a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Sunday, July 13, 2003 Love and Theft"Here are some phrases that Dylan apparently lifted from the English translation of Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza (translated by John Bester) and used on Love and Theft," writes Chris Johnson on Dylanchords.com. Johnson proceeds to list about a dozen quotations from the book, right next to lines from Dylan's terrific 2001 album. Example: Where the Yakuza (or Japanese gangster) in Saga's book says, "There was nothing sentimental about him — it didn't bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed," Dylan sings, in the rocking "Lonesome Day Blues," "My captain he's decorated, he's well-schooled and he's skilled, / He's not sentimental, it don't bother him at all how many of his pals have been killed."The LA Times has a good piece on this (via Golgonooza). Some people are accusing Bob of, well, theft. Of course it's not. On the same album you can hear plain echoes of old blues and folk songs. Saga himself is "flattered" by the borrowings, and the Times piece quotes a Rolling Stone editor who points out that folk and blues singers always borrow and change lines from other sources. "It's the tradition of Woody Guthrie, who borrowed freely from Irish ballads to create his original songs," says Joe Levy. Exactly right. The album title itself comes from another book: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott. But Dylan doesn't like it when people do the same thing to him. It goes against that free-borrowing folk ethic to support the so-called Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, as Dylan did in 1998. That law keeps his work — and mine, and Walt Disney's — from lapsing into the public domain for a stunning 70 years after his death. (The law was passed just in time to keep early drawings of Mickey Mouse from becoming public property.) As long as an artist lives, of course, he should be paid for his stuff: Dylan's publishing company drove a stern but reasonable bargain with me for the use of his lyrics in Too Much of Nothing. But the Sonny Bono law, which our friend Larry Lessig tried to fight in the Supreme Court last year, says that authors like me who want to quote a few lines of Dylan in their novels will have to go on paying for the privilege — to an estate or corporation — even after Bob's grandchildren have retired. That's silly. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:41 PM | |
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