Jeff Tweedy giving back

My friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to this news: Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) will be donating five percent of his songwriting royalties to organizations working toward racial justice. And he’s asking other musicians and songwriters to do the same. As he writes in a tweet, “The modern music industry is built almost entirely on Black art.” Well, yes.

Speaking of which: I saw by chance yesterday an NPR story about Bob Dylan’s new song “False Prophet” and its unacknowledged borrowing from a 1954 recording by Billy "The Kid" Emerson. NPR is more generous to Dylan than I’m willing to be: in 2020 I see not “a familiar, recurrent aspect of [Dylan’s] creative process” but unacknowledged borrowing, from a source unlikely to be recognized by most of Dylan’s listeners. And I have to remind myself: here’s a guy who borrows from CliffsNotes and SparkNotes for his Nobel Prize lecture. That’s not what used to be called “the folk process.” That’s ripping off.

Bob, how about kicking in some of your royalties?

[As I wrote to Stefan, every time I begin to warm to Bob Dylan, he does something to make me step back.]