Why don't I like Bob Dylan?

No riffs. Sure the voice was offputting at first, and sure the lyrics overwhelmed that. But I grew to like the voice, and the arrangements. But there's never any riffs taht stick, at best an amazing set of chords. And when I find my mind drifting away during the fourth song on a side, it's 'cause there's no riff to hold it all together and lead me between the verses. The best Dylan covers (Highway 51 Revisited, by Johnny Winter or PJ Harvey, say) add a musical hook.

substitute taht/that, 51/61
I like wine!

my eldest brother has been insufferable about dylan since he was about fifteen, which has to have played some part in my aversion of the man.

personally, if i'm looking for a distinctive voice with down-home lyrics i'll put on kris kristofferson. at least his fans are a pretty decent bunch without pretensions.

isn't it, yknow, just at least slightly possible to separate your impression of an artist from your impression of his fans?

i mean these are the most boring reasons imaginable for disliking someone, way lamer at this point than claiming bob dylan is the greatest poet since keats or something

Has anyone else noticed that there were a lot of threads like this one started 5 or so years ago? Someone proclaims a hatred of some famous and well-loved classic rock band, musician, or album and various folk chime in in agreement; then, a few years later, the thread gets revived with an apologetic capitulation.

Was contrarianism popular back in 2002? Is it not so hot now? Please enlighten me...

isn't it, yknow, just at least slightly possible to separate your impression of an artist from your impression of his fans?

actually, J.D. I find him very average at best musically (i'd have the same issues as others about his vocals, for instance), but the constant trumpeting of his talents would tend to push me towards dislike.

i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

Not liking Bob Dylan has less to do with being "punk" and more to do with having ears that function properly.
I guess I'm off to an ENT doctor tomorrow, then. Funny, they seem to be working properly.

i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

-- darraghmac, Sunday, 30 September 2007 13:34 (2 hours ago) Link

Hopefully you'll grow out of this--it betrays an inability to think for yourself.

it betrays an inability to think for yourself

oh, come on, it does nothing of the sort. it's a perfectly natural response: if you're constantly bombarded with "DYLAN IS GOD" and -- for whatever reason -- you hear nothing but (say) nasal singing and some well dodgy harmonica, you're going to become more entrenched in your own opinions.

i can be pretty sure about this because it's exactly how i felt. it was when more sensible and less hyperbolic criticism of dylan caught me off guard that i thought, you know, i really should listen to this old git properly (qv my revive, above).

it's the same with the beatles: i couldn't allow myself to like them when i was growing up in the eighties and early nineties because the praise lavished upon them was sickeningly predictable and tedious. like any good teenage iconoclast, i flicked the Vs and refused to listen. and that was, of course, thinking for myself -- not deeply, perhaps, but certainly thinking. it was simply an opinion based not on the music but on the cultural baggage.

tastes change; people change. a pal made me a CD of slightly less canonical beatles stuff, as i've discussed elsewhere here, and that changed everything.

but come off it: with artists like this, "not thinking for yourself" is surely more like following the slavish IT'S GENIUS line? i'm not saying not liking dylan is a particularly radical position to adopt; however, i am absolutely and categorically saying that people wanking on about how fucking godlike he is makes him -- for people like me and, i guess, darraghmac -- a little harder to embrace.

I don't give a fuck about people not liking Dylan; it's when the reason advanced is that he can't sing that i get mad. He's a pretty good singer actually, in terms of musicality, phrasing and expressiveness; it's just that the sound of his voice is defiantly un- Bel Canto- like. It reminds of the Charles Hallé line about the English not caring much for music, just liking the sound of it.

"i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

-- darraghmac, Sunday, 30 September 2007 13:34 (2 hours ago) Link

Hopefully you'll grow out of this--it betrays an inability to think for yourself."

This still isn't making any sense to me- I can't think for myself because i disagree with the majority opinion on an artist?

grimly, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard re: the Beatles. Why not just listen an make your own decision? I bet you weren't a lot of fun to hang out with.

And not liking something because it "doesn't live up to the hype" is a thoroughly invalid criticism.

Why not just listen an make your own decision

because, dude, i was an angsty and -- yes! -- immature teenager and didn't have the merit of yr worldly wisdom at the time. thanks, though, for this sage advice: it would no doubt have revolutionised my entire existence and that of everyone around me. anyway, i won't take up any more of your time: i guess you've got burma ("why not just let the people have a say?") and world peace ("why not just be nice to each other?") to sort out before bedtime.

He's a pretty good singer actually

he's a great singer. i think if you're looking for his influence (not that "influence" is the reason to venerate him or anyone), i think it's most evident in singing. he changed the way people sing just as much as elvis or ella did.

as for being put off by the canonization, that's just a basic problem with canons, right? received wisdom about the greatness of an artist or work of art serves the valuable function of preserving the art for posterity, but it also makes it harder to fight through the overlay and encounter the art yourself, on its own terms and your own terms.

dylan's phrasing really knocks me out, it's so odd yet musical. he really paved the way for someone like Mark E Smith, who uses phrasing in really awesome ways, serving as a musical element much more than a lyrical one, dylan works like that for me a lot of the time, actually, which is kind of odd given how much thought goes into breaking down his lyrics....

OTM about the MES thing: that was who sprang to mind on more than one occasion.

that feels like a weird thing to say, but ... yeah, it makes a lot of sense, too.

OTM about the MES thing

Either covering the other would be something to hear alright -

Grotesque era Fall doing Tom Thumb's Blues/ Dylan and the Band doing 'The NWRA'

Off topic but...I just saw him sleepwalk through a set last night in Bridgeport. The show was embarassingly bad. No audience interaction (fucker didn't even say thank you.) The playing (while very tight) was uninspired. Dylan just seemed tired, literally and figuratively.

EC was great though...but only a 45 minute set.

'Slow Train Coming'. Yes. Expect extended explanation soon.
-- dave q, Wednesday, May 1, 2002 5:00 PM (5 years ago)

This is gonna be so good...

(though NB that Knopfler is all over that shit, so it's kinda stealth killer. "I Believe In You" surely numbers among both Knopfler and Dylan's finest hours, and that's sayin' something.)

Worst live performer I've ever seen. Honestly. A joyless bore. His recorded music is about 24% better.

I saw him in '78 and he was incredible -- engaged with the audience, just electric (ha) -- but two years later, the born again Bob was indeed a joyless bore. So, after a career spanning 47 years or something, I guess he can be at either extreme or somewhere in the middle and it's not altogether helpful to generalise about how he is as a live performer, just on a night-to-night basis.

and it's not altogether helpful to generalise about how he is as a live performer, just on a night-to-night basis.

I thought I was being rather specific.

No audience interaction (fucker didn't even say thank you.)

yeah but he never says anything to the audience, in my experience at least. So, uh, I wouldn't take that as the leading barometer of his state of "boredom" or "tiredness" or whatever. Seen him three times, once in the late 80s, once in the early 90s, and back in 2005. I don't believe he said a word beyond singing in those three shows. And while I do recall finding those earlier two shows disappointing overall, I was extremely pleased with the 2005 show. He was definitely into the show and the music was cooking.

I just bought tickets to one of his Chicago Theater shows, so kwhitehead I'm hoping you either saw a bad night or were just put off by his silence.

He still playing piano?

I thought I was being rather specific.

I was talking to paulhw, whose post was immediately above mine!

In other words, continue to post your individual specific impressions of live shows toyourheartscontentetc...

He appeared to be playing piano; stood behind it for most of the show. He played guitar for the first two songs.

i've read some years ago that he owned shares of diamond mines in south-africa
(which is the reason my interest in discovering him vanished. yes it makes me musical illiterate)

Why would knowing that about an artist stop you from liking them? (even if it's true, which I doubt)

Because sometimes people can't get past moral objections to artists as individuals, or don't want to get past them. (If you are missing the objection might even be: I am assuming this went back to the Apartheid era of South Africa. Also, the diamond trade throughout Africa is just incredibly destructive and is closely related to various ruthless military factions there, along with the usual story of benefiting outsiders and a small local elite, while in now way benefiting the local population in general. I'm not saying that's how it works in every country, but that's how it works in a lot of places there.) And it seems quite plausible that he would have had such investments. Maybe he had some Israeli chums get him set up during his period of celebrating Israel as neighborhood bully (not sure he's ever backed away from that), given that Israelis are among the biggest investors in Africa's diamond trade, and given it was one of the countries with the closest relationship to Apartheid South Africa.

(But Angel Canales is or was a diamond dealer and I haven't stopped listening to him.)

I can't over my moral objection to Rudipherous.

get over*

great artists/musicians/playwrights who have done portraits of/been court musicians for/written plays for terrible tyrants: a list thread.

I'm more concerned about the fact that because Dylan wrote Neighborhood Bully that must mean he's in cahoots with the evil Zionist empire who likely rewarded him with his own personal African diamond mine. Wtf kinda third-rate Stormfront bullshit is that?

thought u were cool w/ anti-semites tbh mords -- slovenian ones ne way.

nah, that dude isn't an anti-Semite. We chatted about Jews awhile. He has much love for the tribe.

one of his paradoxes?

i found this pretty convincing:

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-still-the-most-dangerous-philosopher-the-west

i mean he's not really likely to say "i am anti-semitic", but will go right up to the line, describing israel as being like nazi germany, etc.

I've read the article. Look, I'm not saying the dude is perfect (tho a lot of the stuff in the article in out-of-context) and I certainly don't want to apologize for him. But he didn't stand in class and say anything offensive. AND: If he came onto the Bob Dylan thread and said that, I'd tell him to stfu too.

(You know, I hadn't read this one. I had read the original that I guess this is a follow-up too. Yeah. It's disturbing.)

(It's maybe a conversation to have over on the Zizek thread.)

Some of my favorite songs of his are too damned long:

Desolation Row
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
Visions of Johanna
Idiot Wind

I don't really care beyond verse three or four. It's not that I don't like interminable folky ballads - shit "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is one of my all-time favorite songs. I just don't find Dylan's lyrics to be interesting enough to listen to.

I would dig 7" edits of all these. I dunno, maybe they exist. I should try to find them.

Because sometimes people can't get past moral objections to artists as individuals

Fair enough, although personally I find it quite easy.

his period of celebrating Israel as neighborhood bully (not sure he's ever backed away from that)

Why should he back away from it? He's only voicing his opinion.

i've read some years ago that he owned shares of diamond mines in south-africa

Do you have a source for this?

I would dig 7" edits of all these. I dunno, maybe they exist. I should try to find them.

SUGGEST BAN

DNFT

describing israel as being like nazi germany

this is not anti-semitic btw

i think you forgot a T