Untold Dylan -- Every Bob Dylan song reviewed & then some
December 18, 2020 3:53 PM   Subscribe

Untold Dylan

The phrase 'exhaustive detail' epitomized: every song ever recorded, every lyric written; who played what, when, where and why; every artwork for every cover, every photo on every album, every artwork and photo inside a photo on every cover.
"...
the mind reels before it, and the intellect stands abashed
."
posted by y2karl (15 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I support this insanity.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:38 PM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


If completely overanalyzed dylan is your thing, then dylanchords.info is another classic repository.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:46 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Comprehensive. Easy to get lost -- or bewildered, really -- in all the links. (Though this link was a bit less bewildering)

Reminds me a bit of the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. I certainly remember a time where I thought that true fandom came from being able to think about an artist in this sort of encyclopedic manner. But, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 9:54 PM on December 18, 2020 [5 favorites]


He won a Nobel Prize you know...
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:23 PM on December 18, 2020


Needs more cowbell.
posted by chavenet at 12:35 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


I've seen the footage of the guy in the late 1960s / early 1970s, and seems to me they give him way too much credit. He was a precocious kid, and these analysts have spent more time thinking about Dylan's songs than he has.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:21 AM on December 19, 2020


Will this content be included as part of the $300 million sale for Universal Music Publishing Group?
posted by greenhornet at 3:49 AM on December 19, 2020


I've seen the footage of the guy in the late 1960s / early 1970s, and seems to me they give him way too much credit. He was a precocious kid, and these analysts have spent more time thinking about Dylan's songs than he has.

The idea that one should trust the impression Dylan gives as a person, rather than as a songwriter is, I think pretty much exactly backward. Apart from the obvious point that, whatever else he may be is, Dylan is definitely full of shit, I think his songs and statements are more suggestive of the view that doesn't think particularly seriously about anything except songs. However else you categorise it, I think the defining feature of Dylan's work is that it exists in intentional and deeply considered engagement with the musical tradition he works in.

However, what Dylan is ultimately not very interested in is the sort of directly meaningful lyrics that we're understandably desperate to identify in songs that move us deeply (we want things to have meaning, not really grasping that meaning is not a property, but rather something that an artistic work does: it's rarely a good idea to wholly trust the use of the word "meaning" as a noun). He's not working in a primarily realist mode: more obvious artistic touchstones are expressionism (often abstract expressionism) and surrealism. The point of Dylan's work is to express something at the level of the song, rather than the level of the phrase or line. And, crucially, he is interested and engaged in songwriting, not lyric writing: he's a composer, not a poet. There are plenty of realist songs throughout his career, of course, but it's notable that, for me, it's only the lyrical collaboration with Jacques Levy, on Desire, that results in a collection of original songs that actually feels interested in realism.

Dylan's comments on his work frequently makes little sense to me. Sometimes he says things that seem musically nonsensical, or which are demonstrably inaccurate, about his own work. I think some of this is intentional piss-taking, obscurantism or mystification intended to confound people who want to critically define him. In this respect, comparisons with philosophers like Derrida and Nietzsche, who often seem to actively try to mislead readers and destabilise interpretation of their bodies of work, also make some sense to me. I think this is (i
all these cases ) probablyy both a genuine creative and intellectual impulse and a reflection of a rather adolescent sort of insecure egoism. However, sometimes the things he says are so obviously insightful that I have to think that they are a genuine attempt to explain his songwriting, something that is only partly linguistic, and to try to convey that the "meaning" of a song cannot be reached for by considering only its lyrics, and that it can never be grasped by any analysis. It doesn't help, however, that he will often then switch back to chatting utter shit, sometimes before the end of the sentence.

Whether a critical endeavour is worthwhile has little to do with any of this, of course. What the author of a work intends is part of its context, not its meaning. However, I do think that trying to get to the meaning of the vast majority of Dylan songs by analysing them line by line is futile in a couple of related (although, I think, fundamentally distinct) ways. This sort of analysis is like trying to understand what Nietzsche is saying by attempting to regularise all his aphorisms into a consistent system (requiring the critic to make decisions about what is meant and what is facetious that derive almost entirely from their own perspective and desires rather than the text), but it's also like trying to appreciate what a meal tastes like by identifying the individual flavour. It involves a sort of category error by misidentifying the relevant semantic unit. There is also an understandable tendency to want to talk about words primarily, and treat the music as less important, if only because writing about music is massively more difficult than writing about words. It's as hard to write words that meaningfully discuss a piece of music as it is to write music that meaningfully about a set of words: it's not impossible in principle, but it's more often than not unattainable in practice.

Of course, these sorts of issues are not universal in or limited to criticism of Dylan, and they aren't necessarily fatal when they (almost inevitably) occur. The fact that you can't pin a piece of work down doesn't mean that you won't say interesting and valuable things while trying to do so, even if what you usually end up saying isn't really about the work at all.
posted by howfar at 4:34 AM on December 19, 2020 [17 favorites]


The thing I've realized about Dylan (along with the other Wilburys) is that he was and is essentially a nostalgia act, first of the music of the 30s-50s and now of himself. You take childhood fascination with Little Richard, a bit of beat fanaticism, a midlife crisis-and-conversion and a soupcon of boomer self-actualization malarkey and you get what he gave us. I've always loved it and still do (though at a lower pitch than in my youth), but I've felt that he's like that one friend everyone has who wants everything to be a little more extra than it is. When you're in the mood for it, it's fantastic. The rest of the time...

I've always wondered if I'm alone in feeling that Dylan's YIn is to Paul Simon's desperately earnest and sincere Yang. If you want to go to a party or stay up till sunrise bullshitting about the Universe, Dylan's your guy. If you're going through a rough divorce and need someone to empathize, Simon it is.
posted by klanawa at 12:02 PM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


If you're going through a rough divorce and need someone to empathize, Simon it is.

And just what is Blood on the Tracks about then, chopped liver?
posted by y2karl at 1:57 PM on December 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


these analysts have spent more time thinking about Dylan's songs than he has

This is true of every fandom ever.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:02 PM on December 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


exhaustive detail

I looked up "Handy Dandy"; there is a long essay about it. I learned that it was played live only once, 18 years after it was recorded. Also it was originally 45 minutes long or something, the idea was to just keep going and edit it down later. Which seems legit to me, why not?
posted by thelonius at 3:24 PM on December 19, 2020


This is true of every fandom ever.

Given the extraordinary number of times and variety of ways Dylan has rearranged almost all of his songs, I'd tend to the view that it's likely less true of Dylan than anyone else of comparable status. Even if we're talking about just words, the number of lyrical rewrites and variations that Dylan has given songs is highly unusual.

I think the general problem with interpreting musicians of this era is that it's almost impossible, now, to really appreciate that the 1960s weren't always an era understood with a sort of gentle nostalgic contempt, and were lived through, by many, as a frequently terrifying period of cultural, political and artistic upheaval, just as unstable, uncomfortable and innovative as what we're going though now. Given all that has happened since, and the fact that we know the world didn't end, we just can't think ourselves back there, and so tend think of enormous cultural and artistic shifts as being a sort of lazy and inevitable progression. But although that's what that era may look like from a remove of 50-odd years, it's quite evident, if you consider just how much changed in such a short period of time, that it's not what it felt like to live though.

They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man....
posted by howfar at 3:27 PM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


And just what is Blood on the Tracks about then, chopped liver?

Blood on Tracks and Hearts and Bones can both be great without being the same.
posted by klanawa at 3:46 PM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


Something about Dylan clicked for me when I heard an interview with Mavis Staples. She remembers meeting him for the first time, when they were both very young, and he burst out quoting the Staples Singers’ “Sit Down Servant”: “Yonder come little David/With his rock and his sling/I don’t want to meet him/He’s a dangerous man.” I thought: That’s where he got that mode from: prophetic, colloquial, strange, funny. It’s that cross where Dylan sounds absolutely emphatic but it’s hard to say exactly about what: “Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue,” or “something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?” or nearly all of John Wesley Harding. I think it’s possible he heard that one recording (which is galvanizing) and thought: I can do that.
posted by argybarg at 4:26 PM on December 19, 2020 [6 favorites]


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