45 REVELATIONS
It occurs to me that the general attitude toward self-plagiarization needs an overhaul. In pop music, as in most art forms, an artist who’s achieved success with a sound will often follow up with similar records—and that’s viewed, by critics especially but also by fans, as an aesthetic sin.
45 REVELATIONS
Ken Barnes
It occurs to me that the general attitude toward self-plagiarization needs an overhaul. In pop music, as in most art forms, an artist who’s achieved success with a sound will often follow up with similar records—and that’s viewed, by critics especially but also by fans, as an aesthetic sin. (Selectively, that is—the Police or Bruce Springsteen can cover the same territory repeatedly and remain relatively immune from reproof, but Chic or Rick James or almost any black act, or mainstream rockers like Boston or REO Speedwagon, will get reamed.)
The demand for diversity must have arisen in the anything-goes mid-to-late ’60s, when the Beatles and Stones led the way in unbridled experimentation and it was every artist’s duty to do something different with each new release. It’s a noble ideal but,not necessarily a healthy oneplenty of people floundered overreaching themselves, and conversely Little Richard and Chuck Berry’s records sounded the same, likewise the early Byrds, Sam & Dave, and the Supremes, without irreparable harm to their historical placings. It’s ludicrous to condemn an artist who pulls off the rare trick of unearthing a sound that sells records for mining the same vein again.