…we’ve got one more solid reason to respect Bob Dylan.
6 thoughts on “If The Whole “Musical Legacy” Thing Wasn’t Enough…”
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…we’ve got one more solid reason to respect Bob Dylan.
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Well after Obama got the Peace Prize for doing nothing, the Nobel Committee has taken a prestige hit even though the Norwegians are to blame for that one.
You may have heard, but…..Bob Dylan briefly played with Bobby Vee Fargo. He told Vee that his name was “Elston Gunnn”.
I heard that – actually wrote about it a while ago. More to come.
Dylan knows how much the Nobel is worth these days….
I’ve never gotten Dylan. He seemed like a guy who did C&W themes for people who thought that they were too cool for C&W.
Here is Spengler on Dylan:
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/10/26/americans-are-not-a-folk-and-bob-dylan-is-not-our-poet/
Long story short? Dylan is a pop-singer who knew how to press the buttons of Boomers.
Here is Andrew Klavan on Dylan:
You could spend and well spend a year or two of your life studying the way Milton describes, not the fall of Lucifer from heaven, but how the ancients incorporated that fall into their own mythologies:
“How he fell
From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’re the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star
On Lemnos th’ Aegean Ile.”
The density of thought, the precise arrangement of words (the placement of “Dropt” has the effect of a hangman’s trapdoor opening) and the milking of classical beauty to enhance Christian mythology could and should be subjects of entire treatises. And that’s before you even get to the deep philosophy that underlies the comparison of the two cultures.
You could likewise spend two years studying, “It ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,” but you would be wasting your life and making as big an ass of yourself as did the Nobel Committee.
https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2016/10/16/our-culture-is-blowing-in-the-wind/2/
The Nobel prize was misguided, and I think Dylan knows it, and is showing it by his response.
And comparing classical poetry to pop music is like comparing cooking to mechanics; they’re different media. Poetry has to convey its entire meaning with word choice, meter, density, etc.
Music, especially recorded music, has words, the music, the performance, even the recording itself to get its idea across. THere is no way to compare across genres.