I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO-My LIfe in the Bush of Ghosts [Remix website] (1981, 2006).

I’m stealing the bulk of these comments from a Pitchfork review of the album reissue because I have never actually listened to this album which I’ve known about for decades.

When Eno and Byrne released My Life in 1981 it seemed like a quirky side project.  But now, Nonesuch has repackaged it as a near-masterpiece, a milestone of sampled music, and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. So we’re supposed to see Bush of Ghosts as a tick on the timeline of important transgressive records.  Nonesuch made an interesting move that could help Bush of Ghosts make history all over again: they launched a “remix” website, at www.bush-of-ghosts.com, where any of us can download multitracked versions of two songs, load them up in the editor of our choice, and under a Creative Commons license, do whatever we want with them.

The only thing is, at the time this review was written, the site was not up yet.  And as I write this in 2019, there’s nothing on the site except for a post from 2014 about Virgin Media and Sky TV.  Alas.

[READ: May 1, 2019] “The Ecstasy of Influence”

Back in the day I was a vocal proponent of free speech.  It was my Cause and I was very Concerned about it.

It’s now some thirty years later and I don’t really have a Cause anymore.  It’s not that I care less about free speech, but I do care less about the Idea of free speech.

Had I read this article in the 1990s, I would have framed it.  Right now I’m just very glad that people are still keeping the torch alive.

Lethem begins this essay about plagiarism by discussing a novel in which a travelling salesman is blown away by the beauty of a preteen girl named Lolita  That story, Lolita, was written in 1916 by Heinz von Lichberg.  Lichberg later became a journalist for the Nazis and his fiction faded into history.  But Vladimir Nabokov lived in Berlin until 1937.  Was this unconscious borrowing or was it “higher cribbing.”

The original is evidently not very good and none of the admirable parts of Nabokov’s story are present in the original.

Or Bob Dylan.  He appropriated lines in many of his songs.  He borrowed liberally from films, paintings and books.  Perhaps that is why Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

In 1941, Muddy Waters played Alan Lomax the song “Country Blues.”  Lomax knew of Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” and asked if any other songs used the same tune.

In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts of how this song came to be: he made it on a specific date, it came from the cotton fields, he had heard the Johnson song as well as an earlier version from Son House.

In an episode of The Simpsons, a courtroom scene declares that “animation is built on plagiarism…. You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?”

Early on in the history of photography judicial decisions could have changed the course of the arts.  The debate was if any photographer needed permission to capture and print an image. The decisions were in favor of the pirates.

What about novelists? Some professors say that a novel should always eschew any feature that dates it…fiction should be timeless.  But in any work, characters drive cars, speak English and use electricity, which obviously dates it.  The teacher then said they should avoid the “frivolous Now.”  But we are born with brand names in our common knowledge: Band-Aid, Q-Tip, Xerox.

The idea that culture can be property means that people try to justify everything from attempts to force the Girls Scouts to pay royalties for signing songs around campfires to the endless rights battle over “Happy Birthday” (for which ASCAP 114 years after its was written continues to collect a fee).  [No longer, hooray!].

The RIAA is suing music fans.  ASCAP makes shop owners pay to play music in the background.

Thomas Jefferson considered copyright a necessary evil.  He wanted people to be free to create. Sometimes second comers do a better job than the original idea.  Some people knew the Monkees before The Beatles.

But modern American copyright law is subject to almost constant bloating. Emails and children’s finger paintings are protected.  But the original laws were created when copying was hard to do and copies were easy to find–a useful benchmark for deciding upon infringement.  But now we make a copy every time we accept an email or text.

Movies have always said that piracy was a crime–it is like stealing handbag.  But that is false.  If you steal a handbag that owner no longer has it. But copying intellectual property leaves the original untouched.

Jefferson wrote:

He who received an idea from me received instruction himself without lessening mine, receives light without darkening me.

Lethem says that a friend once bought him a gift from MoMA.  The artist Robert The had transformed Lethem’s first novel Gun, with Occasional Music into an expertly cut object in the shape of a pistol.  Robert The reincarnates everyday objects.  Lethem never would have imagined his book looking like this.  It wasn’t readable anymore. But he could not take offense.  Indeed he was flattered.  It does not detract form his novel  There is no need to choose between the two.

Then there is the case of Disney  Disney had perpetually pilfered from works in the public domain: Snow White, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword and the Stone, The Jungle Book.  Yet Disney is very protective of its own creations.  Indeed, most copyright law is associated with protecting Mickey Mouse.

What about “their world” sources like Paul Simon and David Byrne used.  Is that why Byrne and Brian Eno launched a remix website where anyone can download dissembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

We should think of art as a gift.  A gift establishes a bond between two people.  If you by a saw blade at the store, you don’t bond with the clerk.  Art that matters to us is like a gift.  Even art that is sold still retains its artistic merit.  But even a beautiful and powerful ad can never be art–it is never really a gift to the recipient.

Dizzy Gillespie defended another player who’d been accused of poaching Charlie Parker’s style: “You can’t steal a gift.  Bird gave the world his music and if you can hear it you can have it.”

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who’d taken offense at Bellow’s fictional use of certain personal facts said “The name of the game is Give All.  You are welcome to all my facts.  You know them, I give them you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.”

He ends by saying as a novelist he is grateful to be making a living as a writer.  He asks us not to pirate his editions, but do plunder his visions.

You the reader are welcome to my stories.  They were never mine in the first place but I gave the to you.  If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.

The last four pages of the essay are the footnotes.  Basically Lethem says that in this section he will name every source that he stole, warped and cobbled ideas from.  He stole all the ideas in the essay from different sources and then tried to make them sound more like himself for the essay.

Some of the original thoughts come from: Harold Bloom, Michael Maar: The Two Lolitas, William Gibson: “God’s Little Toys,” Siva Vaidhyanathan: Copyrights an Copywrongs, Lewis Hyde: The Gift (which he recommends highly), Mary Shelley (introduction to Frankenstein), Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture (the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform), David Foster Wallace: “E Unibus Pluram” (I thought that section about the frivolous now sounded familiar), Mark Hosler from Negativland, Robert Boynton: “The Tyranny of Copyright” and many more I didn’t feel like including.

This is an excellent essay.