Is Bob Dylan overrated?

They're polling flagposts of the zinging

dylan's site updated a page selling his new lyrics book with a small note about the prize, heh heh

Now removed!

a tony award is next bob dylan has written lyrics and music for a musical opening next year

Wigwamalot!

how soon we forget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93Ck62tsGQ

^ almost makes me interested in Bob Dylan

eh he's overrated

a tony award is next bob dylan has written original lyrics and music for a musical opening next year

yes, yes i get it.

Wigwamalot!

lmao

My work is done here

would love for Dylan to reject the prize or not care too much, but based on his ramblings in the 2012 RS interview where he talks about iirc being reincarnated as a biker or smth, I'm afraid this is all wishful thinking:

I'd always been different than other people, but this book told me why. Like certain people are set apart. You know, it's just like the phrase, "peers" – I mean, I see this, "Well, your peers this, your peers that." And I've always wondered, who are my peers? When I received the Medal of Freedom I started thinking more about it. Like, who are they? But then it became clear. My peers are Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, John Glenn, Madeleine Albright, Pat Summitt, Toni Morrison, Jasper Johns, Martha Graham, Sidney Poitier. People like that, and they are set apart, too. And I'm proud to be counted among them.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-unleashed-a-wild-ride-on-his-new-lp-and-striking-back-at-critics-20120927

dylan otm.

b.b. king is overrated though.

and i don't even know about madeleine albright.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/quotabelle/authors/pat-summitt/summitt1970utmartin.jpg

r.i.p.

feel like the death of pat didn't get enough love but it's been a busy year. also i don't have sportscenter.

it's interesting how he still seems able to tap into this kind of postmodern stream-of-consciousness rambling that's somewhat unique and recognizable in his mid 60s output, when it's absent on Together Throug Life and Tempest which are (most of the time) caught up in poor storytelling...

i would also add softball legend joan joyce to dylan's list of peers. one of a kind. i got to see her play in her prime. unbelievable.

http://flo-static-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/api/5791789ab14b8.jpeg

that 2012 dylan interview is kind of crazy, where he's talking about transfiguration?

By transfiguration, you mean it in the sense of being transformed? Or do you mean transmigration, when a soul passes into a different body?

Transmigration is not what we are talking about. This is something else. I had a motorcycle accident in 1966.I already explained to you about new and old. Right? Now, you can put this together any way you want. You can work on it any way you want. Transfiguration: You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it's a real concept. It's happened throughout the ages. Nobody knows who it's happened to, or why. But you get real proof of it here and there. It's not like something you can dream up and think. It's not like conjuring up a reality or like reincarnation – or like when you might think you're somebody from the past but have no proof. It's not anything to do with the past or the future.

So when you ask some of your questions, you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I've lived through a lot. Have you ever heard of a book called No Man Knows My History? It's about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. The title could refer to me.
Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That's how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.

well, maybe not in her PRIME prime, but she was still amazing when i saw her play. she played forever.

xp I cannot read that without laughing (a laughter tinted with anxiety)

sounds like more or less the same guy telling that Newsweek journalist abt big and small letter versions of words

and i don't even know about madeleine albright.

― scott seward, Friday, October 21, 2016 2:08 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She said the price was "worth it" when asked about half a million Iraqi children dying due to US sanctions.

So...yeah, no fucking idea why he's lumping her in with those others...unless Duke Ellington's final act was to participate in the 1973 Chile coup or something.

i totally get what he's talking about with the transfiguration thing. makes total sense to me. doesn't sound crazy either.

I think it's walking a razor's edge wrt making sense - I feel like I kinda get it if I squint my eyes, but I'm not sure if that's because it distorts my vision or focuses on what he's saying

makes a little more sense in the entire context of the interview, but i guess just the fact that he's trying to explain it seems out of character. and i don't know the stuff about the other guys named Zimmerman -- a confusing thing, but I think Dylan's always been sort of obsessed with doubling / twins etc.

re xpost "Why Try To Change Me Now", one of my fave recent Dylan tracks, this is a pretty intriguing Cy Coleman tribute album: some of the renditions are a bit bland, but even those are at least transparent enough to show off the songwriting. Coleman might coulda been the East Coast Bacharach, but didn't care about pop-rock, incl. Broadway attempts at same. Art/indie-inclined pop-rockers etc. still find affinity with him on this set (which did pretty well on the jazz charts, says here). Would like for Mr. D. to some more of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Is_Yet_to_Come:_The_Songs_of_Cy_Coleman

So when you ask some of your questions, you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time.

in less mystical terms, this totally makes sense to me in terms of dylan and being interviews, like i can't even really think back to who i was at 19 and the things that person might have thought or said and relate to them in anyway...yet for dylan he still gets asked -- at 75! -- things about the early 60s folk movement. i'm sure that does seem like another person in another world to him, yet because of his icon status it sort of stalks him in a way that our past doesnt because no one cares about our past.

and i don't know the stuff about the other guys named Zimmerman -- a confusing thing, but I think Dylan's always been sort of obsessed with doubling / twins etc.

http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/images/g/h0IAAOSw-itXvIC7/s-l225.jpg

Listening to Tempest for the first time ever, and as my comments on several other threads probably shows, Bob Dylan isn't my cup of tea, but most most of it is pleasant and ok. But the title track is just BAD, huh? This is really one where the text works better on it's own, without the horrible melody and plodding rhythm, not that that's saying much. Oy. But some of the other tracks were ok, I'll give him that. But oy.

this is the part that feels the weirdest:

I'm trying to determine whom you've been transfigured from, or as.

I just showed you. Go read the book.

That's who you have in mind? What could the connection to that Bobby Zimmerman be other than name?

I don't have it in mind. I didn't write that book. I didn't make it up. I didn't dream that. I'm not telling you I had a dream last night. Remember the song "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"? I didn't write that, either. I'm showing you a book that's been written and published. I mean, look at all the connecting things: motorcycles, Bobby Zimmerman, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 1964, 1966. And there's more to it than even that. If you went to find this guy's family, you'd find a whole bunch more that connected. I'm just explaining it to you. Go to the grave site.

it's like the mystical messenger character in a thriller w/ paranormal elements

Too bad he didn't write a song about it--or maybe he did, and we just didn't get it...

It was "Wigwam."

haha! i mean, the most obvious candidate is "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" ... there was some essay about i that i can't seem to track down right now.

Those Dylan quotes just make me wish some writer sometime had put him and Ornette Coleman together in a room and transcribed the results.

yeah haha, they definitely both have/had weird brains

Well, the thing is, a big part of that is/was an act - I've had extended conversations this summer/fall with one of Ornette's bassists, and his son Denardo, and both of them said to me that Ornette liked to basically gaslight journalists. That within the band, he would have extremely detailed, down-to-earth conversations about the actual music and how it worked and what he wanted and why, but when a journalist (like me!) asked him about musical stuff, he'd give them a philosophical disquisition instead.

Oh I believe it -- the ornette in the Spellman book strikes me as very different than the mystic sage of his latter days. And Dylan is probably the same -- making a game out of explaining himself, playing with a journalist's expectations etc. but I do think they get wrapped up in that stuff themselves, to the extent that they might not know where it begins or ends.

I think he's trying to tell us that he staged a motorcycle crash in which he killed off his original identity and was reborn as "Robert Zimmerman", after getting the idea from a book he'd been reading that day

(xp re: the dylan interview bit in question)
would be pretty funny if you did go to the gravesite, something was off, & shit very rapidly went all North-by-Northwest tho -- mr. dylan if you're reading please finance this adventure film & I promise to find a way to put you in, even if you're dead by the time we start shooting, we will find a way to cast your remains in a minor speaking role

You gave your prize to a rockstar, duh

He'll try to make it

this is a strange thing to say, especially the way the journalist connected these two ideas

“There’s a certain intensity in writing a song,” he replies, “and you have to keep in mind why you are writing it and for who and what for,” he says. “Paintings, and to a greater extent movies, can be created for propaganda purposes, whereas songs can’t be.”

with films, you can really lead the viewer by the nose and force them to experience the work the way you want them too. maybe paintings are similar -- images are more potent in advertising than jingles.

i feel like his paintings are the opposite of propaganda though -- these quiet scenes, rendered with these bold, oversaturated colors that collapse space and texture. the most propagandistic things he's done are songs like "blowin in the wind."

his statements in interviews often seem tossed off

Can someone show Dylan this, cheers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Propaganda_songs

I don't think of "Blowin' In The Wind" as "proprandistic", although yeah he's shaking his head re them cannonballs etc., but "the answer is"--not "we're gonna win, in a righteous peaceful way, that is" or "It's too soon to know", with cautious hope, folkie folk wisdom, like "the answer's out there, just hang in there"---nope, it's not doin' nothin" but blowin' in the wind, like a flag flappin' or any random piece of paper, paper bag, pine pollen, whutever. He marches us along and tips us over the edge like a trash can at the end of the line, over and over. And makes us, well some of us most of the time, makes us like it. Kind of an anti-anthem, or at the very least his own doubts.
Much later, one woman's experience of writing, in a way, with Mr. D.:
http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/bob-dylan-carole-bayer-sager-book-excerpt.html

Beautifully otm re blowing and that excerpt is outstanding