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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
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 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?
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?
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