Thread: You've got a lot of nerve Board: Purgatory / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
So His Bobness is a Nobel Laureate. But who is he ... what does he write? Is it literature? Or is his life the poem? Where do his songs fit in?

And the voice? Is that in itself a poem, cracked like the sky with naked wonder?
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
(oh ... and to guide your thoughts ... while I dance quietly at my desk with one hand waving free, albeit no longer silhouetted by the sea)
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
I do not see any meaningful definition where Dylan is not a poet. And he has reached a larger audience and ignited more conversations about poetry than the majority of "proper" modern poets.
His subjects are no less serious, his reflections no less profound.
People confuse I like this for it is good.
Whilst there are arguments for what constitutes poetry and the borders by necessity are vague, Dylan rests well within them regardless.

His voice? His words fit his voice, but are not constrained by it.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
I admit to have never knowingly listened to any of Dylan's work (and I have no intention of checking out any YouTube links either) but this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Anyone who writes pop songs is writing, on average, three-minute soundbites. I don't see how anyone can equate pop music with thoughtful, researched works of literature.

Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.

A sign of the times, I suppose, and I doubt very much that disliking it is going to be at all fashionable or in step with modern thinking.
 
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
Bob Dylan is neither fashionable nor modern. In another century he would have stopped at writing poems. If what you mean by modern is post 19th century, then okay. But no-one does poetry any more.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
But no-one does poetry any more.
Really? I must tell that to the published poets I know.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I admit to have never knowingly listened to any of Dylan's work (and I have no intention of checking out any YouTube links either) but this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Anyone who writes pop songs is writing, on average, three-minute soundbites. I don't see how anyone can equate pop music with thoughtful, researched works of literature.

Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.

A sign of the times, I suppose, and I doubt very much that disliking it is going to be at all fashionable or in step with modern thinking.
[Roll Eyes]
Dylan isn't pop. Dylan is essentially a folk performer. Folk tells stories, poetry tells stories.
But dismissing pop assumes that all "proper" poetry has a gravitas that much of it clearly doesn't.

[ 13. October 2016, 17:21: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
 
Posted by Sarasa (# 12271) on :
 
Christopher Ricks, former professor of English at Cambridge wrote a whole book arguing that Dylan is a poet. It's an interesting read.
To me poetry 'works' if it moves you and makes you see something, however insignificant in a different way. Simple 'pop' songs can do this, and Dylan is far more than a writer of simple pop songs.
I think my favourite lines are 'There's a lone soldier on the cross/
Smoke pouring out of a boxcar door'from Idiot Wind . Those two lines summon up so many images to me.
 
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I admit to have never knowingly listened to any of Dylan's work (and I have no intention of checking out any YouTube links either) but this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Anyone who writes pop songs is writing, on average, three-minute soundbites. I don't see how anyone can equate pop music with thoughtful, researched works of literature.

Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.

A sign of the times, I suppose, and I doubt very much that disliking it is going to be at all fashionable or in step with modern thinking.
What you have failed to do there is establish what poetry and prose are that songwriting isn't. A lot of songwriting is trivial but then limericks are too. Everything published by Mills and Boon is trivial too. Many biographies are hagiographies or badly researched: the point I'm making is that poetry and prose are not better than lyrics by virtue of form.
 
Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I admit to have never knowingly listened to any of Dylan's work (and I have no intention of checking out any YouTube links either) but this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Anyone who writes pop songs is writing, on average, three-minute soundbites. I don't see how anyone can equate pop music with thoughtful, researched works of literature.

Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.

A sign of the times, I suppose, and I doubt very much that disliking it is going to be at all fashionable or in step with modern thinking.
I would never consider Dylan to be a "pop star" -- he's much deeper than that.

Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics. (This should actually be easier for that than for most of us, since you won't be subconsciously hearing them sung.) He's been the voice for many of my generation.
 
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
There was a time when the poets were the bad boys -- Byron, Shelley, Keats. My argument is that rock and pop performers have completely taken over that role, leaving the poets to be ageing men doing sedate readings to small coffee-shop audiences.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
But dismissing pop assumes that all "proper" poetry has a gravitas that much of it clearly doesn't.
Not at all. Would you care to define "proper" poetry?

I know aesthetic taste is a subjective area that varies wildly along the complete spectrum but I still fail to see how any song, pop or otherwise, can be considered literature. Simply because it's written down it qualifies for consideration and inclusion?
 
Posted by Nicolemr (# 28) on :
 
Simply setting a poem to music removes it from consideration? That seems silly on the face of it.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.

quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
My argument is that rock and pop performers have completely taken over that role, leaving the poets to be ageing men doing sedate readings to small coffee-shop audiences.
The poets I know are far from being aged men doing sedate readings to small coffee-shop audiences. Though maybe that's how it is in your area. My experience of it here is that it can be a lively, sometimes anarchic kind of scene, and that the push is generally from people younger than myself.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
And simply because you define Dylan's work as "pop" while proudly proclaiming you've never heard his music and have no intention of hearing it defines it beyond the pale? Sad, really, sad. [Roll Eyes]
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I admit to have never knowingly listened to any of Dylan's work (and I have no intention of checking out any YouTube links either) but this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Anyone who writes pop songs is writing, on average, three-minute soundbites. I don't see how anyone can equate pop music with thoughtful, researched works of literature.

Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.

A sign of the times, I suppose, and I doubt very much that disliking it is going to be at all fashionable or in step with modern thinking.
The problem here is "pop." Justin Bieber is pop. ABBA is pop. "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" is pop. Dylan set about exploding mythologies, and while he may have had an eye to his royalties, on the whole set about playing iconoclastically with expectations (of "pop" amongst other things ... though more often in interviews than lyrics). Very few of his songs were of the three minute "Love Love Me Do" genre (the early Beatles were pop, too). Ironically "Blowing in the Wind" was an exception - and what an exception. His songs socially commented, his songs interiorally monologued, his songs channeled Rimbaud as much as Guthrie but never Bieber.

His songs sometimes work as poems. Like Chaucer's and Keats' and God help us Blake's. His songs worked better as poems than Pam Ayres' or Helen Steiner Rice's of course, but they also work better as poems than about 85% of published poetry which is little more than stream of consciousness with line breaks and occasional odd spacings

that

work well in the mind o' the poet but are pretty

much random to anyone

else

He has had immeasurable impact sociologically, impact on literature, impact on politics (even when he rode others' waves) ... the list goes on.

He is a baird and a troubadour. He is a baird and a troubadour now being rightfully recognized as one of the giants of the latter half of the 20th and early 21st Century, perhaps beyond any other figure who has strung words together. As it happens I think his voice suits the snarls of post-modernity, but that's another story for now.

[ 13. October 2016, 17:47: Message edited by: Zappa ]
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.
Same old rubbish argument as the Illustrator v. the "fine" artist.
Pretentious twaddle.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Ariel wrote:

quote:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.
So the Psalms don't qualify as literature then?
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
So the Psalms don't qualify as literature then?
More people are familiar with them in written form than in sung form (I think).
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.
Same old rubbish argument as the Illustrator v. the "fine" artist.
Pretentious twaddle.
That probably fucks Homer's and Chaucer's CVs, too.
 
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
But no-one does poetry any more.
Really? I must tell that to the published poets I know.
It's not a living is it? Nor frequent. Nor do people get together in each other's homes and recite and listen. Just like people don't get out the music and gather around the piano to sing.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
So the Psalms don't qualify as literature then?
More people are familiar with them in written form than in sung form (I think).
You seem to be chaning your criteria. Originally, you wrote...

quote:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.
This makes the writer's intention the key. But, then you switich to saying that it's the form in which the audience is familiar with it.

In any event, are you now saying that, if future generations forget that Dylan's lines were ever sung, and only know them as written words, then they can qualify as literature?
 
Posted by Nicolemr (# 28) on :
 
I think most Greek poetry was meant to be accompanied by harp.

What about the Childe ballads? The medieval troubadours?

Set to music or not set to music is a pretty silly distinction.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
In any event, are you now saying that, if future generations forget that Dylan's lines were ever sung, and only know them as written words, then they can qualify as literature?
Yes. Because they would be by then.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
It's not a living is it? Nor frequent.
You may not think it's frequent, that's your experience, it isn't mine.
 
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.

Looks like the Swedish Academy don't think that way. After all a banker (Muhammed Yunus) was awarded the Peace Prize as was Al Gore for his climate change awareness work. They cast their net broad.
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
Has anyone counted or estimated how many songs Dylan has written? I would guess the answer is several thousand.

On the poet or not silliness, I believe he borrowed Dylan from Thomas.
 
Posted by Humble Servant (# 18391) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:

Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics.
That's exactly what they did on BBC Radio 4 PM this evening. They read them as poetry. And it was quite clear that they were not poetry, but song lyrics. Songs written to appeal to a mass adolescent audience for the purpose of making lots of money. Look at the other laureates and then ask yourself if Dylan really fits in up there. He might have been sold as a "spokesman for a generation", but he was just another pop singer with a pretty obvious political message. I have listened to some of his music, and I enjoy it for what it is.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:

Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics.
That's exactly what they did on BBC Radio 4 PM this evening. They read them as poetry. And it was quite clear that they were not poetry, but song lyrics. Songs written to appeal to a mass adolescent audience for the purpose of making lots of money. Look at the other laureates and then ask yourself if Dylan really fits in up there. He might have been sold as a "spokesman for a generation", but he was just another pop singer with a pretty obvious political message. I have listened to some of his music, and I enjoy it for what it is.
Again mistaking preference for relevance.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:
Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics. (This should actually be easier for that than for most of us, since you won't be subconsciously hearing them sung.) He's been the voice for many of my generation.
OK. (My objection to YouTube is basically that I have a limited bandwidth allowance.) Would you like to pick and link to three written-out songs that you think are particularly good and which in your view reflect why he should be nominated for the Nobel Prize and I will have a look.

FWIW I'll attempt to do this without preconceptions, although I do feel that songs belong in the Music category, not the Literature category.

Also FWIW here's a few opinions from some Irish writers, to add a little something to the debate.
 
Posted by Humble Servant (# 18391) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:

Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics.
That's exactly what they did on BBC Radio 4 PM this evening. They read them as poetry. And it was quite clear that they were not poetry, but song lyrics. Songs written to appeal to a mass adolescent audience for the purpose of making lots of money. Look at the other laureates and then ask yourself if Dylan really fits in up there. He might have been sold as a "spokesman for a generation", but he was just another pop singer with a pretty obvious political message. I have listened to some of his music, and I enjoy it for what it is.
Again mistaking preference for relevance.
A charge which could be leveled at either side of this debate.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I know aesthetic taste is a subjective area that varies wildly along the complete spectrum but I still fail to see how any song, pop or otherwise, can be considered literature. Simply because it's written down it qualifies for consideration and inclusion?
Some songs:
They flee from me that sometime did me seek (Wyatt)
Adieu, farewell Earth's bliss (Nashe)
Fear no more the heat o' th' sun
Full fathom five thy father lies (Both Shakespeare)
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow (Campion)
Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon (Burns)

It seems perverse to exclude all of those from literature.
Sure, most pop is bad. Nine tenths of everything is bad. There are lots of novels and poems that are definitely literature that lie unread in old libraries because they're rubbish.

Dylan's Desolation Row is eleven minutes long on Highway 61 Revisited.
Certainly Dylan wrote his songs to be set to music and they don't work as well not set to music. Does that make them not literature? Shakespeare wrote his plays primarily to be performed not read.
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Also FWIW here's a few opinions from some Irish writers, to add a little something to the debate.
And interestingly, only one of the eleven writers interviewed says he wouldn't have given Dylan the Nobel Prize.

And yet, what's the article's title? They could have called it 'About time too', or 'Totally deserved' or 'If you're going to give it to anyone, give it to Dylan'.

[Roll Eyes]

(and for what it's worth, yes: totally deserved, and about time too.)
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
A charge which could be leveled at either side of this debate.
Actually, no. If you look at the history of poetry, Dylan fits quite nicely. It is only when people attempt to to tightly define that there is an issue.
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:
Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics. (This should actually be easier for that than for most of us, since you won't be subconsciously hearing them sung.) He's been the voice for many of my generation.
OK. (My objection to YouTube is basically that I have a limited bandwidth allowance.) Would you like to pick and link to three written-out songs that you think are particularly good and which in your view reflect why he should be nominated for the Nobel Prize and I will have a look.

FWIW I'll attempt to do this without preconceptions, although I do feel that songs belong in the Music category, not the Literature category.

Also FWIW here's a few opinions from some Irish writers, to add a little something to the debate.
Suggestions:

1. "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." As Dave Van Ronk noted, this is the song where Dylan first combined modernist poetry with folk music, taking the Child ballad "Lord Randall" as a template and spinning it into a meditation on mid-20th century alienation and terror.

2. "Tangled Up In Blue."

3. "Blind Willie McTell."

While all songs are better with music, I think those three read particularly well. If you haven't given up at that point, try "High Water Everywhere" as well.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:

While all songs are better with music, I think those three read particularly well.
Nearly all spoken/written word is enhanced by music, it plays to the hardwiring in our brains.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
Suggestions:
For what it's worth, the Oxford Book of American Poetry has Desolation Road.
 
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on :
 
It's well deserved. Dylan's lyrics move people, they are art with depth.

The best hymn lyrics I know are there in 'Ev'ry Grain of Sand'.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
Ariel--

You might have heard Dylan's music, without knowing it.

Examples, from his own site:

"The Times They Are A-Changin’"

"Blowin’ In The Wind"

YMMV as to how poetic they are.

Here's one of my favorites, 'cause it fits me [Biased] , and it has really involved lyrics:

"My Back Pages"

FYI: Looks like Dylan has *all* of his lyrics on his site, under "Songs".
 
Posted by Evangeline (# 7002) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Pigwidgeon:

Rather than checking out any YouTube links, try reading some of his lyrics.
That's exactly what they did on BBC Radio 4 PM this evening. They read them as poetry. And it was quite clear that they were not poetry, but song lyrics. Songs written to appeal to a mass adolescent audience for the purpose of making lots of money. Look at the other laureates and then ask yourself if Dylan really fits in up there. He might have been sold as a "spokesman for a generation", but he was just another pop singer with a pretty obvious political message. I have listened to some of his music, and I enjoy it for what it is.
It's amazing how many people said similar stuff about Shakespeare in his time, that he was crude, appealing to a mass audience of the lower classes, writing for money (which I believe he was), dashing out a bit of blank verse for a Shake-scene or two.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
Yeah, Shakespeare was up there with Steven Spielberg. Very, very, popular, very commercial. He wouldn't have been on an Elizabethan Nobel prize committee's short list. He couldn't have written "thoughtful, researched works of literature" since his work wound up on the commercial stage where the blood from the last bear-baiting was fresh.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
I was feeling conflicted about this (I can hardly bring myself to listen to Dylan--that "voice"!), but you all have made a pretty convincing case.

For my own part, I think "Like a Rolling Stone" reads very well as poetry. As I discovered when I tried to write a parody with the same structure. The man knew his way around the English language. I'd like to hear LaRS snarled by an angry young man or woman at a poetry slam. Done right it would bring the house down. Imho.
 
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
Some of these lyrics and songs bear up well. Over the years. Outside of specific contexts. Like a Rolling Stone holds up. We all probably have our preferences. FWIW, Ring Them Bells.
 
Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :
 
I'm not qualified to say what is or isn't great literature or music or who deserves the prize. But when I watch my 3 year old grandson listening to Dylan I can see that he's hearing something that I can't hear; something is reaching him that absorbs his full attention, and he becomes serious and attentive, unlike any 3-year old I ever met before. Something is going on there, and I wonder if it might be the sound of great music and song.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:

Also FWIW here's a few opinions from some Irish writers, to add a little something to the debate.
I wonder if it is telling that of the very few who in that article disagree, the two who most strongly do are critics?
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
The last edition of Bob Dylan's Lyrics, now fifteen years out of date, ran to 600 pages. The amazing Bob Dylan: All the Songs (Margotin & Guedon, 2015) an amazing analytical book, was just over 700 pages. Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia (2006) is well over 700 pages. I emphasize again, his lyricism is not Justin Bieber or even Snoop Dogg ... some of it is lightweight, especially from 1979-90, but much is deeply symboliste with sometimes very tight schemes of rhyme, rhythm, and all other elements of poetry, ranging from one or two pieces of doggerel ("All the Tired Horses") to deeply prophetic apocalyticism ("Desolation Row"), love poetry ("If Not For You", "Visions of Johanna", "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" - a little longer then three minutes as it happens - "Mississippi")social comment ("Joey", "Hurricane," "With God on Our Side," "I Pity the Poor Immigrant") ballad ("Rosemary, Lilly and the Jack of Hearts," and much of his recent stuff like "Duquesne Whistle"), whimsy "If Dogs Run Free") metaphysics ("Chimes of Freedom," "I and I", "Every Grain of Sand"), tribute ("Lenny Bruce", "Roll on John") ... oh, eschatology, christology, hate ... whatever

If I were to have favourites the list would probably narrow down to two, "Chimes of Freedom" and "No Time to Think" - oh and "To Ramona" - but tomorrow is a long time and that might change.

Oh ... and duration ... three minutes? Lets have a look just the representative songs I've named, shall we?

I could mention about 500 more songs spanning five decades ...
 
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :
 
I was amusing myself thinking about His Bobship's probable reaction to this, just playing around with some of his words. My favourite memory-bites are

quote:
Something is happening but you don't know what it is
and

quote:
And if my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine. But it's all right ma, it's life and life only
I'm more attracted by his early protest songs than the later work. But I played the vinyl off the transitional Highway 61 Revisited. Bob was and is special and I'm not that bothered whether his words are classified as lyrics or poetry. Many of them still strike me as demonstrating a remarkable gift.
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
Dylan is not just important to pop music (really, he was only a major pop star for a few years in the 1960s anyway). He's had a significant influence on literary poetry as well, especially on the way poetry has become a performance art over the past few decades--that would not have happened if the singer-songwriter movement he spawned had not brought out the vocal side of poetry, as opposed to the printed page. The beat poets contributed to that too, but Dylan did it in a bigger way.

An I suspect that if you asked even those more "literary" poets born after, say, 1950 if Dylan was an influence, most would say yes.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
Dylan is not just important to pop music (really, he was only a major pop star for a few years in the 1960s anyway).
Which years would those be?
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
1964-67, really. He had hits then--some his own records, others covers by other artists. After the motorcycle accident he was something other than a pop star.

[ 14. October 2016, 04:14: Message edited by: Timothy the Obscure ]
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
AFAIK "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" was about his only "hit" in his own voice, charting at #2 in May 66. I've heard him do it a few times live, he especially rocked it as an opener at his 1992 Auckland gig.
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
Oh, wait ... and "Like A Rolling Stone" in May 1965, also at #2
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Poetry is something else but this is not what pop stars set out to do. I doubt very much that they set out to write moving and considered, original works of poetry then compose music that fits them.
And I doubt very much that Dylan is a "pop star".

To equate all "popular" music and to therefore conclude, axiomatically, that it's not possible for the words of songs to be literature is wobbly reasoning. As is a statement to the effect that all of them have the same method of writing.

I'm not a Dylan fan by any means, but I fail to see how it makes sense to declare his words not to be capable of constituting poetry just because they are set to music. Poetry to music is thousands of years old, and in fact there is evidence that poetry-with-music might be older than poetry without music.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
Also, when Dylan is (frequently) cited as one of the finest modern songwriters, it is not primarily because of his music but because of his words.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
I would only call him a pop star if I needed a category and couldn't think of another.

He was originally a folk singer. (IIRC, he and folk singer Joan Baez were an item, back in the day.) I suppose an argument could be made that, once he went electric at that folk festival, he was no longer a folk singer. But a lot of his songs and lyrics are rooted in acoustic folk music.

When I hear "pop music", I tend to think of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, etc. Now, "*popular* music" casts a much wider net: Sinatra, ABBA, old sing-a-long songs, Helen Reddy, the Boston Pops orchestra, David Cassidy (back in the day).

Folk star, minstrel, troubadour, bard. But definitely not a pop star.
 
Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Bob Dylan is neither fashionable nor modern. In another century he would have stopped at writing poems. If what you mean by modern is post 19th century, then okay. But no-one does poetry any more.
As a retired English teacher brought up on rhyming iambic pentametres and similar forms, I can't make any sense of a lot of poetry published in periodicals by highly respected contemporary writers.
But I went to a bookshop last month and came out with three books of poetry: one by a cousin's husband, very pleasant stuff if not world-shattering; one by a former neighbour who writes about the local woodland; and Sam Hunt's latest – and he hasn't just been writing it for the last fifty years, but speaking it up and down the country, and very enjoyable I'm finding it. If anyone 'does poetry' it's Sam, and I'm sure his predecessors in the trade would admit it's the real thing.

GG
 
Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :
 
I didn't know how to feel about this yesterday, because, although I love Dylan, the odds on favorite this year was writer, Joyce Carol Oates. But the brilliant Ms Oates -- best living author to my mind -- praised the choice of Dylan for his poetic lyrics and his impact on the world.

His, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," had some influence on one of her best short stories, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been." In fact I've thought I detected a little bit of Dylan influence in lots of her work.

I just hope Oates is next.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
From Golden Key:
When I hear "pop music", I tend to think of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, etc. Now, "*popular* music" casts a much wider net: Sinatra, ABBA, old sing-a-long songs, Helen Reddy, the Boston Pops orchestra, David Cassidy (back in the day).

Folk star, minstrel, troubadour, bard. But definitely not a pop star.
Pop music and popular music are the same thing, surely? The first is just an abbreviation for the second. I’d consider all the ones you listed (at least, the ones I’ve heard of) as falling into the same category, except possibly Sinatra, which is more "easy listening", basically because his songs don’t usually have the intrusive, dominant, usually fast-paced bass beat that seems to characterize so much of what floats around these days in retail outlets (and through neighbours’ walls or car stereos). A lot of what I’ve been exposed to over the years I haven’t found calming or easy to listen to, just grateful when it finally stops.

I’ll get down to the links you posted shortly. A colleague just sent one on to me which was interesting and original, and not a lot like the usual "oh babe I luuuuurve ya" kind of song, though if judged as actual poetry, I think I’ve read better. But that’s only one so I’ll see what some others are like.

What are the eligibility criteria for deciding on Nobel Prizes for the arts, does anyone know?
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
Bowie was and is more influential to today's music.
As was/is Prince.
Dylan was a proto influencer in pop music but those two artists have been WAY more important to music then Dylan.

What this has to do with literature? Danged if I know.

I believe that baby boomer nostalgia, either actual or reflected, played a role in this prize. Dylan is only considered good by people my age (early 50's) because other people tell us younger people he's good. By the time I got old enough to be listening to music of my own (non-radio driven) choice in the late 70's, Dylan was past it in our eyes.

He's a flashcard meme for us now.

There is no way a 70's or 80's starting icon would get a prize like this as the generations who grew up listening to Bowie and Prince are not as self-obsessed with our youth being the greatest ever. We know our youth was the greatest ever but don't need to give prizes out to prove it over other people's youth - we just do memes and listicles and youtube lists. [Big Grin]
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
And yes I fully expect somebody to tell me they are in the 50's or 40's and love Dylan.

To that I have only four words:

Go find The Ramones
 
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :
 
This is what I said on the thread in Heaven.
quote:
Never been as impressed with Bob Dylan as a lot of other people seem to be, but there have been some fairly odd awards for the Literature prize over the years.

I think most people would allow Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Eliott, Hemingway and several others their places in the first rank of Anglophone writers alive since 1901. But I don't think many people would admit Pearl Buck or Doris Lessing to that pantheon.

It's difficult to evaluate some of the ones who wrote in other languages. Knut Hamsun turned out to be a quisling, and also seems to have been a racist.
Dylan has never woven for me, the sort of magic that he seems to spin for others. He crystallises much that was facile about the sixties - and I go back that far - Woodstock and a whole lot hackneyed emotions that were wafting in the Zeitgeist.

As it happens, I've a bit of experience over the years of fitting words to music and music to words. What works as 'just words', what goes to music, and what doesn't really work if you take the music away are none of them the same thing. The notion that something can't be literature if you can sing it has to be nonsense.

The real question, though, isn't really 'does what he wrote count as literature?' It's whether as literature, is it any good? As it doesn't do it for me, I'd put him with Pearl Buck or Doris Lessing rather than with Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Eliott and Hemingway.
 
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Og: Thread Killer:
Bowie was and is more influential to today's music.
As was/is Prince.

Dylan was a proto influencer in pop music but those two artists have been WAY more important to music then Dylan.
That is an indictment of modern music. Dylan, Bowie and Prince all deserve a far better legacy and as others have said, Dylan wasn't a major influencer of pop, although there are lighter echoes in, say, Squeeze and The Beautiful South.
quote:


What this has to do with literature? Danged if I know.

I believe that baby boomer nostalgia, either actual or reflected, played a role in this prize. Dylan is only considered good by people my age (early 50's) because other people tell us younger people he's good. By the time I got old enough to be listening to music of my own (non-radio driven) choice in the late 70's, Dylan was past it in our eyes.

He's a flashcard meme for us now.
But the "non-radio driven choice" is minimal nowadays, given the shift of influence from live to recorded music.
 
Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :
 
Maybe Pearl Buck and Dylan have one thing in common and that is that they broke new ground. Pearl Buck's work seems patronizing, almost racist, today but it was just the opposite when she wrote, "The Good Earth," and gave people a view into Chinese culture that westerners hadn't had before. The average American suburbanite could suddenly see members of that vast inscrutable country as individuals with cares and concerns like we had. Dylan came along when music was almost entirely made up of love songs, and demonstrated that lyrics could be about social issues and -- like good literature -- help explain us to ourselves.

I know Og hates us oldies, we've heard it all before, but we are giving prizes to people our age now partly because they are old and it's time to recognize their body of work while they are still with us.

Cheer up Og, we'll all be dead soon.
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Some of these lyrics and songs bear up well. Over the years. Outside of specific contexts. Like a Rolling Stone holds up. We all probably have our preferences. FWIW, Ring Them Bells.
A lovely song. I read it out to my wife, and we fell silent, over its beauty.

Cadences from the Bible, I guess, and also traditional ballads, but he does remind me of T. S. Eliot, the whimsy, and darkness, the declamatory voice and the ordinary speaking voice, American vernacular in this case.

I can see I'll have to buy the Ricks book, to check out more.

One of the great voices of our age, combining the demotic and the prophetic.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Pop music and popular music are the same thing, surely? The first is just an abbreviation for the second. I’d consider all the ones you listed (at least, the ones I’ve heard of) as falling into the same category, except possibly Sinatra, which is more "easy listening", basically because his songs don’t usually have the intrusive, dominant, usually fast-paced bass beat that seems to characterize so much of what floats around these days in retail outlets (and through neighbours’ walls or car stereos).
You make an equation then immediately turn around and negate it. Popular music means "not classical." It's the music of the people. Frank Sinatra is definitely popular music. But he's not "pop" which took on a separate existence from its etymological roots some time in the 1950s or 1960s.
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
The Nobel committee were certainly being cute when they cited "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition", in relation to Dylan. Nicely done.

I enjoyed the rant from Irvine Welsh (a Dylan fan), "an ill-conceived nostalgia award, wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies."

Oh envy, thy sting is merciless.
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I can see I'll have to buy the Ricks book, to check out more.
It's a great read, predictably well-written
 
Posted by Nick Tamen (# 15164) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
If it's marketed primarily as a song it is is not primarily intended as literature.
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
. . . although I do feel that songs belong in the Music category, not the Literature category.
So what is the basis, apart from personal opinion, for excluding song lyrics/poems written with the intention that they be sung from literature? How are you defining "literature"?

In the OED online, I see this definition: "Without defining word: written work valued for superior or lasting artistic merit." Seems like that can easily include texts intended for singing.

The Wiki specifically includes texts intended to be sung:

quote:
Literature, in its broadest sense, is any single body of written works. More restrictively, it is writing considered as an art form, or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage. Its Latin root literatura/litteratura (derived itself from littera: letter or handwriting) was used to refer to all written accounts, though contemporary definitions extend the term to include texts that are spoken or sung (oral literature).
Poetry written for singing is still the written word. I don't see how or why the addition of music takes away an literary value of the words themselves.

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Pop music and popular music are the same thing, surely? The first is just an abbreviation for the second. I’d consider all the ones you listed (at least, the ones I’ve heard of) as falling into the same category, except possibly Sinatra, which is more "easy listening", basically because his songs don’t usually have the intrusive, dominant, usually fast-paced bass beat that seems to characterize so much of what floats around these days in retail outlets (and through neighbours’ walls or car stereos).
You make an equation then immediately turn around and negate it. Popular music means "not classical." It's the music of the people. Frank Sinatra is definitely popular music. But he's not "pop" which took on a separate existence from its etymological roots some time in the 1950s or 1960s.
Exactly.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
I'm still just floored by someone taking a stand against something they haven't even investigated. Jeez. If someone jumps willy-nilly into a thread and expresses iron-clad views and then admits that they haven't even read a word on the subject, they get ripped a new one.

If Ariel had said that having read or heard some Dylan works, they couldn't be said to qualify as literature, that's acceptable as an informed opinion. As it stands, it sounds like elitist prejudice.

[ 14. October 2016, 15:50: Message edited by: Lyda*Rose ]
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
I was rather impressed that someone should venture a view, without having apparently heard or read Dylan. I think this will be my policy from now on. You know that Uzbekistan novelist that everyone is raving about - absolute tripe.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Og: Thread Killer:
Bowie was and is more influential to today's music.
As was/is Prince.
Dylan was a proto influencer in pop music but those two artists have been WAY more important to music then Dylan.
Hm. Not quite sure I agree. Dylan is a bridge from folk and blues and balladeers into rock and pop. He brought the grit into the conscious-raising music in a way the shiny pop of Bowie and Prince do not. Not knocking them in any way shape or form; but their influence is more in the direction of style, Dylan's is more towards substance.

quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:

The real question, though, isn't really 'does what he wrote count as literature?' It's whether as literature, is it any good? As it doesn't do it for me, I'd put him with Pearl Buck or Doris Lessing rather than with Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Eliott and Hemingway.
Not valid comparisons, IMO. The structural difference make direct comparisons difficult.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
Oh, and seriously Og? People can only honestly like music from their own era?

listens to excepts from own collection .... Mozart ... Robert Johnson ... Beatles ... Sinatra ...

O. M. F. G.

You are right, old music sucks!

Thank you for lifting the scales from my eyes, now excuse me, I must now go to iTunes and stock up on One Direction.
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
As it stands, it sounds like elitist prejudice.
Surely, it sounds like base prejudice. The elite, of which I am one, think Dylan getting the award is a splendid idea.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
I'm still just floored by someone taking a stand against something they haven't even investigated. Jeez. If someone jumps willy-nilly into a thread and expresses iron-clad views and then admits that they haven't even read a word on the subject, they get ripped a new one.

If Ariel had said that having read or heard some Dylan works, they couldn't be said to qualify as literature, that's acceptable as an informed opinion. As it stands, it sounds like elitist prejudice.
All right. I give in. Music is literature, books are art, poetry is dead, and David Beckham will be awarded a Nobel Prize for philanthropy next year because his footballing skills have made millions happy.

I think Og has a point: it's a nostalgia thing. Enjoy your nostalgia, celebrate the elevation of one of your greats. I don't share your feelings and I can't see why people think he deserves a Nobel Prize, but I didn't grow up with this stuff and coming to it cold, it has no resonance or emotional meaning for me. I don't see it primarily as poetry set to music, or anything other as other than music and therefore in the wrong award category - and I don't have to have listened to any of it to know that it's music, surely.

I did ask upthread if anyone knew what the Nobel definition of "literature" is because it's obviously broader than I expected, but I shall go and look this up for myself.
 
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:

I did ask upthread if anyone knew what the Nobel definition of "literature" is because it's obviously broader than I expected, but I shall go and look this up for myself.
As I suggested upthread, when a banker can get the Peace prize, and a politician the same for campaigning on climate change, you'll really have to ask the Swedish Academy. It's their award after all.
 
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
As it stands, it sounds like elitist prejudice.
Surely, it sounds like base prejudice. The elite, of which I am one, think Dylan getting the award is a splendid idea.
Well, a literature snob might well say that being popular means it's not good. I know my dad told me to stop reading/writing fantasy often enough based on about that kind of reason
 
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
As it stands, it sounds like elitist prejudice.
Surely, it sounds like base prejudice. The elite, of which I am one, think Dylan getting the award is a splendid idea.
Well, a literature snob might well say that being popular means it's not good. I know my dad told me to stop reading/writing fantasy often enough based on about that kind of reason
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
I think most people would allow Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Eliott, Hemingway and several others their places in the first rank of Anglophone writers alive since 1901. But I don't think many people would admit Pearl Buck or Doris Lessing to that pantheon.
I think there are more people who admire Lessing than you're prepared to admit.
The Nobel gets awarded to one hundred people every century (more or less). I don't think anyone would bat an eyelid if you put Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett onto a list of one hundred writers of all time. Pearl Buck would look eccentric if you put her on, I suppose(*), but Doris Lessing would I think be sensible either way.

(*) I have never read her, so I am just following her reputation as the person who unfairly beat Woolf.
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
I think Dylan most definitely was a pop star (as the term was used at the time--it's got somewhat different connotations now) for a couple of years in the '60s, more so in the UK than the US. He had 4 Top 10 hits in the US, 6 in the UK (6 & 10 Top 20, respectively), not to mention the covers by the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, the Turtles, Manfred Mann, etc. If you see the documentary "Don't Look Back" (about his '65 UK tour), it's not Beatlemania, but it's leaning that way.

However, the pop star thing never sat easily on him, and he was always more than that. I happen to believe that his songwriting has continued to improve over time (though with some awful lapses in judgment from the late '70s into the '90s, including holding back some of his best songs, like "Blind Willie McTell"), and he's better now than he was in the '60s--I love to listen to those three classic albums from '65-'66, but some of those lyrics are just amphetamine-fueled word salad (the bridge to "Ballad of a Thin Man" is particularly egregious). His work over the past 20 years strikes me as deeper and better crafted than most of what he did back then. But I listened to "Blood on the Tracks" last night, and it hasn't lost any of its power.
 
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
I think most people would allow Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Eliott, Hemingway and several others their places in the first rank of Anglophone writers alive since 1901. But I don't think many people would admit Pearl Buck or Doris Lessing to that pantheon.
I think there are more people who admire Lessing than you're prepared to admit.
The Nobel gets awarded to one hundred people every century (more or less). I don't think anyone would bat an eyelid if you put Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett onto a list of one hundred writers of all time.
Particularly if we disallow everyone who dies before their greatness is noticed.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
As it happens, I've a bit of experience over the years of fitting words to music and music to words. What works as 'just words', what goes to music, and what doesn't really work if you take the music away are none of them the same thing.
Perfectly put.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Pop music and popular music are the same thing, surely? The first is just an abbreviation for the second. I’d consider all the ones you listed (at least, the ones I’ve heard of) as falling into the same category, except possibly Sinatra, which is more "easy listening", basically because his songs don’t usually have the intrusive, dominant, usually fast-paced bass beat that seems to characterize so much of what floats around these days in retail outlets (and through neighbours’ walls or car stereos).
You make an equation then immediately turn around and negate it. Popular music means "not classical." It's the music of the people. Frank Sinatra is definitely popular music. But he's not "pop" which took on a separate existence from its etymological roots some time in the 1950s or 1960s.
And similarly, "classical" music is not even synonymous with itself. In many contexts, people talk about "classical music" and mean everything from Bach through to Brahms to Rachmaninov to people composing things today.

But within the "classical music" world, none of those composers are classical. Bach is from the Baroque era, Brahms from the Romantic, Rachmaninov is a super-late example of Romantic and so on. Classical means a particular era from around the 1750s or 1760s to about the 1820s.

It's like anything. The more familiar you are with it, the more it gets divided into more detailed sub-categories. I agree, Dylan is only "popular music" in the very broadest, "not classical" sense.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
All right. I give in. Music is literature, books are art, poetry is dead, and David Beckham will be awarded a Nobel Prize for philanthropy next year because his footballing skills have made millions happy.
Now you're just making awful category errors. Bob Dylan was not awarded the prize for music.

Okay? If he had written instrumental music, you know that stuff without words (which, I note in passing, some people equate with "classical" in an equally wrong blanket categorization) we wouldn't be having this discussion. He was awarded the prize FOR WORDS.

Now, explain to me why the fact that those words are sung turns them into "music"? Do they suddenly become written on a 5-line stave instead of in the Latin alphabet?

Do the poems of Goethe, Heine, Pushkin, Baudelaire and Verlaine suddenly stop being poems because various classical composers set their words to music? It's the same words.

[ 14. October 2016, 22:50: Message edited by: orfeo ]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
Okay I admit to using "classical" in the pedestrian sense to refer to what is more correctly called "art" music. I am fully aware that the classical period is generally distinguished from the baroque and romantic periods, and that the boundaries are hazy, and roughly where to slot the bigger names. I'm not a total Philistine.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
That wasn't directed at you particularly, more at Ariel about the danger of labels. It was following on from your contribution, not replying to it as a counter.

[ 15. October 2016, 01:28: Message edited by: orfeo ]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
Pax.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
Ariel:
quote:
I think Og has a point: it's a nostalgia thing. Enjoy your nostalgia, celebrate the elevation of one of your greats. I don't share your feelings and I can't see why people think he deserves a Nobel Prize, but I didn't grow up with this stuff and coming to it cold, it has no resonance or emotional meaning for me. I don't see it primarily as poetry set to music, or anything other as other than music and therefore in the wrong award category - and I don't have to have listened to any of it to know that it's music, surely.
So you are still judging his work without having read any of it. Tsk.

Although after all this kerfuffle, I seriously doubt if there is a chance in hell you would come up with anything favorable to say about his work.
 
Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
So you are still judging his work without having read any of it. Tsk.

Although after all this kerfuffle, I seriously doubt if there is a chance in hell you would come up with anything favorable to say about his work.
As I said above, I've read the links that people have sent me and as I said, one of the links was quite interesting and original and I can see that it's poetic. Although it was not intended primarily to be read as poetry.

I find it hard to believe that candidates from what must surely be a large, international pool of writers, poets and playwrights, fell short of the standard to be outdone by a musician, but I never expected agreement, and you're all pleased with the result of the award, so I'll leave it at that.
 
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :
 
Sorry, I misunderstood. Okay, your opinion is your opinion. That's fine. At least now that you have gone to the source, it is informed.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
but I never expected agreement, and you're all pleased with the result of the award, so I'll leave it at that.
Pleased doesn't enter into it. Though some may be, obviously Zappa is, much of this discussion has been about you choosing to exclude anything accompanied by music. If you were arguing that other poets deserved it more than Dylan, that would be opinion.
The definition, and history, of poetry does not exclude song.
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
The assumption I haven't heard Dylan is based on what exactly?

I personally have on my Spotify music from the 50's through to a couple of weeks ago, plus a lot of classical. Including some Dylan.

I stand by what I say. Dylan's memory is cultivated by a generation that doesn't see much good in music that has occurred since. I see little of him, either lyrically or musically, in decent pop music since then (and I don't have an issue with the word pop - some of it is crap a lot of it is just good enough to catch the ear, some of it is finely crafted art).

Nobel prizes for Literature are given for memories of what used to be. That's Dylan.


Now if you don't mind me, I'm going to go listen to the intricacies of a pure pop Carly Rae Jepsen song. (Run Away with Me)

[ 15. October 2016, 19:51: Message edited by: Og: Thread Killer ]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Og: Thread Killer:
Dylan's memory is cultivated by a generation that doesn't see much good in music that has occurred since.
What's your evidence of this?
 
Posted by Ambivalence (# 16165) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
As a retired English teacher brought up on rhyming iambic pentametres and similar forms, I can't make any sense of a lot of poetry published in periodicals by highly respected contemporary writers.
As an amateur of Middle English (Scots, whatever), I thought of the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy when I saw this thread; performance poetry, for a royal audience, scatological and filthy and very much akin to 'the dozens.' Poetry ain't necessarily refined by nature.

I'm no great fan of Dylan's - not for his music nor his lyrics neither - but I recognise I'm in a minority in the latter view. I don't think his lyrics are "tight" and considered; I think they're a scattergun scattering that isn't so clever, though he certainly has some nice turns of phrase. Scorpio sphinx and all; not especially meaningful, but it sounds good...

I don't know what other sorts of things win the same prize, but I suspect I wouldn't rate them too highly either. ^^
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Og: Thread Killer:
The assumption I haven't heard Dylan is based on what exactly?
I think those comments were directed at Ariel.

quote:

I stand by what I say. Dylan's memory is cultivated by a generation that doesn't see much good in music that has occurred since. I see little of him, either lyrically or musically, in decent pop music since then (and I don't have an issue with the word pop - some of it is crap a lot of it is just good enough to catch the ear, some of it is finely crafted art).
Jack White self-acknowledges a connection. The whole singer-songwriter folk rock genre is his baby. Jewel and Fiona Apple are his love children. Sarah McLachlan, Beth Orton, KT Tunstall, Keb Mo. Yeah, not pop, but then neither was Dylan.
Not to mention the really old people/groups that were influenced by him and then spread that, like Neil Young, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, etc.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ambivalence:
I don't think his lyrics are "tight" and considered; I think they're a scattergun scattering that isn't so clever, though he certainly has some nice turns of phrase. Scorpio sphinx and all; not especially meaningful, but it sounds good...
By what definition does poetry need to be meaningful?
Poetry, like any other artform, gains as much meaning from the audience as it does the creator. This works in subtraction as well as addition.
 
Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :
 
That voice, Zappa, was pretty much perfect for the lines of

Well, the wind keeps a-blowin' me
Up and down the street
With my hat in my hand
And my boots on my feet
Watch out so you don't step on me

and it is better to hear the sarcasm than just read

Well, lookit here buddy
You want to be like me
Pull out your six-shooter
And rob every bank you can see
Tell the judge I said it was all right
Yes!

And on the track, but not on the lyrics printed on the album, he introduces the song/poetry with

Unlike most of the songs nowadays bein’ written in Tin Pan alley
That’s where most of the folksongs come from nowadays
This is a song that wasn’t written up there
This was written somewhere down in the United States

Woody Guthrie called him a folk-singer, in contrast to Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and some others he described only as singers of folk songs.
 
Posted by sonata3 (# 13653) on :
 
I don't expect to prove anything with this, but I found it interesting that Dylan, in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, noted that one of his albums was "an entire album based on Chekhov stories - critics thought it was autobiographical - that was fine." (It has been suggested that "Blood on the Tracks" is the album he was referring to). The 2001 "Love and Theft" references novelist Junichi Saga. Whether literature or not, Dylan's later work references a broad range of serious literary work.
 
Posted by Nick Tamen (# 15164) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Ambivalence:
I don't think his lyrics are "tight" and considered; I think they're a scattergun scattering that isn't so clever, though he certainly has some nice turns of phrase. Scorpio sphinx and all; not especially meaningful, but it sounds good...
By what definition does poetry need to be meaningful?
Poetry, like any other artform, gains as much meaning from the audience as it does the creator. This works in subtraction as well as addition.
"A poem should not mean
But be."

Ars Poetica, by Archibald MacLeish
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ambivalence:
I don't think his lyrics are "tight" and considered; I think they're a scattergun scattering that isn't so clever, though he certainly has some nice turns of phrase. Scorpio sphinx and all; not especially meaningful, but it sounds good...
I'd take him over James Joyce any day.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ambivalence:
I don't think his lyrics are "tight" and considered; I think they're a scattergun scattering that isn't so clever, though he certainly has some nice turns of phrase. Scorpio sphinx and all; not especially meaningful, but it sounds good...
I'd take him over James Joyce any day.
Ah, but then would you say that Joyce was not a poet? Or that his idiosyncratic style eliminated him from literature? That is what I think some here are doing, substituting personal taste for standard.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Ah, but then would you say that Joyce was not a poet? Or that his idiosyncratic style eliminated him from literature? That is what I think some here are doing, substituting personal taste for standard.
No but if the only thing I ever read by him was Ulysses, I might say he's not a novelist.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
I read maybe 20 pgs. or so of "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", and quit. Too many "pretty little moo-cows"! Not in a rush to try "Ulysses", from what I've heard of it.

Irish-American writer Adela Rogers St. John said that she thought Joyce pulled off the greatest hoax ever pulled off by an Irishman. (In her wonderful novel "Tell No Man".)
[Two face]
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
If he had had a reliable source of Immodium, Ulysses might have been a short story.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
Og--

quote:
Originally posted by Og: Thread Killer:
The assumption I haven't heard Dylan is based on what exactly?

I personally have on my Spotify music from the 50's through to a couple of weeks ago, plus a lot of classical. Including some Dylan.

I stand by what I say. Dylan's memory is cultivated by a generation that doesn't see much good in music that has occurred since. I see little of him, either lyrically or musically, in decent pop music since then (and I don't have an issue with the word pop - some of it is crap a lot of it is just good enough to catch the ear, some of it is finely crafted art).

Nobel prizes for Literature are given for memories of what used to be. That's Dylan.


Now if you don't mind me, I'm going to go listen to the intricacies of a pure pop Carly Rae Jepsen song. (Run Away with Me)
[Two face] Oh, your mid-life crisis is going to be fun. You're already doing "darn kids, get off my lawn" AND "darn hippy Nobel poet laureate geezers, get off my lawn"!

[Killing me]

[ 16. October 2016, 03:43: Message edited by: Golden Key ]
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
Og & H/As--

If my post just above was too personal--esp. for Purg--I apologize.
 
Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
I read maybe 20 pgs. or so of "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", and quit. Too many "pretty little moo-cows"!
I think you got about twice as far as I managed.
[Snore]
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
Just to get rid of the idea that this has anything to do with influence on popular music--if it was about that, they'd give it to the Beatles, who were far more important as composers and performers. But no one would think of even the best Beatles lyrics as literature.
 
Posted by PaulTH* (# 320) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
Just to get rid of the idea that this has anything to do with influence on popular music--if it was about that, they'd give it to the Beatles, who were far more important as composers and performers. But no one would think of even the best Beatles lyrics as literature
When Dylan came along the Beatles were only writing about boy meets girl. Dylan, following in the Woody Guthrie tradition, wrote about social issues as well. Though he has sold far fewer records than Michael Jackson or Madonna, his influence over lyricism, and even his peculiar style of phrasing have been copied time out of number. While I love the Beatles and acknowledge that they too exerted an enormous influence over a whole generation, Dylan's influence completely altered the consciousness of the world. The controversy to me would be whether or not you can consider songwriting to be literature. But I'm glad he won the award.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
When Dylan came along the Beatles were only writing about boy meets girl.
And they progressed beyond love songs. I'd argue that plenty of Beatles songs can be read as poetry as well, but I don't think they would merit consideration of a Nobel.
 
Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :
 
I remember that John Lennon actually had a book of poetry published - "In His Own Write". My older sister had a copy and I remember it as being absolute rubbish - although, to be fair, it must have been fairly early on (?around 1964).
 
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
It got him compared to Joyce, Some of the puns could have been in Ulysses, other than that it's mildly entertaining.
 
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :
 
I haven't read the thread, but I want to give a little Nod to Bob, one of my very favorite musicians for the last 30 years, and the name of a tribute album I own.

I'd also like to nominate "One more Cup of Coffee" as one of my favorite Dylan songs. It's not that much of a poem, but I find the combination of the words, his voice and the music sublime.
 
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
Just to get rid of the idea that this has anything to do with influence on popular music--if it was about that, they'd give it to the Beatles, who were far more important as composers and performers. But no one would think of even the best Beatles lyrics as literature
When Dylan came along the Beatles were only writing about boy meets girl. Dylan, following in the Woody Guthrie tradition, wrote about social issues as well. Though he has sold far fewer records than Michael Jackson or Madonna, his influence over lyricism, and even his peculiar style of phrasing have been copied time out of number. While I love the Beatles and acknowledge that they too exerted an enormous influence over a whole generation, Dylan's influence completely altered the consciousness of the world. The controversy to me would be whether or not you can consider songwriting to be literature. But I'm glad he won the award.
Just reading slightly upthread. I think Dylan was part of a movement going on in America at the time. He wasn't an outlier by any means. I think he became the most successful member of that movement, with incredible variation and longevity, but I would counsel against the use of consciousness altering phrases. He was great, he was brilliant, and he was part of a large movement for social change.
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
I read maybe 20 pgs. or so of "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", and quit. Too many "pretty little moo-cows"! Not in a rush to try "Ulysses", from what I've heard of it.

Irish-American writer Adela Rogers St. John said that she thought Joyce pulled off the greatest hoax ever pulled off by an Irishman. (In her wonderful novel "Tell No Man".)
[Two face]
Joyce is up there in my pantheon of the literary gods, too
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by simontoad:
I'd also like to nominate "One more Cup of Coffee" as one of my favorite Dylan songs. It's not that much of a poem, but I find the combination of the words, his voice and the music sublime.
it's a goody, but part of that for me was that Emmylou's voice had my testosterone doing cartwheels ... oh dear God I've never reovered
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by simontoad:
Just reading slightly upthread. I think Dylan was part of a movement going on in America at the time. He wasn't an outlier by any means. I think he became the most successful member of that movement, with incredible variation and longevity, but I would counsel against the use of consciousness altering phrases. He was great, he was brilliant, and he was part of a large movement for social change.
I think Dylan wasn't an outlier in the strictest sense, it is rather difficult to find anyone who is. However there are people/groups, if removed from a system, change that system. And I think Dylan is one of them.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
I remember that John Lennon actually had a book of poetry published - "In His Own Write". My older sister had a copy and I remember it as being absolute rubbish - although, to be fair, it must have been fairly early on (?around 1964).
.
There are bits I find oddly endearing, even if I don't mistake them for high art. E.g.

I have a little budgie
He is my very pal
I take him walks in Britain
I hope I always shall.
 
Posted by PaulTH* (# 320) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Zappa:
it's a goody, but part of that for me was that Emmylou's voice had my testosterone doing cartwheels ... oh dear God I've never reovered
I think Emmylou was a treat in her own right, but I liked Bob's versions of the songs on Desire even without her. This live version of One More Cup of Coffee is his gritty best. Bob was always more of a live artist than a recording artist.
 
Posted by PaulTH* (# 320) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by simontoad:
Just reading slightly upthread. I think Dylan was part of a movement going on in America at the time. He wasn't an outlier by any means. I think he became the most successful member of that movement, with incredible variation and longevity, but I would counsel against the use of consciousness altering phrases. He was great, he was brilliant, and he was part of a large movement for social change.
But I think this limits him in the very way he's always hated. He was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in 1963, and some of his songs became anthems for that movement. But as Joan Baez has admitted in interviews over the years, when they were an item, she wanted Bob to tour the country with her, protesting against Vietnam, championing African American rights etc. But though he probably supported those causes back then, he just wanted to get on with his music and poetry. In 1965 when it was all imploding for him, he said, tongue in cheek in an interview in England, "I just think of myself as a song and dance man." Others may have used his music for social change, but to him it was just his music, ever evolving. True artists do what they want. If other people like it so much the better. But they do it anyway. Bob is a true artist.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
True artists do what they want. If other people like it so much the better. But they do it anyway.
An artist is someone who creates art. End of.

Most artists, like Dylan, have interaction with other people. The nature of that interaction is variable, but the authenticity does not need to be one way. Was Michaelangelo not a "true" artist because he worked on commission?
 
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
quote:
Originally posted by simontoad:
Just reading slightly upthread. I think Dylan was part of a movement going on in America at the time. He wasn't an outlier by any means. I think he became the most successful member of that movement, with incredible variation and longevity, but I would counsel against the use of consciousness altering phrases. He was great, he was brilliant, and he was part of a large movement for social change.
But I think this limits him in the very way he's always hated. He was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in 1963, and some of his songs became anthems for that movement. But as Joan Baez has admitted in interviews over the years, when they were an item, she wanted Bob to tour the country with her, protesting against Vietnam, championing African American rights etc. But though he probably supported those causes back then, he just wanted to get on with his music and poetry. In 1965 when it was all imploding for him, he said, tongue in cheek in an interview in England, "I just think of myself as a song and dance man." Others may have used his music for social change, but to him it was just his music, ever evolving. True artists do what they want. If other people like it so much the better. But they do it anyway. Bob is a true artist.
I was reacting to the comment to the effect that Dylan altered the consciousness of the world. Perhaps I should have just gone with "bullcrap". I don't think what you say above is bullcrap, but I don't think its captured him either. He might not have wanted to do a sit in, but he did want to write protest music for a while. He has, as I said above, incredible variation and longevity.
 
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :
 
In the car on the way home from work this morning, it occurred to me that the judges might have taken into account not only Dylan's work, but also misheard lyrics.

Lay lady lay
Lay across my big-arse bed.

That one is obviously a classic and must have been taken into account.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by simontoad:
In the car on the way home from work this morning, it occurred to me that the judges might have taken into account not only Dylan's work, but also misheard lyrics.

Lay lady lay
Lay across my big-arse bed.

That one is obviously a classic and must have been taken into account.
Given he's an American, probably big-ass not big-arse.

Carry on.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
Sorry, dear boy, the lyric was misheard so would be in the spelling of the hearer.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Sorry, dear boy, the lyric was misheard so would be in the spelling of the hearer.
Does "arse" rhyme with "brass"? Or is this person truly cloth-eared?
 
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
It does indeed where I come from.
 
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on :
 
[Killing me] I won't hear Lady Lay in the same way ever again.
 
Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :
 
Dylan sings (if that's the word) "br arse".
 
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Does "arse" rhyme with "brass"? Or is this person truly cloth-eared?
It depends which dialect of English you are speaking. Can't speak for US dialects, but,
English RP (non rhotic) - Yes, same vowel.
Northern English (non rhotic) - No, different vowel.
Rhotic dialects of English (e.g. South West) - No, presence of 'r'.
 
Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 
Not sure how long this link will work, since it's a daily cartoon feature. A secretary at the Nobel Prize office is holding a phone, telling two men standing there, “I keep getting a recorded message that says, ‘You just kinda wasted my precious time, but don’t think twice it’s all right.’ ”

[Big Grin]
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
...and His Bobness has spoken:

"Dylan says Nobel left him 'speechless': Swedish academy". (Yahoo)
 
Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
Just to get rid of the idea that this has anything to do with influence on popular music--if it was about that, they'd give it to the Beatles, who were far more important as composers and performers. But no one would think of even the best Beatles lyrics as literature.
I don't know Dylan, but I do recall finding the poetry segment of a colleague's course the words (okay, lyrics) of Eleanor Rigby, The Streets of London, and Bridge over Troubled Water. Each of which I find profoundly moving. And I would certainly argue that they are poetry, with or without music.

GG
 
Posted by leo (# 1458) on :
 
Eleanor Rigby was The Beatles
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Eleanor Rigby was The Beatles
I don't see that GG implied otherwise; she was using it as an example to show that popular song lyrics can be treated as literature. I'd be willing to bet she realizes The Streets of London and Bridge over Troubled Water aren't Dylan either.
 
Posted by Humble Servant (# 18391) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:

"Dylan says Nobel left him 'speechless': Swedish academy". (Yahoo)
I thought he was the spokesman for a generation. How can you have a speechless spokesman?
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:

"Dylan says Nobel left him 'speechless': Swedish academy". (Yahoo)
I thought he was the spokesman for a generation. How can you have a speechless spokesman?
Tom Lehrer: Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.
 
Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :
 
Actually, the first song that sprang to my mind when I heard the news was Weird Al's parody of Bob Dylan...

[Two face]
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:

"Dylan says Nobel left him 'speechless': Swedish academy". (Yahoo)
I thought he was the spokesman for a generation. How can you have a speechless spokesman?
Ommm
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
Well, you know, Just saying; certainly the degree to which pixellated ink (oxymoron, go figure) is spent on the Bard suggest a degree of literary interest somewhat beyond ABBA (who he dissed somewhat recently) and that Bieber bloke.
 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
Z--

ABBA's lyrics may not be great literature, but their music always makes me happy!
[Yipee]
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
Truth be told I agree. Though back in the '70s I considered them utterly infradig [Disappointed]
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Humble Servant:
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:

"Dylan says Nobel left him 'speechless': Swedish academy". (Yahoo)
I thought he was the spokesman for a generation. How can you have a speechless spokesman?
To the extent that being a "spokesman" involves popping up in front of the cameras straight away in the manner that media demands, no artist is very good at it. Thank God. Their job involves letting ideas percolate.
 
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
quote:
The entire performance felt like a fierce and instantaneous corrective to “times like these”—a reiteration of the deep, overwhelming, and practical utility of art to combat pain. In that moment, the mission of the Nobel transcended any of its individual recipients. How plainly glorious to celebrate this work.

Amanda Petruisch summarising why we BobCats are excited that a master of language has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This ain't, as some have suggested, Justin Bieber or ABBA (fine entertainment though they may provide) but a troubadour who has plucked the chords of being human.


Just sayin'.

 
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 
Z--

Whoa! Wow! [Cool]

And what a great article! [Smile]
 
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :
 
"Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the colour, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it".

Mistakes and all, Patti Smith used Bob's words to tell it all. Very, very moving.
 


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