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The Old, Millennial America: Bob Dylan and the Traditions

Thomas O Beebee

in Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002

No other recording artist has tapped into the reimagined roots of the old, millennial America to the extent Bob Dylan (1941- ) has. He represents something unique: a millionaire purveyor of ... More

No other recording artist has tapped into the reimagined roots of the old, millennial America to the extent Bob Dylan (1941- ) has. He represents something unique: a millionaire purveyor of technologized, capitalist popular culture whose work projects a consistent though often subliminal message of the end of the world. Dylan’s songs are also a prime example of the hybridity of American apocalyptic thought. Dylan has invoked millennium throughout his career, including times when he was seen as a nihilistic radical of the counter-culture. Furthermore, the technologies of recording, radio, television, and other media has meant a broader diffusion of this imagery among the general public than at any previous time in history. This chapter shows that each musical idiom that Dylan has chosen to deliver his message, together with his tendency to mix popular culture imagery with that drawn from the Bible, has deflected and obscured this eschatogical message. The very eclecticism of Dylan’s sources acts to distance him from any single tradition, and his career has seen every possible take on the theme of millennium, from postmodern pastiche to sincere gospel.Less

Down the Foggy Ruins of Time: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Timelessness

Andrea Cossu

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter discusses how Bob Dylan's past artistic achievements are sculpted in public memory, and are still being reproduced in the present through records, images, the work of critics, and the ... More

This chapter discusses how Bob Dylan's past artistic achievements are sculpted in public memory, and are still being reproduced in the present through records, images, the work of critics, and the mythical role Dylan plays for modern popular music. However, so much has gone on since the release of “Love and Theft” that it is difficult to connect to the commonplace idea of Dylan as either a prominent rock star or as a troubadour from the foggy ruins of the 1960s. Instead, the modern, contemporary Dylan is a kind of trailblazer. He has moved away from his myth and headed toward other, decidedly subtler musical references, references that are external and sometimes antithetic to the established reputation of Bob Dylan as the source and end of his own genius.Less

Pop Music

David Brown

in God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary

This chapter explores the aesthetics of pop music in general and then focuses on how specific artists might facilitate religious experience. It examines not just ‘light’ popular music, but also the ... More

This chapter explores the aesthetics of pop music in general and then focuses on how specific artists might facilitate religious experience. It examines not just ‘light’ popular music, but also the various types to which Christians have sometimes taken most exception, among them hard rock and rap. Artists considered include the Beatles, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Nick Cave, and The Bad Seeds.Less

Performative Lyric Voice and the Refrain as an Architectonic Element in Bob Dylan

Fahri Öz

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter talks about how Bob Dylan is a highly productive composer and singer, and the changes in his style and manner of singing his own songs attest to his performative nature. As Betsy Bowden ... More

This chapter talks about how Bob Dylan is a highly productive composer and singer, and the changes in his style and manner of singing his own songs attest to his performative nature. As Betsy Bowden elucidates in Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan, Dylan's songs cannot be treated as rigid forms or texts in print because they are not intended as poems but songs to be performed. Though such performative accounts of Dylan's work are valid, the chapter argues that his lyrics deserve a poetic analysis, and that it is possible to treat his studio recordings as performative acts too. It aims to reconcile the treatment of Dylan the poet with Dylan the singer.Less

Visions of the Flood: Masked and Anonymous between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times

Alberto Brodesco

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter discusses how Masked and Anonymous certainly does not mark a peak in Bob Dylan's long artistic journey. Precisely set between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, however, it is an ... More

This chapter discusses how Masked and Anonymous certainly does not mark a peak in Bob Dylan's long artistic journey. Precisely set between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, however, it is an important key to understanding his commitment and intention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Also in the film are plenty of what Dylan calls “appropriations” from a large spectrum of sources. Intertextuality is indeed a major attribute of Bob Dylan's work, particularly from “Love and Theft” onward. Masked and Anonymous's references go from the speeches of U.S. presidents to novels, plays, sports books, and religious texts.Less

‘Vision music’: Bob Dylan via Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Laurence Coupe

in Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat Spirit and Popular Song

This chapter tries to align Bob Dylan with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and to determine which of the two serves as Dylan's mentor, noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg had been closely identified with ... More

This chapter tries to align Bob Dylan with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and to determine which of the two serves as Dylan's mentor, noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg had been closely identified with each other and with the Beat movement of the 1950s. The two discovered their irreconcilable differences during the 1960s; Kerouac became disenchanted with the mass counterculture inspired by the Beats' minority subculture, while Ginsberg became a countercultural figurehead. The chapter reveals the tension that informs Dylan's remarkable achievement and places him firmly within the Beat legacy.Less

Introduction

Nina Goss and Eric Hoffman (eds)

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Bob Dylan's output in the new millennium. It traces how Dylan's embrace of capitalist culture is perhaps not so much a resignation as it is a final ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Bob Dylan's output in the new millennium. It traces how Dylan's embrace of capitalist culture is perhaps not so much a resignation as it is a final rejection of a generation whose voice he did not want to represent. For Bob Dylan's voice is not the voice of a single postwar American generation, but rather a voice that is in many ways outside time, an American voice that derives from a rich musical tradition, from folk music to rock and roll, from Tin Pan Alley to bluegrass, from jazz to Western swing, from blues to ballads. It is, moreover, a uniquely poetic voice, and one that brings with it a lyrical tradition that stretches back to the French trouvères, forward to the Beats and beyond.Less

Dylan’s Together Through Life: Rolling in Places

James Cody

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines how Bob Dylan's places confound, and the songs on Together Through Life may be the collection that best exemplifies such assertions. Dylan has mapped out the world for people, ... More

This chapter examines how Bob Dylan's places confound, and the songs on Together Through Life may be the collection that best exemplifies such assertions. Dylan has mapped out the world for people, and the creation of an interactive map indicating all the places his songs bring them awaits the inspiration of some technologically hip go-getter. The chapter shows how Dylan's places are ephemeral, partly due to being places that “don't make sense no more.” But the place of the song, the landscape of it, or more exact, the soundscape created by lyrics, voice, instruments, and performance are habitable, even if only for the duration of the song, habitable in the sense of where listeners can be carried if they are open to what Dylan demands.Less

Narrative in “Love and Theft,”Modern Times, and Tempest

Jonathan Hodgers

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter demonstrates how Bob Dylan has shown a fondness for narrative both in his songwriting and his public persona, as seen from his self-mythologizing days in Greenwich Village to his memoir, ... More

This chapter demonstrates how Bob Dylan has shown a fondness for narrative both in his songwriting and his public persona, as seen from his self-mythologizing days in Greenwich Village to his memoir, Chronicles. It focuses on how “Love and Theft,”Modern Times, and Tempest continue to reflect Dylan's playful and experimental approach to the organizational framework of narrative, which in its broadest sense refers to the representation of a series of events. The chapter shows Dylan divesting from his work the idea of an autonomous, self-sufficient text, and situating his work in a longitudinal spectrum of literary influences where narratives are suggested laterally throughout an album, as well as historically via the use of preexisting text.Less

The Last Bob Dylan Record

Nick Smart

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter concentrates on Bob Dylan's last record and how it will carry his whole career. By consistently living and writing and playing, Dylan burdens himself with the obligation not just to meet ... More

This chapter concentrates on Bob Dylan's last record and how it will carry his whole career. By consistently living and writing and playing, Dylan burdens himself with the obligation not just to meet but to elevate the standard of his greatness. If it is ever really concluded that Dylan is done being Dylan, as was thought during the time of the Christian records, and the seemingly unremarkable stretches between Infidels (1983) and Oh Mercy, and Time Out of Mind, a devaluation of the entire career will occur. Every new record will be the measure of existing potency. And now, six decades into this career, the new record might really be the last record—so the pressure becomes more intense.Less

Insiders, Outsiders, and Class Anxiety: Eudora Welty and Bob Dylan on the Medgar Evers Murder

Adrienne Akins Warfield

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

This chapter compares Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” with Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” exploring the relationship between class, racist violence, and regional identity through ... More

This chapter compares Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” with Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” exploring the relationship between class, racist violence, and regional identity through examining the common assumptions both artists shared about Medgar Evers’ murderer and his motivations. The essay argues that class anxiety manifests itself both in acts of racist violence like Beckwith’s and in artistic conceptualizations of such violence as the exclusive domain of the white Southern underclass. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which the revisions that Welty made to the story after Beckwith’s arrest were connected to the class status, Southern identity, and racial consciousness of the killer. The resemblances between Dylan’s and Welty’s responses to the Evers murder show that the tendency to associate racist violence with the economic resentments of lower-class whites is evidenced among both Northern “outsiders” and Southern “insiders.”Less

‘Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan’: The Bard

Daniel Karlin

in The Figure of the Singer

This chapter examines the figure of the singer in the early songs of Bob Dylan. More specifically, it analyses the way the figure of the singer, literal in performance, is metaphorised in sound ... More

This chapter examines the figure of the singer in the early songs of Bob Dylan. More specifically, it analyses the way the figure of the singer, literal in performance, is metaphorised in sound recording. It first considers the question of whether Dylan is a poet or a songwriter before discussing various aspects of Dylan’s career, such as the opposition between an ‘original’ recording and an indefinite series of ‘live’ performances, to highlight the disharmony between poetic language and song. It also cites repetition in Dylan’s music, which is also repeated motif in poetry.Less

Pastmodernism

Steve Redhead

in We Have Never Been Postmodern: Theory at the Speed of Light

It is possible to trace the emergence of Bob Dylan's late style to the New York Supper Club shows in the early 1990s. In the early 1990s, too, Bob Dylan was shaking off the debilitating curse of his ... More

It is possible to trace the emergence of Bob Dylan's late style to the New York Supper Club shows in the early 1990s. In the early 1990s, too, Bob Dylan was shaking off the debilitating curse of his Born Again Christian period, which dated back to the late 1970s. There is, it seems, a lost moment in this history of modernity in popular music culture: the early 1990s. This was a period where Bob Dylan finally emerged from the relative slumbers of more than two decades and prepared to haul himself back to the American, and global, marketplace. Dylan is not so much a ‘postmodern’ thief in the night, as so many critics have presented his supposed widespread and longstanding ‘plagiarism’. He is more than this. He is a seeker of the art of the ‘old, weird America’.Less

Dylan’s Direction Home through the World’s Mighty Opposites

Jamie Lorentzen

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines how the destruction of the 9/11 incident, the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and other formidable fires and floods constitute a sort of paralyzing ... More

This chapter examines how the destruction of the 9/11 incident, the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and other formidable fires and floods constitute a sort of paralyzing Mississippi River fog upon the currents of this dawning century. Bob Dylan navigates bracingly between this world's mighty opposites, as seen when he produced the album “Love and Theft”, the film Masked and Anonymous, the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles, his interview in Martin Scorsese's film documentary No Direction Home, and the album Modern Times. The chapter also shows how tensions between romantic love and divine love, violence and frivolity, and homelessness and homecoming become more seamlessly joined together even as their contrary parts conspire to break apart.Less

Tempest, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Arts

Anne Margaret Daniel

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This chapter analyzes how Bob Dylan has been likened, yet again, to William Shakespeare upon the release of a record titled Tempest. Dylan himself tried to slide out of the comparisons and ... More

This chapter analyzes how Bob Dylan has been likened, yet again, to William Shakespeare upon the release of a record titled Tempest. Dylan himself tried to slide out of the comparisons and speculations in his Rolling Stone interview. However, dwelling in the admitted darkness of Tempest is romance, good humor, and intricate patterns of both rhyme and sound. The perfect-ten tracks of this record come straight from a bard's ear and a poet's pen—something that shows Bob Dylan to be every bit a Renaissance man. Dylan's Shakespeare references in the past have ranged from the patent—like “Shakespeare in the alley” (“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, 1966) and “Ophelia 'neath the window” (“Desolation Row”, 1965).Less

Approaching Electric Folka: A History of Music Revivals, Fusions, and Ideologies

Britta Sweers

in Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. ... More

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.Less

A Nobel For Dylan?

Gordon Ball

in The Poetics of American Song Lyrics

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel specified that in literature the work must be “the most outstanding...of an idealistic tendency”; and that “during the preceding year” the honoree must “have conferred ... More

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel specified that in literature the work must be “the most outstanding...of an idealistic tendency”; and that “during the preceding year” the honoree must “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Emphasis is placed on outstanding idealism and work that benefits mankind. This chapter examines the criteria used in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature and argues that Bob Dylan deserves to be a recipient in light of his activism in early 1960s civil rights, antiwar songs, and beyond. It examines the debate on whether a literary prize can be given to a songwriter such as Dylan, and notes that Laureates Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats have addressed the connections between music and poetry.Less

“Judas!”

Todd Richardson

in Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies

This chapter considers the curious absence of folklorists in the conversation surrounding Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature. It discusses Dylan’s complex relationship with the American Folk ... More

This chapter considers the curious absence of folklorists in the conversation surrounding Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature. It discusses Dylan’s complex relationship with the American Folk Revival and, by association, folklore studies. It concludes by considering Dylan’s robust plagiarism within the context of “the folk process.”Less

Ovid and the Modern Poetics of Exile

Stephen Harrison

in Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid

This chapter argues that the key Ovidian triangle of dislocation, political problems, and lamenting tone is often encountered in later versions of and allusions to Ovid’s exile poetry. This pattern ... More

This chapter argues that the key Ovidian triangle of dislocation, political problems, and lamenting tone is often encountered in later versions of and allusions to Ovid’s exile poetry. This pattern is traced in poetry of the twentieth century, including Robert Lowell’s ‘Beyond the Alps’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Exposure’ (which alludes specifically to Ovid’s Tristia), and Derek Walcott’s ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’. The chapter ends with a detailed consideration of a very recent application of Ovidian poetics in Bob Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times. Richard Thomas has persuasively shown that Dylan used Peter Green’s translation of the exile poems, but this chapter presents a more nuanced account which demonstrates that Dylan too engages with the Ovidian triangulation of dislocation, political issues, and lamentation.Less