Expecting Rain

You've, as always, expressed yourself very well and clearly. I have no interest in scoring points. I am just trying to think through these things. And your thoughts in that post (as elsewhere) were interesting and well founded. In this case, I thought that pushing the discussion further meant addressing the ideas you put forward. I didn't say you were wrong, but only that I disagreed. I could easily be proven wrong. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

I agree that it is funny or seemingly paradoxical -- the relationship between artists/ thinkers and the academics. But I think that it's real. And yes, Dylan has been doing something like this for a long time. It's just that he's seemingly doing it in a different way. Of course, he might have been doing it in exactly this way and no one has tracked it down. As for being given the thumbs up, that will depend on his use of the canon as well as his really making something of it (in a way that academy can make sense of has "rigorous" or "serious"). It's possible, that instead, like Pollack or Duchamp or Matisse or Pynchon or Nietzsche or Plato, etc..., Dylan could convince people that he has invented new rules for defining or representing the True, the Good and the Beautiful (or rejecting them). That's what I meant about artists leading the way. Why not Dylan?

You don't sound even a little mixed up to me.

I have come full circle on this topic after reading the posts and doing my own thinking.
All we really have is yet another theory which Scott Warmuth can suggest and follow up by selective quotes . The problem is this has been going on for years with many people including a lot of us either having our own ideas or following some one else. I think the matter is that Dylan has written and covered so many songs , gone in so many directions, told us so many things and obviously been infuenced by so many things.
It can be hard for us to accept that there is not a bigger agenda at play here. When the fact may well be that Bob is so brilliant that he has done more than many musicans could pack into their life times.
The thing is as humans we like answers we want to know the why's and wherefores of every thing.
We are disturbed by things we do not fully understand and consumed by a need to know.
Just accept Bob Dylan as he come sinto your life with his music and writings. Be happy with what you think the songs mean and what they say to you. And if you find references to other things work them out for yourself.

I think that is the best one could hope for, and I don't think, speaking for myself, that I've set out to do more than that in anything I've posted here.

Of course, there are more and less thorough ways of "working them out". And often times, doing so as a community has the potential to bring possibilities to the fore that one might never imagine on one's own...

Some things are worth the effort, others not.

Hi MMD,
I think that, of course, in the book "chronicle" there is much more than an autobiography...
Each person can found something for himself... It is the same thing for his songs. I think that you can't explain a poet, poetry, who can just feel it. I thank god to feel what i feel when i listen to Bob's songs. That's all. When i feel the wind i don't care to know if the pressure of the atmosphere is high or down.
That said i always appreciate very much your work and your posts !!!

Good points, and that's what I've been thinking the last couple of days. One cannot cast aside the basic aesthetic experience of just listening to Bob Dylan. I remember a thread a while back debating the "sound" of Bob Dylan versus the enjoyment of his lyrics - or the what I call the "content" crowd. I was shocked at how many people just preferred the "sound" - the audio experience. But it's very valid - Bob is(or was, depending on your view) a great and totally unique singer. One "expert" on some other site once wrote that Bob Dylan is probably the greatest alto tenor that ever lived. Is he an alto tenor??

I don't think any component should be cast aside when it comes to Bob.
Discussing and dissecting lyrics in every imaginable way doesn't mean we cannot stop, any time, any day, listen and just follow to whatever emotio-spiritual level it takes us to.

Thank you - that's kind of what I was trying to say. And it gets to the core of the magic surrounding this earthly God - the multifacetedness of his genius!

Cheers, chrome.
I'm restraining myself from getting involved in the core discussion of this thread, and I wouldn't want to raise him to the level of deity, but there's many levels to all things Bob. Have you (any of you on this thread) read Hard Rain / Slow Train?

Another point in this superb thread. MMD suggested that should these "codes" be verified or revealed, it would take his writing to an actually higher and more serious literary level he had not previously reached, and would more solidly qualify him for a Nobel, etc.

I understand the thinking in this regard, but I totally disagree with the conclusion. Yes, these revelations would be another astounding side to this artist(of so many sides). However, his "known" body of work stands at the highest pinnacle of literature right now. This is because when one writes things which improve the human condition - advocating human rights, advocating the end of war, etc. etc., and these words resonate with people AROUND THE WORLD, there simply can be no greater literary achievement. And it is for these very reasons that he has won awards around the world - most recently the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award an American can receive. I would even go so far as to say some of his songs, like "Blowin' in the Wind", have actually saved lives be cause they have changed the way people think. And these types of achievements, esoteric in nature, are totally intangible and immeasurable, but ARE the most important.

I agree with you Chrome !

thanks for your comment mmd and all. has a musician ever been accepted into the academy- how does all of that work. is it more just like, papers on various things about dylan will be accepted in various journals and stuff, and people writing them won't be thought of as silly by a lot of other professors, and it won't be a big career risk for them to admit they think dylan is a great artist. do you think that would make a difference to dylan. is it a correct assumption to think he is doing this latest writing as a way to be taken seriously by people that might have been to afraid to stick their necks out and recognize his work in the first place. i mean how long has this guy been at it. he has written how many amazing songs, done films, paintings, composed a book... and still he is just a rock and roll guy in their eyes-whatever that means. that might be ok with him.

i think that by pointing to the things he likes with his radio show, he is doing his own curating, saying this is his canon for music . it's interesting in his radio show though, and even in his latest book, he doesn't say here is what this is all about and this is why you should like it. i really like hearing peoples interpretations of songs, it is usually pretty interesting to me, but i don't think it would be proper to call any of them definitive "answers" as far as meaning. is that what the professors sometimes try to do, and is that a problem for an artist. or is it just the critics that are a pain. maybe i shouldn't write about this stuff- sounds like it's boring the pants off some. :)

Please don't keep it to yourself, tennessee - I enjoy reading every post and point of view on this thread, and your posts DO make sense - you present your thoughts well, and I can understand what you're saying. It's great to hear everyone responding to this idea. Please continue to express your viewpoints and thoughts - I know I'm not the only one who enjoys them!

Has it been established that he changed his way of writing at a certain point to build in decodeable sub-levels? I'm asking not to argue but for better understanding - I've asked this before. He has referenced source material all the way back to Song To Woody, and only those aware of the source would have noticed. Where does the difference between "previous" and "current" come in?

2001. He needed something different to continue composing after unburdening himself of the bitterness of 80's/90's on TooM. Prior to 2001 I scarcely need sources to follow the meaning and Dylan's borrowing tended to be either a) subtle, or b) the very early wholesale repurposing of melodies. It won't shock me to be told there's some numerology underneath the recent ModBob stuff but it won't make it interesting, either. If I want that kind of stuff there's hundreds of clever people trying to make a living doing the quasi-postmodern thing. Hey, plenty of people love crossword puzzles.

^^
What about Empire Burlesque and, to a lesser extend probably, Knocked Out Loaded, containing all this movie dialogue, sometimes constructing full songs of little else?

I will say it now . I have come to the conclusion there is no code !

thanks doomed, i hope it didn't seem like i was fishing for a complement, but you know, a person can feel pretty silly sometimes writing stuff on a message board- anyway that would be another topic i guess:)

Just enjoy the songs if you enjoy the songs because time will likely bury them, possibly very soon. It's just the rhythm of the generations: the heavily awarded artists of one era are rejected by some ensuing era, or people can no longer hear. Ellington's a great example of this; despite his towering success and many awards he's never heard these days. I predict the ModBob stuff will be mostly ignored by future musicologists precisely because the stuff is esoteric at best.

Yes, those songs are often overlooked, but I think they are quite effective minor collages. Songs such as Maybe Someday or Seeing The Real You At Last are a lot more coherent to Trev than some of the ModBob stuff. He uses nursery rhymes extensively throughout Under The Red Sky, and there are plenty of borrowings on Time Out Of Mind. The use of movie dialogue (I think the majority, and perhaps vast majority, from Bogart films) on Empire and Loaded tends not to inspire one to presume that there must be a hidden code in that work, and that we are supposed to re evaluate every line the context of the movie it originally featured in in order to appreciate those songs.

Why not?

Very good thoughts ifitwastruetennessee.

I can't imagine that he has taken on this style of writing to be taken seriously by academics, because that seems like an inauthentic reason to create anything. He has shown time and time again that he doesn't concern himself with critics.

Good question, but I have no idea. We know he has been borrowing tunes(as most do in the folk tradition) from day one. He talks about that in Chronicles - how he put his words to different tunes.

And also, much has been written about the lifted lines in Chronicles, but I'm more astounded by his own writing in the book. I'll expand on that later.

Thanks Jack! And I like the colored hi-lights for emphasis - you have turbo charged my words - and for free!!

Well, there hasn't been any noticeable attempt so far that I'm aware of ... but feel free to try it! I think because it seems to be mainly from one source (Bogart films) and the songs feel as if they are the thoughts of a Bogart-esque narrator, and are pretty coherent, there's a sense that the songs aren't particularly cryptic. The fact that some of Dylan's later borrowings feel so out of place (the Virgil quotes on "Love & Theft") may explain some of the impetus to find an underlying code to make the songs cohere. In fact, when Dylan was using the movie dialogue he created seamless songs out of his borrowings, they just weren't major songs.