Re: The Dylan Effect
- From: treadleson <treadle99@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 11:14:59 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 2, 7:57 am, Mr Jinx <vernon__bris...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Many people – dear, sweet, rationalists dedicated to a clay-footed
Newtonian gravitational perspective - are rather wary of those of us
silly enough to admit being taken beyond reason by Bob Dylan's art.
They imagine us to be flakes or ‘fanboys’. We bother them.
Apparently we are supposed to be coherent and cool - dispassionate -
in our appraisals of his work. Anything less (or more) just isn’t
seemly.
Now I like rationalists.
.....
I also like cats and hedgehogs and spider’s
webs.
Right. Unless there's a spider attached. So maybe you like
rationalists unless there's reason attached.
But I wonder if they are applying their rationality erroneously
when it comes to Dylan.
.....
If Dylan is a great (rather than merely a 'good' or an 'influential')
artist surely one of the measures of his greatness is that he can
transport us beyond what we rationally believe we know to a place
where other elements come into play?
This reminds me of something I've noticed in music for a while, which
is the waning, nay, nearly non-existent, influence now of Bob Dylan on
younger musicians. My observations are entirely unscientific (I'll
call it a priori), but it seems that many solo & band songwriters for
a long time claimed Dylan as a huge influence, holding him up as the
gold standard. This continued pretty uninterrupted from the Velvet
Underground up to the mid-nineties. Then it kind of vanished. This
is not to say that you don't see his fingerprints in modern songs.
But they're harder to find and there are just fewer citings. I've
always wondered whether part of the reason for this--assuming it's
mostly true--has to do with the huge impact of U2. I say U2 because
they broke away from roots music in such a decisive way and were
echoing music of the immediate era they were in, instead. They became
a kind of musical year zero. Or maybe it's just the passage of time.
We might look at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and tell
ourselves it is merely an amalgam of paint and hard work. The
faithful, plodding rationalist in us would doubtless seek to catalogue
and categorise the work. To judge it alongside other frescos and
marvel at its skill. Rate it, even.
On the other hand it might simply transport us and the details of its
construction be lost in the whirl of what it says to us and how it
makes us feel.
If Bob Dylan did not make us lose our perspectives sometimes he would
simply be an artisan, a far more ordinary prospect than he is. I
think there is no need to prize our rational minds so highly that we
forget our souls. And the greatest thing an artist can do is to make
you lose your subjectivity, objectivity and everything else. There in
the maelstrom is where we find something else. Something beyond our
horizons.
Bring on the loss of reason!
Mr Jinx
.
- References:
- The Dylan Effect
- From: Mr Jinx
- The Dylan Effect
- Prev by Date: Re: Anyone Here Listed On And/Or Using bobdylan.com?
- Next by Date: Re: Uncut's 150 albums of the decade
- Previous by thread: Re: The Dylan Effect
- Next by thread: Dylan on Aufray & Aufray on Dylan
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
