Bob Dylan - Tempest, Sept. 11, 2012

I can't really think of a dylan song lex would like & also I think lex really doesn't want to even listen to dylan

got this today; engineered by Scott Litt!

OK I've listened to this once through now and I love the Titanic song and "Pay In Blood" makes me wish Dylan would record another gospel album.

I can't really think of a dylan song lex would like & also I think lex really doesn't want to even listen to dylan

i don't really

no one as far as i can tell has responded to my main criticisms re: being overly, tediously descriptive and cardboard characters

I think you personally like an awful lot of music with overly tediously descriptive and cardboard characters, albeit not much of it is held up by the lyrics as poetry crew. But this all sort of feeds into something that was in the Petridis review about the bar for 'great Dylan lyrics' having become ridiculously low over the years.

I don't think it's overly descriptive and the characters being cardboard, I guess they are viewed from a certain distance but I mean he's writing an old style folk disaster ballad, so it fits imo

But I mean you like the paris hilton album and all of a sudden you're picky about singing chops & evocative lyrics....like just admit you got a chance to troll in a major newspaper and get paid for it, that's awesome...but your rhetorical style wrt, to quote andrew sullivan I think is ”the closest weapon at hand”

I like the Titanic disaster song and am aware of it's lineage in the folk tradition of topical death songs but couldn't stop thinking of William McGonagall's poem 'The Tay Bridge Disaster' when listening to it.

calling anything "boring" is truly one of the worst and most useless criticisms there is.

you popping up in every thread to snipe at me in that underhanded, cunty way is defintiely one of the worst and most useless posting habits there is

it's nothing personal, i just happen to actually disagree with you on a huge number of things.

like the worth and use of everything i do? yeah that's not personal

i don't know what else you do besides write pieces like the above so i wouldn't say everything, no.

no one as far as i can tell has responded to my main criticisms re: being overly, tediously descriptive and cardboard characters

Contrary to your review, I don't think Dylan's lyrics work better on the page. I think they're written to be sung, and personally I think the way Dylan sings "The Tempest" is very effective. In this song his grizzled voice contributes to the overall effect. A youthful voice would not convey the same sense of world-weary acceptance - even jauntiness - about the prospect of impending doom. I'm not sure what you mean about it being "tediously descriptive". Perhaps you mean that there's not a lot of action. I think it's supposed to be a fairly static picture - one moment frozen in time - ie., the moment before the boat strikes the iceberg. So its supposed to be mainly descriptive. There's not much plot, and we all know the ending from the beginning. As far as cardboard characters, I don't think it's supposed to be a character study either. So what is it supposed to be? I guess it's part of the long lineage of disaster folk songs, from "Casey Jones" on down. Within Dylan's ouevre, it's also somewhat reminiscent of "Desolation Row", I think.

I am as excited to read lex's opinions on Dylan as he would be to read my opinions on Britney

xp a lineage that can trace itself back to a 1970 Grateful Dead song

I am as excited to read lex's opinions on Dylan as he would be to read my opinions on Britney

I'd love to read your opinions on Britney!

xp not sure if you're joking but there are a lot of other, older songs that are about casey jones.

^^^

my opinions on Britney are about as uninformed and prejudiced as lex's are about dylan so I'm not sure it would really be enjoyable for everybody plus I would actually have to devote some time to suffering through multiple albums of her material (as opposed to just being periodically irritated by her singles being played in public spaces) so uh no

His views on this album are informed by listening to this album, in fairness. Do you expect him to absorb a history of American Music if the last Century to really place it in the 'appropriate' context? Are said histories being available for a reduced price from retailers if you buy this album?

lex has made it abundantly clear he has no interest in musical history

in reduced-price format or otherwise

I feel that we are not entirely communicating here.

And anyway that's not true - he's just not that interested in a lot of the canon. Things that inform music that he actually enjoys is different, I believe.

xp yeah I'm joking, I dont know enough about early 20c indigenous American musical forms to be able to elucidate any kind of point with clarity, but my kneejerk reaction is that anyone trying to trace a lineage of folk tradition through the latter part of last century and the start of this one and ending up with late Dylan is not really doing it right

I do like lex's article which sort of my sort of prima facie assumption about late Dylan--mainly, that you get out of it what you put into it.

I also am amused about how everyone is shocked and appalled by his review, considering that the dude didn't just foreground his review in his utter distaste, but actually admitted on a widely-read national publication that he was confused a few years back as to whether Dylan was still alive or not. #1 great thing about lex is the self-effacing, almost cheerful willingness to confess his limitations and allow them to undercut the authority of his withering dismissals

which sort of supports my prima facie assumption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbTBk4pDIHA

no shit shakes

comedy xps

right on, sorry

cardboard characters

Weird criticism imo. These are songs, not movies or novels. You're not going to get Madame Bovary. I love it when a character in a song seems to live and breathe (like, as it happens, a ton of earlier Dylan songs) but I don't expect it.

it's weird that lex doesn't grasp that DYLAN is the character that's important. (does Lex parse Rihanna songs for their in-depth characterizations? idgi)

xp a lineage that can trace itself back to a 1970 Grateful Dead song

Haha, I thought of that too after I posted it. Though there are obviously earlier versions of "Casey Jones", I'm not claiming it as the earliest or best example of this tradition, just the one that first came to mind (and one that's probably pretty well known to people who aren't folk musicologists). Whether or not it should even count as a "disaster song" is also debatable since I believe only Casey himself dies in the crash. Some better examples might be Dylan's own "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues" or even songs about the Titanic itself like "When That Great Ship Went Down".

this set is highly recommended
http://www.tompkinssquare.com/images/PTWcover.jpg
http://www.tompkinssquare.com/people_take.html

tompkins square is such an awesome label

For a recent example, there's also Frank Black's "St. Francis Dam Disaster".

Thanks Tyler! This is a good round-up too, incl some stuff might've influenced D.'s lyrics--"World's Biggest Metaphor Hits Iceberg" an' all:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/16/120416fa_fact_mendelsohn

Weird criticism imo. These are songs, not movies or novels. You're not going to get Madame Bovary. I love it when a character in a song seems to live and breathe (like, as it happens, a ton of earlier Dylan songs) but I don't expect it.

idk i DO expect a character to be brought to life in a pop song because otherwise why are they there? i expect a songwriter to delve into the complexity of their emotions and their motivations and not just describe them in stock phrases. if they're acting in a certain why or feeling a certain thing i want to know why, because that's part of making the connection to me as a listener in order for it to resonate with me.

(does Lex parse Rihanna songs for their in-depth characterizations? idgi)

i've criticised them for their lack of it! the video for "man down" is a really powerful piece of storytelling in which a party girl flirts with a man, who rapes her, and she subsequently takes murderous revenge. it's a pity how little of that ended up in the song. conversely "fire bomb" is an excellent piece of songwriting which conveys the thrill and the horror of being in a mutually destructive relationship amazingly well.

I love it when a character in a song seems to live and breathe (like, as it happens, a ton of earlier Dylan songs) but I don't expect it.

The character who lives and breathes in pretty much all of Dylan's music is Dylan. He is his own protagonist/anti-hero even when he's singing about other people. This is true of a great many songwriters, maybe all of them in one way or another. But I think especially in his later albums, he has been really honing this perspective -- this grizzled, unreliable, taunting figure who has deliberately disengaged and is just watching things happen. Not judging, except to poke fun here and there, mostly happy to keep on keeping on. That's the perspective of the last several records -- "Things Have Changed" is pretty much the late-Dylan mission statement -- and so to engage with them it helps to have some sense of who it is you're engaging with. For me some of it comes through in the words, and much more in the singing. But I can also understand people not hearing it, the same way plenty of people didn't hear what he was doing the first, second, third times around.

Well said. To examine Tempest in isolation, as Lex has done, is to miss a lot of Dylan's latter-day role as macabre, mischievous narrator - to focus too much on the tale and not enough on the teller.

"this album is much better than it sounds", #1 on ILM's rmde list for 12 years running!

some of these songs are basically like folk lungfish

"this album is much better than it sounds", #1 on ILM's rmde list for 12 years running!

Not so much that as, it sounds different depending on who's listening. Like everything! What we're talking about is just the specific ways that a Dylan album sounds different to people who know/like/get Dylan and people who don't.

DYLAN is the character that's important

principle #1

To examine Tempest in isolation, as Lex has done, is to miss a lot of Dylan's latter-day role as macabre, mischievous narrator I can't unhear all the Dylan I've heard, but I *think* I would hear Tempest this way, even if I'd never heard him before. Like I said, it's the Dylan Show, as much of it as we ever get in the studio. Hear the assertive riffage keep getting blissed out with another round of "Pay In Blood" (next stop, dead ahead: "Scarlet Town"). Sounds like he might be running for, from, with that "Duquesne Whistle," but already mentioning to his longtime companion, "You'ew like a timebomb in my heart"--hey another 9/11 release! Aleaady getting close to Carnegie hall '64, "It's Halloweeen, I got my Bob Dylan mask on." Not to suggest all of this is only for effect. No doubt the mask is armor, but the muse etc. seems like his actual ol' lady too, somewhere. He may be trying to keep her and us at a safe distance, but not out of earshot.

I agree that "Dylan" the character is always part of the context of any Dylan song (a point that Todd Haynes made perhaps a bit too forcefully in "I'm Not There"). Others on this board have done a good job of describing the latest "Dylan" manifestation on other threads. I like to imagine a sort of irascible riverboat gambler figure in a bolo tie and sharp-toed shoes who's lived too long to say anything other than exactly what he means but still likes the ladies and if you play cards with him, keep an eye on the deck.

I dunno that description sounds like a cardboard cutout

Though these tracks might work best of all, as several of his 90s/00s have, on various artists soundtracks. As tracks, that is, not however they might morph on tour.

Feel free to substitute whatever mental image works best for you - what would Dylan be without some ambiguity. xp

yeah that's the main thing.