In my opinion the Beatles will survive this effect - at least what they made from 1965 on. Love the early stuff myself, but it's more a meme representing the '60s where the later stuff is pop as timeless art.
Not so sanguine about anyone else from the era. The Stones? Too tied to rock and blues, both of which are out of favour now. The Who? Too wild and improvisational - that's all out of vogue too. Hendrix? Too tied to the electric guitar, and most of his stuff's too abrasive and inaccessible for most listeners. Dylan? Extremely culturally important and innovative, but may well be remembered for historic rather than musical reasons ('Did you know there was a guy who wrote complex lyrics in the era *before* rap?').
These guys are all still respected, but they're not *worshipped* the way they used to be. It's always fascinating to me to read old articles and see just how venerated Dylan was by pretty much all the music writers of the day - they really thought each pronouncement came from a higher place and each new release signalled where the culture was going to go next. And he really was that influential at the time. But I'd argue that since his heyday his influence has been mostly indirect - he inspired people who inspire people.
It's a shame, because personally I love him just as much as all those Boomer writers of old.
I noted with interest that Ted didn't mention any groups... I think Led Zeppelin is another band to watch although the individual members won't linger in our memories.
Steely Dan. The Dan ( Donald Fagen and Walter Becker + the approximately one hundred different sidemen they've had ) are a classic, a thing unto themselves, as incapable of being successfully emulated as The Beatles were.
Want to feel old? It was some 20 years between the release of the first Led Zeppelin record and the release of Nevermind.
It has been some 30 years since the release of Nevermind.
Also interesting how the rate of change in pop culture appears to be slowing. The first Led Zeppelin record came out in late 1968, some 54 years ago.
There are still teenagers listening to Zeppelin today, but imagine a teenager in 1968 listening to the popular music from 55 years ago. That kid would have been seen as a freak, and not in a good way.
I was 13 in 1968, and I listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, etc. My peers shared what they dug and I shared what I dug. Music listening was more open season.
As an Old Movie Weirdo, this makes me sad. I'm glad there are a few of us around to at least keep enjoying the old stars amongst ourselves.
I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide" ("The witch that came (the withered hag)/ To wash the steps with pail and rag,/ Was once the beauty Abishag,/ The picture pride of Hollywood"). First time I read this as a kid, I thought "No way!" Now I believe it.
A few years ago I had the melancholy duty of helping somebody sell off her deceased mother's doll collection at an estate sale. There were Shirley Temple dolls from the 1940s through to a last gasp series in the late 80s or even early 90s, which were clearly aimed at adult collectors. I remember thinking that the old lady who had died was one of her final fans and I was watching the disintegration of the cultural memory of Shirley Temple in real time. I advertised the sale in all the big cities of Texas; we didn't sell any.
I came here to say that very thing! I wonder how much of a lift that seasonal song gave him. Mentions were on an upswing in the 70s, with a little bump around 1977 when the song debuted (though he also died that year, which gives a boost) and continued to go up.
Same! I was going to call it The Bowie Effect. Since this is based on mentions on the Internet, I'm sure he gets a huge bump every Christmas. Smart move on Bing's part!
Google's ngram tool says it is "a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books". I just worry that this tool over-represents the popularity of artists that are more likely to have appeared in books, as opposed to coming up in conversation, videos, social media, newspapers, stories on tv, etc.
I don't mean to discount the the point of the article which intuitively seems right. I just worry that the relative measurements between artists are going to be skewed by little things such as a lot of people write about the Beatles in books but the same may not be true for other artists, especially given how dominant other forms of media are.
Greta Garbo has a particularly memorable name (she was name-checked in Madonna's "Vogue"), which may account for some share of her persistence. Cf. Joe DiMaggio (name-checked by Simon & Garfunkel and Peanuts).
Also, with Williams, there is the astonishing fact that he lost five or six of what would have been his prime years to service as a Marine combat pilot.
I love the anecdote Bob Costas has told: it came to him one day when he was talking to Williams, and he blurted it out.
This has nothing to do with the Bob Hope airport being renamed, but I think part of the problem of celebrities fading from memory is how younger people think about the past. Example: when I was 18-20 years old, which would have been 1983-85, I was heavily into modern bands like The Police and The Cars, but I also knew (and appreciated) The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miiler and rock stars of the 50s. I don't think the 18-20 year-olds (or 30 year-olds for that matter) of today have that same interest in things that went before them. They might go as far back as Friends, the 90s, but that's only because they seem to be on 24 hours a day on 50 channels.
But Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters were 20-25 years before I was born. (And Friends was the outlier example.) The younger people today (and whenever I use a phrase like that I know how old I sound to myself!) are just not as interested or familiar with decades past as people my age were at their age. We had a more universal knowledge back then.
I'm guessing *most* 20-year-olds in 1982 weren't listening to Glenn Miller.
Likewise, most 20-year-olds now aren't listening to The Police. But I'm sure some are.
Anyway, I'm a bit skeptical to the idea that young people today are less likely to be interested in pop culture from their parents' youth than young people 40 years ago were. Also, it's much easier for them to access it now.
Yes! There are so many YouTube Channels now that cover popular music from all across the Billboard era and I have been pleasantly surprised in the comments by how wide a range of fans they have! Todd in the Shadows is my favorite and he has series called "One Hit Wonderland" and "Trainwreckords". Sean Fay Wolfe of Diamond Axe Studios does a lot of Top Ten Best and Worst Lists from a wide variety of years and has a lot of other YouTubers as collaborators, including Lyzette G and Cicabeot1. Todd is a Millennial and the others are Gen Z!
There's too much content from and about contemporary artists. But another component is also whether talents from past generations are mentioned in modern pop culture. I take the example of Kate Bush and her song Running Up That Hill that climbed the charts once again after 40 years because of Stranger Things.
Older music also has been pre-sifted for quality, unlike newer music which is more often sifted by "theoretical ability to sell," for lack of a better way to phrase it. It can take a lot of searching and listening in newer music to find something as satisfying to listen to as the music your parents shared with you! (It's worth it to take the time and effort, though--the joy of sharing a genuinely good and interesting song with your parents/peers/others who shaped your music taste and seeing them enjoy it too is just as good as the first time you yourself heard that song :) )
One grocery store I shop at seems to always pick their background music from about 1964 to 1984. I asked one of the cashiers once if she ever got tired of all the old music, but she didn't seem to mind.
I suspect that the current crop of actors and musicians will have much shorter longevity than those of the 20th century and it has to do with how media is consumed these days. When I was kid back in the 1970s, one of my favourite things to do was to watch the double movie matinee on TV on Saturday afternoons. You didn't get to choose what you watched, you just got whatever was programmed. Hence I got to see a lot of films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Sometimes the movies would be frivolous ones, like "Meet me in St Louis" but I also remember watching The Third Man, Citizen Kane and Gaslight. It was a really broad film history lesson. I knew well the work of Louis Armstrong, Mario Lanza and Gene Krupa. Hope and Crosby, Lewis and Martin, Spencer Tracy (man was he hot), Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and so on, were all stars we knew, even though they weren't in the current movies of the day. Now, kids only get to watch films that are considered for kids, they receive video content from streaming platforms that tell them what they can choose from. I can't imagine an 8 year old clicking to watch Citizen Kane, but it was on TV on a Saturday arvo and I was riveted.
It's curious that we haven't seen any big publishing deals with Hipgnosis recently (great name, BTW). I think Springsteen was the last one that got my attention. Maybe these Hip dudes (I would love to see their record collections when they were twelve) have realized that most of these songs will be difficult to repurpose. How would -you- monetize "Maggie's Farm?"
Just curious, what do you think the half life of Frank Sinatra will be? The romantic in me hopes that he will last longer than most performers because I sense that most fans now will discover him later in life (which is my case).
What about Marilyn Monroe? She’s as famous as ever (incl. recent sensationalistic movies), and yet she never made it into the rarified art status like Louis Armstrong. Probably 99% of millennials could pick her out of a lineup. I guess there are always exceptions to the rule.
My father was 94 when he died in 2019. But near the time of his death, he didn't ask to listen to Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby. He wanted to hear Willie Nelson. Dad certainly remembered the names of 1940s musicians, but ONLY as names, not as something he wanted to hear any more.
Random thought: maybe Bing Crosby is lingering a bit because of White Christmas. It gets lots of play annually, and his distinctive tone could lead even kids to wonder, "who is that?"
Your timeline is probably correct because 80 years is slightly longer than the average lifespan of a human, therefore all we need to recognize is a name mentioned by a grandparent. If you play with the Google graphing toy enough you will likely find the same curves for sports stars, presidents, British monarchs, and automobile models (many of us have heard of the Edsel but few have seen one in the last half century).
Eventually everything and everyone is forgotten. This is part of the human condition.
How many composers of Gregorian chants can be named? The artists who made cave paintings are unknown to us. Likewise for the authors of important texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Be patient.
But these creators did have names and someone knew them. At some point the chain of passing down the information was broken. Wait long enough and the same will happen to Bach and the Beatles. It is naive to think that just because we now have digital files stored in thousands and millions of different locations that the content will survive for a thousand years. We were lucky the Rosetta Stone survived. We might not be so lucky with MP3 files.
I think that Bach has passed the 80 years test. But, once again, if we confine ourselves to "pop" culture, I doubt if anyone who's popular today will be celebrated in 80 years.
Your first sentence is a misapprehension. An example is that in regard to a later era, no one knows who wrote the vast majority of British Isles popular songs before the 20th century. And the "Barbara Allen" in one shire would be considerably different from the "Barbara Allen" in another shire. This is why Dylan is correct to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism by pointing out that borrowing, altering, rewriting are intrinsic to his approximate genre. Except the cases of weirdoes like Paganini, Liszt, maybe Wagner, Stephen Foster, no one paid much attention to such things before the 20th century.
I'm 70. There has always been a cult of celebrity during my lifetime, but it's become bizarre and torrential in the last forty years.
I’m not sure I want to jump down this rabbit hole because you are likely more savvy than I am on this topic. But here goes.
Just because nobody knows who first wrote “Barbara Allen” doesn’t mean there wasn’t a creator. The lyrics and music evolved over generations but, largely, the song is recognizable as “Barbara Allen.” Honest musicians acknowledge this on stage and on their recordings. My problem with Dylan — and others — is that he wrote the lyrics to “Masters of War” then glued them to the music of “Nottamun Town” without acknowledging he borrowed or was inspired by the traditional folk song. Any folkie worthy of the name knows that if you are looking for a tune to steal/borrow/be inspired by all you have to do is visit the archive at Cecil Sharp House. There, you can find music that is “new” to young ears.
The whole concept of copyright and “owning” a song is barely 300 years old. But where money is involved there are lawyers, and I suspect Dylan’s lawyers advised him more money was to be made by saying the words and music to “Masters of War” were his than to write on the label “Words by Bob Dylan, music Traditional.”
Last… the cult of celebrity goes back a lot longer than 40 years. Have you not seen the old newsreels of Chaplin being carried on the shoulders of an adoring crowd? Before we had photographic evidence there were written accounts of Dickens being mobbed by fans. Worshipping idols, whether they be religious or secular, is an ancient human affliction.
In my opinion the Beatles will survive this effect - at least what they made from 1965 on. Love the early stuff myself, but it's more a meme representing the '60s where the later stuff is pop as timeless art.
Not so sanguine about anyone else from the era. The Stones? Too tied to rock and blues, both of which are out of favour now. The Who? Too wild and improvisational - that's all out of vogue too. Hendrix? Too tied to the electric guitar, and most of his stuff's too abrasive and inaccessible for most listeners. Dylan? Extremely culturally important and innovative, but may well be remembered for historic rather than musical reasons ('Did you know there was a guy who wrote complex lyrics in the era *before* rap?').
These guys are all still respected, but they're not *worshipped* the way they used to be. It's always fascinating to me to read old articles and see just how venerated Dylan was by pretty much all the music writers of the day - they really thought each pronouncement came from a higher place and each new release signalled where the culture was going to go next. And he really was that influential at the time. But I'd argue that since his heyday his influence has been mostly indirect - he inspired people who inspire people.
It's a shame, because personally I love him just as much as all those Boomer writers of old.
I noted with interest that Ted didn't mention any groups... I think Led Zeppelin is another band to watch although the individual members won't linger in our memories.
For sure. If I was going to place a bet on any band from the '70s lasting it would be either them, Floyd or ABBA.
Great point about ABBA and, honestly, you've got to consider the Bee Gees. Staying Alive will never die.
The clue's in the name ;)
Good point, could well be Queen. So many strings to their bow, with both artistry and pop appeal.
Steely Dan. The Dan ( Donald Fagen and Walter Becker + the approximately one hundred different sidemen they've had ) are a classic, a thing unto themselves, as incapable of being successfully emulated as The Beatles were.
Steely Dan has already been forgotten. Sorry.
I doubt that.
Want to feel old? It was some 20 years between the release of the first Led Zeppelin record and the release of Nevermind.
It has been some 30 years since the release of Nevermind.
Also interesting how the rate of change in pop culture appears to be slowing. The first Led Zeppelin record came out in late 1968, some 54 years ago.
There are still teenagers listening to Zeppelin today, but imagine a teenager in 1968 listening to the popular music from 55 years ago. That kid would have been seen as a freak, and not in a good way.
I was 13 in 1968, and I listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, etc. My peers shared what they dug and I shared what I dug. Music listening was more open season.
So will John Lennon airport in Liverpool never change its name?
Almost certainly
Gosh The Clash already wrote the lyric ,"phony Beatle mania has bitten the dust." ages ago !o!
As an Old Movie Weirdo, this makes me sad. I'm glad there are a few of us around to at least keep enjoying the old stars amongst ourselves.
I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide" ("The witch that came (the withered hag)/ To wash the steps with pail and rag,/ Was once the beauty Abishag,/ The picture pride of Hollywood"). First time I read this as a kid, I thought "No way!" Now I believe it.
A few years ago I had the melancholy duty of helping somebody sell off her deceased mother's doll collection at an estate sale. There were Shirley Temple dolls from the 1940s through to a last gasp series in the late 80s or even early 90s, which were clearly aimed at adult collectors. I remember thinking that the old lady who had died was one of her final fans and I was watching the disintegration of the cultural memory of Shirley Temple in real time. I advertised the sale in all the big cities of Texas; we didn't sell any.
This feels like an especially poignant example of a huge star fading away.
Bing Crosby seemed relevant to me and my friends when we were kids because of his Christmas duets with David Bowie. Instant credibility!
I came here to say that very thing! I wonder how much of a lift that seasonal song gave him. Mentions were on an upswing in the 70s, with a little bump around 1977 when the song debuted (though he also died that year, which gives a boost) and continued to go up.
Bing Crosby will remain for a while if for no other reason than "White Christmas" being part of the popular Christmas music canon.
Same! I was going to call it The Bowie Effect. Since this is based on mentions on the Internet, I'm sure he gets a huge bump every Christmas. Smart move on Bing's part!
Ozymandias.....
Google's ngram tool says it is "a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books". I just worry that this tool over-represents the popularity of artists that are more likely to have appeared in books, as opposed to coming up in conversation, videos, social media, newspapers, stories on tv, etc.
I don't mean to discount the the point of the article which intuitively seems right. I just worry that the relative measurements between artists are going to be skewed by little things such as a lot of people write about the Beatles in books but the same may not be true for other artists, especially given how dominant other forms of media are.
For example, classical musicians fare pretty well over time: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Beatles%2CMozart%2CBeethoven%2CDebussy%2CLouis+Armstrong&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
Good point. Maybe the real story in ngrams is that books are dying, not just pop stars. What happened around 2007? (iphone?): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Bob+Dylan%2C+John+Lennon%2C+Paul+McCartney%2C+Michael+Jackson%2C+ABBA%2C+Bruce+Springsteen%2C+Metallica%2C+Elvis+Presley&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
Greta Garbo has a particularly memorable name (she was name-checked in Madonna's "Vogue"), which may account for some share of her persistence. Cf. Joe DiMaggio (name-checked by Simon & Garfunkel and Peanuts).
Who’s Simone Garfinkle? Is Peanuts his dog?
Also Gary Cooper was name checked in Puttin on the Ritz
True, but that song is almost a hundred years old, and as much as I like it, more people are likely to have heard of Gary Cooper than Irving Berlin.
Also, with Williams, there is the astonishing fact that he lost five or six of what would have been his prime years to service as a Marine combat pilot.
I love the anecdote Bob Costas has told: it came to him one day when he was talking to Williams, and he blurted it out.
"Ted! You're that guy John Wayne pretends to be!"
Williams: "Aww, I know."
This has nothing to do with the Bob Hope airport being renamed, but I think part of the problem of celebrities fading from memory is how younger people think about the past. Example: when I was 18-20 years old, which would have been 1983-85, I was heavily into modern bands like The Police and The Cars, but I also knew (and appreciated) The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miiler and rock stars of the 50s. I don't think the 18-20 year-olds (or 30 year-olds for that matter) of today have that same interest in things that went before them. They might go as far back as Friends, the 90s, but that's only because they seem to be on 24 hours a day on 50 channels.
Bob
https://www.bobsassone.com
When you were 20, you were admiring 50's music, which was about 10 years before you were born.
A 20-year-old today admiring Friends, is admiring something from about 10 years before they were born.
But Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters were 20-25 years before I was born. (And Friends was the outlier example.) The younger people today (and whenever I use a phrase like that I know how old I sound to myself!) are just not as interested or familiar with decades past as people my age were at their age. We had a more universal knowledge back then.
I'm guessing *most* 20-year-olds in 1982 weren't listening to Glenn Miller.
Likewise, most 20-year-olds now aren't listening to The Police. But I'm sure some are.
Anyway, I'm a bit skeptical to the idea that young people today are less likely to be interested in pop culture from their parents' youth than young people 40 years ago were. Also, it's much easier for them to access it now.
Yes! There are so many YouTube Channels now that cover popular music from all across the Billboard era and I have been pleasantly surprised in the comments by how wide a range of fans they have! Todd in the Shadows is my favorite and he has series called "One Hit Wonderland" and "Trainwreckords". Sean Fay Wolfe of Diamond Axe Studios does a lot of Top Ten Best and Worst Lists from a wide variety of years and has a lot of other YouTubers as collaborators, including Lyzette G and Cicabeot1. Todd is a Millennial and the others are Gen Z!
There's too much content from and about contemporary artists. But another component is also whether talents from past generations are mentioned in modern pop culture. I take the example of Kate Bush and her song Running Up That Hill that climbed the charts once again after 40 years because of Stranger Things.
Seconding this.
Older music also has been pre-sifted for quality, unlike newer music which is more often sifted by "theoretical ability to sell," for lack of a better way to phrase it. It can take a lot of searching and listening in newer music to find something as satisfying to listen to as the music your parents shared with you! (It's worth it to take the time and effort, though--the joy of sharing a genuinely good and interesting song with your parents/peers/others who shaped your music taste and seeing them enjoy it too is just as good as the first time you yourself heard that song :) )
One grocery store I shop at seems to always pick their background music from about 1964 to 1984. I asked one of the cashiers once if she ever got tired of all the old music, but she didn't seem to mind.
There was a time when I said my name is “Wayne. Like John Wayne.” Now I say “Wayne. Like (rapper) Lil’ Wayne.”
Who the heII is Lil' Wayne? Different strokes....
My dog is named Ernie. A (much) older lady won my heart when she said, "Ernie Pyle!"
Before my time, even, but still.
I suspect that the current crop of actors and musicians will have much shorter longevity than those of the 20th century and it has to do with how media is consumed these days. When I was kid back in the 1970s, one of my favourite things to do was to watch the double movie matinee on TV on Saturday afternoons. You didn't get to choose what you watched, you just got whatever was programmed. Hence I got to see a lot of films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Sometimes the movies would be frivolous ones, like "Meet me in St Louis" but I also remember watching The Third Man, Citizen Kane and Gaslight. It was a really broad film history lesson. I knew well the work of Louis Armstrong, Mario Lanza and Gene Krupa. Hope and Crosby, Lewis and Martin, Spencer Tracy (man was he hot), Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and so on, were all stars we knew, even though they weren't in the current movies of the day. Now, kids only get to watch films that are considered for kids, they receive video content from streaming platforms that tell them what they can choose from. I can't imagine an 8 year old clicking to watch Citizen Kane, but it was on TV on a Saturday arvo and I was riveted.
It's curious that we haven't seen any big publishing deals with Hipgnosis recently (great name, BTW). I think Springsteen was the last one that got my attention. Maybe these Hip dudes (I would love to see their record collections when they were twelve) have realized that most of these songs will be difficult to repurpose. How would -you- monetize "Maggie's Farm?"
Just curious, what do you think the half life of Frank Sinatra will be? The romantic in me hopes that he will last longer than most performers because I sense that most fans now will discover him later in life (which is my case).
How does one monetize Maggie's Farm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNMsiBnJN44
👍
Sinatra is a hardy perennial. My impression is that kids are at least aware of him and the position he occupies in cultural history.
What about Marilyn Monroe? She’s as famous as ever (incl. recent sensationalistic movies), and yet she never made it into the rarified art status like Louis Armstrong. Probably 99% of millennials could pick her out of a lineup. I guess there are always exceptions to the rule.
Bogart seems to have legs, too.
Monroe crosses the line from movie stardom to fashion icon, as does Audrey Hepburn. I suspect both of them will stick around.
I wonder if Jack Nicholson has legs?
How much of our own great-grandparents do most of us know?
My father was 94 when he died in 2019. But near the time of his death, he didn't ask to listen to Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby. He wanted to hear Willie Nelson. Dad certainly remembered the names of 1940s musicians, but ONLY as names, not as something he wanted to hear any more.
Random thought: maybe Bing Crosby is lingering a bit because of White Christmas. It gets lots of play annually, and his distinctive tone could lead even kids to wonder, "who is that?"
Your timeline is probably correct because 80 years is slightly longer than the average lifespan of a human, therefore all we need to recognize is a name mentioned by a grandparent. If you play with the Google graphing toy enough you will likely find the same curves for sports stars, presidents, British monarchs, and automobile models (many of us have heard of the Edsel but few have seen one in the last half century).
Eventually everything and everyone is forgotten. This is part of the human condition.
I don't think that's true of classical music composers, artists & writers, but if we limit it to popstars, I agree.
How many composers of Gregorian chants can be named? The artists who made cave paintings are unknown to us. Likewise for the authors of important texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Be patient.
There's more to music than the Gregorian chants, and you can't forget someone who's name you never knew.
But these creators did have names and someone knew them. At some point the chain of passing down the information was broken. Wait long enough and the same will happen to Bach and the Beatles. It is naive to think that just because we now have digital files stored in thousands and millions of different locations that the content will survive for a thousand years. We were lucky the Rosetta Stone survived. We might not be so lucky with MP3 files.
I think that Bach has passed the 80 years test. But, once again, if we confine ourselves to "pop" culture, I doubt if anyone who's popular today will be celebrated in 80 years.
I'm sure you're right. I can't think of anyone who is popular today being worthy of celebration right now.
Your first sentence is a misapprehension. An example is that in regard to a later era, no one knows who wrote the vast majority of British Isles popular songs before the 20th century. And the "Barbara Allen" in one shire would be considerably different from the "Barbara Allen" in another shire. This is why Dylan is correct to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism by pointing out that borrowing, altering, rewriting are intrinsic to his approximate genre. Except the cases of weirdoes like Paganini, Liszt, maybe Wagner, Stephen Foster, no one paid much attention to such things before the 20th century.
I'm 70. There has always been a cult of celebrity during my lifetime, but it's become bizarre and torrential in the last forty years.
I’m not sure I want to jump down this rabbit hole because you are likely more savvy than I am on this topic. But here goes.
Just because nobody knows who first wrote “Barbara Allen” doesn’t mean there wasn’t a creator. The lyrics and music evolved over generations but, largely, the song is recognizable as “Barbara Allen.” Honest musicians acknowledge this on stage and on their recordings. My problem with Dylan — and others — is that he wrote the lyrics to “Masters of War” then glued them to the music of “Nottamun Town” without acknowledging he borrowed or was inspired by the traditional folk song. Any folkie worthy of the name knows that if you are looking for a tune to steal/borrow/be inspired by all you have to do is visit the archive at Cecil Sharp House. There, you can find music that is “new” to young ears.
The whole concept of copyright and “owning” a song is barely 300 years old. But where money is involved there are lawyers, and I suspect Dylan’s lawyers advised him more money was to be made by saying the words and music to “Masters of War” were his than to write on the label “Words by Bob Dylan, music Traditional.”
Last… the cult of celebrity goes back a lot longer than 40 years. Have you not seen the old newsreels of Chaplin being carried on the shoulders of an adoring crowd? Before we had photographic evidence there were written accounts of Dickens being mobbed by fans. Worshipping idols, whether they be religious or secular, is an ancient human affliction.