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Edith blogged a while back about the fracas over the similarities between The Flaming Lips' "Fight Test" and Cat Stevens' "Father & Son." In this interview, Wayne told The Guardian Stevens now gets 75% of the royalties from the song after the group settled with the former folkie. I later ran across a story from The Calgary Herald that suggests Paul McCartney may have taken the melody of "Yesterday" (which I understand is the most-recorded song in history) from an older pop tune called "Answer Me."

That bastion of rock-and-roll culture, The Wall Street Journal, got into the plagiarism fray earlier this week. According to this New York Times story, the Journal published a piece Tuesday that accuses Bob Dylan of taking phrases verbatim from a book called Confessions of a Yakuza in lyrics on his latest album.

A grad student with a Poststructuralist bent might roll his eyes, invoke Barthes, and mutter, "Like, duh, all cultural products are simply rearticulations of earlier texts." Of course, the file-sharing wars demonstrate that the music industry still cling to Romantic notions of authorship., so that argument is not going to get a lot of play outside a New York Times story. Its interesting to note, however, how much recorded music plays a part in musical appropriation. In one of my undergrad music classes we were taught that Blues, as we generally understand it, did not really emerge until the 1930s when musicians began aping records from the likes of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey, which solidified the genre's keys and song structures. Moreover, record companies were inclined to release songs that audiences could immediately recognize as "The Blues."