For a Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan sure knows a lot about professional wrestling. "A Complete Unknown" recounts his most famous heel turn: stabbing his leftist folk music fans in the back in 1964-65.
Terrific piece. I recommend listening to Bob’s Nobel lecture, in which his Goodreads-esque dives into MOBY DICK, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and THE ODYSSEY (download this speech, Christopher Nolan!) suggest that there is a lot more Harold Bloom than Jim Morrison inside Bob.
I forgot that the leftist Jew Robert Zimmerman, who could barely sing, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his help with the propaganda. The prize is even more of a joke today, awarded to leftists just like the peace prize is given to feminists and - Barack Obama before he had done a single thing, "because he gives us hope!" cheered the leftists. The prize is handed out by a committee of five in Norway, appointed by politicians, so when there are at least three socialists they can overrule the others. Just like on a leftist Supreme Court. Only right-wingers think about what is fair in how you use your power.
Who got the first Nobel Prize in Literature? Not Leo Tolstoy, who was perhaps the most famous author in the world at the time. Instead it went to ... Sully Prudhomme. You've heard of him, right? No? Only Leo Tolstoy? How odd.
Likewise Robert Frost didn't get the nobel prize for his poetry collections. He wrote The Road Not Taken and The Mending Wall. John Updike didn't get the prize - he was an ordinary White man who critized Marxism, so he won't be given the prize in modern times, when it's all about leftism. But a singer who doesn't write literature? Sure, he gets the literature prize!
I thought you were kidding, but it turns out there is indeed a Nobel Prize in Literature and Bob Dylan is indeed a laureate. It turns out that Dylan is also the only American to win in the last 30 years, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the last American before him was Toni Morrison
Bob Dylan isn't a Leftist and nothing in his lifestyle or persona indicates a genuinely liberal or "open" personality. He seems to have had a youthful, mildly activist phase ("Hurricane") but so have most of us. If he wanted to be a liberal crusader he's passed up a million opportunities.
I doubt he bothers to vote, but if he does it's probably conventionally Republican.
He's Jewish and from Minnesota. While I'd love to believe a major entertainment figure and perhaps the greatest and most influential of his genre is right-wing, ethnic and regional stereotypes exist for a reason.
Conservatives are easily, even especially, prone to being led by the nose with a compelling narrative about racial prejudice and Carter was a good storyteller. Dylan could have lent his considerable social and creative heft to numerous liberal causes over the years but never did so. He apparently was pretty indifferent about Carter and "Hurricane" afterwards.
He attends traditionalist temples and gave his son a traditional bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. My guess would be that he is mostly indifferent about politics because he lives in multimillionaireland and doesn't have to worry about public policy.
Ray "Boom Boom" Manchini has a story of sparring with Dylan (in the late 90s, early 00s, iirc). Dylan wanted to improve his boxing. Manchini got a few head punches in. "Hey Ray, careful, I don't want any songs knocked out of me." Manchini was actually terrified he may have affected Dylan's songwriting ability until Dylan said he was joking.
An example of Dylan’s vindictive streak was when he accepted an award from a charity called MusiCares in 2015 and chose to devote the bulk of his speech to ragging on ancient Nashville guys like Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall who didn’t think much of his early songs (delivered in a knowing “why me, Lord?” tone and getting laughs, but still…). For a guy who has received almost nonstop critical support he seems almost Trumpian in his inability to let go of a slight:
“Merle Haggard didn’t even think much of my songs. I know he didn’t. He didn’t say that to me, but I know [inaudible]. Buck Owens did, and he recorded some of my early songs. Merle Haggard — “Mama Tried,” “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” I can’t imagine Waylon Jennings singing “The Bottle Let Me Down.”
“Together Again”? That’s Buck Owens, and that trumps anything coming out of Bakersfield. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard? If you have to have somebody’s blessing — you figure it out.
Oh, yeah. Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. What don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?
What have I done to deserve this special attention? No vocal range? When’s the last time you heard Dr. John? Why don’t you say that about him? Slur my words, got no diction. Have you people ever listened to Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. Talk about slurred words and no diction. [Inaudible] doesn’t even matter.
“Why me, Lord?” I would say that to myself.
Critics say I mangle my melodies, render my songs unrecognizable. Oh, really? Let me tell you something. I was at a boxing match a few years ago seeing Floyd Mayweather fight a Puerto Rican guy. And the Puerto Rican national anthem, somebody sang it and it was beautiful. It was heartfelt and it was moving.
After that it was time for our national anthem. And a very popular soul-singing sister was chosen to sing. She sang every note — that exists, and some that don’t exist. Talk about mangling a melody. You take a one-syllable word and make it last for 15 minutes? She was doing vocal gymnastics like she was on a trapeze act. But to me it was not funny.
Where were the critics? Mangling lyrics? Mangling a melody? Mangling a treasured song? No, I get the blame. But I don’t really think I do that. I just think critics say I do.”
Sounds like later 1990s Michael Jordan getting himself fired up by obsessing over a column by some Utah sportswriter hinting he'd lost a step since he came back from baseball.
Greatness and ego go hand in hand. "letting things go" is something most normal folks do, but the greats seem to catalogue each and every slight and use them as motivation.
One of the strange aspects of growing up GenX is that adult boomers would teach us about their childhoods as if it were history as important, formative and heroic as the revolutionary and civil war periods. In the late 70s/early 80s, from the reverent tones, I assumed Dylan was as dead as Hendrix. I was pleasantly shocked in the late 80s when he had a hit.
My parents were too old for rock and roll. The most contemporary they got was the folk craze (or the second folk craze, maybe the folk revival). The songs were simple, catchy and unlikely to offend the parents, but it doesn't make any sense to write new folk songs. Folk songs have to evolve over time based on audience response. They're like the Iliad; let the rhapsodes try out the stories in the small comedy clubs for a few centuries before you commit the final version to paper. So what were they writing, things that seemed like they could be folk songs? Things that had some of the characteristics of folk songs? Pre-folk songs?
Thus, in my mind, the folkies were as phony, if not more so, than the rockers. After a few years folk music was an obvious dead end for any creative.
Rock music, OTOH, far from being limited to the original Rock & Roll, was more the intersection between the revolution in electronic instruments and the rapidly expanding potential of analog tape studio production. Dylan would have been a fool to eschew the two great musical advancements of his lifetime.
In this age of (mostly moronic) singers and actors weighing in on politics, health care, and world affairs, I'm reminded of the quote from Bret Easton Ellis: "Separate the art from the artist." I don't listen to Dylan, or any other singer, for their insight on things that matter; I just like their music!
TIL that My Back Pages was a Dylan song, which goes along with my post yesterday that Dylan might be the most successfully covered songwriter of all time
I was hoping I would learn from Steve's column why Dylan Is Great. Boomers have been saying my whole life how "Dylan's so great!" but all I hear is a mediocre songwriter, mediocre guitar player, and lousy singer. And alas, Steve' column didn't explain the alleged 'greatness'.
Well, Steve mentioned that Dylan did piss off some annoying pompous people, so there's that.
He's an astounding lyricist. He's more poet than musician, which is probably why he's made sure the lyrics of every song he's written are available on his website. I've come around to the idea that his literature Nobel was deserved.
I'm culturally biased toward Christianity, so his gospel rock resonates with me but I think it's some of his best work. The album lnfidels is very multi-layered and seems representative of a man who's explored lots of ideas and paradigms about the world and whose mental framework for interpreting and understanding it has gelled. Dylan was 42 years old then which is about the time your neural network becomes less like a computer and more like an encyclopedia. (This can vary wildly. Some men hit their mental stride coincident with the physical peak of their 30s, which is a genuine gift. I didn't hit mine until my 50s, and at that point lacked the youthful drive and physical energy to capitalize on it.)
It's all subjective. Outside the studio he's practically unlistenable. My only points really are he's an amazing lyricist and has intellectual chops. I can listen to Sixteen Shells by Tom Waits and that's all I need to hear. By contrast, Tom Petty combined great lyrics with great musicianship.
I saw an interview of The Doors and Jim's band mates seemed frankly embarrassed by him. He kept saying the band was about "sexual politics" and Ray Manzarek looked like he wanted to turn invisible.
Almost everything in the entertainment industry (which the music industry is a part of) is marketing. Dylan figured this out and marketed himself. Also, wrote his own music and played his own instruments so that when his song got played he got all the royalties and IP control.
Dylan seems to have skated free of the legal troubles that embroiled the Beatles and Stones after rock became big business. E.g., he had a shady manager, Albert Grossman, who is portrayed in the movie, but pretty much always seems to have been top dog in that relationship too, unlike the Stones with Allan Klein.
Overall sounds like a decent if not great movie...I recently saw Chalamet on College GameDay and either he is a fantastic actor or a genuine football nut. I laughed at the description of him as "fey" because it is accurate - he doesn't have that sort of inherent masculine edge that apparently was called for here and he could have used in Dune. Dylan himself was before my time but I did see him twice albeit over 20 years ago - on one occasion he played only songs from the 80s and 90s (or so I was told, since I didn't recognize any of them) and the second time he stuck to the standards but was so hammered he was unintelligible for the entire show.
At any rate, he's an interesting character - as Steve notes, he set out to be a star but managed to still be innovative, not an easy thing to pull off.
Terrific piece. I recommend listening to Bob’s Nobel lecture, in which his Goodreads-esque dives into MOBY DICK, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and THE ODYSSEY (download this speech, Christopher Nolan!) suggest that there is a lot more Harold Bloom than Jim Morrison inside Bob.
I forgot that the leftist Jew Robert Zimmerman, who could barely sing, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his help with the propaganda. The prize is even more of a joke today, awarded to leftists just like the peace prize is given to feminists and - Barack Obama before he had done a single thing, "because he gives us hope!" cheered the leftists. The prize is handed out by a committee of five in Norway, appointed by politicians, so when there are at least three socialists they can overrule the others. Just like on a leftist Supreme Court. Only right-wingers think about what is fair in how you use your power.
Who got the first Nobel Prize in Literature? Not Leo Tolstoy, who was perhaps the most famous author in the world at the time. Instead it went to ... Sully Prudhomme. You've heard of him, right? No? Only Leo Tolstoy? How odd.
Likewise Robert Frost didn't get the nobel prize for his poetry collections. He wrote The Road Not Taken and The Mending Wall. John Updike didn't get the prize - he was an ordinary White man who critized Marxism, so he won't be given the prize in modern times, when it's all about leftism. But a singer who doesn't write literature? Sure, he gets the literature prize!
The last 20 years of Nobel winners for literature has been mostly laughable!
Dylan was probably the most worthy recipient in a century, which says more about the prize than it does about Dylan.
Yes!
I thought you were kidding, but it turns out there is indeed a Nobel Prize in Literature and Bob Dylan is indeed a laureate. It turns out that Dylan is also the only American to win in the last 30 years, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the last American before him was Toni Morrison
Bob Dylan isn't a Leftist and nothing in his lifestyle or persona indicates a genuinely liberal or "open" personality. He seems to have had a youthful, mildly activist phase ("Hurricane") but so have most of us. If he wanted to be a liberal crusader he's passed up a million opportunities.
I doubt he bothers to vote, but if he does it's probably conventionally Republican.
He's Jewish and from Minnesota. While I'd love to believe a major entertainment figure and perhaps the greatest and most influential of his genre is right-wing, ethnic and regional stereotypes exist for a reason.
Conservatives are easily, even especially, prone to being led by the nose with a compelling narrative about racial prejudice and Carter was a good storyteller. Dylan could have lent his considerable social and creative heft to numerous liberal causes over the years but never did so. He apparently was pretty indifferent about Carter and "Hurricane" afterwards.
He attends traditionalist temples and gave his son a traditional bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. My guess would be that he is mostly indifferent about politics because he lives in multimillionaireland and doesn't have to worry about public policy.
I thought it was pretty funny when they offered Zimmy the DyNoMite Prize. What wasn't so funny is when he accepted. Kinda like the day the music died.
Ray "Boom Boom" Manchini has a story of sparring with Dylan (in the late 90s, early 00s, iirc). Dylan wanted to improve his boxing. Manchini got a few head punches in. "Hey Ray, careful, I don't want any songs knocked out of me." Manchini was actually terrified he may have affected Dylan's songwriting ability until Dylan said he was joking.
An example of Dylan’s vindictive streak was when he accepted an award from a charity called MusiCares in 2015 and chose to devote the bulk of his speech to ragging on ancient Nashville guys like Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall who didn’t think much of his early songs (delivered in a knowing “why me, Lord?” tone and getting laughs, but still…). For a guy who has received almost nonstop critical support he seems almost Trumpian in his inability to let go of a slight:
“Merle Haggard didn’t even think much of my songs. I know he didn’t. He didn’t say that to me, but I know [inaudible]. Buck Owens did, and he recorded some of my early songs. Merle Haggard — “Mama Tried,” “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” I can’t imagine Waylon Jennings singing “The Bottle Let Me Down.”
“Together Again”? That’s Buck Owens, and that trumps anything coming out of Bakersfield. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard? If you have to have somebody’s blessing — you figure it out.
Oh, yeah. Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. What don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?
What have I done to deserve this special attention? No vocal range? When’s the last time you heard Dr. John? Why don’t you say that about him? Slur my words, got no diction. Have you people ever listened to Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. Talk about slurred words and no diction. [Inaudible] doesn’t even matter.
“Why me, Lord?” I would say that to myself.
Critics say I mangle my melodies, render my songs unrecognizable. Oh, really? Let me tell you something. I was at a boxing match a few years ago seeing Floyd Mayweather fight a Puerto Rican guy. And the Puerto Rican national anthem, somebody sang it and it was beautiful. It was heartfelt and it was moving.
After that it was time for our national anthem. And a very popular soul-singing sister was chosen to sing. She sang every note — that exists, and some that don’t exist. Talk about mangling a melody. You take a one-syllable word and make it last for 15 minutes? She was doing vocal gymnastics like she was on a trapeze act. But to me it was not funny.
Where were the critics? Mangling lyrics? Mangling a melody? Mangling a treasured song? No, I get the blame. But I don’t really think I do that. I just think critics say I do.”
Sounds like later 1990s Michael Jordan getting himself fired up by obsessing over a column by some Utah sportswriter hinting he'd lost a step since he came back from baseball.
Ah, the greats ...
Great men are often the most petty.
Reminds me of how Trump gets all wee-weed up when 3rd-place talk show host Jimmy Kimmel or some non-entity on The View take a pot shot at him.
Greatness and ego go hand in hand. "letting things go" is something most normal folks do, but the greats seem to catalogue each and every slight and use them as motivation.
One of the strange aspects of growing up GenX is that adult boomers would teach us about their childhoods as if it were history as important, formative and heroic as the revolutionary and civil war periods. In the late 70s/early 80s, from the reverent tones, I assumed Dylan was as dead as Hendrix. I was pleasantly shocked in the late 80s when he had a hit.
My parents were too old for rock and roll. The most contemporary they got was the folk craze (or the second folk craze, maybe the folk revival). The songs were simple, catchy and unlikely to offend the parents, but it doesn't make any sense to write new folk songs. Folk songs have to evolve over time based on audience response. They're like the Iliad; let the rhapsodes try out the stories in the small comedy clubs for a few centuries before you commit the final version to paper. So what were they writing, things that seemed like they could be folk songs? Things that had some of the characteristics of folk songs? Pre-folk songs?
Thus, in my mind, the folkies were as phony, if not more so, than the rockers. After a few years folk music was an obvious dead end for any creative.
Rock music, OTOH, far from being limited to the original Rock & Roll, was more the intersection between the revolution in electronic instruments and the rapidly expanding potential of analog tape studio production. Dylan would have been a fool to eschew the two great musical advancements of his lifetime.
A Mighty Wind is blowin'
It's blowin' to the Sea!
It's blowin' Peace and Freedom
It's blowin' you and me!
Never saw that. Glad I googled those lyrics first. I was about to make fun.
Not quite as good of a Christopher Guest movie as "Dog Show," but still ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUehfDYkfU
In this age of (mostly moronic) singers and actors weighing in on politics, health care, and world affairs, I'm reminded of the quote from Bret Easton Ellis: "Separate the art from the artist." I don't listen to Dylan, or any other singer, for their insight on things that matter; I just like their music!
TIL that My Back Pages was a Dylan song, which goes along with my post yesterday that Dylan might be the most successfully covered songwriter of all time
I was hoping I would learn from Steve's column why Dylan Is Great. Boomers have been saying my whole life how "Dylan's so great!" but all I hear is a mediocre songwriter, mediocre guitar player, and lousy singer. And alas, Steve' column didn't explain the alleged 'greatness'.
Well, Steve mentioned that Dylan did piss off some annoying pompous people, so there's that.
He's an astounding lyricist. He's more poet than musician, which is probably why he's made sure the lyrics of every song he's written are available on his website. I've come around to the idea that his literature Nobel was deserved.
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/jokerman/
I'm culturally biased toward Christianity, so his gospel rock resonates with me but I think it's some of his best work. The album lnfidels is very multi-layered and seems representative of a man who's explored lots of ideas and paradigms about the world and whose mental framework for interpreting and understanding it has gelled. Dylan was 42 years old then which is about the time your neural network becomes less like a computer and more like an encyclopedia. (This can vary wildly. Some men hit their mental stride coincident with the physical peak of their 30s, which is a genuine gift. I didn't hit mine until my 50s, and at that point lacked the youthful drive and physical energy to capitalize on it.)
Thanks for your explanation.
By coincidence , "Jokerman" is the only Dylan song I actually like, i.e., will listen to simply for the pleasure of listening to it.
It's all subjective. Outside the studio he's practically unlistenable. My only points really are he's an amazing lyricist and has intellectual chops. I can listen to Sixteen Shells by Tom Waits and that's all I need to hear. By contrast, Tom Petty combined great lyrics with great musicianship.
There was a worse rock singer, Jim Morrison (if you can call it singing). And he did not have the benefit of being able to write lyrics (or poetry).
I saw an interview of The Doors and Jim's band mates seemed frankly embarrassed by him. He kept saying the band was about "sexual politics" and Ray Manzarek looked like he wanted to turn invisible.
Almost everything in the entertainment industry (which the music industry is a part of) is marketing. Dylan figured this out and marketed himself. Also, wrote his own music and played his own instruments so that when his song got played he got all the royalties and IP control.
Dylan seems to have skated free of the legal troubles that embroiled the Beatles and Stones after rock became big business. E.g., he had a shady manager, Albert Grossman, who is portrayed in the movie, but pretty much always seems to have been top dog in that relationship too, unlike the Stones with Allan Klein.
Overall sounds like a decent if not great movie...I recently saw Chalamet on College GameDay and either he is a fantastic actor or a genuine football nut. I laughed at the description of him as "fey" because it is accurate - he doesn't have that sort of inherent masculine edge that apparently was called for here and he could have used in Dune. Dylan himself was before my time but I did see him twice albeit over 20 years ago - on one occasion he played only songs from the 80s and 90s (or so I was told, since I didn't recognize any of them) and the second time he stuck to the standards but was so hammered he was unintelligible for the entire show.
At any rate, he's an interesting character - as Steve notes, he set out to be a star but managed to still be innovative, not an easy thing to pull off.