing – obscurity – and not really too many people are thankful for it.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This extraordinarily odd speech might well be the singer’s most Dylanesque performance.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689282016-11-21T10:44:09Z2016-11-21T10:44:09ZFive extraordinary poems that inspired Bob Dylan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146593/original/image-20161118-19334-1q11cmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan: not leaning on his guitar.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/badosa/9488666868/in/photolist-fstU5C-oaGNHR-DL9Am-6Qai86-fstT8N-JFJQA-fseydg-fstSNo-9BQ2o8-4V4khQ-9UQLyR-9UQLiV-9UQLMX-9UQLtz-3wjGj6-aEsQZb-59Efn1-fsu1tq-yr5HEa-7YEeyU-c1F3Wh-gafvUx-5ijYuf-5ifFrv-5izouH-5iDEzo-5iDEUb-5ijYvs-5ijYpW-5iDESf-5ijYoh-5izosc-5ijYs7-5iDEKu-JFJQy-5iDEQh-55W45D-3dm9ZV-dNFktJ-dNzJtp-ix9YEb-3xmfsP-aCuwTi-a218Ht-aCxcNw-aCxcJA-aCuwFc-KMJj4-KMxwq-dWYCP">Xavier Badosa via Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell said that Bob Dylan wasn’t a poet because he “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GvLq2Xd8zjkC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=robert+lowell+bob+dylan+hamilton+leans+crutch+guitar&source=bl&ots=YWnJMuqDC0&sig=eiAy0475WGkIeKATo2Rg3ohL4hY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRlvbpjK3QAhUqIsAKHXmHBccQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=robert%20lowell%20bob%20dylan%20hamilton%20leans%20crutch%20guitar&f=false">leaned on the crutch of his guitar</a>”. The Nobel committee clearly disagree – they awarded him the <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/1858001-1858001">Nobel Prize in Literature</a>. Indeed, Dylan has leaned on poetry more than any other musician, before or since. Here are five poets who provided him with inspiration.</p>
<h2>Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)</h2>
<p>Baudelaire’s use of hashish, dissatisfaction with the uptight middle-classes, and celebration of prostitutes, visionaries and outsiders produced a poetry that would have resonated with the Dylan of Mr Tambourine Man.</p>
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<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anywhere-out-of-the-world/">Anywhere Out of this World</a> shares and anticipates Dylan’s pot-fuelled, visionary lyrics of the mid-1960s. Baudelaire writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible…<br>
At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: “No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it seems Dylan wasn’t leaning very heavily on the crutch of his guitar when in <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/mr-tambourine-man/">Mr Tambourine Man</a> he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free<br>
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands<br>
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves<br>
Let me forget about today until tomorrow…</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Walt Whitman (1819-1892)</h2>
<p>Walt Whitman’s inclusive, democratic vision of America would have been of enormous appeal to the young Dylan. The 1856 edition of his <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27494.Leaves_of_Grass">Leaves of Grass</a> presents a poet – open-shirted, unshaven, sexually assured – that would not have been out of place on any of Dylan’s 1960s album covers. Whitman’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45472">I Sing the Body Electric</a> – with its unknowing nod towards Dylan’s move from folk troubadour to electric bohemian – opens:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I sing the body electric,<br>
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,<br>
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,<br>
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>His extended, visionary lines anticipated and inspired Dylan’s long lyrics from <a href="http://bobdylan.com/albums/hard-rain/">Hard Rain</a> through <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/">Desolation Row</a> and provided a model that the young singer was keen to follow.</p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<h2>Andre Breton (1896-1966)</h2>
<p>Andre Breton was the figurehead of the <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism">Surrealists</a>; a group of writers who gathered in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The Surrealists’ surprising, erotic images of women find resonances in Dylan’s romantic lyrics. Breton’s <a href="http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/expansive-poetics-97-andre-breton-2.html">Free Union</a> is a list poem in which a love of language and of woman overwhelms the reader with poetry and erotic intent. It begins:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My wife with the hair of a wood fire<br>
With the thoughts of heat lightning<br>
With the waist of an hourglass<br>
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dylan’s images of love and of women are rarely commented upon. If they are, he is often mocked for the surrealism of his lyrics. <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/love-minus-zero-no-limit/">Love Minus Zero / No Limit</a> contains the verse:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cloak and dagger dangles<br>
Madams light the candles<br>
In ceremonies of the horsemen<br>
Even the pawn must hold a grudge<br>
Statues made of matchsticks<br>
Crumble into one another<br>
My love winks, she does not bother<br>
She knows too much to argue or to judge </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>If Dylan is at fault here, then so is an entire literary and artistic movement. In his greatest moments, Dylan nailed surrealism and love as well as any of its most important poets.</p>
<h2>Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)</h2>
<p>One can only imagine how the teenage, Jewish Dylan must have marvelled at the geeky, bespectacled beat poet <a href="http://allenginsberg.org">Ginsberg</a>, and the impact of his poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303">Howl</a>. Dylan’s <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/hard-rains-gonna-fall/">A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall</a> recognises Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”,
and recycles them into “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken / I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.”</p>
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</figure>
<h2>Langston Hughes (1902-1967)</h2>
<p>One of the key poets of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes">Hughes</a> was responsible for the integration of jazz and black art forms into poetry. In <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46548">Harlem</a> he uses short, rhyming lines that anticipate the proto-rap of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Here is the complete poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens to a dream deferred? </p>
<p>Does it dry up<br>
like a raisin in the sun?<br>
Or fester like a sore—<br>
And then run?<br>
Does it stink like rotten meat?<br>
Or crust and sugar over—<br>
like a syrupy sweet? </p>
<p>Maybe it just sags<br>
like a heavy load. </p>
<p>Or does it explode? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bob Dylan – <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean-homesick-blues/">“on the pavement / thinking about the government”</a> – transformed popular culture in the 1960s. To many, his lyrics seemed to come out of nowhere. If all you had been doing was listening to Sinatra, they did. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MGxjIBEZvx0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For the bohemians who had been hanging out in coffee-houses and paying attention to the poets, however, all he was doing was doing what poets have always been doing: making it new, and telling it like it is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68928/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Atkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>He was criticised for leaning on the crutch of his guitar, but if Dylan leaned on anything, it was his love of poetry.Tim Atkins, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/686762016-11-11T06:59:47Z2016-11-11T06:59:47ZAs a writer-musician, Leonard Cohen was a one-off<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145541/original/image-20161111-25058-171xmzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen in 2008, just before he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lucas Jackson/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Just weeks after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, that other great literary songwriter, Leonard Cohen, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/au">has died at the age of 82</a>. When Dylan’s Nobel was announced, a number of commentators claimed that Cohen would have been a more appropriate choice. One can see why.</p>
<p>Cohen’s long career has shown him to be a master songwriter, producing wry, literate, and melancholy lyrics for 50 years. Cohen also began in the literary field, producing four collections of poems and two novels before his debut album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967.</p>
<p>In fact, Cohen’s literary career made him an unlikely success in the music scene of the late 1960s, as did other factors. He had an haute-bourgeois background (being the son of a well-off, well-connected Jewish business family in Montreal); he had wanted as a child to attend a military school; and he had a BA from McGill, and had begun a higher degree at Columbia (the university, not the record label). </p>
<p>Most of all, he was not young. When Songs of Leonard Cohen was released, Cohen was 33 years old, having spent the previous decade building, with mixed success, his literary reputation.</p>
<p>While Cohen continued sporadically to produce books after 1967, his musical career is what he is best known for. But there is a notable continuity between Cohen’s poems and his song lyrics. </p>
<p>The themes, tone, and style of Cohen’s songs were already largely in place in his early poetry. His poems, like his songs, eschew complexity when it comes to form and word choice, and they focus — like the songs — on eroticism, death and loss, and redemption.</p>
<p>Cohen’s early albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room (1969), and Songs of Love and Hate (1970) — the latter arguably his most realised album — are no doubt the basis for the idea that Cohen wrote depressing songs. However, while a melancholy tone can be found throughout his career, Cohen is surprisingly mercurial. </p>
<p>In a number of his songs, there is self-mockery and a dark, dry sense of humour. This sense of humour is also seen in his surprisingly funny live persona, observable in two important documentaries: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126376/">Ladies and Gentleman … Leonard Cohen</a> (1965), and Tony Palmer’s more emotional <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251613/?ref_=tt_rec_tti">Bird on a Wire</a> (1972). </p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<p>At a lyrical level, the note of self-mockery comes out in songs such as Dress Rehearsal Rag (from Songs of Love and Hate), in which the poet views himself in the following terms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just take a look at your body now,<br>
There’s nothing much to save.<br>
And a bitter voice in the mirror cries,<br>
‘Hey, Prince, you need a shave.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Outwardly, Cohen’s lyrics were more straightforward than Dylan’s (certainly the Dylan of the mid 60s). Yet within his apparently simple words lies a profound sense of playfulness and enigma, apparent in the song that arguably became his most famous, Hallelujah. </p>
<p>A religious language was never far from the surface in Cohen’s songs, and one of the more unlikely developments in Cohen’s long career was his becoming a Buddhist monk. So it is appropriate, then, that the abiding sense that comes from his songs and his style of singing is that of a cloistered voice coming out of the dark, offering words that bring together the spiritual and material worlds.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>As detailed in the recent biography by Sylvie Simmons, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10876733-i-m-your-man">I’m Your Man</a> (2012), Cohen had a youthful interest in hypnotism. In his early teens he bought a book called 25 Lessons in Hypnotism: How to Become an Expert Operator. After success with animals, Cohen hypnotised the family’s maid and told her to undress.</p>
<p>Unable to wake the naked woman from her trance, the young Cohen began to panic, fearing his mother’s imminent return. As Simmons notes, the mix of eroticism, impending doom, and loss is “exquisitely Leonard Cohenesque”. And as Simmons also suggests, Cohen’s powers as a singer and performer have always been notably mesmeric.</p>
<p>This mesmeric sense is key to Cohen’s musical and literary success. Famously, when he appeared at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, Cohen transfixed and calmed his unruly audience of over 600, 000 with his down-beat songs and between-song patter.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cohen performing in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Valentin Flauraud/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To be mesmeric one has to be consistent, and consistency was a key feature of Cohen’s career. Unlike Dylan, he didn’t try to reinvent himself, and while his musical accompaniment changed a little in terms of the technology used, it remained the same in spirit: simple, repetitive, and basically traditional accompaniment to Cohen’s mesmerising baritone. </p>
<p>Thematically, too, Cohen was remarkably consistent, concerned repeatedly with love, mortality, loss, and redemption. And Cohen’s skill for the memorable phrase was also a consistent feature, as seen in a line like “the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”, from Tower of Song (I’m Your Man, 1988).</p>
<p>As a writer-musician, Cohen was a one-off. And in songs such as Chelsea Hotel # 2, The Stranger Song, First We Take Manhattan, and countless others, he has left a remarkable legacy. </p>
<p>It is one that shows, perhaps more clearly than Dylan, that songwriting can indeed be a literary art.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Perhaps more clearly than Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen showed that songwriting can be a literary art. Within his apparently simple words lies a profound sense of playfulness and enigma.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/672192016-10-19T01:02:38Z2016-10-19T01:02:38ZAmerica’s Nobel success is the story of immigrants<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142227/original/image-20161018-15108-77suz4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What does the Nobel mean for America?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/entirelyamelia/10397523303/in/photolist-gQN2ra-ifKzVn-aHGFTt-ifKmqD-pbPMav-ifKHXe-ifJRYt-ifKtHU-ifKJHc-aTfCDD-pbR2tB-pbQKib-ifKHn9-pbRiJ2-ifKyU4-ifLbhP-ifK9xG-ifKnEG-ifKBPn-ifKqpt-ifKsVb-oZmacH-ifKS7S-ifK6Gj-ifKkvx-aBLEg5-aBLF5L-aBLEio-aTcrQ4-aTfRyv-aTfZTH-aBHZwe-ifKc8R-aBLDRN-gDgYNk-aBHZRx-aTfEGx-9vBMjS-aTfPix-ifKg4g-aTfzRT-aTfST6-64Wh4T-aTfWLR-aTfXHF-767zoo-aTfxQX-aTg2on-aTfQCK-aTfZ1D">Amelia Gapin</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If it were not for <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-are-bob-dylans-songs-literature-67061">Bob Dylan</a> – the singer, songwriter and now <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-bob-dylan-isnt-the-first-lyricist-to-win-the-nobel-67023">Nobel laureate</a> – 2016 would have become the first year since 1999 without a Nobel winner born in the United States. </p>
<p>Since World War II, the U.S. has dominated the four research <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org">Nobels</a> (in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics). It did so <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/nobel-prizes-1557">this year</a> too. But there was a difference: None of the nine scholars who shared the four research Nobel Prizes in 2016 was born in the United States. However, as many as six of the winners work at U.S. universities and now call the United States as their home. </p>
<p>In other words, this year, as in so many others, America’s Nobel success was a story of immigrants. At a time when <a href="https://theconversation.com/immigration-five-essential-reads-64656">immigration</a> has become a hot-button issue, this fact <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/1011/Why-Nobel-winning-scientists-are-talking-about-immigration-video">did not go unnoticed</a>, including by the White House. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"786652827129032704"}"></div></p>
<p>So why does this matter?</p>
<p>I have been associated with U.S. academia for a quarter-century – first as a student from Pakistan and then as a researcher, a teacher and more recently a university administrator. I have experienced the magical embrace of U.S. higher education firsthand.</p>
<p>I believe the diversity of the Nobel winners is a testimony to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00091380409604964?journalCode=vchn20">spectacular exceptionalism of U.S. higher education</a>: U.S. academic institutions attract, welcome, embrace and ultimately benefit from the best intellectual talent from all corners of the world.</p>
<h2>Race to the top</h2>
<p>There are many things that make American higher education truly exceptional. Immigration, and the ease and openness of U.S. academia to scholars from across the world, is certainly not the only one. </p>
<p>But, it is an important one. </p>
<p>In fact, many other <a href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/688061468337210820/The-road-to-academic-excellence-the-making-of-world-class-research-universities">countries are trying hard</a>, though less successfully, to replicate the U.S. experience. For example, countries such as Singapore, South Korea, even Saudi Arabia, which are investing heavily in <a href="http://www.nyas.org/publications/Detail.aspx?cid=e34a05fe-3f4b-4a80-a320-9e37fc36c5dd">building their own research universities</a>, begin by trying to attract top researchers from across the world. They offer them incentives such as outstanding facilities and lucrative salaries.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142228/original/image-20161018-15089-qjlnmm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nobel Academy in Stockholm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/williamjm/20182617176/in/photolist-wKtbWd-wNib7K-5hiNWT-4yQy2p-6BSsma-6BWpKE-9vjvea-xt3dW-mc5hL-86sL44-7mU5Dp-5LNtTx-5GN7Lo-dsHqQ6-fRWPd-nvPMMz-aTbrbe-2kofaH-8KxqBa-8KxoPM-B81KPK-BX8Vpn-nvQ2bj-nvPLHF-8KAuzy-8KxoSM-8KAq4q-8KxodB-8Kxqqi-8KAsdE-6AnZuU-DG8gF1-cBzDyE-P7qyr-CYqDF-8KAqJh-aUTmdH-8KxoW2-yVRAm-GoqJeT-9bBdFG-uv7Pc-gZmLg-nN2mxt-utgDm-8KAsr7-aDzt2-8KxoH2-3iAxUz-CubFoJ">William Marnoch</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such incentives help. But they are not enough. U.S. universities are quite unique in the way they welcome and embrace talent, which helps attract the best in the world. </p>
<p>The journey of Nobel laureate <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1999/zewail-bio.html">Ahmed H. Zewail</a> (who received the Nobel for chemistry in 1999) is illustrative of the exceptionalism of U.S. higher education and the culture of openness. <a href="http://www.aucpress.com/p-3058-voyage-through-time.aspx">Writing about his journey</a> from his native Egypt to U.S. academia, Zewail describes how he was embraced by all the universities he was part of – whether as a student at University of Pennsylvania, as a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley or as a professor at California Institute of Technology. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“My science family came from all over the world and members were of varied backgrounds, cultures, and abilities. The diversity in this ‘small world’ I worked in daily provided the most stimulating environment, with many challenges and much optimism.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>America’s research excellence</h2>
<p>The history of the Nobel awards is, in fact, a rather neat lens through which we can see this play out.</p>
<p>The very first American to win a Nobel in the sciences was <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1907/michelson-facts.html">Albert A. Michelson</a>. He was awarded the prize in 1907 for his research on the measurement of the speed of light. Michelson’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Strzelno in then Prussia, now Poland, when he was only two years old.</p>
<p>Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/">579 times to 911 people and organizations</a>. The U.S. alone has had more than 350 Nobel winners. More than 100 of these have been immigrants and <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/countries.html">individuals born outside of the United States</a>. </p>
<p>No other country comes close. The two countries apart from the U.S. that can claim <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11926364/Nobel-Prize-winners-Which-country-has-the-most-Nobel-laureates.html">more than 100 laureates</a> are the United Kingdom and Germany. What is noteworthy is that a number of winners of both these countries were living and working in the U.S. when they were awarded their Nobel. </p>
<p>In fact, if it were to be a category of its own, immigrants to the U.S. who won the Nobel, would would come second only to the U.S.-born laureates group. Their number exceeds that of laureates <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/countries.html">born in any single country</a>. </p>
<p>The point is the global movement of intellect and ideas is often necessary and perhaps central to the creation of knowledge and production of great research. The United States has both immensely contributed to and benefited from the excellence of such research. </p>
<p>With increasing globalization, this trend will not slow down. If anything, this trend is on the rise and is likely to continue. Consider, for example, the research Nobels awarded to those in the United States in the last two years. Of the ten laureates who live, teach and work in the United States, all but one were born outside the U.S, and six studied in U.S. universities. </p>
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<h2>Attacks on openness are misguided</h2>
<p>Great research is a truly global enterprise. In context of <a href="https://theconversation.com/immigration-five-essential-reads-64656">current conversations on immigration</a> – and the notion that somehow immigrants might be thwarting America’s “greatness” – it is instructive to note just how much of America’s great success in Nobel Prizes has come because of immigrants. </p>
<p>Attacks on <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-were-wrong-to-blame-immigrants-for-our-sputtering-economies-56324">American openness</a> are not just <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/1011/Why-Nobel-winning-scientists-are-talking-about-immigration-video">misguided</a>, they are <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Trump-Presidency-Could-Keep/236662">self-defeating</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/before-trump-proposed-his-border-wall-vigilantes-made-it-a-national-obsession-58909">Trump supporters</a> in the United States – much like <a href="https://theconversation.com/immigration-rhetoric-is-a-threat-to-britains-long-term-growth-27248">Brexit supporters</a> across the Atlantic – seem worried that this embrace of the outsider is making America less great. </p>
<p>As America’s Nobel success testifies, they could not be more wrong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67219/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adil Najam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Immigrants have contributed to America’s great success at the Nobel. Of the 350 Nobel winners from the United States, more than 100 have been immigrants.Adil Najam, Dean, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670792016-10-18T09:21:45Z2016-10-18T09:21:45ZBob Dylan’s Nobel prize – and what really defines literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142013/original/image-20161017-12425-r837ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yulia Grigoryeva/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize win and the ensuing debate as to whether a musician should have been considered is a striking comment on the seemingly glib question of what literature actually is. And with the Man Booker prize also just around the corner, how and why literature matters are topics currently animating plenty of cultural debate.</p>
<p>Assessing the literary merit of Dylan’s work is nothing new. Christopher Ricks, a former Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, published a <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060599249/dylans-visions-of-sin">book on Dylan</a> back in 2003, and a <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-companion-to-bob-dylan/ACD7194EAB1B73788B8E5D86EC16177C">Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan</a> was released a few years later. But others have argued that his Nobel award snubs those who write “literature” — as in, <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-honouring-dylan-the-nobel-prize-judges-have-made-a-category-error-67049">in books</a>.</p>
<p>The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a writer who has produced for the field of literature, in Alfred Nobel’s words, “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Dylan won the prize for having “created new poetic expressions”. The UK’s former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion commented that Dylan’s songs are “often the best words in the best order”. And Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke of Dylan’s “<a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/announcement.html">pictorial thinking</a>”. The week before Dylan’s win, David Szalay’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/03/all-that-man-is-review-david-szalay-short-story-collection">All That Man Is</a>, shortlisted for the Man Booker, <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/david-szalay-wins-gordon-burn-prize-2016-407521">won the Gordon Burn prize</a>. The judges said the novel “subtly changes the way you look at the contemporary world”.</p>
<p>But what is an “ideal direction” for literature? And how exactly does literature change our relationship with “the contemporary world”? </p>
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<h2>Changing minds</h2>
<p>The idea that reading influences us is something we hear throughout our lives. Children are encouraged to read for more reasons than developing literacy, and huge claims are made for the power of literature at all stages from childhood to old age. Many have spoken of how literature <a href="https://readingagency.org.uk/news/blog/neil-gaiman-lecture-in-full.html">engages the imagination</a>; others emphasise its <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/loves-knowledge-9780195074857?cc=gb&lang=en&">empathetic and political values</a>.</p>
<p>It’s not just writers and scholars who stress literature’s importance. The Guardian recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/05/improving-books-for-dyslexics-dyslexia-awareness-week">published an article</a> about a <a href="http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/">charity</a> that publishes books especially for children with dyslexia. The newspaper began by wondering how children could be enticed to read, citing evidence that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/16/reading-improves-childrens-brains">reading improves academic ability</a> and <a href="https://readingagency.org.uk/news/media/reading-for-pleasure-builds-empathy-and-improves-wellbeing-research-from-the-reading-agency-finds.html">happiness</a>.</p>
<p>Some people are sceptical about such powerful claims for literature. Philosophy professor Gregory Currie <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-reading-fiction-literally-change-your-mind-62726">has argued</a> against fiction’s power to “change our minds”. While I disagree with Currie about whether or not literature can have a significant impact on its readers, he’s right about how difficult it is to assess the claim.</p>
<p>Figuring out what counts as “literary” is famously difficult. There aren’t strict criteria for literary prizes – there couldn’t be, as there is no prescription for writing well. But Dylan’s prize highlights an important fact: what counts as literature emerges from use of language. Genre – whether you’re talking about realism, science fiction, or folk song – doesn’t have much to do with it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Science fiction and fantasy still tend automatically not to be recognised as ‘literature’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zepfanman/8334281469/in/photolist-dGtnw6-aF1NgM-8ixQYw-8xWaUk-8xWaDk-6Vm5M3-4tVmYR-8xZdgL-98BHv6-7PhWCP-cQRXx3-4Umt4m-9Jzje8-97BMFB-8xWc7F-83CJxB-8xWaLc-83Ps6s-7PhWCH-83FQuA-2mvxVJ-83Ps6A-7kCo2q-7gtjxh-piMqnb-9rkXAQ-4Fst7X-dkjYkM-GdKts-gJxHQT-83Ps6w-fbBG9-9qoAj1-8Heunw-83FQfU-8xZdbL-56v3kX-dvpSVw-5XEuR4-7rVXe8-dvpQbd-5NXqeh-7PhWCM-e4LWcv-5y2K5H-aF5D6W-4fe7ju-8xZe6q-bqBP8J-6LwAHr">zepfanman/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>This isn’t always acknowledged within academia. For example, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27490164">experiments concerning literature</a> tend to focus primarily on whether or not a book is fiction when accounting for its impact. But while the fictional world is important, the way that world has been created is more so. Rather than generic distinctions or the status of a book as fiction or non-fiction, it is literary language – “the best words in the best order” – that makes a book matter to us.</p>
<h2>Linguistic risks</h2>
<p>We’re now just a few days away from finding out the winner of the <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/">Man Booker Prize</a>. Announcing the shortlist, the judges <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-prize-announces-2016-shortlist">spoke of their excitement</a> around “the willingness of so many authors to take risks with language and form”.</p>
<p>Their emphasis on language and form seems right. If Dylan’s prize win shows anything, it’s that words have a unique ability to deepen engagement with human emotion and experience, whether they come in songs, plays, poems or prose. It is the <em>way</em> words are used that makes “literature”.</p>
<p>We care hugely about literature. When David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377">published a study</a> in 2013 proposing that fiction has a positive impact on our ability to empathise, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study">the news made the national press</a>. They suggested that “fiction may change how, not just what, people think about others”. In fact, it’s likely that literature in general – literary prose, poetry, and songs whose lyrics are as generative of meaning as Dylan’s – only changes “how” we think, shaping our concepts and ways of perception more than it influences thoughts directly. It might not change “what” we think at all.</p>
<p>This is because the way a book is written is what creates the experience for readers. Take Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, currently being <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667321/">adapted for the screen</a>. Tell someone it’s about a failure to have sex on a wedding night, and they’re unlikely to take it seriously or meaningfully. But get them to read it, and they’ll find its tone one of “<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n08/colm-toibin/dissecting-the-body">almost reverent care</a>”.</p>
<p>It’s the form of a book or a song that prompts the way we engage with it – whether it enables <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prime-your-gray-cells/201606/what-you-read-matters-more-you-might-think">“deep reading” or merely “light”</a> – not its genre, or its status as fiction. As Dylan’s prize shows, it’s the power of language that has an impact on readers and listeners. What really matters are words.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67079/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily Holman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What counts as literature? It’s less to do with genre than we think.Emily Holman, DPhil in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670232016-10-14T20:04:56Z2016-10-14T20:04:56ZNo, Bob Dylan isn’t the first lyricist to win the Nobel<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141856/original/image-20161014-30240-nwb2q1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Portrait_of_Rabindranath_Tagore_photographed_during_Bengali_Wikipedia_10th_Anniversary_Celebration_Jadavpur_University_Campus5887.jpg">Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s been a great deal of excitement over Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s rare for artists who have achieved widespread, mainstream popularity to win. And although Nobels often go to Americans, the last literature prize to go to one was Toni Morrison in 1993. Furthermore, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0">according to The New York Times</a>, “It is the first time the honor has gone to a musician.”</p>
<p>But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”</p>
<p>A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-bio.html">Rabindranath Tagore</a>, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913. </p>
<p>The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.</p>
<h2>Bengal’s own renaissance man</h2>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=hXU3AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA30&dq=rabindranath+tagore+%22chapter+three%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2oPie8NrPAhVEYiYKHVZXDzsQ6AEISjAG#v=onepage&q=rabindranath%20tagore%20%22chapter%20three%22&f=false">Tagore was born in 1861</a> into a wealthy family and was a lifelong resident of Bengal, the East Indian state whose capital is Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Born before the invention of film, Tagore was a keen observer of India’s emergence into the modern age; much of his work was influenced by new media and other cultures. </p>
<p>Like Dylan, Tagore was <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=hXU3AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=rabindranath+tagore+%22self-taught%22+music+poetry+painting+drama&source=bl&ots=rrP00DgQaZ&sig=qAbTSOMOIp3CPOxXpRfiUYmjDhY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixoe-xqdnPAhWIJCYKHQYxDa0Q6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=self-taught&f=false">largely self-taught</a>. And both were associated with nonviolent social change. Tagore was a supporter of Indian independence and a friend of <a href="http://www.swaraj.org/tapan.htm">Mahatma Gandhi</a>, while Dylan penned much of the soundtrack for the <a href="http://folkmusic.about.com/od/bobdylan/a/Bob-Dylan-Civil-Rights.htm">1960s protest movement</a>. Each was a multitalented artist: writer, musician, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/09/08/this-26-foot-long-bob-dylan-sculpture-will-welcome-visitors-at-national-harbor-casino/">visual artist</a> and film composer. (<a href="http://homemcr.org/event/like-a-bullet-of-light-the-films-of-bob-dylan/">Dylan is also a filmmaker</a>.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-bio.html">The Nobel website</a> states that Tagore, though he wrote in many genres, was principally a poet who published more than 50 volumes of verse, as well as plays, short stories and novels. Tagore’s music isn’t mentioned until the last sentence, which says that the artist “also left … songs for which he wrote the music himself,” as if this much-loved body of work was no more than an afterthought. </p>
<p>But with <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=_uZJWmJywPkC&pg=PR1&lpg=PR1&dq=tagore+songs+%22over+2000+songs%22&source=bl&ots=cyxfy19qxg&sig=2xsa1IPg_UPUGC2LOFjJffqiqNY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWyLSFzdjPAhVCJh4KHWMYD0E4ChDoAQhMMA0#v=onepage&q=tagore%20songs%20%22over%202000%20songs%22&f=false">over 2,000 songs</a> to his name, Tagore’s output of music alone is extremely impressive. Many continue to be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF2BE1A3EC35555A3">used in films</a>, while three of his songs were chosen as <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-rabindranath-tagore/story-EvYsWUz6in9DTarTlHO7RJ.html">national anthems</a> by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an unparalleled achievement.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Bengali national anthem, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, Tagore’s significance as a songwriter is undisputed. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUW0SZQ5-eI">YouTube search</a> for Tagore’s songs, using the search term “Rabindra Sangeet” (Bengali for “Tagore songs”), yields about 234,000 hits. </p>
<p>Although Tagore was – and remains – a musical icon in India, this aspect of his work hasn’t been recognized in the West. Perhaps for this reason, music seems not to have had much or any influence on the 1913 Nobel committee, as judged by the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/press.html">presentation speech</a> by committee chair Harald Hjärne. In fact, the word “music” is never used in the prize announcement. It is notable, however, that Hjärne says the work of Tagore’s that “especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics is the 1912 poetry collection ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings.’”</p>
<h2>Dylan: All about the songs</h2>
<p>It may be that the Nobel organization’s downplaying of Tagore’s significance as a musician is part and parcel of the same thinking that has long delayed Dylan’s receiving the prize: uneasiness over subsuming song into the category of literature. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.edlis.org/twice/threads/nobel_nomination.html">It’s rumored</a> that Dylan was first nominated in 1996. If true, it means that Nobel committees have been wrestling with the idea of honoring this extraordinary lyricist for two decades. Rolling Stone <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/why-bob-dylan-deserves-his-nobel-prize-w444799">called Dylan’s win</a> “easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote ‘Lord of the Flies,’ which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez.” </p>
<p>Unlike Tagore’s Nobel announcement, in which his songs were an afterthought, the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/announcement.html">presentation announcing Dylan’s award</a> made it clear that aside from a handful of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/books/so-you-thought-you-knew-dylan-hah.html?_r=0">other literary contributions</a> this prize is all about his music. And therein lies the controversy, <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/13/why_bob_dylan_shouldn_t_have_gotten_the_nobel_prize_for_literature.html">with some saying he shouldn’t have won</a> – that being a pop culture icon who wrote songs disqualifies him. </p>
<p>But like many great literary figures, Dylan is a man of letters; his songs abound with the names of those who came before him, whether it’s <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/">Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot</a> in “Desolation Row” or James Joyce in “<a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/i-feel-change-comin/">I Feel a Change Comin’ On</a>.” </p>
<p>Why not celebrate Bob by being like Bob and reading something unfamiliar, great and historically important? Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” his most famous collection of poems, is available in the poet’s own <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/tagore/gitnjali.htm">English translation</a>, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats (who won his own Nobel in literature in 1923). And YouTube is a great repository for some of Tagore’s most celebrated songs (search for “Rabindra Sangeet”).</p>
<p>Many music lovers have long hoped that the parameters of literature might be writ a bit larger to include song. While Dylan’s win is certainly an affirmation, remembering that he’s not the first can only pave the way for more musicians to win in years to come.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67023/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Lubet does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.Alex Lubet, Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music, University of MinnesotaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670612016-10-14T05:19:11Z2016-10-14T05:19:11ZExplainer: are Bob Dylan’s songs ‘Literature’?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141738/original/image-20161014-3985-qoz7xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is Bob Dylan a poet in the great tradition of Sappho?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">In the days of Sappho, John William Godward</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The media has reported on this surprising choice by asking musicians, poets, and writers if Dylan’s songs are indeed “literature”. Irvine Welsh, the author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135836.Trainspotting">Trainspotting</a> (1993), made it clear on Twitter that he didn’t think they were: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you’re a ‘music’ fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then ‘literature’. Then compare and contrast.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So are song lyrics a type of literature or, more specifically, poetry? The English poet Glyn Maxwell thinks not. In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13236716-on-poetry">On Poetry</a> (2011), he writes that “Songs are strung upon sounds, poems upon silence”. Inhabiting silence makes poetry the harder and more important art form. Music, Maxwell writes, makes lyrics seem better than when they appear on the whiteness of the page.</p>
<p>But many don’t share Maxwell’s position. The critic Christopher Ricks has long championed Dylan’s song lyrics as poetry. In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198951.Dylan_s_Visions_of_Sin">Dylan’s Vision of Sin</a> (2004), he places Dylan’s songs in a poetic tradition that includes Tennyson and Donne.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141747/original/image-20161014-3969-z8ql7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bob Dylan: he belongs to the tradition of blues, country and Tin Pan Alley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ki Price/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both Maxwell and Ricks, however, ignore an ancient link between poetry and music. Ancient Greek poetry, such as the epics of Homer or the lyric poems of Sappho, were accompanied by a stringed musical instrument called the lyre. It is from the lyre that we get the words “lyric” and “lyrics”.</p>
<p>Perhaps not surprisingly, the Swedish Academy drew attention to this ancient link between poetry and music when announcing its decision. The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, pointed out that Homer and Sappho were “meant to be performed, often together with [musical] instruments”.</p>
<p>There are more recent examples, of course. English lute songs of the 16th century set poetry to music. In the 19th century, Schubert and other composers wrote lieder (German “art songs”), which also set poetry to music.</p>
<p>But how accurate is it to compare Dylan with Sappho and composers of art song? Dylan belongs to the tradition of blues, country, and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Tin-Pan-Alley-musical-history">Tin Pan Alley </a>(the commercial American songwriters of the first half of the 20th century). He was central in the rise of “Americana”, a mix of folk and popular American musical forms that have little to do with “elite” musical forms such as opera and lieder.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141746/original/image-20161014-3953-1y9g2t9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bob Dylan took his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dylan has avoided taking on the mantle of “poet”. He once described himself as a “song ’n’ dance man”. Nevertheless, he famously took the name of a Welsh poet (Dylan Thomas) for his pseudonym. (Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman.) In addition, his songs, as Ricks and others have pointed out, take in numerous literary references, as seen in his many often-playful allusions to the Bible. And while his breakthrough in the early 1960s was as a “folk” singer, Dylan quickly became famous for the complexity and “poetic” quality of his lyrics.</p>
<p>So, do Dylan’s lyrics survive as poetry in the “silence” of the page? You can find out for yourself by reading the 960 pages of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22572014-the-lyrics">Dylan’s The Lyrics: 1961-2012</a> (2014). And you can compare his work with those of other song writers – such as Lou Reed, PJ Harvey, and Paul McCartney – whose lyrics have been published in book form.</p>
<p>Certainly, many people would argue that the lyrics of Dylan’s classic songs from the 1960s do survive as poetry. The strange, surreal, and often funny lyrics from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgefX2sZRU">Highway 61 Revisited</a> (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) arguably represent his peak as a lyricist.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG8Hi-fpyLI">Visions of Johanna</a>, from Blonde on Blonde, is a good example of the “literary” Dylan.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? <br>
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it<br>
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it<br>
Lights flicker from the opposite loft<br>
In this room the heat pipes just cough<br>
The country music station plays soft<br>
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off<br>
Just Louise and her lover so entwined<br>
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Visions of Johanna contains some of Dylan’s most celebrated lyrics, and you can see why. It clearly works on the page.</p>
<p>But should we make the printed page the standard of what counts as “literature”? Bob Dylan’s songs are multimedia things. Lyrics are to songs what scripts are to plays or films. We can read scripts for enjoyment, and to better understand the productions they come from. But to pretend that the play or film is somehow secondary is clearly a mistake. Equally, we can’t ignore the music and performances that accompany Dylan’s song lyrics.</p>
<p>Dylan’s Nobel Prize shows up what the Swedish Academy has so far ignored in their award system: film, popular music, and the emerging forms of digital storytelling.
Perhaps what this Nobel tells us more than anything is that “literature” or “poetry” are categories of our own making. To move beyond the page seems long overdue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67061/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ancient poems were accompanied by a musical instrument called the lyre – from which we get the word ‘lyric’. ‘Literature’ and ‘poetry’ are categories of our own making - so moving beyond them in a major award seems long overdue.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670492016-10-14T02:37:07Z2016-10-14T02:37:07ZIn honouring Dylan, the Nobel Prize judges have made a category error<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141710/original/image-20161014-3985-yme348.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan is a musician, who has been well recognised in his field.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/simonm1965/7662243224/">Simon Murphy/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1920, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize in Literature 1907), published <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/103/50.html">The Conundrum of the Workshops</a>. This poem about review culture features the Devil as “first, most dread” critic who responds to human creative outputs with: “it’s pretty, but is it art?”, a review that hurls the makers into confusion, rivalry and anguish. What could be worse, for an artist, than to discover that what you were making is not art after all?</p>
<p>Social media has taken over the Devil’s role as “most dread” reviewer, and all night the twitterverse has been alive with commentators expressing their outrage at, or rejoicing over, the decision of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-bob-dylan-deserves-his-nobel-prize-in-literature-67017">Nobel Prize Committee to award the Literature prize to musician and songwriter Bob Dylan</a>. As journalist and writer Jason Diamond tweeted: “My timeline is like watching a ‘Dylan deserved the Nobel’ vs ‘Dylan didn’t deserve the Nobel’ ping pong match.”</p>
<p>Much of this ping-pong commentary operates less according to the rules of evidence and argument than according to the rules of quarrel; of personal taste; of anger directed at established privilege; and of teasing Boomer nostalgia.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Billy Collins, one of the most popular poets in America, supports Dylan’s win.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/5617580149/">David Shankbone/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the Affirmative team we have not-a-poet Salman Rushdie tweeting that “From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition”. </p>
<p>And there’s actual poet Billy Collins, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0">who affirms the prize</a> because Dylan’s lyrics are “in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page”. </p>
<p>From the team for the Negative, there’s editor Chloe Angyal: “Literally zero women were awarded Nobels this year. Maybe someone can write a poignant, gravelly, somewhat atonal folk song about that”. </p>
<p>Or the writer Shay Stewart Bouley who tweeted about “peak white man music.” Or music journalist Everett True, <a href="https://everetttrue.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/bob-dylan-wins-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-some-facts/">who pokes fun at the committee</a>: “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature is like your third-rate English teacher at school, trying to look ‘cool’.” </p>
<p>Not all commentators have relied on personal taste or social politics: several observe something that struck me too: there seems to have been a category error in the awarding of this prize.</p>
<p>Novelist Jodi Picoult tweets: “I’m happy for Bob Dylan. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?src=hash">#ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy</a>?” From novelist Joanne Harris: “Is this the first time that a back catalogue of song lyrics has been judged eligible for a literary prize?” More bluntly, from novelist Jeff VanderMeer: </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"786564909991550976"}"></div></p>
<p>Is it possible that this award was determined according to the sort of logic set out by The Logician in Ionesco’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2007/oct/03/ionescosrhinocerosisasrele">Rhinoceros</a>: The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded only to those who have created literature. Bob Dylan was awarded the Prize. Therefore Dylan is a creator of literature?</p>
<p>Perhaps. I am very interested in the relationship between song lyrics and poetry, and it is a close relationship – the first poems were almost certainly sung – but centuries ago, the two creative modes parted company. They operate now according to a different logic, depend on different traditions, and are located within very different ecosystems. This is not a question of relative quality; it is a question of categories.</p>
<p>So, whether I admire Dylan’s body of work or not, whether I am a fan or not, I think the Nobel Prize Committee has made a category mistake. They awarded the prize to Dylan “<a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/">for having created new poetic expressions</a> within the great American song tradition”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141725/original/image-20161014-3953-1qiiqfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Why not Patti Smith?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And I don’t argue with this at all. But does that mean his output is “work in the field of literature”? Not for my money. Dylan is a musician; he has been well recognised for his contributions to music, and more broadly to cultural life. </p>
<p>When Swedish Academy member Per Wastberg gushes that “He is probably the greatest living poet”, I can only say that Mr Wastberg should not be let anywhere near a literature prize. </p>
<p>And – taking my own place on the team for the Negative – if it must go to a songwriter, why Dylan? Did he need the money more than, say, Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin? Has he not had enough public attention? And were there really no writers – no poets, novelists, essayists, no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature – considered Nobel-worthy?</p>
<p>It’s very good to see that literature can still spark passion and outpourings of personal commentary; but I can’t help but read this decision as one that was discourteous to members of the field of literature, dismissive of women’s achievements, and fundamentally kinda nostalgic. Let me leave the last (tongue-in-cheek) word to writer Leah Kaminsky: “No woman wins any Nobel prize this year. Oh the times they ain’t a changin’.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67049/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Were there really no poets or novelists or essayists - no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature - considered Nobel-worthy? This nostalgic decision is discourteous to writers.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670172016-10-13T15:51:56Z2016-10-13T15:51:56ZWhy Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel prize in literature<p>To the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2016/oct/13/nobel-prize-in-literature-2016-liveblog?page=with:block-57ff87ebe4b0160123895641#liveblog-navigation">surprise</a> of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel prize in literature.</p>
<p>As the news broke, I was in the middle of teaching James Joyce to some undergraduates – an author who did not win the Nobel, but is often considered a pinnacle of high literature. Many wouldn’t look to compare these two artists, not least <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonpinter/status/786525603495280640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">those already protesting</a> that Dylan’s win cheapens the award. But in many ways, they’re alike. I’m thrilled. Dylan’s win has been a slow train coming.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"786543014134976513"}"></div></p>
<p>Meanwhile, Dylan will have been gearing up for another gig – much as he has been doing for more than half a century. On his Nobel-winning night he’s set to play Las Vegas, so it’s good to hear that he’s won a prize based on the reasonable judgement of a committee of high-minded enlightened experts and not just on the throw of the dice. </p>
<p>In terms of stamina alone, he’s a worthy winner but – more than that – it is the quality and the generosity of the achievement that is a pleasure to recognise. It’s great for his millions of fans around the world, old and young, great for the prize and great for the idea that popular music and serious literature aren’t necessarily so different after all.</p>
<p>The world of Dylan’s most distinctive lyrics is probably more Las Vegas than it is Stockholm – his songs are more often populated with gamblers than writers and academics. But his stature as the poet of rock and roll has never really been much in doubt. The significant presence of literary culture in what Variety magazine once mocked as the “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i25JXXi1E4MC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=%E2%80%9Cdeliberately+iggerunt%E2%80%9D+dylan&source=bl&ots=AzCc1pp5-P&sig=Yww5xcYd8us9fGSngWi_lmS1jkA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_pMq5jdjPAhUrJsAKHUy1A0IQ6AEIIzAC#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cdeliberately%20iggerunt%E2%80%9D%20dylan&f=false">deliberately iggerunt</a>” vernacular language of his songs has increasingly been revealed. </p>
<p>The seriousness of the literary as well as musical achievement has gradually gained more and more respect and leading academic critics, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/sep/14/music">Christopher Ricks</a>, have been keen to recognise and to try to account for it. His autobiographical <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/16/highereducation.biography">Chronicles</a> are packed with references to and anecdotes about writers.</p>
<p>References and anecdotes are also something that filled Joyce’s pages. Curiously, Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records at the time Dylan was beginning his recording career, gave him a first-edition copy of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses. Dylan professed that “he couldn’t make hide nor hair of it”. He wanted the poet Archibald MacLeish to explain it to him but didn’t get around to asking in the end. </p>
<p>Readers of Joyce as well as Dylan might recognise that as just the kind of thing that happens to Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom. Ulysses is full of snatches of songs and music – and if it had been written a few years later Bob Dylan would have been in there for sure.</p>
<p>What a lucky man to own a first edition of such a famous text – now one of the most prized and valuable of all collectable rare and vintage books (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/04/ulysses-sells-record-price">one sold in 2009 for £275,000</a>) as well as one that is most valued by serious literary critics and readers all over the world. Not a bad insurance policy just in case the recording career didn’t take off.</p>
<p>But of course it did take off – and how. It’s hard to imagine a more prominent living figure in American culture – perhaps even world culture – than Bob Dylan, or one whose work combines a more richly poetic and surreal artistry in its vision of the contemporary world, a more iconoclastic sense of social justice, more notes of personal intimacy or such a dry and acute sense of humour. There is nobody better capable of provoking his huge and amazingly loyal audience with new challenges, at the same time as endearing himself to them all the more. </p>
<p>I hope the buskers and street singers in the subways and on the street corners around the world dust off their favourite Dylan standards and sing them out loud. It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone with or without a guitar or harmonica who hasn’t tried to strum some Dylan chords or mimic that unmistakeable voice at some point in their lives – just to try to answer that great Dylan anthem question: “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxLMr784l0Q">How does it feel?</a>”</p>
<p>How does it feel for Dylan to win the Nobel? Let’s hope he tells us in the acceptance speech – or in song.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67017/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To the chagrin of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win a Nobel Prize. But this James Joyce expert is fully in support.Richard Brown, Reader in Modern Literature, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.