Posted on 10/16/2016 11:31:46 AM PDT by Rummyfan
This week Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - to general acclamation. But not from me, and I'd feel the same way if they'd given it to Cole Porter or Oscar Hammerstein or W S Gilbert. Ira Gershwin liked to cite the old Encyclopedia Britannica definition:
SONG is the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third.
Bob Dylan is a practitioner of that third art: not words, not music, but the transformation that occurs when the former sit upon the latter.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Can’t pump the gas cuz the vandals took the handles!
I do a stellar Dylan impersonation - all I have to do is pinch my nose closed...
Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder are all ‘not going to be tickled’ about Dylan getting this award.
Steyn is always a lovely read, even as a re-run.
Kinda harsh, considering Dylan must have had the not-so-great-one in mind when he wrote “Idiot Wind” for “Blood on the Tracks”:
“Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth/ You’re an idiot, babe/ It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”
oops, got my Marks confused...this is from the GOOD one.
I noticed it too (though not as wittily). Call me crazy (many do), but I think the Hillary campaign decided to use Dylan to pump the 60‘s liberals nostalgia vote.
There was a lot of praise on this site for Dylan getting the Nobel. Personally, I did not understand why he got it for literature. He isn’t a writer, yes, he has a couple of books but nothing of literary quality and nothing produced this year. Generally, awards are given for same year or recent works. Very odd.
Congrats to Dylan. Too bad that, since awarding the “prize” to Ødungo it was rendered relevance equal to the trinkets one can pluck out of a box of CrackerJacks.
“Mother Teresa! But they told me you were dead!” “No, no, your Holiness,” an aide would have hastily explained. “This is Bob Dylan, the voice of a disaffected generation.”
Dylan's genius (early in his career) was as a songwriter,not as a performer.
bump
So listening to Dylan conjures up images of Estelle Getty for Stein?
Okay...
Yeah, bugs me too.
I mean, not only is it just “poetry” (arguable) that is supposed to be mated with music and not stand on its own, but for God’s sake, it’s 40 years too late at least.
Very untimely, even if you think it’s relevant.
Yes. He should not be praised as an actual singer. He’s awful. (And the arrangements sometimes are too goony - as were much in the ‘60s.)
It how the left rewards him for his liberal views.
>>Kinda harsh, considering Dylan must have had the not-so-great-one in mind when he wrote “Idiot Wind” for “Blood on the Tracks”:<<
Positively 4th Street is the greatest put-down song ever, with THE greatest rock phrase ever:
“I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is to see you”
That was good. Almost made me forgive him for referring to Trump as only a reality TV star.
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