Dylan

It's taken me about 55 years, but I've finally started appreciating Bob Dylan. So what took me so long? The answer my friend is 'blowin in the wind' whatever that means.

I think Dylan is derivative, an impostor, a fraud, and that's his best quality because he's sincere about it. He's a poseur, in the way that we're all poseurs, it just takes some of us longer to admit than others. He can't really sing, but he sings, and doesn't much care that he can't sing. He doesn't play guitar all that well (or piano, or harmonica) but doesn't much care, and keeps on playing. As for the songs themselves, the musical structure and arrangements? Well they're repetitious and rudimentary. People who've worked with him in the studio say he doesn't come in prepared with much more than a musical scaffolding in mind and the rest gets improvised. Take a song like "Like A Rolling Stone" or "The Hurricane", for example, and you realize that this is obviously the case. In 'Rolling Stone' it's Al Kooper's improvised organ lick that makes the song musically interesting and catchy, in 'Hurricane' it's Scarlet Rivera's plaintive violin. I guess you've got to give Dylan credit for relying on the real musicians to make the music work, and recognizing what works musically when they hit on it.

As for the lyrics - Dylan doesn't know what his songs are about and he's said as much publicly. When asked, he answers that the songs are about whatever you want them to be about. He just writes them, and whatever comes out, comes out. I don't think he's being cute or evasive. Read his lyrics, and the only conclusion any reasonable person can draw is that Dylan is telling the truth. He has no idea what he's writing about, or maybe he has some vague idea. The words he uses are nothing special, by design one can suppose they're ordinary, because he's writing in the folk narrative or blues idiom. Sometimes his words are more narrative, and sometimes more 'poetic'. When they are on the poetic side, what he comes up with is often opaque gobbledygook, a hodgepodge of images and metaphors vomited out, that may or may not amount to anything much. Sometimes, cause he uses so many words, like an archer shooting arrow after arrow, he hits on something that sticks, a few of those arrows even strike gold. One thing is for sure, Dylan likes words, really likes them, and his songs are full of them. He writes a lot of songs, and a lot of long ones too. So chances are he'll occasionally put words together that seem to mean something. The one amazing innate talent that Dylan unquestionably has is a memory for words. It's quite impressive that he can remember all those lyrics when he performs. 

Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota. From the beginning it was all about adopting a persona, or rather several personas. He's worn more than a few of them over the years; the Woody Guthrie-esque dust bowl balladeer, the Billy The Kid-esque outlaw individualist, the gospel singing born-again Christian, persona after persona, each one in its own way embodying an aspect of the American myth. Meanwhile he was always really a middle class Jewish kid from the northern mid-west. But his most enduring trick, the trick of being derivative, reminds us that we're all derivative, we're all poseurs, and being a poseur is the very quintessence of being an American. The entire culture is derivative, and most Americans have themselves fled a past, a former country, shed a former identity to adopt a new one. The very quintessence of the American myth is that our identity is whatever we want it to be, that's what makes America great, that's what freedom actually means. It's not that you can become rich in America. It's that you can become someone else entirely. A Napoleon in rags, whatever that is.

As for whether he should've gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature, in case you're wondering? Not a chance. They should go back to giving the Nobel to authors most of us have never heard of before. Everyone's heard of Dylan. And give it to actual authors of literature, not songwriters. I mean can Kazuo Ishiguro win a Grammy?