Comments on: “Are all those songs yours?” “Some of ‘em. Not all of ‘em.”

By: eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:34:43 +0000

RM–You see what can happen sometimes? John Corigliano’s graceless project inspires your animated and informed response. Writing new melodies for Forever Young and Chimes of Freedom is a particular kind of waste of energy, but adding lyrics to I’m Not There is vandalism.
Marcus seemed pleased with Howard Fishman’s admiration, and also seemed professionally objective regarding Corigliano. One wishes he had thrown objectivity out the door when Corigliano declared that folk songs lack emotional range.

By: rm

rm — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:33:07 +0000

Oh, I realized that there were two “helpers” here: one with the lyrics on “I’m Not There,” which is profoundly offensive, and the other composing “music” to words that were already “music.” In any case, one of the songs in the “piece” can be heard in “I’m Not There,” but you’d have to listen to Dylan’s version, however messy and “gap”-ed it was.
Sorry for the couple spelling errors: “guared” – or course, and “in the know” not “new.” Sorry for the error: perhaps the moderator . . .

By: rm

rm — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:17:01 +0000

Hard to believe to that Marcus would take this at all seriously, after what the guy said about the lack of emotional divergence in the verses of “folk songs’ {whatever that means, now, much less to him}. This should have moved him to anger – if Greil Marcus still was the firebrand of his youth, which he is not: he merely confers a kind of hip propriety to anything he DOES nowadays, be it a book, a conference, or whatever. As the writer said, he “requires no explanation,” and while to “those in the new” – disturbing as THAT notion is – this seems true, it is utterly absurd. It’s just that Marcus represents a memory of when popular music was first “taken seriously” {by whom?} and when fans actually read this “serious”-ness, and made decisions based on it. Nowadays, critics are yesterday’s news. Forturnately, Bob Dylan isn’t. The young have discovered him! Now, young people see him as new, and what they hear is generally unencumbered by criticism, finally. Too see this sort of thing now, something the more youthful Dylan would have found extremely unsettling {he clearly ok’d this}, is disturbing. Dylan is not “a poet,” and he knows it: he’s often a “bard” in the old sense, but sadly, often in the newer sense. Sometimes, as in 1967, in that rowdy “basement,” he and his musician friends gave us a glimpse of what people’s music once was: and it was not “weird” at all. And some was deadly serious: Dylan cries his way through a version of “Tears of Rage” – a meditaion on a betrayal with emotion so deep it had to be a love that was not sexual or romantic. And so on. He imagines the pain of another performer on another song {never bootlegged because perhaps Dylan kept it closely garded}, and YOU feel it. But it never was meant to appear ANYWHERE. The others contribute where they think they ought, and it’s incredibly moving: but not for others to hear in 1967. Was that a “song” or just a feeling that coalesced from thoughts to words to music that needed those words. A composer who clearly does not hear the musicality in Dylan’s words doesn’t hear the poetry in them either. A young and maybe scared Bob Dylan, recovering from a life-altering crash, struggled with enormous emotional discord on “I’m Not There,” and sometimes there’s a song coming, and sometimes, it flutters away from him and he tries, and fails to grab it back. Sure, one day that melody will become a famous song {I’m not telling: you can hear it, if you’re not just reading the words}, but back then, something: a photograph perhaps, a broadcast, who knows . . . propelled him into singing something, with words, on the fly, and there are no “gaps”: it all belongs. The other musicians, both “audience” and colleagues, lay out, and DO NOT HELP HIM! And that is the key here. To “help” with this music, which never was a song in 1967, would have been to do it violence. They let him struggle, suggested it ought to be “finished,” but it was just a suggestion, and they had just let him rage and struggle until he could do no more. One of them tagged a “strange” year on to the title. We cannot know but what we hear. To get a chance to hear genuine people’s music again, and then to have this man not only disparage it, the young Dylan, and US, by filling in “the gaps” is loathesome. Marcus should know better.

By: eruke

eruke — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:02:42 +0000

Hello Robert and welcome–and I hope that you’ll pay another visit or two even after you find all the non-brilliant moments here….I’ve been thinking and thinking some more about your comments on Ricks, which hit on something very important. On the one hand, we could argue that Ricks saw this project as a chance to free himself from the constraints of academic discourse, to bring a playful energy to his prose. But on the other hand, the wordplay and the levity make it too easy to dismiss Visions of Sin as Christopher Ricks’ hobby, as opposed to the real work of Milton, Keats, et al. Ricks comes off as eclectic or eccentric, and Visions of Sin becomes a marginal work of art criticism, the intellectual darling of Dylan nuts, and not a project that brings Dylan to the table of great artists. I don’t want Bob dylan to get the lip service of the canon–I want the people who, as human beings, not as professional scholars, turn to Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Beckett to help them feel and think about mortality, faith, passion, beauty and the nature of language, to come to *need* Dylan’s work as the same kind of companion. Asking scholarship/criticism to validate or confer value is for Philistines, but strong scholarship can serve as a guide who refreshes, introduces, defamiliarizes our own attention. Visions of Sin can do all this, but Ricks’ style makes it too easy to see the book as the marvelous whimsy of an important scholar. So I am with you on that. Thank you enormously for provoking me to think about this.

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:16:26 +0000

Bravo–you go, girl!

By: Robert Reginio

Robert Reginio — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:31:29 +0000

I just stumbled upon this brilliant blog, and have quite enjoyed getting caught to to the most recent posts.

You sum up quite accurately what I always felt was the essential strangeness of Corigliano’s project. And how does one miss the rhythm in the words? His “use” of Dylan betrays a rather limited view of a “great poet”…

In a way, my dislike of Christopher Ricks’ book hinges on this notion of propriety too, but from the other side, as it were. Protests to the contrary aside, Ricks’ exhausting punning-for-the-sake-of-punning style suggests a lack of “seriousness” about the endeavor. Why not write about Dylan as he writes about Beckett or Keats or Milton, i.e., in a style he finds fit for a “great poet.”?