Why don't I like Bob Dylan?

*takes planet waves,which's one of the two dylan's within one's left hand's reach right now, and puts on*

I respect him and all, but I just can't get beyond that fuckin' voice.
That probably sums it up for 95 percent of all Dylan haters. I could never get into Led Zeppelin because of Robert Plant's fucking' voice, so I can't knock someone else for doing the same. Lots of people also don't like Dylan because they simply don't like ANY blues-, folk- or roots-based music.
I think Dylan's a great singer. I don't think he has a lousy voice, either, although it's obviously an acquired taste). Live, however, he can get lazy — singing in octaves and all.

Music's not that interesting either.

**wasnnae talkin' 'bout any aleister crowley condoms up there oh no xpost**

Though the songs are often great. (xp)

I think many are also turned off by all the Dylanology shit, too, or with the notion that you have to have an English degree with a minor in Child Ballads to appreciate his music. I leave it to others, like Greil Marcus, to ponder the relationship between "Million Dollar Bash" and the biblical story of Abraham, or whatever. To me, it's a silly song about getting drunk, and you can sing along to it. It just fucking sounds good.
His music has never been inaccessible; he's a pop singer, no more, no less (a "song and dance man?").

his voice is great
his lyrics are frequently wonderful
his songs are sometimes very good
his fans are often insufferable
his reactionary outlook is regrettable
his recent music is depressingly hackneyed
his earlier work was infinitely better when the organ provided a counterpoint to his voice/guitar/harmonica
his very best stuff is not nearly as exciting or musically interesting as a heckload of other stuff
his most valuable asset is the mood his songs can set
his storytelling is better than his music
his storytelling is better than his poetry

someone post some of these frequently wonderful lyrics. all ive heard are lame or creepy lyrics from bd.

written down they don't work half so well, listen to 'talking world war III blues', 'motor psycho nitemare' or 'stuck inside of mobile with the memphis blues again'...

i love dylan more musically than lyrically. stuff like highway 61 is so distinctive in the way it's produced and arranged, it's got little to do with the rest of the blues rock scene then, like yardbirds or john mayall or whoever, it's sort of this odd, mannered take on the electric blues but there's a certain artifice or fakeness i guess that i like about it, no one is really hitting into a groove and soloing like most white blues people did then, and then obv. dylan's vocals and phrasing really aren't like, well, anything really that came before or since....

dylan's vocal phrasing and singing style as a musical element is by far the most underrated thing about dylan. too much focus on lyrics too little focus on how all these records SOUND.

and scott's totally OTM, most of the stuff i love now i didn't really get or like at first...i'd hate to think of what if i had never WORKED (and it was work at times) to get into jazz or more noisier rock stuff.

i have a couple of bob dylan albums but i think i prefer the best of. most of the things i like about dylan i like more in "your own public execution" by mouse and the traps or "rain of crystal spires" by felt. his lyrics rarely seem that interesting to me, mark e smith does the cryptic spite thing more to my liking. i guess bob does a lot more than that but he doesn't feel essential in the old man music way that the beatles and the kinks do to me. oh god i really am a child of britpop...

i meant to chuck d bowie in with the beatles and kinks there.

"but I think that many people simply forget (or maybe just never really understood) that Dylan had pop hits"

this is true, but people in their teens and twenties now aren't hearing dylan's songs as pop hits. they hear them in a different context. rudy vallee had pop hits too. but to a teen listening now to him, the reaction would probably be something like: "what is up with this dude's voice. it's sounds like he's singing through a megaphone. mark e smith does that kinda thing more to my liking."

Well yeah, of course yer right, Scott. But its also not so inconceivable--even when not compensating for the shifting expectations/assumptions of today's young pop audience(s)--to understand how Dylan could have sold to the same audience that was buying Monkees records at the time, for example. It's just not as out there as being unable to see why a pop audience didn't like Beefheart, or even the Velvets, y'know. Not that anyone here is saying such; I'm just being super obvious, as usual.

I think very few young people are getting into Dylan via his recent releases, however. If you scan any radio you're much more likely to hear "Rolling Stone" than "Thunder on the Mountain." I think they're curious after reading the RS Top 500 Albums list or something similar and seeing Highway 61 or Blonde on Blonde in the top 10 every time. Or, they've seen clips of "Don't Look Back" and dig his cool shades and put downs.

it's good to hear him out of context, which is how i got into 'infidels', my favorite of his.

i like a few of his '60s albums. i've given his '70s stuff like 'desire' and 'blood on the tracks' a shot, but out of all that i really only like 'pat garrett and billy the kid'. i wanted to like 'new morning' but i never came around on it. his output over the past decade bores me to tears.

I just out-Bimbled Bimble.

-- Lostandfound, Tuesday, 25 September 2007 06:24 (Yesterday) Link

Oh dear.

-- Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 25 September 2007 07:09 (Yesterday) Link

I didn't mean this as a bad thing!

Fuck a Bob Dylan.

someone post some of these frequently wonderful lyrics. all ive heard are lame or creepy lyrics from bd.

As others have said, the importance of Dylan's lyrics has been overstated by Boomer critics perhaps eager to give "rock" music some kind of academic cachet, perhaps also (subconsciously) because he took his last name from a famously lyrical Welsh poet.

That said, "wonderful" lyrics don't necessarily exclude creepiness. In fact, he often excels when he's being creepy. Ultimately, separating lyrics from the overall sound of the music is at best dubious, at worst pointless. If you want to hear compelling language within the context of his songs, I'd probably suggest something like "Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)" or "Visions of Johanna" or something. Maybe even "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands".

Christopher Ricks' Visions of Sin is a good, if too academically "playful," examination of Dylan's lyrics.

Publisher's Weekly review otm: "Sometimes Ricks strives to be too hip and precious—as when he characterizes "Lay, Lady, Lay" as "erotolayladylaylia," and when he concludes that there are similarities between other poems and Dylan's by providing a list of one word correspondences, as he does with "Lay, Lady, Lay" and Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed."

Hitchens on Ricks

Less savage than I would have expected.

Fuck a Bob Dylan
Alex, you're so punk!

if i hadn't already decided to start listening to dylan, this thread would make me want to.

but then if i hadn't decided to start listening to dylan, i wouldn't have revived this thread.

aah.

I think many are also turned off by all the Dylanology shit, too, or with the notion that you have to have an English degree with a minor in Child Ballads to appreciate his music

this might just be the root of it -- i'd forgotten all about my prick of an english lit tutor who force-fed us "jokerman" as part of a newly minted postmodernism course he obviously didn't understand at all. i remember coming in the following week and forcing the class to listen to "famous blue raincoat". it made sense at the time. can't for the life of me think what i was trying to prove, but still.

Yeah, that quote is on the money. It's funny, I have an English degree, but that's not why I love Dylan. For me, it's not as rarefied or as academic or even as earnest as that; although I do love words, language, it would all be next to useless without the music and the attitude, the humour, etc. Dusty old texts, with some historical value maybe. Lyrics have never been essential to my enjoyment of music, although they're more integral to my love of Dylan than, say, my love of the Cocteau Twins, obv. Well done countering Bob with Len, though, grimly. I don't get it either, but it's somehow funny (perhaps because of all artists, Cohen's words actually sometimes are closest to poetry?)

Cohen's words actually sometimes are closest to poetry?

Which is precisely what makes them so unbearable as songs - I'm just listening to Maybelle Carter singing I'm thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, and I think Dylan is the only living songwriter who could write something as perfect (maybe Will Oldham on a very good day) in that transparent, un- poetising but completely poetic idiom

the worst thing about the literary cult of dylan or whatever you want to call it is that it focuses so much on the big cryptic epics that you forget how many simple, direct, great songs he wrote over the years...i like lines like this just as much as "sad eyed lady of the lowlands":

build me a cabin in utah
marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
have a bunch of kids that call me "pa"
that must be what it's all about

Yeah, or the in-between longer (yet more understated) narratives like "Hollis Brown" or "North Country Blues". I agree that Dylanologists and others (sigh, I have to include myself upthread!) tend to focus far too much on the poetic epics at the expense of his less audacious yet equally engaging material.

I mean, no magic swirling ships or binoculars hanging off of donkeys here:

The iron ore poured
As the years passed the door,
The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-humming.
'Til one day my brother
Failed to come home
The same as my father before him.

heartily agreed. matt just quoted my favourite dylan lines ever. fuck, that song is great.

Well, I took me a woman late last night,
I's three-fourths drunk, she looked uptight.
She took off her wheel, took off her bell,
Took off her wig, said, "How do I smell?"
I hot-footed it . . . bare-naked . . .
Out the window!

Well, sometimes I might get drunk,
Walk like a duck and stomp like a skunk.
Don't hurt me none, don't hurt my pride
'Cause I got my little lady right by my side.
(Right there
Proud as can be)

I's out there paintin' on the old woodshed
When a can a black paint it fell on my head.
I went down to scrub and rub
But I had to sit in back of the tub.
(Cost a quarter
And I had to get out quick . . .
Someone wanted to come in and take a sauna)

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,
It's President Kennedy callin' me up.
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg,
Sophia Loren."
(Put 'em all in the same room with Ernest Borgnine!)

Well, I got a woman sleeps on a cot,
She yells and hollers and squeals a lot.
Licks my face and tickles my ear,
Bends me over and buys me beer.
(She's a honeymooner
A June crooner
A spoon feeder
And a natural leader)

Oh, there ain't no use in me workin' so heavy,
I got a woman who works on the levee.
Pumping that water up to her neck,
Every week she sends me a monthly check.
(She's a humdinger
Folk singer
Dead ringer
For a thing-a-muh jigger)

Late one day in the middle of the week,
Eyes were closed I was half asleep.
I chased me a woman up the hill,
Right in the middle of an air raid drill.
It was Little Bo Peep!
(I jumped a fallout shelter
I jumped a bean stalk
I jumped a ferris wheel)

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote,
He's a-runnin' for office on the ballot note.
He's out there preachin' in front of the steeple,
Tellin' me he loves all kinds-a people.
(He's eatin' bagels
He's eatin' pizza
He's eatin' chitlins
He's eatin' bullshit!)

Oh, set me down on a television floor,
I'll flip the channel to number four.
Out of the shower comes a grown-up man
With a bottle of hair oil in his hand.
(It's that greasy kid stuff.
What I want to know, Mr. Football Man, is
What do you do about Willy Mays and Yul Brynner,
Charles de Gaulle
And Robert Louis Stevenson?)

Well, the funniest woman I ever seen
Was the great-granddaughter of Mr. Clean.
She takes about fifteen baths a day,
Wants me to grow a cigar on my face.
(She's a little bit heavy!)

Well, ask me why I'm drunk alla time,
It levels my head and eases my mind.
I just walk along and stroll and sing,
I see better days and I do better things.
(I catch dinosaurs
I make love to Elizabeth Taylor . . .
Catch hell from Richard Burton!)

I really want to hear Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan do a reading of "To His Coy Mistress."

had we but weerrld enuf and tiime...

<i>Fuck a Bob Dylan
Alex, you're so punk!</i>

Not liking Bob Dylan has less to do with being "punk" and more to do with having ears that function properly. I hated Bob Dylan's voice back when my life was otherwise ruled by Kiss, Queen and Pink Floyd.

No riffs. Sure the voice was offputting at first, and sure the lyrics overwhelmed that. But I grew to like the voice, and the arrangements. But there's never any riffs taht stick, at best an amazing set of chords. And when I find my mind drifting away during the fourth song on a side, it's 'cause there's no riff to hold it all together and lead me between the verses. The best Dylan covers (Highway 51 Revisited, by Johnny Winter or PJ Harvey, say) add a musical hook.

substitute taht/that, 51/61
I like wine!

my eldest brother has been insufferable about dylan since he was about fifteen, which has to have played some part in my aversion of the man.

personally, if i'm looking for a distinctive voice with down-home lyrics i'll put on kris kristofferson. at least his fans are a pretty decent bunch without pretensions.

isn't it, yknow, just at least slightly possible to separate your impression of an artist from your impression of his fans?

i mean these are the most boring reasons imaginable for disliking someone, way lamer at this point than claiming bob dylan is the greatest poet since keats or something

Has anyone else noticed that there were a lot of threads like this one started 5 or so years ago? Someone proclaims a hatred of some famous and well-loved classic rock band, musician, or album and various folk chime in in agreement; then, a few years later, the thread gets revived with an apologetic capitulation.

Was contrarianism popular back in 2002? Is it not so hot now? Please enlighten me...

isn't it, yknow, just at least slightly possible to separate your impression of an artist from your impression of his fans?

actually, J.D. I find him very average at best musically (i'd have the same issues as others about his vocals, for instance), but the constant trumpeting of his talents would tend to push me towards dislike.

i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

Not liking Bob Dylan has less to do with being "punk" and more to do with having ears that function properly.
I guess I'm off to an ENT doctor tomorrow, then. Funny, they seem to be working properly.

i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

-- darraghmac, Sunday, 30 September 2007 13:34 (2 hours ago) Link

Hopefully you'll grow out of this--it betrays an inability to think for yourself.

it betrays an inability to think for yourself

oh, come on, it does nothing of the sort. it's a perfectly natural response: if you're constantly bombarded with "DYLAN IS GOD" and -- for whatever reason -- you hear nothing but (say) nasal singing and some well dodgy harmonica, you're going to become more entrenched in your own opinions.

i can be pretty sure about this because it's exactly how i felt. it was when more sensible and less hyperbolic criticism of dylan caught me off guard that i thought, you know, i really should listen to this old git properly (qv my revive, above).

it's the same with the beatles: i couldn't allow myself to like them when i was growing up in the eighties and early nineties because the praise lavished upon them was sickeningly predictable and tedious. like any good teenage iconoclast, i flicked the Vs and refused to listen. and that was, of course, thinking for myself -- not deeply, perhaps, but certainly thinking. it was simply an opinion based not on the music but on the cultural baggage.

tastes change; people change. a pal made me a CD of slightly less canonical beatles stuff, as i've discussed elsewhere here, and that changed everything.

but come off it: with artists like this, "not thinking for yourself" is surely more like following the slavish IT'S GENIUS line? i'm not saying not liking dylan is a particularly radical position to adopt; however, i am absolutely and categorically saying that people wanking on about how fucking godlike he is makes him -- for people like me and, i guess, darraghmac -- a little harder to embrace.

I don't give a fuck about people not liking Dylan; it's when the reason advanced is that he can't sing that i get mad. He's a pretty good singer actually, in terms of musicality, phrasing and expressiveness; it's just that the sound of his voice is defiantly un- Bel Canto- like. It reminds of the Charles Hallé line about the English not caring much for music, just liking the sound of it.

"i think that's fairly valid when you genuinely can't see anything great about a musician/band that you keep hearing such consistently hyperbolised praise for.

-- darraghmac, Sunday, 30 September 2007 13:34 (2 hours ago) Link

Hopefully you'll grow out of this--it betrays an inability to think for yourself."

This still isn't making any sense to me- I can't think for myself because i disagree with the majority opinion on an artist?

grimly, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard re: the Beatles. Why not just listen an make your own decision? I bet you weren't a lot of fun to hang out with.

And not liking something because it "doesn't live up to the hype" is a thoroughly invalid criticism.

Why not just listen an make your own decision

because, dude, i was an angsty and -- yes! -- immature teenager and didn't have the merit of yr worldly wisdom at the time. thanks, though, for this sage advice: it would no doubt have revolutionised my entire existence and that of everyone around me. anyway, i won't take up any more of your time: i guess you've got burma ("why not just let the people have a say?") and world peace ("why not just be nice to each other?") to sort out before bedtime.

He's a pretty good singer actually

he's a great singer. i think if you're looking for his influence (not that "influence" is the reason to venerate him or anyone), i think it's most evident in singing. he changed the way people sing just as much as elvis or ella did.