Re: My Top 50 Albums Of the 1960s

Date: 11 Feb 2003 10:40:20 -0800
Newsgroups: rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s
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Mark Dintenfass <email-address-deleted> wrote in message news:<email-address-deleted>...
> A lot of people don't like the way Dylan sings because they're worrying
> about whether he's hitting all the notes dead on, and whether he has a
> "musical" voice.
Or maybe because his off-key, nasal warblings grate worse than
fingernails on a chalkboard.
> But Dylan isn't coming out of the melodic (European)
> tradition of singing. His models, even more than Woody Guthrie, are old
> blues and country singers, and his aims are rootsiness and conveying
> the full sense of the lyric.
In other words: The man can't sing a lick.
> Those were also the aims of the other
> folkies at the time, but Dylan added to the mix his astonishing
> songwriting and a complicated ironic presentation, a kind of urban cool
> that his predecessors in the "folk" movement lacked. As I've said here
> before, if you compare his version of "My Back Pages" with the Byrds,
> you realize that the Byrds are focused on the song's sound while Dylan
> is focused on what the song says, and no one communicated complicated
> meanings as well as he did at his best.
If (and I cannot stress this "if" enough) a song has a "message" (is
didactic), this should have no bearing on its value *as a song.*
Regarding didactic poetry, Edgar Poe wrote that it was a "heresy" --
having nothing to due with the purpose of a poem. Poe felt that if a
message could be best expressed in an essay format (or as a public
speech), than it should be.
The same applies equally to music/song.
The only justification of employing didacticism in song, is that the
musical format allows one to readily and widely disseminate a catchy
slogan ("Look for the Union Label"/"Feed the World") or basic,
generalized concept ("And the rain falls and blows through the
window/And the snow falls, in white drifts that fold/And the tides
rise, with floods in the nursery/And a child is crying, he's hungry
and cold/His life has been sold/...").
However, these don't really make for *great* songs. They have their
merits (especially the Don McLean penned ORPHANS OF WEALTH, quoted
above), but their not the sort of thing that one feels inspired to
sing for the own sake (that is, other than to convey their
socio-political agenda).
But if I'm going to listen to a didactic song, I'd much rather hear it
sung by Don McLean, who has a pleasant, if somewhat weak, voice, than
by Dylan, whose voice is anathema to aesthetic faculties and torture
to my eardrums.
>
> One more thing. In his electricized 60s work, Dylan added an element of
> real anger to his sound--something that had been essentially absent
> from American popular music (including r'n'r) until he came along.
Yeah. Just what the world needs more of.
But Dylan hardly pioneered this concept: JEZEBEL, HOUND DOG, RUNAROUND
SUE, etc., are angry attacks against unfaithful lovers.
> Think of how many of his songs are essentially attacks and insults.
> "Positively 4th Street" is one long, furious putdown of a Greenwich
> Village phoney, and it became a hit. I can't think of a single previous
> charting record which struck that sort of mood, though since then there
> have been hundreds.
See above. Or listen to Dion's greatest hits.
The only difference is Dylan's level of pretention: he is not railing
against a faithless lover, but some pseudo-intellectual (and while one
may not like a p.i., he's hardly worth expending real anger on).
Consequently, so much of Dylan's music rings false.
> And if that's what you're writing songs about,
> melodic prettiness is not just irrelevant, it's a betrayal. Most of the
> people who sing Dylan songs betray them in just that way.
Obviously, one can keep a level of passion/anger/intensity in a song
without making it "ugly" (as opposed to its having "prettiness"). A
song need not affront one's ears merely because the singer is railing
against something/someone that assualts his sensibilities.
If the message is powerful enough, the combination of
concept/lyric/and delivery should convey its force to the listener (as
with McLean's music). Assaulting our eardrums may make us feel the
pain -- I guess Dylan is going for a Pavlovian conditioned response --
but it's not quite the same pain that the lyrics are referring to.