I lived the experience described by the Stan Rogers song and loved the song for that reason. I benefited greatly by the experience of working for a large energy company in Western Canada. There was no subjugation as described by the added verse which project the Marxist ideology obviously held dear by the later verse writer.
Very thought provoking. But I come from a jazz/swing music background where changing songs is very common, and a feature of the musical culture. Artists like Frank Sinatra will not only change the lyrics to an old song for their new recording, they'll change the lyrics from performance to performance, extemporizing on the spot.
And, of course, this is even more true for the music. It would be strange if the norm was to record a song with all the same instruments performing all the same parts every time, out of respect for the composer. Updating the orchestration is not only accepted, it's expected, even though that is also rewritting another artists' work without consulting them.
I love your substack by the way! A definite improvement over the blogspot website, and I loved that too.
Changing/updating orchestration is a very different category of action from deliberately changing or undoing the meaning of a well-known lyric. Recording artists who cover old songs are obliged, professionally, to change the arrangement/orchestration, else they'd be cover bands, not artists.
In contrast, changing words in order to completely change the meaning of the someone else's song is sort of a no-go, I think. You're right that Jazz/swing musicians do alter lyrics all the time, and in a delightful way. This toying with words is inherent to the form, it's a natural extension, or expansion, of the genre itself; it's almost like that outcome is already sitting there, waiting, in the original, when the playing begins.
What those jazz musicians don't do (there may be a handful of exceptions that prove the rule) is deliberately invert/undo of the meaning of a carefully crafted "message" ballad, like "The Idiot," in an attempt to make it align with their own personal political views.
Watkin himself pretty much spells out that his alteration to the words and meanings of Rogers' song was ideological and undertaken for a didactic purpose, as opposed to sheer caprice or rhythmic play, or wordplay. He said Roger's song "never sat right" with him, that it presented a "false dichotomy." And then he went on to talk about capitalist overlords and so on.
He's obviously free to steal, or co-opt, someone else's song in order to to explicitly undo, or reverse, its message; I just think it's an unattractively dense and un self-aware thing to do. You're right that Sinatra changed, or switched around, words, i but it was generally more in the context of playing with phrasing, and getting kicks and larfs. He didn't invert the meaning of songs with any didactic intention; he didn't sing, I don't know, "Don't Give Peace A Chance"...
I think Watkin should write his own songs instead of shaking the proverbial can and "tagging" someone else's.
I was just pointing out that the original post seemed to have an attitude towards changing lyrics that's more strict than my experience with jazz. I wasn't saying "All lyric changes are morally permissable," but more like, "In some cultures certain lyric changes are welcomed."
Though I do think that changing musical arrangements can also be just as powerful as changing lyrics. Jimi Hendrix playing The Star Spangled Banner on a distorted electric guitar at Woodstock is a very different political statement than the Marine Band playing it at The White House.
On the other hand, during the olden times when hardly anyone could read and write, most artistic texts were replicated orally, inevitably changing details at every replication. Songs stayed more recognisable, stories changed faster. And now you can trace down cute area-specific versions of Red-Riding-Hood or whatnot and see how it developed (perhaps starting as a simple horror-story, then morphed into a morality story about how young girls should act, then mostly lost that aspect and changed the ending into a happy one).
Another example of distorting the religious message in Kipling is Leslie Fish's setting of "Cold Iron." Leslie is a Pagan, and she omits the line about "Iron out of Calvary." Adding a verse to "The Idiot" to reverse its meaning to fit the performer's views really annoys me. Parodying a song to give a counter-message is fine, but it should be something original, not an attempt to make the original writer's views seem to be one's own. (I've parodied "The Idiot" myself, crossing it over with an Arrogant Worms song to make "The Last Saskatchewan Idiot.")
I thought of mentioning the omission of Calvary, but she leaves in all the rest of the obvious references to Christ, so I'm not sure she is trying to change the message as opposed to making an, I think mistaken, aesthetic decision. I expect I'll see her at Pennsic and may ask her.
I think that in talking about edited verse, you lead yourself astray by bringing up the question of rights, and of copyright and moral right and so on. If that were all there was to it, then we could say that a contemporary of Aristophanes or Catullus or Li Po, none of whom ever heard of copyright, could not possibly be criticized for reciting their lines inaccurately. There has to be more to it than that.
At the simplest level, there is a question of accurate quotation, if you claim to be presenting the work of poet X: You must not substitute your own words, even if they are in fact better, because doing so is misrepresenting the work in question.
But that doesn't come up if you are doing your own interpretation, and it's known to be such. On the other hand, there is a question that does come up there: Did you come up with something good in its own right, or did you miss the point of the original work, and fail to come up with a point of your own? That's not a question of legal rights but of aesthetic rightness.
Many years back, my wife and I went with another couple to see a stage production of Pippin at a community college. The version we were familiar with ends with the performing company (effectively the chorus) trying to persuade Pippin to get into a box that will be set on fire, gloriously burning him alive, and with Pippin rebelling at the last moment and choosing to live. This stage version had a different ending, in which the conflict and the final decision were gone, and things just trailed off. And the four of us looked at each other and quietly made our way out, not wanting to be asked how we had liked the production, because we all felt that that change made it unendurable . . .
An interesting connection here is parody of one poet by another. Parody isn't theft, of course. It's different to plagiarism plus modification, but there is a degree of simulation involved, of style or mannerism. Byron parodied others and was himself parodied. Dryden, Johnson and Swift, all parodied others and were themselves parodied. Apparently, parody was more common in literary circles in the past — the barbed tongue of the bard. Byron parodied Wordsworth's Peter Bell:
"There’s something in a stupid ass:
And something in a heavy dance;
But never since I went to school
I saw or heard so damned a fool
As William Wordsworth is for once."
With the rise of AI simulations and pastiche productions that seem to scrape stylistic peculiarities and mannerisms of established artists, the notion of authenticity and how to draw its rightful or ethical boundaries will become a hot topic. Do I own my style? My quirks?
"The Mary Gloster" is a brilliant work. But I think my own favorite of his would have to the "Hymn of Breaking Strain." Dorothy Sayers asked in one of her essays whether it was even possible to have a Christian tragedy, but I think this poem is evidence that it is.
I'm fond of that poem as well. As you may know, the Rationalists have adopted a setting of it as part of their equivalent of religious music, unfortunately with a few words changed, I think by accident not intention. I'm also fond of the anarchist poem, Macdonough's Song, and of quite a lot of others.
I have fond memories of a San Diego SF convention, many years ago, where I quoted some lines from Macdonough's Song to you after a panel, and you quoted the next lines back, and you and I and Karen Anderson and several other people left the room all reciting it together. It delighted me that many people knew it by heart!
Copyright law has made derivative works difficult to publish, other than fanfic. And those are usually “published” by uploading them to some website where they will be available free.
It isn’t clear to me which way causality flows, if either, between the sort of disapproval expressed in the post, which seems fairly common, and the legality.
I am of the opposite view. Obviously, it is difficult to improve something that is already very good, or to make something great out of a part of something mediocre, but I do not object to people trying and even failing. (Ideally, a mashup creates something really new, using flavors from other works.) So long as the original is still around, and it is clear which is which, I am happy for people to make mashups, updates, reverses, etc. These likely start out at a disadvantage, since they will immediately draw comparison with the originals.
For great artists, there is a danger that their work will be used without payment or attribution, but if they are truly great, they seem likely to do well in spite of this, and a repackaging or remix might lead new audiences to the original. Less great artists are in greater danger of being ignored. And so all have at least some reasons to welcome reuse of their work.
Obviously, anything can be done badly. And perhaps some of the resulting embarrassment inevitably attaches to the innocent, due to the laziness of audiences. But in net, I evaluate derivative works as a positive.
Unfortunately, I am not able to supply a large number of examples. The one that sticks out in my mind is a song, a mashup of Anna by the Beatles and Leave Them All Behind by Ride, with a few bits and pieces from other works, including a guitar solo from Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones. All the originals are clearly identifiable, but they have been integrated into something really new and startling, titled Leave Anna Behind. Note that I remember the original artists, but I’ve forgotten the name of the mashup artist. Maybe CCC?
I think the closest I have come to being fanficed is Verner Vinge's story "The Ungoverned," which has a setting based on my nonfiction, cited at the end. I certainly have no objection.
As I sometimes put it, when you are young you are afraid people will steal your ideas, when you are old you are afraid they won't.
I don't object to fanfic, read Glowfic and have referred to it in past posts. But the work there I like most is fanfic only in borrowing a setting (Golarian). I expect some of the character names are from the Pathfinder material for the setting but the characters, as best I can tell, are original with the Glowfic authors.
I've also read fanfic in the strict sense elsewhere, with setting and characters borrowed from a published work of fiction. Some of it is pretty good, some not. I don't think I have read anything better than the original, perhaps nothing as good, but if there isn't any more of the original and you like it the imitation may be the best you can get.
A dimly remembered three decades old SF story had the AI suffer a mental breakdown by quoting poetry, wrongly. Sometimes improving it. Hamlet's "to take arms against a SEA of troubles" was corrected to "take arms against a HOST of troubles" on the reasoning that one doesn't do battle with the oceans.
Andy Weir's relatively recent novel "The Martian" seems to have been edited in the Amazon e-edition. The titular character displays his irreverence, when cautioned that all of Earth can read his text messages, by responding: 1 "Look! (.)(.) <-- Boobies!" [ in the original, versus ] 2 "Look! (.)(.) <-- A pair of breasts!" I'm not sure how, or if, the change improves the characterization.
The release of Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" illustrates how editorial input can greatly improve a work: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is vastly superior (IMO) to Lee's original.
I agree that the changes to the Kipling poem are unwelcome, partly because it feels forced, and also because I feel like the calls to God in the original poem could be read as a layer of irony or distance
Like, if you talk to God and you believe that He might judge you, of course you're not going to complain to him about the quality of the people that he made
Especially if you will be judged similarly to them
I know pretty much nothing about Kipling so I have no idea how compatible this is with his ideas, but maybe if all art can be interpreted ironically, you can appropriate it without approving its (apparent) meaning
I think Kipling had strong religious feeling, monotheist from his references, no commitment to any particular religion. But he could write from the standpoint of a character who did.
I lived the experience described by the Stan Rogers song and loved the song for that reason. I benefited greatly by the experience of working for a large energy company in Western Canada. There was no subjugation as described by the added verse which project the Marxist ideology obviously held dear by the later verse writer.
Very thought provoking. But I come from a jazz/swing music background where changing songs is very common, and a feature of the musical culture. Artists like Frank Sinatra will not only change the lyrics to an old song for their new recording, they'll change the lyrics from performance to performance, extemporizing on the spot.
And, of course, this is even more true for the music. It would be strange if the norm was to record a song with all the same instruments performing all the same parts every time, out of respect for the composer. Updating the orchestration is not only accepted, it's expected, even though that is also rewritting another artists' work without consulting them.
I love your substack by the way! A definite improvement over the blogspot website, and I loved that too.
Changing/updating orchestration is a very different category of action from deliberately changing or undoing the meaning of a well-known lyric. Recording artists who cover old songs are obliged, professionally, to change the arrangement/orchestration, else they'd be cover bands, not artists.
In contrast, changing words in order to completely change the meaning of the someone else's song is sort of a no-go, I think. You're right that Jazz/swing musicians do alter lyrics all the time, and in a delightful way. This toying with words is inherent to the form, it's a natural extension, or expansion, of the genre itself; it's almost like that outcome is already sitting there, waiting, in the original, when the playing begins.
What those jazz musicians don't do (there may be a handful of exceptions that prove the rule) is deliberately invert/undo of the meaning of a carefully crafted "message" ballad, like "The Idiot," in an attempt to make it align with their own personal political views.
Watkin himself pretty much spells out that his alteration to the words and meanings of Rogers' song was ideological and undertaken for a didactic purpose, as opposed to sheer caprice or rhythmic play, or wordplay. He said Roger's song "never sat right" with him, that it presented a "false dichotomy." And then he went on to talk about capitalist overlords and so on.
He's obviously free to steal, or co-opt, someone else's song in order to to explicitly undo, or reverse, its message; I just think it's an unattractively dense and un self-aware thing to do. You're right that Sinatra changed, or switched around, words, i but it was generally more in the context of playing with phrasing, and getting kicks and larfs. He didn't invert the meaning of songs with any didactic intention; he didn't sing, I don't know, "Don't Give Peace A Chance"...
I think Watkin should write his own songs instead of shaking the proverbial can and "tagging" someone else's.
Great points. I agree.
I was just pointing out that the original post seemed to have an attitude towards changing lyrics that's more strict than my experience with jazz. I wasn't saying "All lyric changes are morally permissable," but more like, "In some cultures certain lyric changes are welcomed."
Though I do think that changing musical arrangements can also be just as powerful as changing lyrics. Jimi Hendrix playing The Star Spangled Banner on a distorted electric guitar at Woodstock is a very different political statement than the Marine Band playing it at The White House.
If you want a powerful version of that, look up Chase Holfelder's minor key version of "The Star Spangled Banner," which transforms it into a dirge.
On the other hand, during the olden times when hardly anyone could read and write, most artistic texts were replicated orally, inevitably changing details at every replication. Songs stayed more recognisable, stories changed faster. And now you can trace down cute area-specific versions of Red-Riding-Hood or whatnot and see how it developed (perhaps starting as a simple horror-story, then morphed into a morality story about how young girls should act, then mostly lost that aspect and changed the ending into a happy one).
Another example of distorting the religious message in Kipling is Leslie Fish's setting of "Cold Iron." Leslie is a Pagan, and she omits the line about "Iron out of Calvary." Adding a verse to "The Idiot" to reverse its meaning to fit the performer's views really annoys me. Parodying a song to give a counter-message is fine, but it should be something original, not an attempt to make the original writer's views seem to be one's own. (I've parodied "The Idiot" myself, crossing it over with an Arrogant Worms song to make "The Last Saskatchewan Idiot.")
I thought of mentioning the omission of Calvary, but she leaves in all the rest of the obvious references to Christ, so I'm not sure she is trying to change the message as opposed to making an, I think mistaken, aesthetic decision. I expect I'll see her at Pennsic and may ask her.
I think that in talking about edited verse, you lead yourself astray by bringing up the question of rights, and of copyright and moral right and so on. If that were all there was to it, then we could say that a contemporary of Aristophanes or Catullus or Li Po, none of whom ever heard of copyright, could not possibly be criticized for reciting their lines inaccurately. There has to be more to it than that.
At the simplest level, there is a question of accurate quotation, if you claim to be presenting the work of poet X: You must not substitute your own words, even if they are in fact better, because doing so is misrepresenting the work in question.
But that doesn't come up if you are doing your own interpretation, and it's known to be such. On the other hand, there is a question that does come up there: Did you come up with something good in its own right, or did you miss the point of the original work, and fail to come up with a point of your own? That's not a question of legal rights but of aesthetic rightness.
Many years back, my wife and I went with another couple to see a stage production of Pippin at a community college. The version we were familiar with ends with the performing company (effectively the chorus) trying to persuade Pippin to get into a box that will be set on fire, gloriously burning him alive, and with Pippin rebelling at the last moment and choosing to live. This stage version had a different ending, in which the conflict and the final decision were gone, and things just trailed off. And the four of us looked at each other and quietly made our way out, not wanting to be asked how we had liked the production, because we all felt that that change made it unendurable . . .
An interesting connection here is parody of one poet by another. Parody isn't theft, of course. It's different to plagiarism plus modification, but there is a degree of simulation involved, of style or mannerism. Byron parodied others and was himself parodied. Dryden, Johnson and Swift, all parodied others and were themselves parodied. Apparently, parody was more common in literary circles in the past — the barbed tongue of the bard. Byron parodied Wordsworth's Peter Bell:
"There’s something in a stupid ass:
And something in a heavy dance;
But never since I went to school
I saw or heard so damned a fool
As William Wordsworth is for once."
With the rise of AI simulations and pastiche productions that seem to scrape stylistic peculiarities and mannerisms of established artists, the notion of authenticity and how to draw its rightful or ethical boundaries will become a hot topic. Do I own my style? My quirks?
Kipling's "Muse among the motors" is a collection of poems imitating the style of a variety of poets, including himself, all about motor cars.
Thank you for that reference, David. I hadn’t read that one by Kipling - off now to read it.
My favorite Kipling poem is probably "The Mary Gloster." It's a Browning monolog, I think better than any of Browning's.
"The Mary Gloster" is a brilliant work. But I think my own favorite of his would have to the "Hymn of Breaking Strain." Dorothy Sayers asked in one of her essays whether it was even possible to have a Christian tragedy, but I think this poem is evidence that it is.
I'm fond of that poem as well. As you may know, the Rationalists have adopted a setting of it as part of their equivalent of religious music, unfortunately with a few words changed, I think by accident not intention. I'm also fond of the anarchist poem, Macdonough's Song, and of quite a lot of others.
I have fond memories of a San Diego SF convention, many years ago, where I quoted some lines from Macdonough's Song to you after a panel, and you quoted the next lines back, and you and I and Karen Anderson and several other people left the room all reciting it together. It delighted me that many people knew it by heart!
I am interested in how people interact on a subject. It gives me a whole lot of viewpoints. Very interesting stuff!!
Copyright law has made derivative works difficult to publish, other than fanfic. And those are usually “published” by uploading them to some website where they will be available free.
It isn’t clear to me which way causality flows, if either, between the sort of disapproval expressed in the post, which seems fairly common, and the legality.
I am of the opposite view. Obviously, it is difficult to improve something that is already very good, or to make something great out of a part of something mediocre, but I do not object to people trying and even failing. (Ideally, a mashup creates something really new, using flavors from other works.) So long as the original is still around, and it is clear which is which, I am happy for people to make mashups, updates, reverses, etc. These likely start out at a disadvantage, since they will immediately draw comparison with the originals.
For great artists, there is a danger that their work will be used without payment or attribution, but if they are truly great, they seem likely to do well in spite of this, and a repackaging or remix might lead new audiences to the original. Less great artists are in greater danger of being ignored. And so all have at least some reasons to welcome reuse of their work.
Obviously, anything can be done badly. And perhaps some of the resulting embarrassment inevitably attaches to the innocent, due to the laziness of audiences. But in net, I evaluate derivative works as a positive.
Unfortunately, I am not able to supply a large number of examples. The one that sticks out in my mind is a song, a mashup of Anna by the Beatles and Leave Them All Behind by Ride, with a few bits and pieces from other works, including a guitar solo from Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones. All the originals are clearly identifiable, but they have been integrated into something really new and startling, titled Leave Anna Behind. Note that I remember the original artists, but I’ve forgotten the name of the mashup artist. Maybe CCC?
I think the closest I have come to being fanficed is Verner Vinge's story "The Ungoverned," which has a setting based on my nonfiction, cited at the end. I certainly have no objection.
As I sometimes put it, when you are young you are afraid people will steal your ideas, when you are old you are afraid they won't.
I don't object to fanfic, read Glowfic and have referred to it in past posts. But the work there I like most is fanfic only in borrowing a setting (Golarian). I expect some of the character names are from the Pathfinder material for the setting but the characters, as best I can tell, are original with the Glowfic authors.
I've also read fanfic in the strict sense elsewhere, with setting and characters borrowed from a published work of fiction. Some of it is pretty good, some not. I don't think I have read anything better than the original, perhaps nothing as good, but if there isn't any more of the original and you like it the imitation may be the best you can get.
The mashup artist is not mentioned there, that I can find. CCC is mentioned here https://soundcloud.com/rolling-stones_mashup_set/5-beatles-vs-rolling-stones
A dimly remembered three decades old SF story had the AI suffer a mental breakdown by quoting poetry, wrongly. Sometimes improving it. Hamlet's "to take arms against a SEA of troubles" was corrected to "take arms against a HOST of troubles" on the reasoning that one doesn't do battle with the oceans.
Andy Weir's relatively recent novel "The Martian" seems to have been edited in the Amazon e-edition. The titular character displays his irreverence, when cautioned that all of Earth can read his text messages, by responding: 1 "Look! (.)(.) <-- Boobies!" [ in the original, versus ] 2 "Look! (.)(.) <-- A pair of breasts!" I'm not sure how, or if, the change improves the characterization.
The release of Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" illustrates how editorial input can greatly improve a work: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is vastly superior (IMO) to Lee's original.
This is a tricky subject
I agree that the changes to the Kipling poem are unwelcome, partly because it feels forced, and also because I feel like the calls to God in the original poem could be read as a layer of irony or distance
Like, if you talk to God and you believe that He might judge you, of course you're not going to complain to him about the quality of the people that he made
Especially if you will be judged similarly to them
I know pretty much nothing about Kipling so I have no idea how compatible this is with his ideas, but maybe if all art can be interpreted ironically, you can appropriate it without approving its (apparent) meaning
I think Kipling had strong religious feeling, monotheist from his references, no commitment to any particular religion. But he could write from the standpoint of a character who did.