joni’s never wrong
“Quotation is something that happens a lot in the music world. Merle Haggard can mimic Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson perfectly. The Beatles, in “Back in the USSR,” mimic The Beach Boys. Quotation is a phrase that is used all the time in jazz solos. It happens a lot in old-time string band music too. One song is always using a line from another song to brace it. But then goes off on another tangent. Minstrels did it all the time. Weird takes on Shakespeare plays, stuff like that. It’s just done automatically.”— Bob Dylan, who has recently been accused of plagiarism, as if the world suddenly paid attention to the man who’s stolen music his whole life, who named an album Love and Theft and wrote the lyric, “Steal a little, they throw you in jail / steal a lot they make you king.” (Thx, Sara Bader)
“Bob 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 to the LA Times earlier this year.
