Bob Dylan and genius

[MKFaizi]

Pretty good review. Maybe, you can get a job at Rolling Stone.

No kidding.

Faizi

[Blair]

That's an insult to Rolling Stone.

Do they publish streams of shit conciousness with no paragraphs or punctuation?

[MKFaizi]

No, they hire editors to provide punctuation and all that sort of thing to make things easier to read.

Faizi

[joel knoll]

prince you're just a fucking heckler. angry at your father or something? if youve got anything intelligent or funny to say, pull your boyfriends cock out of your mouth for just two seconds and say it. otherwise, keep blowing and spare me the bullshit.

[Blair]

Profoundly insecure and homophobic? Wow, that's really original.

[joel knoll]

im glad to see, prince, that idiocy is alive and well, so that those resolved to eliminate them shall not be left with nothing to do. with that, i - along with the rest of the world - leave you most gladly to your own meagre devices.

has anyone anything to say about dylans relationships with his audience, or with the fairer sex? ("fair" in but one sense of the word, i fear...) what exactly is dylan's attitude toward Woman in a song like "Just Like a Woman"?

[Blair]

Pay attention.

A triple layered meaning, if you are capable of deciphering it.

[joel knoll]

i confess i am incapable of deciphering it. let us reconcile our former differences and discuss. let me apologize for my arbitrary and ungrounded insults (tho youre still a bit of a heckler...). truth is, prince, i dont know you- or your sexual preferences- from anything at all. am i a homophobe? probably. i was raised in a staunchly christian reformed community, and my whole life has been an attempt to shake those demons. in a very real sense, i am scared of homosexuality, for the same reason that i am intimidated by black people: i have always been taught, and have believed, that they are somehow alien to what is healthy and righteous. profoundly insecure? most definitely. thats a rather easy game to play, though, because everyone is, the more obviously the more loudly they deny it.

i have not come to this Forum to have a mean-spirited battle of wits with anyone; the more so do i regret having fallen into it with you. if your cryptic suggestion of a "triple-layered meaning" is a bait, i beseech you to withdraw it and acknowledge the white flag i am waving at you. how silly... as if we were in the third grade again.

if, however, your suggestion is in earnest, then please enlighten my ignorance.

[Blair]

Just pay attention to what is being said.

Noone here is your enemy. The enemy is society and it's beliefs, its lies.

i am not gay, by the way, I was simply pointing out an assumption/joke you made, as being less than accurate.

[Jamesh]

Well I watched the doco's on Dylan on Oz TV and he was clearly a very smart laddie.

I have no doubt he would have made a very good philosopher, if he had of chosen that path.

The most interesting bits, apart from some of the songs, were the press interviews where he threw the questions back at the interviewers, to make them think of the absurbity of their questions or comments. A very good reasoner back then.

[dieohgenus]

Yeah, I think music's a good part of a well-rounded education.

I've been trying to figure out the mathematical connection to it because musicians seem to statistically do better at math than non-musicians. I think it's because of the relations of time that you have to deal with in keeping a rhythm. You have to be able to hold a piece of time in your head and chop it up into halves or quarters or thirds or three quarters and a quarter or whatever--you can make it as complicated as you want. I think it helps your visualization skills to practice doing things like that.

Yes, *you* think it is part of a well-rounded education. And please, the guitar? Nothing better at hand? I mean ... guitar? Is that all you got? No classical instrument?
And as for musicians doing better at math: this is another believe of yours, maybe that's because you did not cite *one* source for your assumption, yes? (I recognize you wrote "statistically", so naming individual examples of thinkers and composers who were into music but not good at math does not disprove it, but it makes it very unlikely. Back up your claims, please.) Anyway, the guitar is the instrument of the neds, the proles; just look at your favorite (if there's such a thing) garage, rock or punk band: truly laughable.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Matt has a real admirer. How flattering for him. There are at least hundreds of ancient posts of him to dig up and doubt. Good luck!

[Ryan Rudolph]

this post is an oldie, but I can't help but comment. I probably have a bit of a bias towards Bob Dylan because he was one of the major musical figures I used to rebel agaisn't pressure to be listen to nothing but the Beatles in my home. His lyrics are decent in the sense that they provide vivid imagery, metaphor and attempt to provide truth without a lot of emotion, and get you thinking, and some of it is really profound.

IE:
1. when you ain't got nothing, you aint got nothing to lose.
2. you don't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.

As Kevin says, compared to everything else at the time period, Bob Dylan was pretty creative, but he didn't take it all the way, as can be seen later in life when he lost his creativity and degenerated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmtLJgRt_zc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5yQ8JJ8 ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHrK6L91 ... re=related

[Talking Ass]

According to QRS standards, a genius must only be a person who discovers and orients himself toward 'ultimate reality' in some Zen-like way. So, certainly Dylan could never be understood in that way since his orientation is radically different. What many don't realize and yet it is evident, extremely so in each of the three songs Ryan posted links to (and those links will soon not function because the labels that own those songs always get them taken down), is that here is almost nothing BUT pure and clear links in Gates of Eden and Hard Rain's Gonna Fall to a Biblical value-system, and straight to the Prophets. (How could someone ever use those tones and themes and do it so well and not be perceived as a prophetic figure?) But what many people don't seem to grasp is that Dylan began as a Christian in a most essential, American folk sense. With his links to Woody Guthrie and a whole American tradition of interpretation of Christian values. The Times They Are A' Changin' directly quotes Matthew 20:16 "the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen". The song When the Ship Comes In has even more of that 'Christian immediacy'.

When the Ship Comes In.

A later 'literal' conversion seemed really a let down, almost a betrayal of the spontaneity of that earlier lyricism. What is interesting is how he moved so strongly into a literal Evangelical Christianity with Slow Train, Shot of Love and Saved, but then with Infidels moved toward something less distinct, perhaps less political (except Neighborhood Bully which was directly supportive of Israel).

What seems to capture people and impress people is the strong link in Dylan's songs to a clear moral expression, to values.

You can't at all say that Dylan 'degenerated' though. Every Grain of Sand is lyrically equal to many of his best earliest songs. (Couldn't find the original).

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (2001) is also quite good...

[Ryan Rudolph]

hey talking ass, this is another one of his later songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9EKqQWPjyo

Some of the lyrics are okay - Here is more of an artist though, not a full blown philosopher, he doesn't perfect his craft, he only presents what is happening what is within him or others. His lyrics are very thought inspiring though, better than most pop music that amounts to seduction of the opposite sex.

Bob Dylan - things have changed -

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes
I’m looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

This place ain’t doing me any good
I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood
Just for a second there I thought I saw something move
Gonna take dancing lessons, do the jitterbug rag
Ain’t no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag
Only a fool in here would think he’s got anything to prove

Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too
Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road
If the Bible is right, the world will explode
I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losing hand

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

I hurt easy, I just don’t show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity
Gonna get low down, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
I’m in love with a woman who don’t even appeal to me

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I’m not that eager to make a mistake

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

[Talking Ass]

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Compare with 1 Peter "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour."

Ryan, it is more accurate to think of Dylan as a preacher, not as a philosopher, don't you think? Like A Rolling Stone is a sermon, a devasating sermon. I wouldn't have wanted to be on the other side of Positively Fourth Street.

A not-so-well-known early love song. Ballad in Plain D

[Ryan Rudolph]

talking ass,

All labels are limited, but Dylan did have a rare ability to present metaphor, vivid imagery, persuasive argument and heart-felt experiences through the genre of story telling folk music. That is why he did possess some genius in many of his observations. However, like many of us, I think he struggled heavily trying to live his own idealism, and he became quite complacent, deluded, and lost for part of his life. In this last video, things have changed, he seems conflicted by his sinning nature, still filled with desire and doubt, and secretly hoping of end times. probably the inevitable outcome of the amount of consciousness he exposed himself to in his early twenties...

[Talking Ass]

(That song Things Have Changed was published in 2000 and the video must have come out around then. It is not his latest, it is actually a little 'old'). (But all pretty ironic if compared to The Time's They Are a Changing).

According to himself, in Chronicles 1, his 'memoir', he himself had no idea where many of his songs came from. They just seemed to have appeared at the window. Take for example It's Alright Ma. In terms of social commentary, a sharp view into the truth of American consumerism, the buying and selling of people, the buying and selling of destinies. (One of my favorite Dylan lines is):

• 'For them that must obey authority
  That they do not respect in any degree
  Who despise their jobs, their destinies
  Speak jealously of them that are free
  Do what they do just to be
  Nothing more than something they invest in

...seems to nail the sense of a deceiving present, a lying present, and it also seems that anyone who took this message to heart, would really make the effort to discover what had 'real' spiritual value. Whatever the 'truth' is, if it is not the lying present and all those entities that seek to entrap you, what then is it? How does one live it? Through and through, the value-structure that informs his writing is utterly Jewish and Christian. It's Alright Ma is nothing else but a Christian hymn. And so to realize or embody those values ('the consciousness he exposed himself to in his twenties') wouldn't have a great deal in common with what is generally held up as being 'ultimately valuable' around here. What Dylan seemed most to value, more so than his theatrical personage, were his children, his family (a terrible sin from the QRS perspective) and it would seem some sort of general commitment to a group of values that informed his work and 'served' him throughout his life and his career as a song-writer.

See, you speak in terms of certain ideal values (what they are I am not certain) but the only way to know how that focus will actually have served you is to check in with you many years down the line. People's perspectives of themselves have a rather nasty habit of changing as time passes. So the part I am not sure about is that of [his] delusion or complacency, and if he would ever have described himself as 'lost' I wonder how he would define that? If his Christian salvation was a 'real thing' (for him), do you suppose he wisened up about it? Or veered away from that path?

Finally, it is not such a good idea to see his songs, and the one you mention, as being a sort of autobiography of his own outlook. If there is anyone on the popular scene who has used persona and then left persona it is Dylan. You can't ever rely on Dylan himself to give you the straight skinny.

[Ryan Rudolph]

yes, in judging Dylan's level of consciousness, I am assuming his lyrics are indicative of his own self-referential mind state at that moment, and this is indeed an assumption, and could be false depending on whether he was merely acting out as a persona, or his former self at an earlier time.

Before I comment more on what you have stated, I will have to give it some thought.

[Talking Ass]

Well, while your thinking (and thinking....) check out this rather camp cover of Like a Rolling Stone.

[uncledote]

Yeah, I think music's a good part of a well-rounded education.

I've been trying to figure out the mathematical connection to it because musicians seem to statistically do better at math than non-musicians. I think it's because of the relations of time that you have to deal with in keeping a rhythm. You have to be able to hold a piece of time in your head and chop it up into halves or quarters or thirds or three quarters and a quarter or whatever--you can make it as complicated as you want. I think it helps your visualization skills to practice doing things like that.

Yes, *you* think it is part of a well-rounded education. And please, the guitar? Nothing better at hand? I mean ... guitar? Is that all you got? No classical instrument?
And as for musicians doing better at math: this is another believe of yours, maybe that's because you did not cite *one* source for your assumption, yes? (I recognize you wrote "statistically", so naming individual examples of thinkers and composers who were into music but not good at math does not disprove it, but it makes it very unlikely. Back up your claims, please.) Anyway, the guitar is the instrument of the neds, the proles; just look at your favorite (if there's such a thing) garage, rock or punk band: truly laughable.

ha ha - guitar can be one of the most serious, varied, challenging and rewarding instruments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTbT7-OiaBQ

[alice144]

Different people are smart in different ways. I can't write like Bob Dylan does, and I wouldn't even want to try. I would feel that it would require too much ceding control... like, I'd have to think much more flexibly than I do now. As a scientist, I like to be able to apply a certain dollop of rational analysis to the things I come across in my life, and I'm not willing to give that up!

Furthermore, I think that Dylan was able to find a lot of his inspiration through his highly experimental and iternerant lifestyle, which is something else that I can respect, but, again, I would be uncomfortable living that way.

What I enjoy about Dylan's lyrics is that, while they're messy, they find unusual ways of expressing things which exist, but which we don't necessarily usually admit to be part of the so-called human experience. There have been periods in my life when I have especially felt the tension of "I am supposed to be feeling this, and yet I am not". This can be so alienating -- one of the jobs of an artist is communication, so by making something "weird", which, in fact, a lot of people experience, "usual", he is doing many of us a great service.

A lot of this alienation is a linguistical one; often I've felt that if there isn't a word or a phrase to describe what I am experiencing, it cannot be real. But then, this is often not true. There aren't a lot of really top lyricists like Dylan who have been able to identify and properly communicate these emotions. Off of the top of my head I can only think of maybe four or five others, a couple of which are experimental novelists, and short story writers.

Who knows what a genius is? But I'd go ahead and call Bob one.

[Tomas]

-Alice 144 writes-
Who knows what a genius is? But I'd go ahead and call Bob one.

-Tomas-
Good thing he changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman and he got outta Hibbing, Minnesota. These two actions (act-ons) clearly define 'Bob' as genius-oriented.

Poor Prince (whatever his 'real' doofus name is), is a has-been. Still in Minneapolis, Minnesota leafing through his gold records. Tough to be taken seriously when you are 5 foot three. Pretty good when he first arrived but he decided to park it in neutral some time in 1999 and the gall to think past accomplishments would allow him to reach nirvana.

[Tomas]

As the article pointed out, he has certainly been a changeling. In that way, I have always equated him with Cher.

I think his best song might be "Highway Sixty One." But I admit that I just love that legend about Abraham. Great adaptation of a Biblical/Koranic theme set to music. American qwali.

Faizi

No way, Jose [Marsha]. It's this tune, he didn't write it but the filmer sure plays (captures Dylan's element) smooth.

Hey Joe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__obEhNWtIc