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I was visiting a friend on Lake Winnipesaukee last Saturday when he started playing a guitar riff that sounded very familiar. I asked him the name of the song, and he said it was the theme from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, L’avventura (seen & heard in video above). I suggested that it sounded very similar to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae. He agreed. Now, composer Giovanni Fusco died in 1968 and The Modern Lovers formed in 1970, so they weren’t broing down in Boston, or even Italy for that matter. It is quite possible however, that a young Jonathan did see the film and fell victim to one of our implicit and ubiquitous human faults, cryptomnesia, or unintended plagiarism.

The term cryptomnesia, literally hidden memory, was coined by Experimental Psychologist, medium investigator and proponent of Hindu re-incarnation beliefs, Theodore Flournoy. Essentially, cryptomnesia is “a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else.” While the individual believes that they are creating something new, in reality the inspiration is drawn from implicit memory, our brains ability to remember information without us consciously knowing that we are remembering it. In a way, we experience the content of a memory not as memory, but perceive it as a fresh creative and uniquely personal experience. If this false belief is corrected or its creator is exposed to the original source of the memory, it can result in a feeling of mystical stochasticity, divine coincidence, déjà vu, defensiveness or plain old weirdness.

In the 8th grade I wrote an entire song that I thought was great until I realized that not only the guitar part, but the vocal melody as well, were from an Dinosaur Jr. song that I had heard only once the week before during a ride to school. To say the least, such an experience can be disappointing, but more often it’s just remarkable. A haunting mist of realization creeps over you, stirring thoughts neuro-duplicity and a hollow autonomy. It becomes very easy to call into question what you’ve ever really done that was yours. Are all our creative processes but micro-collages of cryptomnesia re-assembled as processed through our unique chemical interactions in time and space? And if so, is that a bad thing?

In some development models children learn how to behave by unconsciously copying others, and friends strengthen their relationships when they assimilate each other’s phrases, behaviors, and opinions. Not only that, but these bonds are shown to be more common in situations where trust or affinity are involved, thereby creating a reciprocal cycle of trust, sharing, mimicking and bonding. Now I would suggest here that a primal form of human social bonding would be art, storytelling and music, and it strikes me that these are the only areas of contention that plagiarism rears its head. So what about that Dinosaur Jr. song? Did I just inherently trust J. Mascis so much that I re-appropriated his song and believed it was mine? Perhaps I don’t even need to trust him. With music, it seems more natural to passively consume, but deeply, sometimes subconsciously remember. Like when you walk into the deli thinking sandwich and you walk out whistling a Rod Stewart song, only to try and figure out why you can’t stop hearing, Wake Up Maggie for twenty minutes before you get put it all together.

Now, of course it isn’t just music that is the exclusive domain of cryptomnesia, but music is rife with examples and I will explain why I think that is in a moment, but first another example. Take The Banana Splits’ Tra La La
Tra La La

versus Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier

Buffalo Soldier

This is just one example of many that Thomas Irvin has compiled on his website. Now, who knows what kind of interaction Bob Marley ever had with the music of The Banana Splits, but the comparison is undeniable. If you’ve ever had it happen, (it happens to me all the time) you wonder why musically such blatant plagiarisms repeatedly come to be?

I would posit that perhaps this is because there is a relatively limited lexicon (12 notes in a chromatic scale, duplicated at octaves) in music and an even more binding syntax of contemporary music (particularly popular music) than compared to the phonemes of language and the complete lexicon of our collected global linguistic systems. In its essence, perhaps music is so simple and so direct an emotive and communicative device that we just can’t help ourselves. Perhaps musical memory and experience runs so deep that it can more easily operate undetected from our higher cognitive faculties, resting in a murky sonic pool deep in the nether-reaches of our brains. This ease and simplicity of form would make it more liable to re-appropriation, overlap, plagiarism and our ever-increasing claims of Fair Use. That is to say, it’s easier to lift (accidentally or otherwise) a four note chord progression than an exact paragraph of Faulkner’s.

Nevertheless, it happens in writing too. More and more. Now the question with the integrity of the written word I believe is slightly different. As our access to all of this information, often plagued with dubious citation, glib proclamation, patent  fabrication and deviously mercurous origins, what kind of truths are we writing or more accurately, re-writing? And what will the cultural implications of a rampantly cannibalistic media-based society be? Artwork is another matter, but the battles have begun. But for music, it is less about origin and truth than fair use and over-exposure. There are only so many hooks out there, I hate to say it. With twelve notes and a reasonable limit of 5 – 20 notes in any given hook, keeping in mind that 99% of bands are playing some combination of the same five instruments, Christ. It’s a goddamn litigious nightmare we’re clicking and file-sharing our way into–or wet dream depending on your area of legal expertise.

As with the development of any professional craft, the only solution to this digital age dilemma are due diligence, rigorous editing, and review, but really who cares? That’s the question and I don’t know if enough people do. This is not to justify purposeful, malicious slothful plagiarism which is, in my view, inexcusable. But perhaps on a subconscious level we’re all plagiarists, some of us just take from more places and some just mask it better.

Copy. Paste. Check please.

Read: The Dystopians (The New Yorker, 1/26/09)
Related: a few lines from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives:

Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
A rich man speaking in praise of wealth
A rich man speaking in praise of poverty
A poor man speaking in praise of wealth
A poor man speaking in praise of poverty

Comic primness, or “prim irony,” is an an attitude characterizing a member of a privileged class who somewhat questions the state of affairs whereby he enjoys his privileges; but after all, he does not enjoy them, and so in the last analysis he resigns himself to the dubious conditions, in a state of ironic complexity that is apologetic, but not abnegatory.

On the left we see Wipers frontman and guitarist, Greg Sage circa 1981; on the right, an Etruscan statuette of a kore from the end of the 6th Century B.C. The Wipers are a punk band from Portland, OR formed in 1977. The Etruscans are a pre-Roman Italian civilization who existed from 750-90 B.C.

What I’d like to pose to you all is that IF punk music is ancient Greece (ie. truth, discourse, liberal democracy and generally outrageous behavior), AND Rome is Grunge (ie. started out noble, built around Greek (punk, remember) traditions, grew massively popular before becoming too large and unwieldy, then collapsed and fucked up the world (and/or popular music) for years afterwards) THEN the Etruscans would be analogous to The Wipers. If you’re still with me, there’s more after the break including where Sonic Youth fits into all this…

The Wipers, Alien Boy

Both the Etruscans and the Wipers serve as a cultural link between their predecessors and the future dominant power by building linearly on the traditional art forms and crafts of the fore-bearers and creating a unique cultural niche that would serve as a seminal influence to the Next Big Thing, in one instance Rome, in the other grunge music. Although one instance operates on a civilizational scale and the other on a regional musical one, I would argue that music, like civilization, serves humanity, though on a smaller albeit more spiritually-relevant plane. You could of course argue that music is a subset of culture which is in return, a civilization’s socio-artistic fabric, but then you’d be being a dick. Give me a break, I thought this up in a cab after a wedding. It’s more interesting to just look at the parallels in the creative workings of humanity: linear in the sense of an endless branching network across time, cyclical in rhythms and generational cycles, and rooted in story-telling and myth, the egg & sperm of the Arts.

I would get more into the geographic relevance of this posit, the paths of information and the cultural ghosting of history, but this is just a blog post. Just check out the Wipers; start with “This Is Real,” (1980, Park Avenue Records).

What this does not explain, however, is who the fuck Sonic Youth would be in this analogy. As they enter their 30th year with the debut of their new record The Eternal and get two signature Fender Jazz Masters, their legacy is rich and their heritage a beautiful tapestry. I guess they’d be China. Yeah. Definitely, China. They even write their music like socialists. Think about that one…

Harper’s, June ‘09. Search the Harper’s Index, too. So dope.

Over a Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago, I was riding back to Oakland on the bus at night. I met an aged hippie named Art Bizarre who grew up in Oakland in the 1950s and 1960s. He had not been back here for awhile and was really excited to see the Kwik-Way still lit up and hopping.

Art said, “I used to run across that park there near the lake to go get a hamburger at that place. That was in 1969. Man.”

“Where have you been?”, I asked.

Art was an Artist. He lived in a small town in the mountains of Northern California where he made his art. I suspected, however, that he made more profit by growing green weeds than selling objets d’art.

He described how his family was angry at him for being the enigmatic uncle. After tuning them out for several years, he dropped in at Thanksgiving without warning. He had no respect for their lifestyle and enjoyed visiting them at his own free will rather than by obligation.

When I said that my bus stop was coming up, he offered to get off with me to share a joint. Imagining Art Bizarre’s free will exercised on my couch for the next three weeks, I politely turned down his offer.

I asked, “Where are you gonna get off, Art? This bus goes to the Oakland airport.”

Art said, “I think I’l go hang out there.”

I said, “At the airport? I’m not sure you’ll enjoy it much anymore.”

This was a post-911 world. He didn’t realize that you can’t just go to the airport, smoke a joint and hang out.

While I was parting, Art exclaimed, “Hey check out my band: Cosmic Dissonance!”

“OK, ya. I’ll look out for you guys.”

Google turned up nothing of Art Bizarre and his band. I respect someone who is really that far off the grid. Art assumed, however, that I would somehow be able to “check out” his band. I’ll take that assumption as a compliment.

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Victor chided me one night because our subscribers have no clue who the hell I am. I have little motivation to show off my wares. Cheers to wrinkled old rhinos making precious things you’ll never see and playing in bands you’ll never hear.

who’s coming to my party?

-mm