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koganbotPaste's online version of the Dylan blurb I wrote for their best-living-songwriters issue back in '06 gets rid of the paragraph breaks, to the piece's detriment. So I'm reprinting here.
By the way, Dylan might well make my top ten but it was Paste who put him at the top. I'd probably have chosen Jagger-Richards (Paste's #12), or maybe Johansen-Thunders (not on their list). A still-living James Brown (#56, behind such titans as James Taylor, Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Adams, etc.) would have been in my top five and I'd have trouble defending my not ranking him number one (the designation being "best," not "favorite"). As for this decade, Timbaland and Collipark and Eminem and Simpson-Shanks-DioGuardi and Max Martin would all be contenders (none on the Paste list, of course), though for the last couple of years I'd say the spot is empty.
Whom would you guys choose?
#1
Bob Dylan
It's 1963. Dylan is a young man who's got a lot going on, and so does the U.S.A. - self-professed beacon of liberty, it's finally trying to face the racism, terror, and violence that saturates it. In the last verse of "Masters of War," Dylan tells the war profiteers, "I hope that you die." He's genuinely upset by injustice and war, but he's also full of hate and he wants to feel good about hating, and political self-righteousness allows him to. But his brain won't sit with this.
In "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" he chants, "Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison / Where the executioner's face is always well hidden," as if the home in the valley were itself wielding the destructive blade. A step from there is to feel complicit, to think that the violence of the valley makes its home in your body, and to take yourself out ("home" being a metaphor for whatever beliefs had previously held you together). Then in 1965, in "Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan sings, "Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street." But nobody ever taught anyone how to live out on the street. You end up dying on the street. Dylan lays an impossible demand on us, on himself: to totally overthrow ourselves, betting that on the other side of this overthrow we find authenticity. "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose." (But Dylan knows better, knows that failure's no success at all.) At least Dylan gives Miss Lonely a friend at the end, Napoleon in Rags. At the end of "Visions of Johanna" all he's got is an exploding conscience, and at the end of "Memphis Blues Again" he's got despair. "Here I sit so patiently / Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice."
Except hearing it as despair mistakes a piece of the story for the whole - because there's no way to listen to "Memphis Blues Again" without wallowing in the absolute joy of the wordplay, without splashing around in the metaphors and in the bubbling grotesquerie.
Dylan writes lucky, gathering what he can from coincidence, throwing any old thing into the gale and watching it fly. He's like a man directing and organizing a whirlwind.
The words of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" provide a rhythm on top: LOOK OUT KID, you're GONna GET HIT. If you think of his mouth as a drum set, he's hitting almost every beat with the snare, whack whack whack, a rhythm that reflects the violence in the lyrics. And underneath, the rest of the music is doing a dance, coming up from the juke joints and sock hops.
Like Elvis before him, like Ashlee Simpson now, Dylan simply did not know his place - meaning both that he was uppity ("How much do I know / To talk out of turn / You might say that I'm young / You might say I'm unlearned") and that he was lost, that he had no place. He stretched and he twisted every song form he touched. This is because no form felt like home, and he had to expand them so that he could pile in content that hadn't previously been welcome. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" elongates to 18 bars and for practical purposes feels like one long vamp, a never-ending groove. It contains a critique and contains a party. The album notes say, "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine." Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to: carney trash hucksters, self-serious ruminators, glamour pusses, street scrappers. And since Dylan didn't know who he was, he became all of them.
--Frank Kogan, "#1 Bob Dylan" in Paste, June-July 2006
By the way, Dylan might well make my top ten but it was Paste who put him at the top. I'd probably have chosen Jagger-Richards (Paste's #12), or maybe Johansen-Thunders (not on their list). A still-living James Brown (#56, behind such titans as James Taylor, Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Adams, etc.) would have been in my top five and I'd have trouble defending my not ranking him number one (the designation being "best," not "favorite"). As for this decade, Timbaland and Collipark and Eminem and Simpson-Shanks-DioGuardi and Max Martin would all be contenders (none on the Paste list, of course), though for the last couple of years I'd say the spot is empty.
Whom would you guys choose?
#1
Bob Dylan
It's 1963. Dylan is a young man who's got a lot going on, and so does the U.S.A. - self-professed beacon of liberty, it's finally trying to face the racism, terror, and violence that saturates it. In the last verse of "Masters of War," Dylan tells the war profiteers, "I hope that you die." He's genuinely upset by injustice and war, but he's also full of hate and he wants to feel good about hating, and political self-righteousness allows him to. But his brain won't sit with this.
In "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" he chants, "Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison / Where the executioner's face is always well hidden," as if the home in the valley were itself wielding the destructive blade. A step from there is to feel complicit, to think that the violence of the valley makes its home in your body, and to take yourself out ("home" being a metaphor for whatever beliefs had previously held you together). Then in 1965, in "Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan sings, "Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street." But nobody ever taught anyone how to live out on the street. You end up dying on the street. Dylan lays an impossible demand on us, on himself: to totally overthrow ourselves, betting that on the other side of this overthrow we find authenticity. "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose." (But Dylan knows better, knows that failure's no success at all.) At least Dylan gives Miss Lonely a friend at the end, Napoleon in Rags. At the end of "Visions of Johanna" all he's got is an exploding conscience, and at the end of "Memphis Blues Again" he's got despair. "Here I sit so patiently / Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice."
Except hearing it as despair mistakes a piece of the story for the whole - because there's no way to listen to "Memphis Blues Again" without wallowing in the absolute joy of the wordplay, without splashing around in the metaphors and in the bubbling grotesquerie.
Dylan writes lucky, gathering what he can from coincidence, throwing any old thing into the gale and watching it fly. He's like a man directing and organizing a whirlwind.
The words of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" provide a rhythm on top: LOOK OUT KID, you're GONna GET HIT. If you think of his mouth as a drum set, he's hitting almost every beat with the snare, whack whack whack, a rhythm that reflects the violence in the lyrics. And underneath, the rest of the music is doing a dance, coming up from the juke joints and sock hops.
Like Elvis before him, like Ashlee Simpson now, Dylan simply did not know his place - meaning both that he was uppity ("How much do I know / To talk out of turn / You might say that I'm young / You might say I'm unlearned") and that he was lost, that he had no place. He stretched and he twisted every song form he touched. This is because no form felt like home, and he had to expand them so that he could pile in content that hadn't previously been welcome. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" elongates to 18 bars and for practical purposes feels like one long vamp, a never-ending groove. It contains a critique and contains a party. The album notes say, "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine." Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to: carney trash hucksters, self-serious ruminators, glamour pusses, street scrappers. And since Dylan didn't know who he was, he became all of them.
--Frank Kogan, "#1 Bob Dylan" in Paste, June-July 2006
Words I lifted from Mark Sinker and Greil Marcus
Date: 2024-03-30 07:13 am (UTC)The last paragraph of the piece owes a lot to Mark Sinker and Greil Marcus.
(i) It includes, with Mark's permission, a modified version of this phrase of Mark's:
"an interface between two worlds that want to separate and mustn't be allowed to"
--Comment thread to a poptimists.livejournal.com post by Tom Ewing, "Badnuss (caution contains Other Place content)
Chuck Eddy fired from Village Voice music section." April 19, 2006
Here's Mark's complete comment (Mark had been editor of The Wire for several years in the early '90s):
(So Mark wasn't talking about Dylan, but about a good hunk of the rockcritic/rockwrite/musicwrite project as it appeared in, among other places, the Village Voice's music section edited by Chuck Eddy. Chuck had just been fired by the new owners. Btw, I'm willing to count Dylan as part of that project. Also, I don't totally understand what Mark meant. Are his "two worlds" (1) the world of the obsessives and (2) something larger? I nonetheless think Mark and I are pretty close in how we're using the phrase.)
(ii) My "know his place" wasn't the same as Greil's "keep to his place," and I made something of my own of the word "know," but obviously I was thinking of the Greil piece when writing my paragraph.
Greil Marcus, "Lies About Elvis, Lies About Us" in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, December 1981, review of Albert Goldman's Elvis.