Deep Bob Dylan Theory 2012

[Flex]

Real trainspotter shit here: I'm sure y'all remember when Bob did a short bit of London Calling live, but as far as I know this this is the first time footage of the performance has turned up:


Total shit, but kinda fun.

[Dr. Medulla]

https://thehardtimes.net/culture/bob-dy ... armonicas/

[Flex]

https://thehardtimes.net/culture/bob-dy ... armonicas/

Lol

[Flex]

Dylan's rider is pleasantly normcore: https://www.news-gazette.com/arts-enter ... 9a25c.html

[JohnS]

Bob Dylan has just finished a 4-night stint playing the London Palladium, and on the second night he gave a shout out to Joe Strummer's wife Lucinda who was in the audience. 'We love Joe,' he added, 'he was very honest'!
Despite the strict no-phones policy a good sounding audience recording of the full show is out. The comments are after Bob's band introductions, at about 1:37:15

[Flex]

[Silent Majority]

What a dote. Am really loving his new book.

[Dr. Medulla]

What a dote. Am really loving his new book.

I'm really digging it, and I'm not someone all that into his music. But it's wonderfully entertaining and provocative. I did my MTV lecture today and added his observation that maybe we don't have so many standards anymore (i.e., classics that are endlessly covered) because the music video bakes in our sense of the ideal version. When it was just our imagination, we were more accepting of interpretation. Not sure whether I truly buy the notion, but it's a good point to begin a conversation.

[Dr. Medulla]

Apologies for the Rattyesque length that follows …

Finished the book and, while I did enjoy it immensely, I want to highlight a curiosity about the title, namely the use of the word modern. There are a couple different ways of thinking about that word, neither of which make a whole lot of sense based on the book's contents.

One is to use the word modern as a synonym for contemporary. That's stretching matters considerably as the bulk of his examples are from the 50s and 60s, and none past the 80s (unless I'm forgetting some). If modern does mean contemporary—which I think it does here—it's a suggestion that, what, nothing of significance has been written in the past thirty years? Nothing has caught his ear? Kind of a sad thing that someone with such a huge appetite can't find anything to write about since before he was a Wilbury.

The other use of modern is in the artistic sense, as in modernism. This, too, doesn't work, tho. Some background to explain what I mean. It's been suggested (and I fundamentally agree with) that rock n roll/rock, as art, draws from a couple different artistic critiques of capitalism and industrial life, emerging in the 19th century. One is Romanticism, which looks up the world with a certain sadness for what has been lost. If life under industrial capitalism is one of urbanization, alienation, regulation, competition, it pines for the past, of organic community and tradition and continuity. Art, including music, is about reconnecting human beings to each other and to nature, to find the lost real. The sounds tend to be comforting, reassuring. The live performance is privileged over the recorded because of that desire for community. Folk music is the obvious expression of Romanticism here, with its love of tradition and community and the organic, and suspicion of the mass. Any music that seeks to bring people together draws from that Romantic impulse.

The other artistic critique is Modernism*, which, too, is responding to industrial and urban life. Modernism is both appalled but also intrigued by the noise and chaos and alienation, and draws on these things to shock us, to make us aware that our social reality is not natural. We are not supposed to be alienated from each other, reduced to abstract functions. Modernist art, then, does not seek to reassure, it means to warn. It's the painting you stare at but can't figure out what's happening, it's the song that is loud, cacophonous, disconcerting. It revels in being unnatural to emphasize how unnatural our existence has become. The Modernist impulse leans to the recorded sound, less so the live performance, as the artist isn't all that interested in the audience coming together or what have you. It embraces the products of industrial life and applies them back against themselves.

(* There's also postmodernism, but it's derivative of modernism—tho rejecting some of its precepts—so let's ignore that because it's not that important here.)

So we can look at rock n roll or rock music and see these roots. Some artists can embrace both. Revolver, for example, contains both the Romantic "Eleanor Rigby" and the Modernist "Tomorrow Never Knows." Punk is a strange combination of Modernist noise and shock, yet also seeking community and an organic authenticity.

Back to Dylan's book. The songs he chooses to write about as expressing his philosophy are overwhelmingly (completely?) from the Romantic impulse. He's not drawn to songs that shock and confuse, whose truths are revealed by making you uncomfortable or by smacking your expectations around. He looks to the stuff that reassures that we're human, that we're social creatures and need to get back to a better, truer place. So his use of the word modern doesn't fit this, either.

None of this is meant to diminish the points he makes, only the curiosity or incongruity of the use of the word modern in the title.

[msza2]

Apologies for the Rattyesque length that follows …

Finished the book and, while I did enjoy it immensely, I want to highlight a curiosity about the title, namely the use of the word modern. There are a couple different ways of thinking about that word, neither of which make a whole lot of sense based on the book's contents.

One is to use the word modern as a synonym for contemporary. That's stretching matters considerably as the bulk of his examples are from the 50s and 60s, and none past the 80s (unless I'm forgetting some). If modern does mean contemporary—which I think it does here—it's a suggestion that, what, nothing of significance has been written in the past thirty years? Nothing has caught his ear? Kind of a sad thing that someone with such a huge appetite can't find anything to write about since before he was a Wilbury.

The other use of modern is in the artistic sense, as in modernism. This, too, doesn't work, tho. Some background to explain what I mean. It's been suggested (and I fundamentally agree with) that rock n roll/rock, as art, draws from a couple different artistic critiques of capitalism and industrial life, emerging in the 19th century. One is Romanticism, which looks up the world with a certain sadness for what has been lost. If life under industrial capitalism is one of urbanization, alienation, regulation, competition, it pines for the past, of organic community and tradition and continuity. Art, including music, is about reconnecting human beings to each other and to nature, to find the lost real. The sounds tend to be comforting, reassuring. The live performance is privileged over the recorded because of that desire for community. Folk music is the obvious expression of Romanticism here, with its love of tradition and community and the organic, and suspicion of the mass. Any music that seeks to bring people together draws from that Romantic impulse.

The other artistic critique is Modernism*, which, too, is responding to industrial and urban life. Modernism is both appalled but also intrigued by the noise and chaos and alienation, and draws on these things to shock us, to make us aware that our social reality is not natural. We are not supposed to be alienated from each other, reduced to abstract functions. Modernist art, then, does not seek to reassure, it means to warn. It's the painting you stare at but can't figure out what's happening, it's the song that is loud, cacophonous, disconcerting. It revels in being unnatural to emphasize how unnatural our existence has become. The Modernist impulse leans to the recorded sound, less so the live performance, as the artist isn't all that interested in the audience coming together or what have you. It embraces the products of industrial life and applies them back against themselves.

(* There's also postmodernism, but it's derivative of modernism—tho rejecting some of its precepts—so let's ignore that because it's not that important here.)

So we can look at rock n roll or rock music and see these roots. Some artists can embrace both. Revolver, for example, contains both the Romantic "Eleanor Rigby" and the Modernist "Tomorrow Never Knows." Punk is a strange combination of Modernist noise and shock, yet also seeking community and an organic authenticity.

Back to Dylan's book. The songs he chooses to write about as expressing his philosophy are overwhelmingly (completely?) from the Romantic impulse. He's not drawn to songs that shock and confuse, whose truths are revealed by making you uncomfortable or by smacking your expectations around. He looks to the stuff that reassures that we're human, that we're social creatures and need to get back to a better, truer place. So his use of the word modern doesn't fit this, either.

None of this is meant to diminish the points he makes, only the curiosity or incongruity of the use of the word modern in the title.

Great stuff.

There was similar head scratching when he named an album Modern Times in 2006 when all of the music on the album was based on standards from the 1950s or earlier.

I suspect that to him "modern times" roughly begin with the advent of the light bulb.

[Flex]

I need to finish and give some more thought to your excellent observations, Doc, but my gut reaction is that Bob is taking the piss a bit (at least). As msza2 mentions, he uses the word "modern" in that album of his from the aughts and in both cases the titles feel deliberately antiquated.

Bob is, at least, plugged into some hip-hop and r&b from this century based on interviews and comments he's made over time (not to mention name checking Alicia Keys on the aforementioned Modern Times)

[Dr. Medulla]

There was similar head scratching when he named an album Modern Times in 2006 when all of the music on the album was based on standards from the 1950s or earlier.

I thought it was a reference to the Chaplin film. I don't know why I thought that—that is, I didn't give it any great reflection. I guess I associate that phrase with Chaplin (and, to a lesser degree, conservative historian Paul Johnson's survey of the 20th c).

I suspect that to him "modern times" roughly begin with the advent of the light bulb.

"It all went wrong when man took lightning from the gods and placed it in glass balls …"

[msza2]

I suspect that to him "modern times" roughly begin with the advent of the light bulb.

"It all went wrong when man took lightning from the gods and placed it in glass balls …"

Lol

[Dr. Medulla]

It ain't me signing, babe: https://boingboing.net/2022/11/22/turns ... -book.html

[Marky Dread]

It ain't me signing, babe: https://boingboing.net/2022/11/22/turns ... -book.html

Very poor but at least they are refunding and those who bought the so called signed edition get to keep it for free.

More interesting to me though was on that same link there's a story of a joke cracking bar tending robot. Which made me wonder if Tep will get his very own Flex.