Whynot

Gracias por compartirlo amigo! Dylan es justamente uno de los artistas en los que estoy queriendo incursionar, tu artículo me vendrá perfecto. Además he leído varias de tus reseñas sobre él y me encantaron.

Saludos!

your my 100th follower! thanks for the follow

thanks for the follow!

And he always denied both titles. He’s not a poet, he’s not a spokesman, but it’s enough to him if you say that he’s just guy who writes songs (“because I got nothing else to do, man”). But when he admits again that he’s in trouble since the beginning, since he put his suitcase on the ground, you realize it’s not quite a “normal” songwriting life; and just a little read about his life shows to what point the songwriting and the recording dictated the directions of his life, dragging him to the unknown, mostly absurd but true and vivid. He may not be the greatest innovator musically, the formal song structures are very simple again, nothing remarkable about form, but if The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix are some, then much thanks to him. He should have taken care of his voice as much as of what he was saying. His singing in “Time Out of Mind” was technically better, in my opinion. But in “Love and Theft” his voice wasn’t yet a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.

One more thing: I didn’t know Charley Patton. Bob said he didn’t read Ezra Pound to write “Desolation Row” — and Ezra had hard times involving himself with the fascism of Mussolini: took such a different path compared with that ‘63 young and marching Dylan (the parade of liberty) —, but he is, at least literally, a little similar to Ezra. He was some kind of cultural instrument, many times more praised as a reviver and cultural spokesman than as the virtuous, tormented poet he was, considered by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce the most important poet of the century and a major influence in their work. Our dear bother Bobby Dylan is praised in both ways (and sometimes mocked for both ways but never reasonably), that’s why he deserves a Nobel Prize like Eliot.

Thanks :)

Sorry if I can’t add much to what a lot of people must have said (and I didn’t read) about his 2001 album, which is not the one I listened to the most (just around four or five times). Bob knows how to overcome his influences, though in other chances he seemed not to know whatever he was doing at all. But one thing I completely admire about him is that he never fears to be misunderstood, and in “Love and Theft” he knew exactly what he’s making — is what I feel.

His lyrics are like a kaleidoscope or (why not?) a not always clearly tempered salad of the many forms of madness and image beauty that surrounded and still (maybe mentally now) surrounds him since he decided to “get away and never cone back” (the best decision one can make). I found “Love and Theft” specially hard to grasp. It can be, sure wrongly, resumed to “nobody understands what there is to understand and there’s nothing to understand and I don’t care”. I think every Bob Dylan album, after two or three, is like that, but this one is (forgetting his weaker works), among his best, a perfect example of this philosophy. Is a perfect continuation to “Highlands”. Those highlands are a rabbit hole. It’s funny that he called his music “not folk rock: image music”, when the poetry of Ezra Pound (who appeared in “Desolation Row”) was Imagism, and to read Ezra teaching how to steal properly.

Basically, Dylan is rubbing a lot of nonsense on your face, quotation marks in and out of the songs, 9/11, he’s not that old yet and he was alive! After “Time Out of Mine” (read the title like that: time I won’t live), he couldn’t get more sardonic than he is in this “Love and Theft”, loving to steal for you and yourself and you still say “thank u ;)”. Or else he’s alluding all the time to things only he knows what. Look: he’s not a robber, or a false prophet — “any day above ground is a good day” —, he is Lewis Caroll, and Alicia Keys his Alice. I cannot tell too clear, sorry, but who can?, he lives in another world (as I remember, glorious Empire Burlesque). The album is one of his most beautiful in my opinion. “Po’ Boy” brings me that truly heartfelt sensation of having good times in a boat in a storm, but he’s like joking during the whole record, and he doesn’t even expect you’ll remember or notice that. I don’t get many of his “allusions”, he must’ve heard all the blues ever made.

Great choice! Ok Human is an excellent album that I enjoyed quite a lot too! I'd say my pick for my favourite album of this quarter so far would be ''For the first time'' by Black Country, New Road. I love the variety and novelty of it!