So what can we learn from all this? For one thing, it seems that men have a need to remove women from origin stories.
Charles Fox worked very hard, unsuccessfully, to remove Lori Lieberman from a song they wrote together about her own lived experience. Which is particularly ironic, because the title phrase “killing me softly” was actually borrowed from the 1966 English edition of the novel Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.
Meanwhile, Suze Rotolo was the inspiration for the song Bob Dylan wrote in 1962, closely based on a song recorded two years earlier by another artist. And both of those songs are musically quite similar to a 1973 Fox/Gimbel song that Charles Fox is suggesting Robbie Williams copied from him in 2024.
And in this year’s Dylan biopic, Suze Rotolo’s name has been changed to a pseudonym, because Dylan said that Rotolo had been a private person who would not have wanted her name to appear publicly. And yet Rotolo had taken the trouble to write an excellent and widely read memoir, which doesn’t seem like the act of a person who does not want to be publicly known.
So why do men keep trying to keep women like Lori Lieberman and Suze Rotolo from appearing in their own origin stories? After all, it just ends up making the men look bad, and everyone finds out the true story anyway.
Frankly, I have no idea why men keep trying to do this. But hey — don’t think twice, it’s all right.