Bob Dylan Cheats Again?
His Nobel lecture may have lifted from SparkNotes—possibly the latest of his artistic thefts, and one of the most fascinating.
“Bob is not authentic at all,” Joni Mitchell told The Los Angeles Times in 2010, referring, of course, to Bob Dylan. “He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
Mitchell was giving a particularly acidic summary of what’s become conventional wisdom about the great boomer bard. A gentler term often used about Dylan’s relationship to originality is “magpie.” Here’s The New York Times’ Jon Pareles writing about plagiarism accusations against Dylan’s Love and Theft in 2003: “His lyrics are like magpies’ nests, full of shiny fragments from
