Bob Dylan corner

[Scott Dolan]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

This is the prize invented by the guy who invented dynamite or something, right?

I've dug enough of Dylan enough of the time to see why this award might feel "appropriate"...not sure if it actually is or not, but what's done is done.

I do wonder, though, if "songwriting" was a true equivalency to "literature" or even "poetry", is that something that just now happened?

What the difference between song lyrics and poetry, aside from the fact that one is usually set to music and the other one isn't? 

Edited October 14, 2016 by Scott Dolan

[JSngry]

Song lyrics are generally made in consideration of being sung...in a song. I'm not saying it's a lesser art or anything, far from it. But it's not the same thing.

Take any great poem form any era, even a Psalm, which was supposedly made to be sung. You can put melody to anything, but "song" as we currently understand it sets up expectations of repetitive, symmetrical structures, predictable cadences, etc. Variances from those expectations are often noted, and seldom really radical.

Not for a while now do we have the same set of allowances for poetry. Or for music in general, really.

Arias, great arias with all kinds of lyrical examinations and melodic developments, are those "songs" by today's expectations of song? Probably not?

If Sondheim got a Noble for Literature, would that be considered standard?

None of this a dis on Dylan, when he got me, he got me hard (and when he didn't...not even close), just wondering what's going on with the merging of "values", if this is going to be a real thing going forth, or if this Nobel is some kind of "lifetime achievement award for...just because" kind of thing.

In the end, it don't mean shit other than money and marketing, in the end its just an award, but money and marketing matter in the world where money and marketing matters, and that's a big world.

[Scott Dolan]

Free of any context, I doubt you, I, or anyone else could read a poem and a set of lyrics and know which was which. 

Words on parchment, paper, walls, or screens. It's all writing. It's all literature. It's all written work. 

[Larry Kart]

Another voice heard from (with some bearing on Scott's point) from my book:

STANDARDS AND ‘STANDARDS’ 

 

[1985]

 

The  greatest gap in American popular music may be the one that divides  rock ‘n’ roll from the so-called “standard” tradition of songwriting and singing--the  tunes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter and  the vocal styles of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy  Garland, and Fred  Astaire (to name just a few of the major figures). Arising after World War I, and artistically and commercially  vigorous  until the end of World War II and a bit beyond,  this was the music that several generations of Americans grew  up on. And as  the “standard” tag suggests, it was a music that seemed likely to remain  in the forefront  for some time.  But rock ‘n’ roll changed  all that, with the crucial  dates  probably being 1956 (when Elvis Presley's “Don't Be Cruel”/”Hound Dog”  single climbed to the top of the pop, country, and rhythm-and-blues charts)  and 1964 (when any doubts about  the staying power of rock were  erased by the  advent of the Beatles).  Rock in its various forms is undeniably  the  popular   music of our time, while the standard tradition is close to being a museum  piece--a development that many  find regrettable  but one that  certainly can't  be denied.

 

 Obvious, too, although time has healed some of the wounds, is the  fundamental opposition between rock and the music that came before it.  In fact, rock can be seen as a reaction to and a rejection of almost  everything that the standard tradition represents--an attitude that  a knowledgeable  rock-devotee summed up when she  referred to  the music of Gershwin,  Porter, and the rest as “all those songs  about women getting in and out  of taxicabs.” It was merely  a sly dig in the ribs on her part, and at the time it made  me laugh. But that remark has lingered in my mind; and the more I think  about it, the more it seems to mean. 

 

 For one thing, that  remark  had a  point to it only because its perpetrator and I both knew that the songs  of  the standard tradition are supposed to be “sophisticated”-- a body of music  about people who live in big cities, have a fair amount of cash, and work out their bittersweet romantic problems with a certain world-weary  flair. But  all that,  my friend implied, is a crock--a set of attitudes that  had nothing to do with the way she  and most of the people she knew  lived  their lives, and that probably had little to  do with the way most people lived their lives at the time those songs were  written.  And if there ever was a group of women who kept  “getting in and out  of taxicabs,” my friend’s first impulse would be to give them a  swift kick in the shins.

 

What  that  boils down to, I think, is a belief that when most standard-tradition songs  are measured against the way things happen in real life, they turn out to be  false.  And by the same token, a good many rock fans and rock musicians seem to believe that  their music is good not only because of its visceral kick  but also because it is somehow more genuine--more  realistic and natural--than the music  that came before it. Now there is something  to be said for that way of looking at things. Place a typical Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart lyric alongside something  from  Bruce Springsteen  or Bob Dylan, and most people would say that “Born in  the U.S.A.” and “It's Alright, Ma” are less artificial than “I Get a Kick Out  of You” or “There's a Small Hotel.” But such a judgement  probably  would rest  on the  verbal  content  of songs, on the kinds of stories they try to tell--which is  far from the only way to measure the realism and naturalness  of a song.

 

Consider, for instance,  one of the most basic  questions  that arises  in the  mind of every singer and songwriter: How do I make the words and music  fit  together? One  way  to do this, and the way that became the norm during the  standard  era, was to come up with a melody  and a rhythmic scheme  that  allowed the words of the song to emerge  as conversationally  as  possible--in  the patterns of everyday, person-to-person speech.  (This was,  of course,  a  practical necessity  as well as a stylistic choice, because  so many  standard-era songs  were written for the  musical stage and had to flow easily out of spoken dialogue.)

 

So if one  simply speaks the lyric of any good standard song (say, Porter's “What Is  This Thing Called Love?”) while trying to forget the melody and the rhythms  that go along with it, there are two likely outcomes.  First, the lyric  can be spoken in a conversational tone of voice. And second, the words  one would emphasize  in normal speech are the same  words that are emphasized when the song is sung. Natural, no? And  while  one wouldn't claim that this is true of every  Cole Porter lyric, the  story of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” doesn't  seem very  artificial  either--measured against the world of 1930 (the year the song was written)  or the world of today. 

 

But when songs of the rock era are looked at in this  way,  one comes up with some unexpected results. Not only do the lyrics tend  to be more “poetic” than speechlike, they often don’t fit the music  that goes along with them--that is, the words that would be emphasized if  the lyrics were spoken  are not the words that are emphasized when the  songs are sung. For instance, in Dylan's “It's Alright,  Ma,”  the word “return” is sung by Dylan as “RE-turn,” while in Springsteen's “Backstreets” “became” is sung as “BE-came”--choices of emphasis  that the rhythms of those songs demand  but ones that run counter to the  normal rhythms of  speech. If you think that these  are off-the-wall examples, look  at the lyric  sheet of your favorite rock album--first trying to speak the words in a  conversational tone  of  voice and then listening to how they are sung. Quite  often there will be a vast difference between the words you emphasized and the words the singer did. And when was the last time you heard anybody say  anything the way the Beatles sing the title phrase of “Strawberry Fields Forever”? 

 

So what is going on here? While a cranky Rodgers and Hart fan  might say that lack of craft is all that is involved, that's  not quite  the case,  despite the amateurishness  of much rock--if only because the same devices  crop up in the work of such undeniably slick songwriters as Burt Bacharach  and  Barry Manilow.  No, the problem is that we're stuck with two different notions  of naturalness--one that takes off from human behavior as we commonly  experience it and one that believes there is a deeper, “truer” nature that  is at odds with the  patterns of everyday life. 

 

Follow the first path and you  have songs that stick close to the  texture  of normal  speech and singers who  interpret them that way. (One of Frank Sinatra's chief virtues  is his ability  to make almost  any lyric sound intimate and conversational.) But when the  second path is followed, you have songs and singers who not only feel free  to shout,  mutter,  swoon,  and groan but also tend to twist words this way and  that to fit a pre-existing rhythm or melodic design. (On “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for instance, the non-speech-like word  emphases of the title phrase arise because  at that point composer John Lennon was interested in superimposing a patch of six-eight rhythm on the  song’s prevailing  four-four beat.)

 

 As a child of the “standards” era, I  have my preferences. But I also know that this is not a matter of right  or  wrong. In fact, a glance at the history of music suggests that the kind of  “natural” wordsetting  that prevailed during the era of the standard song is  less common than one might think. Seemingly built  into the very idea of  music is the belief that it is a language in itself,  a sensuously ecstatic  flow of meaning whose power to move  us far exceeds that of common speech, and that it also  does so in a deeper, more “poetic” way. 

 

Music’s  desire to overide the patterns of discernable speech has been constrained at  times (once, in the sixteenth century, by the Roman Catholic church, which decreed at the Council of Trent that the liturgical use of polyphonic music was permitted only  if the texts of such pieces were not obscured), but that desire has never been suppressed,  for in the long run both composers  and  listeners will resist. So perhaps no one should be surprised that we no  longer  live in an era when our pop songs were a kind of heightened conversation. What is  surprising, perhaps, is that any of us grew up in a world where words and music were close to one thing.  

 

 

[JSngry]

Comic strips are literature. Ad copy is literature. Job applications are literature. Work orders are literature.

Get busy, Nobel peoples!

[jlhoots]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Comic strips are literature. Ad copy is literature. Job applications are literature. Work orders are literature.

Get busy, Nobel peoples!

Graphic novels are literature.

[jazzbo]

I think Dylan is an amazing artist. . . I came to really appreciate him later in my life, but I really appreciate his work.

He now has a Nobel, an Oscar, a Grammy or more than one, and a Presidential Medal of Honor. He needs a Tony!

[paul secor]

3 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Another voice heard from (with some bearing on Scott's point) from my book:

STANDARDS AND ‘STANDARDS’ 

 

[1985]

 

The  greatest gap in American popular music may be the one that divides  rock ‘n’ roll from the so-called “standard” tradition of songwriting and singing--the  tunes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter and  the vocal styles of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy  Garland, and Fred  Astaire (to name just a few of the major figures). Arising after World War I, and artistically and commercially  vigorous  until the end of World War II and a bit beyond,  this was the music that several generations of Americans grew  up on. And as  the “standard” tag suggests, it was a music that seemed likely to remain  in the forefront  for some time.  But rock ‘n’ roll changed  all that, with the crucial  dates  probably being 1956 (when Elvis Presley's “Don't Be Cruel”/”Hound Dog”  single climbed to the top of the pop, country, and rhythm-and-blues charts)  and 1964 (when any doubts about  the staying power of rock were  erased by the  advent of the Beatles).  Rock in its various forms is undeniably  the  popular   music of our time, while the standard tradition is close to being a museum  piece--a development that many  find regrettable  but one that  certainly can't  be denied.

 

 Obvious, too, although time has healed some of the wounds, is the  fundamental opposition between rock and the music that came before it.  In fact, rock can be seen as a reaction to and a rejection of almost  everything that the standard tradition represents--an attitude that  a knowledgeable  rock-devotee summed up when she  referred to  the music of Gershwin,  Porter, and the rest as “all those songs  about women getting in and out  of taxicabs.” It was merely  a sly dig in the ribs on her part, and at the time it made  me laugh. But that remark has lingered in my mind; and the more I think  about it, the more it seems to mean. 

 

 For one thing, that  remark  had a  point to it only because its perpetrator and I both knew that the songs  of  the standard tradition are supposed to be “sophisticated”-- a body of music  about people who live in big cities, have a fair amount of cash, and work out their bittersweet romantic problems with a certain world-weary  flair. But  all that,  my friend implied, is a crock--a set of attitudes that  had nothing to do with the way she  and most of the people she knew  lived  their lives, and that probably had little to  do with the way most people lived their lives at the time those songs were  written.  And if there ever was a group of women who kept  “getting in and out  of taxicabs,” my friend’s first impulse would be to give them a  swift kick in the shins.

 

What  that  boils down to, I think, is a belief that when most standard-tradition songs  are measured against the way things happen in real life, they turn out to be  false.  And by the same token, a good many rock fans and rock musicians seem to believe that  their music is good not only because of its visceral kick  but also because it is somehow more genuine--more  realistic and natural--than the music  that came before it. Now there is something  to be said for that way of looking at things. Place a typical Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart lyric alongside something  from  Bruce Springsteen  or Bob Dylan, and most people would say that “Born in  the U.S.A.” and “It's Alright, Ma” are less artificial than “I Get a Kick Out  of You” or “There's a Small Hotel.” But such a judgement  probably  would rest  on the  verbal  content  of songs, on the kinds of stories they try to tell--which is  far from the only way to measure the realism and naturalness  of a song.

 

Consider, for instance,  one of the most basic  questions  that arises  in the  mind of every singer and songwriter: How do I make the words and music  fit  together? One  way  to do this, and the way that became the norm during the  standard  era, was to come up with a melody  and a rhythmic scheme  that  allowed the words of the song to emerge  as conversationally  as  possible--in  the patterns of everyday, person-to-person speech.  (This was,  of course,  a  practical necessity  as well as a stylistic choice, because  so many  standard-era songs  were written for the  musical stage and had to flow easily out of spoken dialogue.)

 

So if one  simply speaks the lyric of any good standard song (say, Porter's “What Is  This Thing Called Love?”) while trying to forget the melody and the rhythms  that go along with it, there are two likely outcomes.  First, the lyric  can be spoken in a conversational tone of voice. And second, the words  one would emphasize  in normal speech are the same  words that are emphasized when the song is sung. Natural, no? And  while  one wouldn't claim that this is true of every  Cole Porter lyric, the  story of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” doesn't  seem very  artificial  either--measured against the world of 1930 (the year the song was written)  or the world of today. 

 

But when songs of the rock era are looked at in this  way,  one comes up with some unexpected results. Not only do the lyrics tend  to be more “poetic” than speechlike, they often don’t fit the music  that goes along with them--that is, the words that would be emphasized if  the lyrics were spoken  are not the words that are emphasized when the  songs are sung. For instance, in Dylan's “It's Alright,  Ma,”  the word “return” is sung by Dylan as “RE-turn,” while in Springsteen's “Backstreets” “became” is sung as “BE-came”--choices of emphasis  that the rhythms of those songs demand  but ones that run counter to the  normal rhythms of  speech. If you think that these  are off-the-wall examples, look  at the lyric  sheet of your favorite rock album--first trying to speak the words in a  conversational tone  of  voice and then listening to how they are sung. Quite  often there will be a vast difference between the words you emphasized and the words the singer did. And when was the last time you heard anybody say  anything the way the Beatles sing the title phrase of “Strawberry Fields Forever”? 

 

So what is going on here? While a cranky Rodgers and Hart fan  might say that lack of craft is all that is involved, that's  not quite  the case,  despite the amateurishness  of much rock--if only because the same devices  crop up in the work of such undeniably slick songwriters as Burt Bacharach  and  Barry Manilow.  No, the problem is that we're stuck with two different notions  of naturalness--one that takes off from human behavior as we commonly  experience it and one that believes there is a deeper, “truer” nature that  is at odds with the  patterns of everyday life. 

 

Follow the first path and you  have songs that stick close to the  texture  of normal  speech and singers who  interpret them that way. (One of Frank Sinatra's chief virtues  is his ability  to make almost  any lyric sound intimate and conversational.) But when the  second path is followed, you have songs and singers who not only feel free  to shout,  mutter,  swoon,  and groan but also tend to twist words this way and  that to fit a pre-existing rhythm or melodic design. (On “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for instance, the non-speech-like word  emphases of the title phrase arise because  at that point composer John Lennon was interested in superimposing a patch of six-eight rhythm on the  song’s prevailing  four-four beat.)

 

 As a child of the “standards” era, I  have my preferences. But I also know that this is not a matter of right  or  wrong. In fact, a glance at the history of music suggests that the kind of  “natural” wordsetting  that prevailed during the era of the standard song is  less common than one might think. Seemingly built  into the very idea of  music is the belief that it is a language in itself,  a sensuously ecstatic  flow of meaning whose power to move  us far exceeds that of common speech, and that it also  does so in a deeper, more “poetic” way. 

 

Music’s  desire to overide the patterns of discernable speech has been constrained at  times (once, in the sixteenth century, by the Roman Catholic church, which decreed at the Council of Trent that the liturgical use of polyphonic music was permitted only  if the texts of such pieces were not obscured), but that desire has never been suppressed,  for in the long run both composers  and  listeners will resist. So perhaps no one should be surprised that we no  longer  live in an era when our pop songs were a kind of heightened conversation. What is  surprising, perhaps, is that any of us grew up in a world where words and music were close to one thing.  

 

 

All well and good, but "standards", the "great American songbook", whatever you want to call it, for whatever virtues were there, didn't reflect the blues heritage - I'm speaking about the blues of the black population, not forms or keys - or the white rural country heritage. It reflected a certain portion of the American population (and probably people who wanted to be part of those folks), and perhaps reflected the way that portion of the population spoke.

And to base one's judgement of the realism of a song on how the lyrics conform to "everyday" speech - and I won't bring up the matter of whose speech - is pretty limiting.

It's interesting that once black and rural white performers and songwriters became more ubiquitous on radio, how quickly things changed. A large audience wanted to hear something that reflected their reality.

[Scott Dolan]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Comic strips are literature. Ad copy is literature. Job applications are literature. Work orders are literature.

Get busy, Nobel peoples!

Honestly, just stop it. 

Literature is an artistic endeavor. It has zero to do with copy, job applications, and work orders. 

What's your next line of argument, brushing your teeth each night makes you a dentist? 

[JSngry]

[danasgoodstuff]

Now that I've had time to let this sink in, I'd rather they gave it to someone less arty and more songwriting as songwriting, more attentive to detail and, well, more like Smokey Robinson or Chuck Berry or Willie Nelson.  But we all know that wasn't going to happen.

Larry:

I appreciate what you're saying and especially the attention to detail/close argument rather than sweeping generalizations so common in this sort of pre- vs. post-rock comparison.  But sometimes standards have a too much craft for too little impact/diminishing returns/overwrought painting ourselves into a beautiful corner quality for me.  And then other times I think the BIG BREAK aspect is overstated and that Lennon & McCartney, Burt Bacharach, ____, ______________ (you fill in the blanks) were closer to the Great American Songbook than whatever it is that's happening now.  Not a coherent, much less closely reasoned and detail supported, argument...I know.

[JSngry]

8 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Another voice heard from (with some bearing on Scott's point) from my book:

STANDARDS AND ‘STANDARDS’ 

 

[1985]

And when was the last time you heard anybody say  anything the way the Beatles sing the title phrase of “Strawberry Fields Forever”? 

 

 

(On “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for instance, the non-speech-like word  emphases of the title phrase arise because  at that point composer John Lennon was interested in superimposing a patch of six-eight rhythm on the  song’s prevailing  four-four beat.)

 

 

My smile is my makeup I wear since my breakup with you?

[JSngry]

Also, this whole "voice of a generation" thing...I really dislike that, because, yeah, ok, Dylan was cool, but he was not, and is not "my voice". So either I'm not in the generation I think I am, or else not all of us had the same voice, or both. Hell, Donna Summer might well be the voice of my generation, and I'm ok with that. She worked hard for the money.

 

“Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot,” Paul Blackburn

 

There will be many other nights like

be standing here with someone, some

one

someone

some-one

some

some

some

some

some

some

one

there will be other songs

a-nother fall, another—spring, but

there will never be a-noth, noth

anoth

noth

anoth-er

noth-er

noth-er 

Other lips that I may kiss,

but they won’t thrill me like

thrill me like

like yours

used to

dream a million dreams

but how can they come

when there

never be

a-noth—

 

( Collected Poems , 316) https://www.coursehero.com/file/6005709/Blackburn-Paul-Selections/

 

[ArtSalt]

I am afraid I fall into the I like Dylan, but only when his songs are being sung by someone else. I did buy those two recent Sinatra albums of his and I couldn't get into them, maybe in time. His voice is like a bad 78 shellec and a night on corn whiskey gone all melancholic. I suppose Tom Waits could be accused of the same, but his night goes into a china town in search of adventure.

You can generally tell a song from poetry, they are not the same discipline. Although there have been some good attempts to putting William Blake's poetry to song by Jah Wobble Tyger and Hugh Cornwell Youth And Age. And Ute Lemper did that album of Bukowksi poetry, which I haven't listened to yet, but I am fan of them both.

[A Lark Ascending]

The world of 'The Arts' bestows its largesse. Back in in the olden days Bobbo would have come back with 'Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you..?" 

Edited October 15, 2016 by A Lark Ascending

[soulpope]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Also, this whole "voice of a generation" thing...I really dislike that, because, yeah, ok, Dylan was cool, but he was not, and is not "my voice". So either I'm not in the generation I think I am, or else not all of us had the same voice, or both. Hell, Donna Summer might well be the voice of my generation, and I'm ok with that. She worked hard for the money.

!

[felser]

3 hours ago, soulpope said:

!

Went and looked up all of the Nobel Literature winners between 1970-2015.  I've heard of two of them - Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow.  And have never read a full book by either  of them.  Whereas Bob Dylan's best lyrics were and are a major influence on me.   "Voice of a Generation" thing is romanticized, but I like and carry the myth, so therefore it works for me (we live our lives on that basis a lot more than we will want to admit).   And there is so much still to find in the most compelling of his songs (for instance, "Rainy Day Women" is based on a biblical proverb about complaining wives (27:15), among other things - it's not actually a drug song -  and the  John Wesley Harding album is steeped in Biblical imagery).  I could spend a good chunk of my lifetime just exploring the meanings of the first first 10 songs on "John Wesley Harding".   So while I understand some of the concerns, I will celebrate the Nobel Prize presentation to Dylan.

[soulpope]

3 hours ago, felser said:

Went and looked up all of the Nobel Literature winners between 1970-2015.  I've heard of two of them - Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow.  And have never read a full book by either  of them.  Whereas Bob Dylan's best lyrics were and are a major influence on me.   "Voice of a Generation" thing is romanticized, but I like and carry the myth, so therefore it works for me (we live our lives on that basis a lot more than we will want to admit).   And there is so much still to find in the most compelling of his songs (for instance, "Rainy Day Women" is based on a biblical proverb about complaining wives (27:15), among other things - it's not actually a drug song -  and the  John Wesley Harding album is steeped in Biblical imagery).  I could spend a good chunk of my lifetime just exploring the meanings of the first first 10 songs on "John Wesley Harding".   So while I understand some of the concerns, I will celebrate the Nobel Prize presentation to Dylan.

No pun intended - but not having read one single book of any Nobel Literature winner of the last 45 years just mirrors the fact not being overly interested in literature .... and again, neither want to disturb the Dylan follower`s Nobel Price party - but the idea behind the Nobel Literature price was to put the spot on mainly rather unknown/known to minorities writers who gave it all and to give them a chance both reach a wider audience and (which is often overlooked) grant them economical stability (the price is worth around USD 950 000) .... so we may agree that Bob Dylan`s market share audiencewise hardly can be bettered and he most likely lives in economically sound circumstances .... so this is (IMO) the main reason why the Nobel Literature Price 2016 for Bob Dylan is a missed opportunity ....

Edited October 15, 2016 by soulpope

[Scott Dolan]

7 hours ago, ArtSalt said:

I am afraid I fall into the I like Dylan, but only when his songs are being sung by someone else. I did buy those two recent Sinatra albums of his and I couldn't get into them, maybe in time. His voice is like a bad 78 shellec and a night on corn whiskey gone all melancholic. I suppose Tom Waits could be accused of the same, but his night goes into a china town in search of adventure.

You can generally tell a song from poetry, they are not the same discipline. Although there have been some good attempts to putting William Blake's poetry to song by Jah Wobble Tyger and Hugh Cornwell Youth And Age. And Ute Lemper did that album of Bukowksi poetry, which I haven't listened to yet, but I am fan of them both.

Can you please expand on how lyrics and poetry are completely different disciplines? I just don't see it. 

Edited October 15, 2016 by Scott Dolan

[ArtSalt]

3 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

Can you please expand on how lyrics and poetry are completely different disciplines? I just don't see it. 

A song lyric is designed to be listened to in context with the music and often when this is taken away, the meaning and power is lost. The poem is heard or read in silence and can stand alone without music. Some poetry functions on the page only. The construction is generally different with song lyrics having choruses, bridges and hooks which are noticeably absent in most poetry.

Can a song lyric function as poetry and poetry as a song lyric, well yes, but I am talking in general and I am not saying one is a higher art form than the other, just different.

One good technique to really pick-up the difference is to buy the complete lyrics of your favourite rock artist, say Lou Reed's Pass Thru The Fire and decide to spend an evening contemplating this weighty tome as poetry. You will soon wander and realise that without the music there isn't as much there as you expected.

Edited October 15, 2016 by ArtSalt

[Scott Dolan]

2 hours ago, ArtSalt said:

 

Can a song lyric function as poetry and poetry as a song lyric, well yes, but I am talking in general and I am not saying one is a higher art form than the other, just different.

I respectfully disagree, but fair enough. 

So, do they both qualify as literature, or not? 

[Teasing the Korean]

I think Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature for the five album stretch running from Another Side of Bob Dylan through John Wesley Harding alone.

[ArtSalt]

1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

I respectfully disagree, but fair enough. 

So, do they both qualify as literature, or not? 

Yes and no.....there is overlap of course, artists such as Noel Coward.

Here's The Spectator's opinion on Dylan's Nobel Prize by Guy Dammann:

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature. And quite right too. But many people seem discomfited by the news, as if the award might represent a token gesture by the Swedish Academy. It doesn’t. The award is serious and we should take it seriously.

The protests seem to fall into two camps. The first camp argues that Dylan is a musician, not a poet, and that therefore the award, while being made to a great artist, is a category mistake. The second camp grants that Dylan can be considered a poet, but that his poetry does not merit being ranked alongside that of Yeats, Eliot, Pasternak, Brodsky, Tranströmer and others.

The first argument does not identify a category error so much as exemplify one. For the categorical separation of music and poetry is itself a mistake; a catastrophe, even, and so misguided that only a complete suspension of our critical faculties can allow us to support it. Granted, our ideas of poetry and music have during the course of history come apart. But how have poets and musicians responded to this absurdity? By trying to bring the two back together.

The greatest poets have sought to make their poetry as musical as possible, not by setting them to music necessarily, but by bringing out the musical qualities of language. It is language’s music, after all, which makes poetry poetry. In turn, the greatest musicians have sought to make their music as poetic as possible, by enriching it with images and ideas which their compositional ingenuity has spun into gleaming jewels which light up our world and stretch our ability to feel it. But without poetry, music is just facile play.

The singer-songwriter, then, is modernity’s absurdly convoluted name for the poet. That the term is one of implied praise shows the low esteem in which we hold ‘mere’ singers and cynical, profit-driven songwriters. But these shifting values distract us from the fact that Homer and Hesiod were singer-songwriters no less than Virgil, Chaucer, Wagner, Michael Tippett, Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse and Laura Mvula.

What of the second camp, who argue that Dylan’s literary qualities fall short of the quality represented by the Nobel committee’s pantheon of modern writing? To make this argument one must appeal to an established notion of literary quality, a task which our benighted age has made nigh-on impossible unless you conceal your working. Here, though, is a notion of literary quality with which we can evaluate the art of the poet:

Poems exist to draw our inner gaze. They hold this gaze and direct it either onto a mirror – in which we see images of ourselves and the world around us – or through a window, which allows us to see beyond our world into what is still only becoming a part of it. The task of the poet, in other words, is to teach us to see things, things that are already there, or things that are becoming, and to give these things a weight which resides in the music of the words chosen to point to them. The things poetry helps us to see can’t be seen without the poet’s help, so we must have the words and their music to hand when we look at them.

What, then, does Bob Dylan teach us to see? Dylan, perhaps better than anyone, raises a smudged and shaking mirror to the shallowness and lack of intellectual ambition which have come to stand as our age’s foremost images of excellence. In Dylan’s singer-songwriting we can apprehend with hideous clarity the easy self-satisfaction of the protestor who thinks constructive engagement is for losers and phonies. Above all, Dylan expresses our epoch’s celebration of the protraction of adolescence; a glorified refusal to be understood, because no one understands the real me. So much modern art exists to perpetuate and celebrate our facile self-regard, but Dylan’s music oozes it. Its whole texture is shot through with its insufferable smugness, from its inexplicable contentment with a handful of inanely doodled rhymes and empty riddles, to the performer’s blatant refusal even to sing it properly. His cracked vocal timbre, and habit of singing against the stress and flow of his own verses, so beloved of his millions of fans, articulates with breath-taking clarity the spirt of the adolescent’s stubborn refusal to realise his confused view of the world, and his place in it, is not a mark of genius but a waste of everybody else’s time.

Hence the injured tone of much of Dylan’s songs, and his performances of them. His music is the sound of everything being everybody else’s fault, the music of the drop-out. And nowhere in this great poet’s oeuvre is Dylan’s basic spirit more visible than in the great masterpiece which opens Highway 61 Revisited. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, perhaps the only song in which Dylan bothers to articulate a few consonants, is pure, vitriolic schadenfreude. It is a song dedicated, in other words, to an emotion whose universally shameful status is revealed by the fact that only the Germans were brave enough to provide a name for it.

The song sneers at its victim’s reversed fortunes but our uncritical, lazy sneering-along with it has prevented us from seeing that the song has come to applaud precisely what it denigrates. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but rolling stones were precisely what the sixties were bent on celebrating, and are what we so slavishly persist today in celebrating about them. We love Dylan because we want, like him, to be a rolling stone.

But the Ancient Greeks had another word for the rolling stone. That word is ‘idiot’. An idiot, according to the Ancient Greeks, is someone who stands aside from the political and cultural spheres, who cuts themselves off from critical participation in the world.

The Nobel Prize for literature, at long last, has been awarded to a complete idiot. As an image of excellence, nothing could be more fitting. A Western culture which has for decades prized idiocy above all other moral and aesthetic qualities and accomplishments has finally come clean. How does it feel, ah how does it feel? Long have we asked. Now we can answer. It feels, as idiots should, stupid.

[Teasing the Korean]

 

18 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

 

The  greatest gap in American popular music may be the one that divides  rock ‘n’ roll from the so-called “standard” tradition of songwriting and singing--the  tunes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter and  the vocal styles of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy  Garland, and Fred  Astaire (to name just a few of the major figures).

It is interesting that people of a certain age group - myself included - have viscerally felt this divide.

But in retrospect, you realize how close those two eras were, and the degree to which the eras overlapped. Frank Sinatra was having hits on the charts and was played on the same AM radio stations as the Beatles.  You could see, for example, the Rolling Stones and Jack Jones on the same variety show.

So when Dylan did his Sinatra tribute album a few years ago, it seemed to people in our age group like he was trying to bridge some unbridgeable divide.  But if some millennial who was hip to 20th century pop music picked up this album, I wonder if the album would be perceived as being a very logical artistic expression. 

Edited October 15, 2016 by Teasing the Korean

[Scott Dolan]

ArtSalt, thanks for posting that article. I pretty much agree with every word.