Bob Dylan's new album, "Modern Times," is earning praise for its minimalist arrangements and brooding lyrics about romance, faith and mortality. It's also being criticized for what at least one critic calls its outright thefts of other music – snippets of old blues songs and Chuck Berry. Today, we parse Dylan's sources and inspirations with Rolling Stone editor Joe Levy, and Wall Street Journal music critic Jim Fusilli. Also: British scholar Michael Gray joins us to talk about "The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia," the culmination of over thirty years of dedicated research and scholarship.

jim fusilli thinks it derivative and filled w/ missed opportunities for attribution because the album states "all songs written by bob dylan." joe levy found it masterful and on par w earlier works such as blond on blond. and that influence is part of the folk, country, blues tradition, but that he too found the lack of credit troubling.

the two major examples were thunder on the mountain for the berry influence and rollin' and tumblin'.


thunder does sound berry like but levy points out that berry rewrote the lyrics for country tune ida red to transform it into his hit song mabeline. and they all agreed berry picked up most of his licks from t bone walker and louis jordan. in dylans current version he is looking all over the place for alicia keys (funny as hell).

an almost identical rollin' and tumblin' was recorded by muddy waters in the 1940s and roll and tumble blues was recorded in 1929 by hambone willy newbern.

to me the controversy is written into the album on purpose and we are all the better for having to hash it out. it reminds us that modernism is largely defined by modern copyright law. this strategy seems ok to me, but apparently almost everyone else finds the lack of riggerous attribution troubling.


- bill 9-08-2006 11:29 pm [add a comment]

nettie moore


- bill 9-08-2006 11:58 pm [add a comment]

and now theres this:

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Henry Timrod, sometimes known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy.

But maybe you’ve heard his words, if you’re one of the 320,000 people so far who have bought Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Modern Times,” which made its debut last week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

It seems that many of the lyrics on that album, Mr. Dylan’s first No. 1 album in 30 years (down to No. 3 this week), bear some strong echoes to the poems of Timrod, a Charleston native who wrote poems about the Civil War and died in 1867 at the age of 39.

i knew there was something familiar with beyond the horizon too. today monica played beyond the horizon and red sails in the sunset back to back. identical. i love this (concept) album.
- bill 9-15-2006 11:45 pm [add a comment]