Lethem Post

Under the section, Containment Anxiety, Lethem describes Muddy Waters recording a song and then when asked if it resembled any others of that genre, admits that there are other similar songs. On page 264, Lethem notes that he got the basis for that passage from a piece called Copyrights and Copywrongs by Siva Vaidhyanathan, so I looked into that piece. Upon a google search, the internet lead me to amazon where an description of the book was provided. The piece that Lethem uses on page 213 is from a book that discusses quite literally the opposite of his essay. Copyrights and Copywrongs is a piece about how copyrighting something goes beyond economic interest and copyrighting defends cultural values about various subjects such as race, class, etc. While Lethem uses the piece on Muddy Waters as an example to argue his point that we all plagiarize in one way or another and that creative pieces should be used as a basis to build upon new ideas rather than as private property upon which an outsider can't trespass, the same piece is likely used in Copyrights and Copywrongs to discuss a problem within a specific industry where it's easy for artists to steal ideas from one another and gain from those stolen ideas. Lethem can tie his example of Muddy Waters back to his earlier discussed exemplification of Bob Dylan (earlier in Lethem's essay, that is) and it teaches us that appropriation  is widespread and very subtle in the ways which it can act. I, as a musician, don't believe that songs which sound similar are necessarily products of plagiarism, but rather that a combination of influence, genre characteristics, and intention while writing, could create similar songs. The same goes for all forms of art, in my opinion. Certain characteristics can describe certain genres of art (romanticism for painting, surrealism, rock music, etc), and can blur the line between artists and make some pieces seem more similar to others than the artists had intended - even if the artists had no idea of the other piece.