The history of rock is one of theft, beginning with Elvis\u2019s debut single.<\/b>
\nIn Noah Baumbach\u2019s semi-autobiographical film The Squid and the Whale, the young protagonist Walt performs a song at a school talent show that he claims to have written himself. He wins first prize, his girlfriend loves it, and at dinner his overbearing dad says that it reminds him of his second novel.
But of course Walt gets found out. He didn\u2019t write it, Roger Waters did. It\u2019s the song Hey You from Pink Floyd\u2019s 1979 album The Wall. Confronted by the school therapist, Walt concedes: \u201cI felt I could have written it…so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality.\u201d
It\u2019s something most of us have felt before. Plagiarism as an assertion of identity, a misguided sense that we own the things we love. The composer Igor Stravinsky once referred to this affliction as \u201ca rare form of kleptomania\u201d \u2013 plundering of the musical past as raw material for the present.
Stravinsky was doing something quite different to Walt. He refashioned his stolen sources into something new: Russian folk melodies were incorporated into The Rite of Springand material from the classical era gave rise to Pulcinella. And yet Stravinsky tells us that Pulcinella was not only the first of his \u201cmany love affairs\u201d with the past, but also \u201ca look in the mirror\u201d. Just like Walt, then, Stravinsky\u2019s plagiarism was a form of deferred and narcissistic self-recognition.
We can look at such acts in one of two ways: either as an unethical infringement of somebody else\u2019s intellectual property or as the symptom of an attitude that underpins creative endeavour across the arts. In one of his Red Hand Files bulletins, the singer-songwriter Nick Cave urges us to embrace the second of these:
\u201cPlagiarism\u201d, he writes, \u201cis an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary \u2013 even admirable \u2013 tendency, and that is to steal\u201d. We could tell the history of rock as a twisted genealogy of theft, beginning with Elvis\u2019s debut single \u2013 a cover of Arthur \u201cBig Boy\u201d Crudup\u2019s That\u2019s All Right (Mama) in 1954.
Cave likewise treads in Elvis\u2019s footsteps with his 1985 album The Firstborn Is Dead. It features tracks such as Tupelo, a paraphrase of John Lee Hooker\u2019s spine-chilling Tupelo Blues; and Blind Lemon Jefferson, a homage to a blues singer of the same name. These singers had, in turn, written their songs by drawing on a shared tradition of stock or \u201cfloating\u201d verses native to the deep south.
The further back you look, the more such hybridity and assimilation comes to the fore. The blues itself, as Africanists such as Gerhard Kubik have noted, emerges from a complex and centuries-old process of creative interplay between the Arab-Islamic world of North Africa and musical cultures of the Sudanic belt, displaced through Altantic slavery.
Of course, Walt\u2019s performance of Hey You would not fit within Cave\u2019s vision of stealing as \u201cthe engine of progress\u201d. For Cave, acts of theft are absolved or justified only if the stolen thing is advanced in some way and made yet more covetable. Elvis, in this reading, is effectively pardoned for his appropriation of That\u2019s All Right to the extent that his white-skinned version of the blues \u2013 white-washed as rock and roll \u2013 was an act of \u201cmutating and transforming\u201d the genre that sparked a new mass cultural form still very much alive today.
Another reading, however, is possible: that this new mode of expression was yet another instance of a dominant culture taking \u201ceverything but the burden\u201d from African Americans \u2013 a longstanding relationship characterised, as the historian of blackface minstrelsy Eric Lott memorably put it, by \u201clove and theft\u201d.
But what Cave is really referring to is a trope central to the literary critic Harold Bloom\u2019s theory of the \u201canxiety of influence\u201d. No doubt we\u2019ve all come across the following quote, variously attributed to Picasso, Stravinsky, William Faulkner, and Steve Jobs: \u201cGood artists copy, great artists steal\u201d. It seems to have emerged during the late 19th century, but was most famously expressed by TS Eliot in 1920 as \u201cimmature poets imitate; mature poets steal\u201d.
Borrowing, Eliot notes, is perfectly normal \u2013 what distinguishes bad thieves from good ones is that the former \u201cdeface what they take\u201d, whereas the latter \u201cmake it into something better, or at least something different\u201d. In the right hands, Eliot is saying, plagiarism can lead to the creation of \u201cunique\u201d works rather than mere hackneyed replication. This modernist dictum chimes with Cave\u2019s claim that artistic crooks must \u201cfurther the idea, or be damned\u201d.
So is it ever possible to be original? The lazy answer is no. A better answer is that originality is always a scandalous collaboration with the past.
Ross Cole, Research Fellow, Music and Politics, University of Cambridge.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.<\/p>\n