What’s New Is Old

This chapter explores the 2011 charges of plagiarism against Bob Dylan and Beyoncé. In both cases, the accusations are misguided. Anxieties about plagiarism can seem to have a new urgency in our era, in which ideas, images, thoughts, and inventions are so easily reduced to data strings that can be transmitted, reproduced, and manipulated with little cost and effort. Sampling is the word we now use to refer to the practices of assembling and recombining words, song, and movement of others in new ways to make something new out of something old. Sampling is nothing new, not in art, and not in life. Every time we use a word or phrase we are, wittingly or not, making a pastiche out of the linguistic gestures of those who came before us. In the absence of direct intention to deceive, plagiarism has nothing to do with this.