Joni Mitchell Outs Bob Dylan
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jwhiteside/2010/04/28/folk-lies-joni-mitchell-outs-bob-dylan/
by Jonny Whiteside
4/28/10
"Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name
and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like
night and day, he and I."
Joni Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010
--
Caterwauling Canuck "folk singer" Joni Mitchell got just about
everybody riled up with that sweet morsel of self-serving insight,
but the real shock is not that Mitchell is absolutely correct but
that someone finally came out and said it. After decades of carefully
manicured deification by Columbia Records, brain-dead rock critics
and the slimy elite institution that elevated such barely able
snake-oil salesmen as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to celestial
heights, it's high time to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan's
track record as a Grade-A phony.
Most Dylan fans would be stunned to realize that his vocal style (for
lack of a better term) was high-jacked, in its entirety, from
long-dead bluegrass-country singer Carter Stanley. We're not talking
about an influence, like Lefty Frizzell for Merle Haggard, but a
total appropriation of Stanley's highly idiosyncratic approach. A
counterfeit from the get-go, once Dylan realized what an advantage
his audience's innate ignorance was, he's exploited it ever since.
Just type "Bob Dylan plagiarism" into your friendly search engine,
and a plethora of questionable circumstances pop up, enrobing the
singer almost as completely as his years of reflexive media fawning
have. Documented from his teenage start, when he submitted a hand
written, thinly revised version of country star Hank Snow's "Little
Buddy" for publication as an original poem, to his 1963 pilferage of
Irish poet Dominic Behan's "Patriot Game"'s melody for the similarly
slanted Dylan tune "With God on Our Side" to songwriter James
Damiano's ongoing multimillion dollar copyright infringement suit
(alleging Dylan's Grammy-nominated "Dignity" is nothing but an
altered version of Damiano's "Steel Guitars") to the naked "Red Sails
in the Sunset" melody heist for the song "Beyond The Horizon" on his
Modern Times album, up through the recent Confessions of a
Yakuza-Love & Theft plagiarism charges (Love & Theft? Calling Dr.
Freud!), the Timrod controversy, even the numerous passages of Proust
and Jack London that (re) appear in the text of Dylan's
autobiography, it's a deep, dark thicket of thoroughly damning and
apparently chronic bootlegging. Naturally, Dylan has said nothing
publicly about any of these, but he already spent over three million
dollars defending himself against one-time affiliate Damianothe
classic delay-to-destroy court room technique.
Defenders and apologist have an extraordinary array of excuses on
Zim's behalf, from use of "literary allusion" to his building a
"cultural collage," or that his "borrowing" is "homage," to the more
deliciously desperate "he obviously doesn't NEED to do it"
(strangely, though, he always has). This instamatic,
Clinton-ian excuse making serves only to further polish up the shine
on Dylan's teflon hubris and to underscore the blind, Pavlovian
worship which he has long enjoyed. Let's face it: as a lyricist,
Dylan is crap, inarguably unworthy beside, say, Hank Cochran, Chuck
Berry, Mickey Newbury or Jimi Hendrix ("All Along the Watchtower"
plays as a lead balloon even for Hendrix, nearly deflating his
Electric Ladyland masterpiece).
While we're endlessly told that "The pump don't work / cause the
vandals took the handle" is vintage Dylan worthy of class room study,
in truth it's little more than the wordy spew of a peripatetic
rhyming dictionary who'll hang any phrase together as long as it
fits. Metaphor is convenience, not expression for Dylan. His songs
have also treated women quite badly: the entire attitude of "It Ain't
Me, Babe" is ugly; "Just Like a Woman" is nothing short of
misogynistic, but, worst of all, Dylan's sheer verbosity has
ineradicably stained American pop music, and we've all had to suffer
through the post-Dylan legacy of long-winded nonsense ("American
Pie," anyone?).
The real tragedy is that none of these very well-documented and nigh
irrefutable plagiarism charges will ever emerge from the shadows, as
the Cult of Zimmerman's hulking form casts a very, very long one.
Even when the Hank Snow rip-off stared the world in its face, the
strongest reaction was a nervous giggle and murmurs of youthful
indiscretion. To capitulate the carefully constructed myth of folk
music and Dylan's subsequent installation as rock & roll's poet
laureate is unthinkable, a hot, hit-the-panic-button nightmare for
generations of quiescent "hipsters" never weaned from the
million-selling Dylan teat. His socio-cultural mystique is also an
industry-manufactured sham, one that very handily diverted attention
away from genuine political stink-stirrers like the MC5 or the
lysergic guerilla warfare of the 13th Floor Elevators.
As a junta-backed counter-culture figurehead, Dylan is ideal: a
harmless, unoriginal patsy, a cute insouciant whose relentlessly
self-involved stance never threatened anyone, save for the hazard of
the droning lip service endlessly paid him. We should all praise Joni
Mitchell for this overdue call-out (just don't ask us to listen to
her records), but it's unlikely that any in the Zim Cult will even
consider the ramifications of her statement. But when you pile it up
with all the rest, there's a single conclusion to be made: Bob Dylan
is an artistic (and ethical) fraud, one whose own fear of creativity
has long since given way to an apparently lifelong practice of
emulating his superiors by vampirism, siphoning off their
intellectual blood and using it to top off his own under-baked
efforts. Weirdly, even then, the results have been scarcely palatable.
.
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