newcritics

Bob Dylan is a master of many things, perhaps chief among them is the craft of cultural appropriation. It’s a trickster’s craft - an art best practiced by a thief and a changeling, someone who can walk out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa on his student’s easel with no one raising an eyebrow because the work has become so effortlessly the thief’s own.

When it comes to pop music techniques, thievery - or recontextualization if you prefer - is in its ascendancy thanks to hip hop sampling. But of course such appropriation has always been at the heart of popular music. In fact, until the 1820s most English popular songs, including those from the ballad operas, featured new lyrics set to common folk tunes.

But nothing rankles like pop music thievery. Look how worked up people get. Think about the furor that attended everything from Vanilla Ice’s unwillingness to acknowledge Under Pressure as the source of Ice, Ice Baby to the way feathers were ruffled when it was revealed earlier this year that Dylan had lifted several memorable lines on his new album from the work of Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy.

For some fans, discovering that lines or melodies have been nicked somehow deflates the creator and value of the derivative work. They feel hoodwinked, as if they had been tricked into paying for one thing when they were actually given another. Dylan bore the brunt of that anger a lot more heavily in 1985 when listeners began to realize Dylan had borrowed lines for the album Empire Burlesque from several 1940s detective movies (like Sam Spade’s line in The Maltese Falcon: “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble”).

But derivation is the essence of creativity and culture marches forward like open source software with innovators building on top of the creative kernels of prior innovators. That’s why we can accurately call Gil Evans’ harmonies “Debussyan,” for example. Does the fact that the story of Othello was floating around the Mediterranean for generations make Shakespeare’s version any the lesser? Does the line “second verse same as the first,” borrowed by the Ramones for Judy is a Punk from Herman’s Hermits make I’m Henry the 8th I Am the better song?

Henry is not a better song. But if novelty were the mother of all genius there would be no contest.

Dylan of course has densely packed his songs with appropriated material for years. Some of this appropriation was classic folk process stuff–the Lord Randall structure used for Hard Rain, the melody of No More Auction Block for Blowin’ in the Wind, the great line about railroad men drinking up your blood like wine from the Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s version of the old minstrel tune I Wish I Was A Mole in the Ground.

Besides the Timrod quote on When the Deal Goes Down, Dylan’s latest record almost staggers under the weight of lifts. Blues vamps, their titles and their choruses are dressed up with original verses (Someday Baby, Rollin’ and Tumblin’, When the Levee Breaks). Timrod is not the only 19th century source. The parlor ballad Nettie Moore donates both its title and half its chorus to another number. And on his previous album Dylan not only applied similar techniques to songs (Sugar Baby, Poor Boy) but to the album title itself. (Love and Theft was the title of a famous, and highly academic study of blackface minstrelsy by Eric Lott.)

Choosing to use the title “Love and Theft” and choosing to put the title in quotation marks is about as close to a statement of principle as Dylan is likely to make about his creative process. Yeah, it’s an obscure, even gnomic statement of principle, but hey, it’s Dylan. Like the quotes from Homer (in ancient Greek) and other classical lit that dot Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the lifts Dylan employs seem to flow naturally from the writer himself. It’s just the sound of what’s in his head. And his method of deploying these lifts have a profound overarching effect, especially taken over a career.

Dylan has created a cultural feedback loop through which his music swirls, allowing listeners a kaleidoscopic vision of an eternal American present where Robert E. Lee rubs shoulders with Alicea Keys, where the music of Chuck Berry and Stephen Foster go together like Smith & Wesson.

Which brings me to Dylan’s latest mind-bending, ironic bit of cultural feedback. It was announced last week that director Curtis Hanson’s forthcoming movie Lucky You (a poker movie starring Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore) will feature a new Dylan song entitled Huck’s Tune. Ok, nothing surprising about Dylan evoking one of the fundamental texts of American lit (not even when you find out that Bana’s character is named Huck Cheever). But the twist comes from the fact that Huck’s Tune is the title of a song in Greg Johnson’s 2004 novel The Loony Bin Blues composed and sung by a character who is a Dylan fan.

I haven’t heard the song yet, but Johnson’s lyrics would fit almost perfectly into Dylan’s world:

I wish I had a raft so I could be like ol Huck Finn
I’d light out for the territory where I’d never been
Pick up Tom ‘n Becky and we’d drift through Caroline
Travel cross the water for to see what we could find

Put down on an island where the pirates walked of old
Find one that’s still hidin’ and relieve him of his gold
When it’s spent we’ll pitch a tent, hang around the harbor
Livin’ large on hushpuppies and learnin’ port from starboard

O Huckleberry, Huckleberry, Huckleberry Finn
I understand why you just had to go adventurin’
O Huckleberry, you just had to go adventurin’

The raft’s imaginary, just a figment of my mind
And I discovered Tom ‘n Becky ain’t the wanderin’ kind
Still I kind of wish I had a raft to travel on
A water-goin’ magic carpet, flowin’ like a song

O Huckleberry, Huckleberry, Huckleberry Finn
I understand why you just had to go adventurin’
O Huckleberry, you just had to go adventurin’

A boy can set out foolish and come home bein’ wise
On treasure hunts you never know the nature of the prize.