Dylan: I just don't get it, and I never will

simon silverdollar said:

what i like about dylan, and what interests me about him, is that he does rock music that doesn't sound at all macho or laddish. and that seems like an important step. (not that i necessarily dislike laddish music- i mean, i LOVE The Sonics).

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you don't think his sneer is a form of machismo? a lot of his songs sound like put-downs. and one of the great macho garage punk songs 'a public execution' by mouse and the traps is directly modelled on 'like a rolling stone', it's a gloating character assassination of a woman

WOEBOT said:

the best thing about that documentary thus far is the old studio footage of:

• john julius niles (total shivers down the spine stuff......truly special)
• odetta (insane)

and, which surprised me,

• the joan baez which was completely spell-binding (if less compulsively bizarre than the other two)

(shrugs) the footage of dylan thus far couldnt hold a candle to any of this stuff.....

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i found the niles guy a bit perturbing actually, and kinda mannered

but yeah eveyrone seems to be wowed by odetta -- that amazing yelp. and the expressionist lighting on TV shows back then! over here at the moment they are showing a whole doc about protest in pop music (hosted by chuck D) and she's in that too. of course postpunk gets no shrift at all in it, no surprises there

joan baez came off really sympathetic didn't she, i had always thought of her as the archetype of everything sanctimonious about protest folk, but yeah it sounded better than i thought -- she looks better now than she did then i think. nice kitchen too!

It'd be simplistic to say that pronouncements of cultural importance are defensive, motivated by a need to see off rival claims, with the lines of division being determined socially and politically. But if you wanted to go down that road with Dylan I don't think an anti-Brit thing makes sense, as there is no underlying conflict. Boomers in particular tend to be anglophile. (It's not like John Lennon is losing his place in their pantheon.)

Buick6 said:

The thing I prefer about US music is it's lack of 'class distinction'

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Buick6 said:

and country music becoming oh so chic

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Missing the nail on the head. Country has always been popular, but it's a markedly working-class music. That's the background against which contemporary Dylanism should be seen. Now, more than ever, it is important for middle-class liberals to assert their tastes as being essentially American but at the same time clearly superior to those of their non-college-educated compatriots.

There's probably a generational thing going on too. It'd be a bit irksome the high status that Neil Young has with alt-rockers. It must be intolerable that these kids would prefer Johnny Cash to the Bobster.

<i>But all of the interesting British Pop, from the Kinks to punk to postpunk to New Romantic, didn't in any sense reflect America back to itself. From the American POV, it brought something to the table that wasn't on offer, it was an exotic presence. </i>

To continue making massive generalizations... I don't think any of this music was particularly big in America. The Kinks were just a curiosity--there is no great US fascination, outside the tourist trade at least, with quaint old English village greens. The Stones and the Beatles and the Who--ie bands who drew heavily on American R&B--much more important. The big punk band in the US--the very rock 'n' roll Clash. Etc. Duran Duran--mainly interesting in the US as a brief reprise of Beatlemania.

<i>It could be argued the reverse: that the decline of British Pop came with bland AOR Americanization, i.e. Dire Straits, Phil Collins, when British pop really did start reflecting America back to itself.</i>

But the original question was, did America become isolationist, or did British music get crap? This assumes that the success of British music in America is directly related to its quality. Which is a big fallacy. There's all sorts of excellent music from around the world that is not sucessful in America (and this does not make America "isolationist"--or certainly no more so than any other country. The US is not under some moral burden to be interested in music from other cultures. People are into what speaks to them.)

I'm saying, the success of British music in America has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with whether British music is working within recognizably American idioms. So sure, Dire Straits were not transforming the American tradition the way the Stones were (when I say reflecting, maybe I should have said refracting--the good stuff refracts), and they suck, but they were still within it. And they did a song about MTV, which was the biggest thing going in American culture at the time. So they were successful.

And besides all that, the big thing that happened was that "disco" (loose terminology here) became the center of British music in a way that it never did in America. The two countries went on divergent paths.

Is joeschmo blissblogger in a flannel shirt?

when i was, i think about 11 or 12 i used to wind my dad up by saying i didn't get the appeal of the beatles and the rolling stones, i used to be like, oh they can't sing like marvin gaye, they can't play their instruments like the meters etc etc and he used to say, don't flaunt your ignorance, its embaressing. and it was embaressing, but at least i had the excuse that i hadn't even reached adolescence.

i love dylan to death but i don't want to play this game, i'm cringing reading it.

luka said:

when i was, i think about 11 or 12 i used to wind my dad up by saying i didn't get the appeal of the beatles and the rolling stones, i used to be like, oh they can't sing like marvin gaye, they can't play their instruments like the meters etc etc and he used to say, don't flaunt your ignorance, its embaressing. and it was embaressing, but at least i had the excuse that i hadn't even reached adolescence.

i love dylan to death but i don't want to play this game, i'm cringing reading it.

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thanks luka - have sat idly by thinking i'd join in but too much nonsense on here.

there's elvis, there's the beatles and there's dylan, the rest can be negotiated.

see, we can all be absolute.

i went away and brooded on this.

i think that part of my reaction to this thread is based on the disappointment when people you like/respect don't get wahtever it is you obsessively love.

i don't care about all that 'he can't even play his harmonica' line like ability or otherwise is the key, we'd all be huge dave gilmour and mike oldfield fans then.

i suppose it's the more the fact that they don't get what makes the bobophiles quite so smitten. i think blissblogger is right to highlight a literary quality which allows some of our best writers to indullge themselves but i do feel that this literary element is also a turn off as it seems to get between the listener and the music - context becoming more overwhelming than the music, as if we have to quote the'mercury' quote to describe LARS - what does it mean?

it's not all about the lyrics, if it were we could just listen to cover versions, no, it's about the actual songs and their shape - from the early work like Hard Rain - long driving songs so totally at odds with bubble gum 3 minute early sixties onto the madcap electric albums - wild laughter turned into abstract form - the hammond swirl and the attack of the band - the lush sensitive narratives from the seventies - mad violins in desire - the trip through the wild wierd america on world gone wrong and on and on

the point is that Dylan (like elvis and the beatles) re-invent their idiom - they move it on to impossibly new ground and make the competition look like amateurs - nothing is ever the same again, they (to use pound's phrase) make it new - wildly so when there were so few ideas about the potential of this new idea - pop music

there is a hagiographic element to the obsessive dylan fan but there's this other group of fans - the patti smith lineage that snakes through into cave where dylan is the outsider, stuck to his guns in the desert by himself - masked and ananoymous indeed with just a battered bible in his hands

i just love his style - polka dot shirt, shades and winklepickers - cool and sharp and now like a riverboat card sharp - pencil thin moustache and bootlace tie - a gambler and a shapeshifter. his voice moving from the early 'whine' to the rich and lushly textured thing on LOve and Theft

i am sorry you don't get him KPunk it's your loss but somehow i think you'll live!

k-punk said:

A decade after More Brilliant than the Sun and this mouldering rockist triad is still being ringfenced and heritage plaqued? Yeh, in Q magazine, but here?

Seriously, though, is this what you think, are these the artists that have meant most to you in your life, or is this what we're all required to say on behalf of the big Other?

(Although I guess the interesting thing about that though, is what Simon said: in the eighties Dylan had more or less dropped off the canon)

The point about literary critics foaming at the mouth over Dylan is what has always puzzled me ... Because he doesn't strike me as very literary at all... unless gibberish (sorry 'surreal lyrics') counts as literary... but of course so much contemporary poetry is equally vacuous.... Can someone quote some of the lyrics that are supposed to be good?

With Dylan, though, maybe you have to buy into that troubadour Beat American road mythology thing... Whereas I, like Simon, have always found that Kerouac-Ginsberg thing unreadable loghorrea... like, get an editor, chaps... If you really want to cringe, just remember Ginsberg's comments in the Scorsese film... 'Dylan was a shaman, maaaaaaaaaaan.....'

Because, ultimately, I CAN now get the Beatles and the Stones, but my impression is that you had to be there to really get Dylan... or at least care about being there, which I don't....

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i do think that because in the end they are the ones i return to over and again

i suppose what i meant by the comment is they seem to me the ones who did it first/ best

the point is there are plenty others but i don't expect to reach anything even close to agreement on anyone else - not even the stones or whoever you care to mention, in the end the discussion here shows this rockist triad as you call it is not ring fenced - i just got a bit pissed off with too many 'can't play harmonica' comments nad made a rather rash post only to have the big Other waved in my face!

i know your style is to be provocative but Q mag, c'mon

k-punk said:

The idea that the Who, Stones and the Beatles 'reflected America back to itself' is simply wrong, for at least two reasons:

1. There WAS no r and b derived American pop until it was invented by those groups.
...

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what about Elvis? would you not considered he (and Bill Haley and Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee, and many others) as "r and b derived"- "hound dog" was an R&B cover

even Pat Boone (the whitest of white american pop) covered Little Richard in the 50s...

<i>1. There WAS no r and b derived American pop until it was invented by those groups.

2. Those groups were as English in their own way as The Kinks... (Village Green didn't come out till 67 btw, and the early Kinks hits were massive in influencing garage punk, 'Louis Louis', all that trivia).... The idea that The Who, especially, aren't thoroughly English is ridiculous... no-one could mistake any of their records for American productions.</i>

1. I guess you've never heard of Motown then.

2. Of course they were English. I'm not saying they weren't. I'm just saying they were obsessed with American music and culture, and that was what they drew on to create their music. Surely you're not going to tell me they were operating out of some English indigineous tradition? What is this, Britpop redux?

blissblogger said:

you don't think his sneer is a form of machismo? a lot of his songs sound like put-downs. and one of the great macho garage punk songs 'a public execution' by mouse and the traps is directly modelled on 'like a rolling stone', it's a gloating character assassination of a woman

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i was talking to the most beautiful woman that i've spoken to in some time last night -- call me infatuated! -- and it turns out that her mother was a folk singer who, along with others in her circle, kinda "mentored" the young bob dylan

there was a triad of 3 "no no's" (my term!) -- i forget the second term -- but it was "no greed, no ****, no meanness" -- and it was felt by the nyc folk people that dylan was contemptuous of this credo

(not that saintliness or piety is any kind of criterion for pop or rock stardom)

but yes, he was evidently very misogynistic, a real cunt, a get-rich schemer from day one, etc -- at least according to this second-hand account

I always think of Britpop as being an attempt to reconstruct an entirely English rock tradition, independent of America.

I don't know if I would quite see Beatles/Stones/Who as being refracted <i>through</i> English cultural tradition, so much as simply having an unavoidable distance from America/American music that allowed them to synthesize/fantasize/mess around with it.

I would say more that English cultural tradition was a minor element in their sound... the Beatles always had the music hall thing going on, which worked as a change of pace/oddly disjunctive element, but couldn't have stood on its own... the Who... not sure really... is it music hall again? That weird desire to write conceptual song suites? The Stones I would call least English of all... they had that early Lady Jane/As Tears Go By aristocratic thing going on, that seemed to draw on some kind of tradition of English balladry, but that died pretty much after 66 for them...

trying to think of dylan you shoulr try... maybe John Wesley Harding... you'd probably hate the music, its very "rural," heh," but the lyric writing is his most compressed, not Beat at all...

k-punk said:

The point about literary critics foaming at the mouth over Dylan is what has always puzzled me ... Because he doesn't strike me as very literary at all... unless gibberish (sorry 'surreal lyrics') counts as literary... but of course so much contemporary poetry is equally vacuous.... Can someone quote some of the lyrics that are supposed to be good?

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i can't for the life of me recall why . . . . but when i was in law school, somebody there gave a lecture during lunch one day about "jews in rock" -- dissecting the lyrics of a leonard cohen song and, yes, dylan's "all along the watchtower"

evidently the lyrics of "watchtower" recall isaiah 21???

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief."

"Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
"But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.