Bob Dylan is sick and tired of his critics.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the 71 year old folk-rock icon, who has just released his 35th studio album, addressed charges of plagiarism, calling his critics “wussies and pussies” for claiming he was stealing from the works of others.
In 2006 the New York Times accused Dylan of borrowing from a Civil War era poet on his Modern Times album. And the Wall Street Journal claimed Dylan’s 2001 record Love and Theft had very similar phrasing to a 1995 biography of a Japanese mobster.
Dylan claims that in folk and jazz, “quotation is a rich and enriching tradition,” and he compared the accusations to folk fans calling him Judas when he started to play the electric guitar on stage for the first time in the early 1960s.
No doubt, some will examine Dylan’s latest album Tempest for its authenticity. But in his latest interview, Dylan has a few choice words for his harshest critics: They can “rot in hell”.
