When I moved here back in the 90s, I would come home from school every day completely wiped out. Not only was I having to learn who Kylie , the Stone Roses and Brother Beyond were, I had to grasp what it meant to like each one, and what kind of person I was for pledging allegiance to them.
And not just bands. Movies, TV shows, pretty much any form of culture. Were you the kind of person who watched The Word or Blind Date? A few years ago, I interviewed David Sedaris for this paper and we talked about this, but he, characteristically, saw this not as a problem but as something full of potential.
He and his husband, Hugh, had just bought a house in West Sussex. But I also kinda like that. The public loved it and embraced its full length. He experimented with form, sometimes writing six or seven verses to a song, often reprocessing and modernizing traditional folk structure. Through these explorations, he brought a sense of adventure and literacy to popular song that had not been there in the century of recorded music before and showed pop songwriters that the industry-imposed standard of three minutes was entirely arbitrary.
FM radio developed as a free-form platform for devoted rock-loving DJs to indulge themselves by playing full album sides and deep tracks not released as singles. Not only did he alter song form itself, but he pointed the way for others to alter song form in their own ways — on their own with no direction home, if you will — assuring his own place in music history.
This kind of storytelling had no precedent in popular music. Its roots are in the long folk song ballads of the late 19th century mostly derived from English and Irish traditional music, but Dylan fused this with a Beat poetic sensibility and electric instruments to create something entirely new. Poetry actually predates literacy, according to scholars. The first poems were recited or sung and passed down orally through generations.
When writing appeared, poetry became known as lyrics derived from the Greek word for lyre, the stringed instrument that was meant to accompany the performances of poetry. Music and poetry have been inextricably linked, then, for many thousands of years. Fast forward to the Middle Ages, where the primary poetic form among the illiterate was the ballad. The ballad had a structure, a meter, and a rhythm designed to make it memorable, and often told a complex story with many verses.
So the connection between music and poetry is as old as humans themselves. Through his songs, Bob Dylan brought poetry into the spotlight in a way that it had never been before. Because of the way he constantly revises his classic old material in concert. Infuriating for some, this process of revision is a vital way of keeping the songs interesting for him, and for his audience.
There's no danger that a Dylan show will just be a facsimile run-through of heritage tracks. Because his world tour with The Hawks effectively invented rock music, as distinct from rock'n'roll: nothing that loud, and that powerful, had been heard on stage before. Because, back in the s, just as most fans and critics were considering him washed-up and mined-out, he somehow came up with Blood on the Tracks, an indisputable classic containing some of his finest songs.
He has repeated this trick many times. Because he brought an unparalleled — then and now — philosophical and artistic depth to the humble pop lyric, incorporating a wealth of literary, religious and historical references within surreal "chains of flashing images", as Allen Ginsberg described them.
And unlike his imitators, he managed to make them mean something. Because, with his last album, Together Through Life, he became the oldest performer to debut at No 1 on the US album chart, and the oldest performer to top both UK and US charts simultaneously. Because when he wrote a protest song, it made a difference. Thanks to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", his powerful account of the death of a poor black serving-woman at the whim of a Baltimore society blade who served a derisory sentence, the killer in question, one William Zantzinger, lived the rest of his life in bitter ignominy.
Because of his nimbleness in sidestepping cultural trends. Just as Western youth was becoming obsessed with protest songs, he slipped into more personal, surreal territory; and a few years later, just as Western youth was becoming obsessed with the DayGlo paisley counter-culture which those surreal songs had helped create, he opted out of psychedelia to woodshed more rootsy material with his friends in The Band.
The resulting Basement Tapes became a trove of strange new material for others to cover, instigating both the bootlegging phenomenon and the widespread interest in what became known as "Americana".
Because, when included in Time's Most Important People of the Century, he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counter-culture generation". Because just as the world was going disco in the mids, he chose to revive the notion of a travelling gypsy revue of poets, playwrights and troubadours, the Rolling Thunder Revue, and film it as the world's most expensive home-movie, Renaldo and Clara. Because he is the only contemporary songwriter to have one of his songs prompt a homily by the Pope.
So it is: but it is not the wind that blows things away. It is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, 'Come! Because he wrote "Subterranean Homesick Blues", a condensed well-spring of social comment via catchphrase and slogan that remains one of the most compelling raps ever put to tape. Because he has on several occasions deliberately appeared to defy fans' expectations in a career-threatening manner, most notably with the double-album Self Portrait, a collection so contrary and shambolic critic Greil Marcus's opening line in his Rolling Stone review became a legendary catchphrase: "What is this shit?
Then there was the bible-thumping admonishment of his Christian period, when audiences were subjected to fire-and-brimstone sermons rather than favourite songs. Because, if you turn the cover of John Wesley Harding upside-down and look at the bark of the tree, you'll see The Beatles vinyl only drugs optional. Because he created an entire industry of Dylanologist commentators and interpreters, way beyond the attention afforded any other songwriter or performer. Because, honouring Dylan at the Kennedy Center Honors Reception, President Clinton described him as "striking the chords of American history and infusing American popular music He probably had more impact on The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.
Plus, Dylan took to the wrath and language he found in Old Testament poets and prophets. Wrath, in particular, worked well for him; it formed a frequent viewpoint in his songs, along with contempt and mistrust. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form.
These influences came to bear fast, as Dylan began writing his own songs. It was as timeless as a s Scotch border ballad and as visionary as Isaiah, yet its specter of doom was immediate, in precisely the way we feared at that moment: the wasteland of a post-nuclear world.
By , Dylan had already written all the anthems he was going to write. He was restless, ready to move on to a greater purpose. Also, other influences were moving in.
Dylan realized it was possible to restyle and enliven his music. It was majestic and, at six minutes, epic: the longest single that had ever been released. There was clearly a tale — a rushing soliloquy — at work here, but not a pretty or straightforward one. The song was a condemnation, and yet in another way it spoke for both its target and the listener: It was scathing but sympathetic. You could identify with the rolling stone. It felt scary; it felt exhilarating; and suddenly it felt like everything had forever changed.
In the decades since, the question has never stopped: incrimination or manifesto? Without them there would have been no foundation for the Nobel. He tested each measure of wording, rhythm and inflection for hours, days, until he got it right. He worked like a poet — in ways he never would again — but he had so much more to do than getting the meter or parallelism right: He had to fuse it with music that changed throughout various takes, until everything came together in a finished work.
But the toll of that bedrock period came fast and hard.
0コメント