Eric Lott on Bob Dylan's 'Love And Theft'

He's one of those rare people for whom cultural miscegenation is a spur to cultural newness and uniqueness.

Eric Lott is an American cultural critic, scholar, and author known for his work in the fields of literature, cultural studies, and race theory. He is most notably recognized for his influential book "Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class," published in 1993. "Love And Theft" is the thirty-first studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in 2001.

The only word I've gotten on the issue is from Bob Dylan's publicist, who told a writer doing a piece on the relationship between Dylan's title and my book that Dylan "does not deny a connection" between them. Beyond that, he doesn't want to talk about it.

I don't know why Dylan declined an interview with me, but I'd guess it had something to do with imagining a tedious sit-down with a scholar-squirrel (Gore Vidal's term) who'd be asking all sorts of boring shit about the connections between my book and his CD. Who's going to look forward to something like that?

But in fact I was thinking of something mock-confrontational. I mean, I like revere the guy. But I was going to be, "What do you think gives you the right to use my title?" Ho-ho-ho. By the way, I think I'm going to call my next book Time Out of Mind.

My title is actually a riff on one of Leslie Fiedler's; he wrote a famous book of literary criticism called Love and Death in the American Novel, and, among other things, it suggests that classic U.S. fiction is continually possessed by the idea of two men, one white and one dark, alone together in the wilderness or on the open sea, like Huck and Jim, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg—on up to Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies, and beyond, I suppose. I think the minstrel show isn't too far from this notion; with white men putting on blackface to mimic and lampoon black people and black culture, there's the same kind of imaginary proximity of white and black men. So "Love and Theft" it was: the fascination with and heisting of black cultural materials.

One can't know this, of course, but I imagine Dylan liked, first of all, the general resonance of the title, in which stolen hearts and emotional misdemeanors always stalk the sweetness of love, as they do in Dylan's songs. More generally, though, I think you're right; he knows full well his musical indebtedness and is playing with it in the songs as well as title of "Love and Theft." "High Water" sounds the most like actual minstrel show music from the 19th century, which is interesting not only since it's dedicated specifically to black blues singer (donor?) Charley Patton but also because it's a song of high seriousness, as though ultimate truths are rooted in cultural plunder.

This isn't to say that Dylan's just a blackface artist, like Michelle Shocked abjectly claimed herself to be on her record Arkansas Traveler. He's one of those rare people, like Michelle Shocked, in fact, for whom cultural miscegenation is a spur to cultural newness and uniqueness. Dylan goes his own way. Of course he pokes fun at himself in the middle of "Brownsville Girl" when he goes, "If there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now." He's obviously always been full of original thoughts.

Dylan knows whereof he speaks, too. There's a great line on "Sugar Baby" that goes, "Some of these bootleggers/They make pretty good stuff/Plenty of places to hide things here/If you want to hide them bad enough." Sure, he's talking about moonshiners; he can't help but also be talking about pirated recordings since he's been so richly bootlegged himself. Best of all, though, he's bootlegging all kinds of music on Love and Theft, and in lines like these he shows he knows it. (By the way, Sean Wilentz's magnificent article on the album nails a number of these sources; you can find it at bobdylan.com.)

I was pretty bowled over at the prospect that he might have been turned on by my book or even just the title. So I was glad some of the reviews (in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and elsewhere) mentioned the connection. I didn't even mind (that much) the creepy mention by Robert Christgau in the Voice, where Christgau imagines me exclaiming Sally-Field-like, "He loves me! Honey, Bob Dylan loves me!" I mean, what's interesting about Christgau's quip is that he doesn't just mention my book, he actually impersonates me—like minstrelsy is catching or something. As always, though, such ventriloquism says a lot more about the impersonator than the one impersonated.

Dylan knows how embedded in his culture he is, but I don't guess he thinks of himself or most musicians as only thieving. In a USA TODAY interview in August, he made mention of minstrel shows and other "low" entertainment forms as precedents for the feel he was after on "Love and Theft"—he may think of himself as being in the burlesque vein of minstrelsy, but not so implicated in its crimes. Which I think is the point of his "influences all mashed up" remark. And I endorse that remark, not only as an apt description of what Dylan does with his sources but as a one-line account of how cultural mixing in the U.S. takes place. It's a penetrating comment.

he political relations of blackface minstrelsy are still alive in the culture. Not only in the forms you rightly mention but in everything from cartoons and TV commercials to frat-house antics and bar chat. Spike Lee's Bamboozled—at least its first half where not only are "black" TV productions white-scripted but even black dancers on shingles in the streets of New York are framed by white interests—is excellent on the ingrown persistence and cold corruptions of blackface structures of feeling.

What's fascinating when it comes to the music is that it's usually tricky to specify where minstrelsy or obvious cultural appropriation stops and something different and fresh begins. Sometimes they co-exist outright, in (say) Biz Markie or the Beastie Boys. The Michael Boltons of the world are always there to give us the worst-case minstrel show example; but it's far easier to spot a lame plunderer like Kenny G or Robert Palmer than it is to say how an obvious borrower like Dylan or Elvis nevertheless somehow makes the music his own.

Original source: https://web.archive.org/web/20020613061502/http://www.gadflyonline.com/12-10-01/book-ericlott.html