“Slate” Unmasks Its (And Everyone Else’s) Music-Writing Plagiarizers

And here we thought the New York story on plastic surgery would be the most fucked up (and entertaining) music-related story we’d encounter this week. Not even close, thanks to a reader of Jody Rosen’s, who informed the Slate/Rolling Stone critic that someone named Mark Williams had copied his Jimmy Buffett piece for the former in a Texas weekly, the Montgomery County Bulletin. After contacting the paper’s editor and receiving a curiously blank reply, Rosen started nosing around some more. He was, and you will be, amazed at what he found:

When the borrowings from my Slate essay end, four paragraphs from the bottom of the article, Williams makes a jarring genre shift from think-piece to celebrity profile, complete with boilerplate quotes from the singer himself. Did the Bulletin really interview Jimmy Buffett? I Googled a phrase from Williams’ piece– “leaves the Parrotheads with this head scratcher”–and the search returned two results: “Spring Fling” and a USA Today piece from July 8, 2004, “Buffett takes country out for a boat ride,” written by Brian Mansfield.

It was then that I realized, with a pang of regret, that Mark Williams is not my biggest fan–a reader so enraptured by Rosen’s prose stylings that he was driven to steal them. “Spring Fling” has at least three sources: my Slate essay, Mansfield’s USA Today piece, and a Minneapolis Star-Tribune Miranda Lambert profile. And this is just the beginning of Williams’ collage-art music journalism.

Further digging found endless examples of the Texas paper’s “creative rewriting,” particularly on the political end of things. Even in my worst moments of unconsciously pilfering my colleagues’ phrases I’ve never rewritten anything quite so baldly as Williams and his editor, Mike Ladyman, seem to be doing on a regular basis. It’s enough to make any writer want to check and see if their own phrases might have made it into the Bulletin under someone else’s name.

Dude, you stole my article [Slate]