The obligatory “Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature” post
Yes, it was a surprise when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
My reaction? I think it’s an absurdity. But I think quite a few of the Nobel Prize in Literature awards choices have been absurd, so this one’s just absurd in a different way.
And I like Bob Dylan. I remember the first time I heard him on the radio, on some obscure folk station before he was famous, and he sounded so different than anything I’d ever heard before. He had an awful voice that was nevertheless a great voice, completely compelling. You couldn’t figure out why it was compelling—the voice sounded like something you wouldn’t have wanted to hear another moment of—but still it was great. And even though the song was long (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was the selection, as I recall) it didn’t seem too long at all.
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road.
Great lines. Great song. But great literature? Nope.
If you’re going to give a songwriter a Nobel for literature (and I don’t think that makes a particle of sense), give it to Leonard Cohen.
Here’s a Dylan song I happen to really really like. It’s a cover, though; he didn’t write it. In the early days he used to sing a lot of folk or traditional songs. This seems to have been one of them:
[NOTE: See, I’m putting this post in the “Music” category. I refuse to put it in “Literature and writing.” Eat your heart out, Nobel Prize Committee for Literature.]
He doesn’t appear to be answering the Nobel Committee’s calls, so perhaps he feels the same way.
About the only thing I appreciate about Bob Dylan is it seems he just may comprehend how absurd and overblown much of the admiration of his music is.
Few musicians’ careers better exemplify the “Emperor has no Clothes” tale.
It’s odd how often Americans latch onto artists who are consciously copying other artists, only with less sincerity and talent.
Mike Royko nailed it over 40 years ago: http://ml.islandnet.com/pipermail/dixielandjazz/2002-June/000564.html
While I like Dylan’s music, I never understood why people take him as seriously as they do. Maybe its a generational thing.
Anyway, the Nobel prize strikes me as a great example of a problem in the larger art world. The institutions of the high arts spent a century turning painting, literature and theater into something the middle class didn’t like (they would say couldn’t understand but lets not kid ourselves) to try to keep art “special”. But by the end of the 20th century, the high arts weren’t special, they were irrelevant. Now we have the institutions of the art world trying to regain their former prestige by attaching themselves to popular culture. And I could rant on even longer about why this won’t work.
It’s a shame because I think we need high art, but we don’t have institutions to provide a link between artist and the general public.
baltimoron,
Andrew Klavan’s Daily Wire podcast yesterday (or maybe Monday) is a nice monologue on a theme similar to yours. You might enjoy it.
Good on ya, baltimoron. I’d just add a note about the fragment “. . . to try to keep art ‘special’ “, that, analogously with Thorstein Veblen’s idea about conspicuous consumption, this act is to keep themselves “special”, i.e., precisely a function as to your term “prestige”.
I hate to blame Bob Dylan for winning a prize in a contest he didn’t enter.
And he’s not a politician like Obama.
And so far he’s made no statement about it one way or another.
Rufus and Baltimoron:
It was yesterday’s intro segment
https://soundcloud.com/andrewklavanshow/ep207
Bob Dylan is one of the few artists who changed my life. Leonard Cohen is another.
If you don’t get or like Dylan, fine. That’s your loss as far as I’m concerned. But whether you like him or not, he changed the face of popular music. That’s a stone fact and any number of musicians, artists and critics will attest to it.
Dylan has a plenty healthy ego but he never bought into the sky-high voice-of-his-generation hype. He gave the finger to all the leftie political types who thought they owned him. To his credit he spent most of his later career fleeing such adulation. He knew it would kill him — his body or his art.
He knows his limitations. He knows he is a songwriter, not a poet. He ducks awards as much as possible. It is no surprise he won’t take calls from the Nobel Committee. He is far from perfect but he has that much integrity.
For some time he has lived his life on the road as just a musician who happens to call himself Bob Dylan. That’s all he ever wanted.
Rufus – Thanks. Do you happen to have the link?
sdferr – I really do need to read Theory of the Leisure Class. Coming from someone who admittedly has not read the source material, I’m not sure conspicuous consumption fits in this instance. The problem with the art world was that the upper class could no longer out consume the middle class (By the early 20th century anyone could buy a good quality print of a famous painting, for example) so they changed strategies and decided to make things that offend middle class sensibility.
OM – thank you for that link
I had less in mind (in the analog) the material consumption of the highfalutin’ art that turned off the public (which, in a sense, what with the invention or discovery of the field of aesthetics turned out to be just as sufficient, whether ugly or beautiful, for the mere purpose of aesthesis) as the intellectual gobbledigook that purported to justify it. It wouldn’t be a strict adherence to Veblen’s presentation, I reckon.
I do think conservative folk who write Dylan off, as some commenters above, are missing a bet.
Dylan is a man who fought hard for his independence from the leftist hive-mind. In the seventies he came out as a serious Christian. I don’t think that lasted the way Billy Graham night have liked, but it sure annoyed Dylan’s leftie fan base.
He has a fine song, “Neighborhood Bully,” defending Israel.
https://vimeo.com/101836593
I haven’t heard Andrew Klavan podcast, but he posted a little hissy fit when Dylan won. I don’t know if Dylan deserves the prize (if for no other reason I don’t think if fits the TECHNICAL definition of literature), but I’m at the point of finding even slight snobbishness as repellent as bestiality.
Dylan may not deserve it but he’s no where as anti-Western than Shaw or Sinclair Lewis, writers no cares about.
I also don’t care about the difference between “high” and “low” art. Elizabethan critics would be horrified to find out how highly we regard Shakespeare. Theater back then was aimed at the illiterate. (Shakespeare’s sonnets were largely ignored.) Dickens was a mere popular writer who was only defended by a few critics (Poe and Chesterton, among others.)
So I think we should wait a century decide how deserving Dylan is.
huxley, I’m not sure this is your intent, but I don’t judge the innate value of things on their impact on me. There are books I have read that changed my life that I know are not great literature. There are songs I’ve heard that have had tremendous impact on me that I know are not great songs. Just as there are books and songs that had little effect on me that I still recognize as great.
Did Bob Dylan affect a lot of people with his music? Yes.
Ipso facto, Bob Dylan lyrics are great literature? No.
Matthew, in the podcast OM put up there is no hissy fit. He admits to being a great fan of Dylan’s music, and puts the blame at the feet of the Nobel Committee. I think you will appreciate his opinion.
huxley, I am, admittedly not a fan, and I am too young to know what the pop music landscape was before and after Dylan, but how did he change it for the positive? I know he helped popularize a folk craze, a craze he piggy-backed on when he realized his dream of being the next Elvis wasn’t what the public wanted at the time, but what did he do that others weren’t already doing?
As music his muisic is simplistic, as most pop music is. Does anyone really claim he was/is a ground-breaking musician? Lyricist, sure, but I honestly don’t see any innovations he introduced.
Rufus: I mentioned Dylan’s impact upon myself and I noted the legions of musicians, artists and critics who will stand up for Bod Dylan.
We can await the verdict of time on Bob Dylan. However, there is no question in terms of impact, there is popular music before Bob Dylan and there is popular music after Bob Dylan.
No one is arguing, least of all Dylan himself, that his work is great literature. That was a category error on the part of the Nobel Committee.
I’ve seen Klavan do this before. In a talk with Bill Whittle, Klavan talked about how American critics look the other way at American culture about the things he likes (crime novels.) Whittle mentions rock and roll and Klavan brings up one Beatles song “She Loves You” and compares it to a Nat King Cole song. Basically, he chooses a bad song by a band IMO is really overrated to show how American culture is declined. He specifically, if probably unconsciously, picking the worst of the band to prove an ENTIRE genre of music is inferior. He doesn’t seem to realize that any genre has good and bad works in it.
Basically, he does not give the same consideration of others that he wants for himself, in this regard. If he doesn’t like critics disdaining his favorite types of art; he shouldn’t do it to others.
Now, I am certainly taking this way to seriously. It’s as much my own personal problem as anything and I’m just a guy ranting on the internet. I’m going to take deep breaths now. I don’t know if I’m going to listen to the podcast.
huxley,
I have no idea what this, “…there is popular music before Bob Dylan and there is popular music after Bob Dylan.”
What did he create, or usher in? Music is quantifiable. Baroque music is different than Romantic, Dixieland Jazz is different than Swing. I can explain how and why through chords, tempos and structures. Chuck Berry was a pop music innovator, Bill Haley and the Comets, The Beatles, the Beach Boys, David Bowie, the Talking Heads… Some of these I appreciate, some I don’t, but I can explain the music they created. Bob Dylan may be the greatest folk artist, but folk existed similarly before he came on the scene and continued on after he moved on. How did pop music change, other than more people impersonating dust bowl era folk musicians, just as he had done?
And text from people you don’t know can seem cold and callous. I’m not typing this argumentatively, I’m just looking for an answer. I don’t know a lot about Dylan, so it is very possible there is something major I haven’t heard about.
Matthew,
Computer programs analyzing pop music through algorithms show, quantifiably, and unbiasedly, that pop music has gotten simpler over the years; “dumbed down.”
There are still brilliant musicians playing and creating complex, brilliant music, but it’s not popular (except in movie scores).
Dylan wrote some good songs but they don’t rise to the level of “great literature,” in my book. Yeats, Eliot, Neruda, and … Zimmerman?
Hardly the worst choice ever made, however.
Dylan is closer to literature, than Barack is to peace.
BTW, if you like Dylan check out the Nod to Bob commemorative album celebrating his 60th birthday. Lots of great covers by people like Greg Brown, Lucy Kaplansky, and Eliza Gilkyson.
What huxley said, pretty much. And Neo.
“Computer programs analyzing pop music through algorithms show, quantifiably, and unbiasedly, that pop music has gotten simpler over the years; “dumbed down.””
Good Lord. “Computer programs analyzing pop music through algorithms”. I guess that proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt, eh? Were the “algorithms” (or algorhythms??) written by Mozart, or Beethoven, or George Gershwin, or Carol King, or Puff Daddy? If this was meant as satire, I apologize.
FOAF,
If you take the whole paragraph I wrote:
“Computer programs analyzing pop music through algorithms show, quantifiably, and unbiasedly, that pop music has gotten simpler over the years; dumbed down.'”
yes, that proves “it” beyond a shadow of a doubt. I didn’t write about anything qualitative, like whether it’s better or worse, more or less enjoyable… The term “pop music” is quantifiable, establish your parameters (the top 5 most popular songs of a year, the top 100 most popular songs in a month…) and either run those songs through a compute for expediency sake or have a musician look at the sheet music, or sit in a chair and listen to the songs.
Gioachino Rossini’s, “Barber of Seville Overture” is more complex musicly (less simple) than 2 Unlimited’s, “Get Ready for This.”
If you’re interested, here’s an article that does a decent job of explaining how the music business uses this type of computer analysis, as well as a link to a scholarly study proving the decreased complexity of popular music over time, https://mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same#.Ot2GeDpNR
Great line, parker!
Bob Dylan removes mention of Nobel prize from website
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/21/bob-dylan-unacknowledges-nobel-prize-literature-win-removed-website
Vanderleun,
It’s a shame he’s not on the Committee. He seems to understand the award better than they do!
How do you know he’s not?
Like Rufus T. Firefly, I don’t think Mr. Zimmerman would belong to any group that would have someone like him as a member.
Rufus: It’s easy to miss Dylan’s influence because it isn’t a sound or a technique or a fashion or a movement. Dylan is the guy who broke it all open so you could say anything in a song, usually from a very personal point of view.
Before Dylan popular music was sliced up into tidy subdivisions: traditional, folk, country, blues, jazz, rock, pop, gospel, show music. There was some overlap between but it was fairly tidy and each category’s songs had a predictable range of generic lyrics. Love songs, teen songs, gospel, old blues, old ballads, etc.
Dylan started with folk music, creating new powerful protest songs like “With God On Our Side” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” then upped the ante by adding wild surreal imagery in “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall.”
As Joan Baez said after the first time she heard him sing:
Nobody was writing like that. He was writing exactly what I wanted to hear. It was as if he was giving voice to the ideas I wanted to express but didn’t know how.
Not long after he added, covertly, drug imagery in “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,” then electric guitar with a strong rock/blues backing — famously alienating his original folk and leftist audience. He hooked up with the Andy Warhol/Chelsea Hotel crowd and was writing so dark, deep and personal that it was like staring into the abyss. His lyrics entered the realm of great poetry, far beyond moon-june-spoon or teen laments.
Everyone writing songs in the sixites, including top groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — was forced to look up and rethink their music. Bob Dylan opened those doors.
And he kept moving and everyone else did too to keep up.
So you don’t have to like Bob Dylan’s songs. The point is he changed the game entirely. A lot of the music you do like wouldn’t have been possible without him.
Like Rufus T. Firefly, I don’t think Mr. Zimmerman would belong to any group that would have someone like him as a member.
Dylan has his irascible streak, but much of his estrangement from groups is a matter of survival. He became famous so quickly and he had been forced into roles he didn’t want.
At first he was expected to be the voice of the protest movement, then the voice of young people and then a messiah -ike figure with answers for everyone.
Dylan knew he wasn’t any of those thing and he didn’t want to be them either. So he fought back with hostility and seculusion. He even purposely made bad albums like “Self-Portrait” to reduce people’s expectations.
The Scorcese documentary on Dylan, “No Direction Home,” makes this clear.
Thanks, huxley. I understand your point now. I am hard pressed to think of anyone else writing long, poetic ballads like that prior. I checked, and the song, “Big John” was recorded the year prior to Dylan hitting it big, and, of course there were songs like “Tom Dooley,” which Dylan likely recorded himself. But was anyone writing long form, folk-type music about current events? I don’t know. I’m willing to accept you are correct. I’m not sure if I see his influence in subsequent Beatles or Beach Boys songs, maybe something like “Rocky Racoon,” or “Happiness is a Warm Gun?”
Peter, Paul and Mary’s, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone” seems in a similar vein, but I’m not sure if they were influenced by Dylan, or vice versa.
Even when things don’t add up to me, I put a lot of credence in first hand accounts, and most people old enough to care about pop music in the early ’60s give Dylan a lot of credit for something. I’ve never understood what that was, but I guess he captured something in the zeitgeist that is difficult to put into words.
huxley and Rufus Firefly:
Phil Ochs was doing it simultaneously with Dylan. I wrote about Ochs in this post.
And thanks, Rufus! I appreciate your open-mindedness.
To put it more succinctly, Dylan created the possibility for a popular musician to become a full-blown artist and not just an entertainer or an interpreter.
“Rocky Raccoon” was Paul McCartney’s reply to Dylan after Dylan moved on to rootsy music with The Band. Tapes of Dylan and The Band during their Big Pink period reached Europe and pretty much killed off psychedelic rock.
Partly I think musicians were ready to move on from psychedelia. After Sgt Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour etc. where do you go? But the fact that Dylan was blazing a new trail was a signal that music was a-changin’ again.
Phil Ochs loved Dylan but felt competitive with him. After Dylan evolved from topical protest, Ochs followed along with densely imagistic, surreal though still political albums.
Ochs was apparently manic-depressive and self-medicated with alcohol. After a long bad patch in the seventies, he was getting back on his feet. Then Dylan came out with “Blood on the Tracks” which stunned Ochs and depressed him. Once again Dylan had danced ahead into the distance. Ochs hung himself a year later.
huxley:
You make it sound like Ochs’ suicide was a reaction to competition with Dylan. It wasn’t, nor had he gotten back on his feet prior to it. I happen to have been an Ochs fan, and have read a lot about his decline. Very very sad. Seems to have mostly been a result of his manic-depression, inherited from his father who had a very bad case.
Nor was Ochs a Dylan follower in temporal terms anyway (he did admire him and envy his greater success, apparently). It was a case of simultaneous development in the artistic sense; they came up almost at the same time. But Ochs was starting to go off the deep end long before that album of Dylan’s, which hardly featured (or didn’t feature at all) in his decline, which had different determinants (in addition, of course, to his inherited illness):
That attack in Africa occurred in 1972 and was a large factor in his mental/emotional decline:
If you want to get a chill (I certainly do when I hear it), listen to this song Ochs released in February of 1970, years before all of this happened. I think he sensed what was happening to him. Such a sad and beautiful song. Heartbreaking:
Also from the Wiki entry about that album:
neo: I wrote that based on the biography “Death of a Rebel” by Marc Eliot. I am travelling and don’t have my books with me.
I did make it clear that Ochs had had a bad patch before “Blood on the Tracks.” Eliot, as I recall, didn’t blame “Blood on the Tracks” for Ochs suicide, but did say it was a setback for Ochs which wasn’t helpful. And Ochs did commit suicide the next year.
I love Phil Ochs, bought his albums and listened to them closely, and read what I could find on Ochs. I stand by my impression that Ochs was another musician set free by Dylan to do more creative work than he would have without Dylan’s example.
huxley:
I disagree about Ochs being “set free” by Dylan’s work. Right from the start Ochs had a lyrical and non-political side. His very first album contained “The Bells” (a musical rendition of the Poe poem) and his second contained “The Highwayman” (another poem very beautifully set to music). In 1965 Ochs recorded “Changes” for the first time—lyrical, very personal, heartbreaking and touching. It was written on the occasion of his marital breakup.
Here’s an article from 2010 that compares the later work of Dylan vs. Ochs. The author says it’s really impossible to know who influenced who, but they came up simultaneously and developed in different directions. Here’s some of it:
neo: Well, I disagree with you and your cite.
It’s true Ochs set “The Bells” and “The Highwayman” to music beautifully early. Nice, but not what I would call transformative work at the level of “Bringing It All Back Home” (1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) and “Blonde on Blonde” (1966).
Ochs wrote “Changes” in 1965. It is exquisite and I love it, but Dylan had already written “Mr. Tambourine Man”and “Gates of Eden” — far more complex, groundbreaking songs.
By the time Ochs got to his artistic masterwork, “Pleasures of the Harbor,” (late 1967) Dylan had already written the manificent double album, “Blonde on Blonde” (May, 1966) and moved on to the spare “John Wesley Harding” (1967).
Looking at the dates, which your cite omits, there is no question Dylan was leading and Ochs coming up from behind.
One can debate the merits of Blonde vs Pleasures, but Dylan got there first by a mile.
Neo,
Och’s Changes was his signature. I have never read your thoughts on Tim Buckley, Tom Rush, and Jesse Winchester; three of my favorites from back in the hay days of singer/songwriters.
And I would include Joni Mitchell as another great one that I still listen to after all these years.
Huxley,
These visions of Johanna still conquer my mind as jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. Blonde on Blonde was IMO BD’s high tide.
huxley:
My point (which I will try to make crystal clear now) is that in their earlier protest songs, the two men were neck and neck, doing approximately the same thing. In their later, non-political songs, no one influenced anyone because their songs were very very different from each other. For example, “Changes” is nothing like “Mr Tambourine Man,” and I certainly don’t see the latter as having influenced the former.
Nor could it have, unless Ochs was privy to “Mr. Tambourine Man” significantly before it was released. Dylan’s song was released in late March of 1965 and recorded the previous January, 1965. Ochs’s song was actually written before that, because Gordon Lightfoot recorded a cover version of “Changes” in November of 1964, although Lightfoot’s album with the Ochs song wasn’t released till 1966. But obviously Ochs’ “Changes” was written earlier than “Mr. Tambourine Man” was recorded and released (although of course we don’t know when Tambourine Man was actually written).
My point is that all these songwriters (and that includes Lightfoot, by the way, who also began writing that sort of personal song in 1964) were writing personal stuff at around the same time, and that none of them were really writing songs that resembled Dylan’s.
Who started it? It was an idea, a movement, whose time had come.
neo: To make my point crystal clear — after Dylan moved out of the topical protest song, he was moving fast and moving explosively, changing the face of popular music, far more so than Ochs on either count.
I didn’t say that Ochs heard and was influenced by “Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” before he wrote “Changes”. I was pointing out how far Dylan had surged ahead of Ochs, who didn’t reach that level complexity until “Pleasures of the Harbor” in 1967.
Ochs was still standing on stage with an acoustic guitar singing protest songs and sensitive guy songs while Dylan was burning it down with an electric guitar, getting booed, and singing, “LIke a Rolling Stone.”
Ochs was a friend and rival of Dylan. Ochs, like the rest of the music world, paid attention to Dylan and Dylan’s progress and, I am saying, generally nfluenced to raise his standards.
I can’t imagine Ochs would ever have gotten to “Crucifiction” on
I can’t imagine Ochs would ever have gotten to “The Cruicixion” on “Pleasures” in 1967 wihtout Dylan’s incredible run in a bare two years of “Briginging It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde on Blonde.”
Ochs was a wonderful talent, but he was no Picasso. Dylan was.
These visions of Johanna still conquer my mind as jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. Blonde on Blonde was IMO BD’s high tide.
parker: Yep! VoJ is incredible.
In 1999, Sir Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the UK, listed [Visions of Johanna] as his candidate for the greatest song lyric ever written.
I don’t think Dylan could sustain that intensity and he knew it. Otherwise he would be doing harp music with Jimi and Janis.
Consider “Ballad of a Thin Man” which Dylan recorded in August, 1965. Most people, including wiki, interpret it as the travails of a straight journalist confused by the breakout of the counterculture. Most listeners enjoy feeling superior to poor Mr. Jones:
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.
And it is that, however…
Dylan is such a tricky multilevel guy pushing the limits of song that “Thin Man” can also be read as the horror of a straight guy who blunders into a gay orgy.
Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice, he asks you how it feels
And he says, “Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan”
And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
Now, you see this one-eyed midget shouting the word “Now”
And you say, “For what reason?” and he says, “How”
And you say, “What does this mean?” and he screams back, “You’re a cow!
Give me some milk or else go home”
And you know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
For me that’s the best pop music joke I know.
Dylan wrote that in 1965. No one else was writing songs at that level then. Not Phil Ochs, not Lou Reed, not Lennon/McCartney, not Jagger/Richards, not Leonard Cohen.
huxley:
And Phil Ochs never copied him, he wrote a very different kind of song, even after that.
Although I think your interpretation of the Mr. Jones lyric is a bit far-fetched. But poetry and lyrics that are ambiguous and mysterious lend themselves to that sort of thing, and who knows? Not me.
However, Leonard Cohen was writing poetry of a fairly experimental type years before Dylan was writing lyrics like that, and when Cohen turned to music it was natural for him to write wonderful (and somewhat mysterious and obscure, in many cases) poetry as lyrics. (He had already gained fame in Canada as a poet during the very early 60s.) I happen to prefer his lyrics to Dylan’s, but I don’t expect most people to share that preference.
neo: Again, my case for Dylan is not that people copied his style or wore his influence on their sleeve as Dylan did for Woody Guthrie, but that Dylan inspired them, forced them even, to write from a higher, more complex and creative standard.
Dylan raised the bar and most of the important sixties artists responded, including Phil Ochs.
Ochs and Dylan were neck and neck for maybe a year, But find anything like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in Ochs’s early repertoire .
Dylan wrote “Hard Rain” in 1962. It was his anguish over the Cuban Missile Crisis expressed in charged, biblical/Blakean language. It was one of many signals that Dylan was a songwriter who had broken through to an entirely new level of depth.
Ochs approached that level five years later with “The Crucifixion” in which Ochs merged JFK’s assassination with Christ’s crucifixion.
It’s nothing I can prove like Pythagoras’s Theorem, but I say Phil Ochs would never have written anything like “The Crucifixion” unless Dylan had blazed that trail years before.
Ochs followed Dylan’s lead. He did not copy Dylan’s style.
However, Leonard Cohen was writing poetry of a fairly experimental type years before Dylan was writing lyrics like that…
neo: Not really. Cohen’s poetry was hardly experimental. It was rebellious in that Cohen refused to join the avant-garde, the academics or the Beats. It harkened back to the plain speech of William Carlos Williams and the surrealism of Lorca plus Cohen’s own romanticism.
However, Cohen did write his great experimental novel, “Beautiful Losers” which was far more radical than any of his poetry. But “Beautiful Losers” wasn’t published until 1966, after Dylan had already made his key breakthroughs — which isn’t to say Cohen needed Dylan to write “Beautiful Losers.”
When Leonard Cohen left Hydra in Greece because his poetry and novels couldn’t pay the bills, his idea was to become a country-and-western singer to make money. He had had a C&W band in high school. He did not plan on morphing his poetry into the sort of songs Dylan had been writing for years.
Leonard Cohen became Leonard Cohen the songwriter we know and love because he landed in the musical environment of New York City in which Bob Dylan had already done the spadework for visionary poetic songs. Leonard Cohen became a tenant of the Chelsea Hotel about the time Bob Dylan left.
In any event, I use words carefully — as you do. I said Dylan’s breakthrough was to bring artistic freedom to songwriting. That freedom had already been won for poets, painters and novelists.
huxley:
I don’t really see your point in terms of influence. They were all writing personal “freed up” songs at that time—almost at exactly the same time—and it is not at all clear to me that Dylan was the leader and they the followers in terms of influence. Each of them was unique in style, and Dylan was certainly unique (and remains unique).
Also, I really don’t get your point about “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I know that song well—heard it quite early in time—and to me at the time it sounded like a traditional song in the question-and-response folk ballad genre, just a bit more surreal in its lyrics. I saw nothing especially ground-breaking in it at the time. It has the Dylan stamp, for sure, and a lot of images, but it reminded me of old folk songs and still does, particularly “Lord Randall.” And the rain imagery was very much like “What Have They Done to the Rain,” an antiwar song that came out in 1962 and was extremely popular.
Who influenced whom? Who copied whom? Each person was idiosyncratic, and no one sounded like Dylan then OR now. In fact, although Hard Rain was like ballads, etc., it was certainly different, and no one but Dylan could have written it, then or later. His style is very distinctive, of course. Phil Ochs wasn’t just writing nothing like it in 1962, he was never writing anything like it, nor was anyone else. Ochs always wrote lyrics in a more traditional style.
For that matter, take the lyrics of “The Sounds of Silence” by Paul Simon, which he apparently began in 1963. It was quite ground-breaking and derivative of no one, including Dylan, who had written nothing like it at the time. Was Simon the leader, influencing Dylan? As I said, I think the changes in popular music were all happening simultaneously, with various innovations going on at once.
One more thing that was going on at the time with most of these musicians, and which was responsible in part for some of these more freed-up and surreal lyrics: drugs, particularly drugs like pot and LSD but also many others. Far out, “mind-blowing” lyrics became more and more acceptable in general, and even required in order to be cool. This wasn’t Dylan’s doing, of course—it was the atmosphere and the times. And the audiences were receptive to it, because they were using drugs, too (or at least more of them were).
neo: I don’t see your points either and it seems you keep shifting the goal posts. You won’t meet the challenge of citing an Ochs song which compares to “Hard Rain” in the same slice of time. Likewise an indication Ochs could have written “The Crucifixion” without Dylan breaking the ground for that song.
There are important reasons Bob Dylan is remembered as the guy who changed the game. Not Phil Ochs, not Paul Simon.
I think, like relativity and calculus, the job would have gotten done by somebody sooner or later, but Bob is the guy who got it done. Again, not Phil Ochs, not Paul Simon.
You dismiss my interpretation of “Mr. Jones.” But if I’m wrong what are those verses about? The alternative is to say they were wacko surrealism that didn’t mean anything. I think Dylan was a more thoughtful writer than that.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.