Beyoncé’s album B’Day is number one this week, relegating Bob Dylan to number three after one week at the top. Audioslave’s Revelations is second. Albums have a tendency these days, like movies, to get a big push when they are released, then settle into their run, however long it might be. Both the Beyoncé and Audioslave album were released just last week, as Dylan’s was the week before it became number one.
Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack is in its third week as the number one track. His album is expected to be number one next week.
An article in today’s New York Times suggests Mr. Dylan’s lyrics are derivative.
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.
It seems to me that all lyrics are derivative. All writing, in fact, is derivative. If it weren’t for the Bible, Shakespeare would have been short many a phrase. Some disagree:
That’s exactly what bothers Chris Dineen, a middle school Spanish teacher and casual fan of Mr. Dylan’s in Albuquerque. “It seems kind of duplicitous,” he said. “Even casual fans know that Dylan has a history of doing this and it’s part of what makes him great, but this is different. This is one poet who’s used over and over and over again.”
Mr. Dineen said he would have been happy if Mr. Dylan had just given Timrod credit for the lines. “Maybe it’s the teacher in me. If I found out that he had done this in a research paper, he’d be in big trouble.”