Ross Cole
When it’s admirable to steal music Acts of theft may be absolved or justified only if the stolen thing is advanced in some way and made yet more covetable
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n Noah Baumbach’s 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’t write it, Roger Waters did. It’s the song Hey You from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. Confronted by the school therapist, Walt concedes: “I felt I could have written it … so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality”. It’s 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 “a rare form of kleptomania” – plundering of the musical past as raw material for the present. Stravinsky was doing some-
thing quite different to Walt. He refashioned his stolen sources into something new: Russian folk melodies were incorporated into The Rite of Spring and material from the classical era gave rise to Pulcinella. And yet Stravinsky tells us that Pulcinella was not only the first of his “many love affairs” with the past, but also “a look in the mirror”. Just like Walt, then, Stravinsky’s 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’s 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: The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-maycare attitude toward appropriation – everybody is grabbing stuff from
36 ColdType | Mid-June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music – the great artistic experiment of our era.
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lagiarism,” writes Cave, “is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary – even admirable – tendency, and that is to steal”. We could tell the history of rock as a twisted genealogy of theft, beginning with Elvis’s debut single – a cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s That’s All Right (Mama) in 1954. Cave likewise treads in Elvis’s footsteps with his 1985 album The Firstborn Is Dead. It features tracks such as Tupelo, a paraphrase of John Lee Hooker’s 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 “floating” 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 Ger-
