The nature, the mechanics, and the meaning of creativity, especially as it pertains to music, matter a lot to him, as he makes abundantly clear with his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. ![]() The answer to that may be “Who cares?” And the answer to that is: Bob Dylan cares. His whole body of work is largely concerned with the question, “Who really made this?” ![]() Even with his paintings, many of which appear to be based on still frames from movies and published photographs, Dylan has tempted accusations of appropriation. In Chronicles: Volume One, his 2004 book of impressionistic reminiscences, Dylan seems to have mined an old issue of Time magazine and an assortment of other sources to construct a collage representing his memories and ideas. ![]() ![]() From his earliest days as a folk singer in MacDougal Street coffeehouses, he has been known for drawing freely, often brazenly, from the work of his predecessors (and occasionally his contemporaries), employing the “folk process”-through which each singer makes additions or alterations to a shared body of material-to produce work idiosyncratically his own. As an author of all kinds of work-songs, poetry, a memoir, radio-show commentary, the occasional film script or Nobel lecture-Bob Dylan has been engaged for more than 60 years in an inquiry into authorship itself.
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