Blatant Ripoff or "Homage"?
Can you see the difference?
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- Zachariah Wells
- Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- I write, I edit, on occasion I snark.
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16 comments:
I don't get it - isn't he just doing a cover, kind of like an established band would do a Hendrix song as an encore?
After paying for the rights and acknowledging the original writer--and without modifying the lyrics.
He didn't acknowledge Collins!? I was assuming he did in there, somewhere, and it was cut off. If he didn't, that's nasty work.
Well, the Koyczan clip doesn't include what was said immediately before or after, so he very well could have been clear about everything - which is what I'd assume considering how blatant the "borrowing" is. If not, it's like buying a term paper off the internet, and as easily detectable...
The more interesting question to me is "Which performance did you enjoy more, the cover or the original?".
I usually would pick a spoken word poets over a page poet when it comes to performing live - for instance, Koyczan's performance at the Olympics v. Elizabeth Alexander's at Obamauguration - but in this case I think Collins' understated delivery hits at the heart of the poem much better, which I guess should be no surprise, as he wrote it...
Agreed, Rob. Koyczan's hamming is pitched beyond the back row. As for whether he ripped it off or paid for the rights to partially disassemble and appropriate Collins' poem, who knows? Given the showmanship of his routine, I'm going to guess that he'd rather leave seams covered.
Now you're sounding like a guy who thinks rap isn't music because of all the sampling.
If he gives credit (which we can't prove one way or another), do you really think he should be sending Collins a cheque for using it at a live performance?
If so, I owe Al Purdy's estate way more than my A-Frame Donations currently cover...
This wasn't "sampling"; he removed Collins' beginning, substituted his own and otherwise simply reproduced the poem. I have no issue with people mashing up, sampling, or simply reading someone else's poem. But I don't know of anyone who would want to have their poem edited for the purposes of someone else's performance the way SK does with BC's here. All he did was turn someone else's poem into his own by the least artful means available. If someone did that to a piece of my writing, I wouldn't be demanding payment, I'd be asking for a public apology.
I agree that if it were my poem I'd prefer it to be read as I intended, but that doesn't mean that chopping off the first part (and a few other lines along the way) and adding a new opening isn't sampling, just that it's not sampling to your tastes (or, as I indicated earlier, mine).
And if you don't like calling it "sampling", then "covering" can work too - think of all the good songs that have been covered with watered down lyrics in the last few years. Or the rewriting of classic poems for modern day audiences. Not to your liking, perhaps, but probably not grounds for a public apology either (assuming, again, that he gave credit).
Yikes, call off the hounds, already! It's a modified cover. Sometimes, apparently, Mr. Koyczan neglects mid-show to credit it, but has already been shamed and done his mea culpa:
http://archive.wordsaloud.ca/wa5/news/wa5_eletter_1.pdf
Much more grave, I think, is the charge of Plagiarism-of-our-method-for-scoring-easy-nationalist-points that Molson
(remember "Joe Canadian"?) could level against Koyczan for his lame "zed" crack during his Olympic performance.
Rob, in all of those cases you're talking rights have been requested, granted and paid for. In cases in which that hasn't happened, judges have indeed had to decide what constitutes fair use sampling and what's a ripoff.
I'm glad to see that SK apologized for not acknowledging the author. It was a classy thing to do, even if his cut and paste treatment of the poem was less so. It's still not clear if he ever bothered asking BC if it was cool to cut up his poem.
Much more grave is calling ad copy--which SK's "Olympic" poem was, originally, as it was commissioned by, I believe, the BC tourism bureau--with the odd lame rhyme a poem. Now Gordon Pinsent, say, reading, say, Birney's Vancouver Lights--that might've been a memorable moment.
Having seen Koyzcan perfrom "the Lanyard" I was quite shocked to see this... he made no mention that the poem was by Billy Collins and presented it as his own to an audience of hundreds of people who paid close to 30 dollars a head to hear this cover. Pretty lame. I honestly thought it was Koyzcan's poem until I saw this post.
He is doing a stand up cover and it is alright, not great but alright. The original from Mr. Collins was not well read and could have used an infusion of energy - maybe if he had a red bull or two instead of the double hit of Valium?
;)
Thief!
I have to say my wife and heard him do the same piece at a music festival on Vancouver Island last summer. No mention of Collins.
If this is as it appears, there's no possible justification for it. It is appalling. And while Collins is a sort of sleepy reader, his "performance" is far better than SK's ridiculous mugging and pandering. What pained me most about his well-seasoned performance of that mawkish piece of nationalistic self-congratulation at the Olympics is that most people watching will now think that's what a poet is.
On top of everything else, Collins poem isn't very good either. What does it boil down to? We can never repay our mothers, and our attempts to do so are necessarily ridiculous? Barely enough to pay its way IMO. But as is often the case with him, it gets by with a little easy humour and a basic way with words.
I'm going to go take a shower.
KC
Hmmm... looks like he's a crook and I wasted a good amount of my (not terribly) precious time hypothetically defending him. Bah!
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