Uncle Bob's Voice

Oh wait-That was Bugs,wasn't it!

How many levels of mana would Bob have to stand on to sound good?...answers on a postcard to Steven Toy.

cheers

Nigel

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I can quite easily name 10 songwriters who are far more accomplished. I think this very fact precludes him from greatness.

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You are correct, Bob is crap, what on earth was I thinking of to believe that I know what makes a good lyric?

Please post these 10 better writers and an example of their work so I can learn the error of my ways and begin to aspire to your excellent taste.

cheers

Nigel

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Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate, driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

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through acerbic social commentary

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Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

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to things I identify with:

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And if my thought-dreams could be seen,
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine

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And then there are things that are just there to make a lame couplet.

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But people don't live or die, people just float.
She went with the man, In the long black coat

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And no he can't sing, but I love him anyway.

i know no answers an no truth
for absolutely no soul alive
i will listen t no one
who tells me morals
there are no morals
an i dream a lot

It’s possible to take issue with the pop-philosophy of these lines and the crude ideas on existentialism. However, it could not be said that this is verbose or literary in language. Furthermore it is neither poetic nor prosaic. In fact, this could be a transcript of everyday speech, due to the fragmentation of the words as is often found therein.

‘People tend to assign meaning to his songs because they don't know what he is on about.’ No. That is an oxymoron. In general, meaning is not assigned to song and poetry because of its incomprehensibility. Superficially incomprehensible poetry often arouses more interest (and more study) than more easily understandable poetry. Therefore, it is scrutinised more carefully than more simplistic poetry until it is found where, between significant and minor, its literary value might lie. People tend to assign meaning to his songs because they have found that others claim to know what he is on about and even though they might not, they want to be associated with the ‘understanding few’ and so comply with the opinion that the songs possess meaning. People (literary bigots; whoever wrote the quotation above, for example) tend to try to refute the existence of a deeper meaning in his songs precisely because, although ‘they don’t know what he’s on about,’ they want to be perverse and disassociate themselves from the crowd of complicity, because they see it as sycophantic (perhaps rightly). But, at heart, there is a unifying commonality between the complicit and the perverse crowd: ignorance.

In fact, when Bob does use poetical language-techniques—alliteration, regularisation of metre, assonance, rhyme (which has rather different concerns stretching beyond mere poetic force) etc.—which you might expect to find in ‘wordy and verbose’ poetry, the songs seem simple, ridiculous even, and unconcerned with poetic diction. For example, Lay, Lady, Lay (see Ricks).

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Whatever colors you have in your mind
I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile
His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean
And you're the best thing that he's ever seen

Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead
I long to see you in the morning light
I long to reach for you in the night
Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead

Looking at the rhyme scheme you can see, even in this seemingly non-poetic song, Dylan’s poetic talent. As for alliteration and assonance: ‘lady’ is like a beautiful expanded version of ‘lay,’ which it is sandwiched between, thus establishing a unity between the direct command to this woman but also a courteousness, which takes the edge of the command. There are two lines that don’t rhyme: ‘Why wait any longer for the world to begin?’ is paired with ‘Why wait any longer for the one you love?’ They clearly go together. ‘Begin’ is not totally un-rhyming because its picks up, as can be done in a song more vividly than in a poem, the sound of ‘clean’ and ‘seen’ in the previous stanza. But it stands as not really a beginning, which is ever completed or concluded, and the only line in the poem, which, if you take that view, has no rhyme, is ‘Why wait any longer for the one you love, | When he's standing in front of you?’ Everything else rhymes, and the feeling is that that line can be answered only by an action and not by a word and that it is waiting forever to be rhymed in conduct by an action and not by a particular word.

(If you read Christopher Ricks’ analysis of Dylan, people of such narrow perception, critical short-sightedness and inability to judge work objectively and without prejudice will be immediately persuaded that Dylan’s oeuvre is of the highest poetic value (which I do not believe to be true of the whole range: his songs, like, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets have their particular poetic faults), primarily because they (the aforementioned perverse group who ignorantly refute the value of Dylan’s work) are so critically limited and so will be unable to explain why anyone’s work might surpass or even equal Dylan’s, in terms of literary merit. BTW Ricks is generally regarded as the greatest literary critic of modern times, having done criticisms of such ‘wordy and verbose’ language as Milton’s, who happens to be considered as a poet, possessing one of the greatest commands of poetic language (see Ricks’ Milton’s Grand Style.)

The question of the merit and beauty of Dylan’s voice is a matter of aesthetics and so, by nature, eludes definite conclusion. However, assenting that his voice is bad and even unpleasant (which I do not believe: Visions of Johanna, Desolation Row (very Waste-Land-esque), A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, She’s You Lover Now, Time Passes Slowly, One More Cup of Coffee, Angelina, Sweetheart Like You, Blind Willie McTell, My Blue-eyed Jane to name but a few exhibit brilliant vocal control, dynamism and range), it is no matter as many of the greatest works of art could be regarded as deficient in conventional beauty: Eliot’s The Waste Land (incoherent fragments of language, ostensibly incomprehensible, and bewilderingly hostile to a first-time reader), similarly Joyce’s Ulysses, Ginsberg’s Howl; Picasso’s Guernica (a horrible scene of war and death; confounding; could-be visual from The Waste Land), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Stravinsky’s dissonant and incongruous operas, The Velvet Underground’s music, some of Joseph Conrad’s prose and there are many more examples, which abound in the vast history of art.

However, I believe Dylan’s voice does have merits when compared with a more conventional reckoning of a ‘good voice.’ Take his voice on Time Out of Mind. He is aware of and exploits absolutely the bounds of his vocal range. In fact, the nuances of his cigarette-shot voice increase its interest and appeal (hence its aesthetic beauty) and certainly do not detract from it as regards palatability.

By-the-way, I hold a slight degree of contempt for and scepticism of the kind of close-reading and gratuitous interpretation of Dylan’s songs by would-be-literary-critic Dylanologists, since by over-analysing Dylan’s songs one of their most important fundamentals (as song/poetry) is abstracted, that is their immediate beauty; an ephemeral quality which anything but the most adept literary criticism tends to devastate.

Phil - Dave's son.

I presented Lay, Lady, Lay in its proper structure, as it was written by Dylan, and did not want to manipulate it, as that would debase any of the deductions (many of which were incidentally Ricks’). I think, because it might seem highly un-poetic and trite, it was probably a poor choice of song to demonstrate Dylan’s talent for exploiting poetic device to add meaning to a poem. I was just trying to think of a less ‘conventionally poetic’ example (which might suggest Dylan is more of a poetaster) and then demonstrate how literary criticism could actually show it to be accomplished poetry. I agree some of the criticism suggesting meaning through form (metre and rhyme, as well as assonance, alliteration, enjambment etc.) is reading too much into a poem and is simply a manifestation of a critic’s desire to assert someone as a poet. Critics do tend to have a greater poetic intelligence (in terms of ability to recognise and/or exploit poetic device) but not necessarily the aesthetic ability to create beautiful poetry.

I do not consider that thematic function and poetic technique (as regards language), are two separate strands in a web of artifice. Rather, the very best poets manage to synthesise the two so that they are intractable when a thematic deduction is being made. I also think you lay too much importance on the thematic aspects and the ‘meaning’ of a poem. I think, even disregarding any ‘meaning’ that might be in a poem, its utilisation of poetic device can establish it as an accomplished poem, and the finest poets manage to integrate both device and meaning, whereas sometimes the poetic device is used merely to enhance aesthetic beauty; to make a poem sound ‘nice’.

RE: Woodface’s comments.

Please don’t resort to making deductions about my character from the hyper-literary tone I might be adopting. I am writing this simply to reinforce the argument; for basic rhetorical effect, because such a style often overwhelms into submission. Don’t take offence at my writing of ‘[sic]’. It is conventional, when quoting, to highlight errors, which are not your own because there are people in the world (as which you stereotype me) who are so anal as to isolate grammatical and spelling errors and disregard the integrity of an argument because of them. BTW I don’t speak like this normally. I’m a 17-year-old Mancunian, I expect, close to the peak of my social life. And not wanting to offend any of the non-obsessive writers on this forum, one who posts to internet groups about hi-fis does suggest a rather pathetic stereotype! (Sorry that was a lowly attack, probably as base as your devastating assassination on my character because of my writing of ‘[sic]’!)

Faults in Shakespeare’s sonnets -- you cannot hope to suggest that the 154 or so sonnets (those which are assuredly by Shakespeare) are all absolutely perfect, i.e. without any faults. Were it so, the poorer ones would be indistinguishable from the best (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…’ for example).

“’I presented Lay, Lady, Lay in its proper structure, as it was written by Dylan, and did not want to manipulate it’ I don't know where you found this text, but I think it would be a mistake, even if it was in a book of Dylan's lyrics, to assume that Dylan had much to do with it.” –- copied and pasted it from Dylan’s website without checking the line-breaks, after writing the analysis. Because it’s a song it deserves different consideration from what you see on the printed page (Philip Larkin says some interesting things about such matters).

“Certainly the way a poet handles a rhyme scheme - or any other formal device - is evidence of his skill as a poet. But simply using a particular device isn't.” – Using a device to elucidate meaning, create meaning or other such things is evidence of poetic skill, because it requires a good critical mind to do so (see T.S. Eliot’s – ‘The Second-Order Mind’). That is what I mean.

“I really can't imagine why you think I exaggerate the significance of 'meaning' in a poem.” -- I just get the impression that you acclaim ‘meaning’, way above use of language. It seems that to some extent you are disregarding the exploitation of language and use of poetic device; considering it merely as something which ameliorates aesthetic beauty, and serves little other purpose. But I am suggesting that the best poets use device to give ‘meaning,’ not just to just to embellish.

“I think you may have misunderstood me. Perhaps you could explain the distinction you're trying to make.” -- I am referring to your “It's all part of a range of patterning devices which when taken as a whole differentiate poetic discourse from prose and have an aesthetic - not thematic effect.”

Again, if you are saying that poetic device is merely something to make a poem more beautiful, improve it aesthetically and that is what distinguishes it from prose, I disagree. These ‘patterning devices’ are very often (though not always) employed to elucidate or improve thematic understanding (i.e. suggest a ‘meaning’ to the reader, even if it is just expressing the concerns of one line, or even one word, as in the following example) but not just make it sound better. For example, the rhyme stresses the significance of the skull in these lines:

“Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.”

The rhyme, ‘skull’ and ‘Capitol’, is chosen not just because the rhyme-scheme demands a rhyme at this point and the two rhyme nicely (the rhyme is actually imperfect). Capitol is a derivation of ‘head’ (from the Latin. Think: ‘decapitate’ etc.) and is chosen to suggest the return of the ‘idiot wind’ to the ‘skull’ from the previous line, the poetic significance is obvious and quite easy to pick up. You may dispute this but this is not my deduction. Dylan said this in a correspondence with Allen Ginsberg. He chose the rhyme deliberately for the sake of elucidating ‘meaning’ not just for embellishment or for the sake of the rhyme-scheme. I am not suggesting this one line testifies to Dylan’s songs as poetry; it’s just a clever ploy.

Critics - monkeys! Bit of an unfair over-generalisation. I'm just saying that critics (because that is their job) are more sensitive to recognising the purpose of a particular usage of poetic device. Whereas, poets, who are more concerned with aesthetics, not technical adeptness (as I think you might be suggesting) and so do not necessarily see so clearly such functions.