Music can be considered many things: art, entertainment, message, a universal language, the expression of our soul, commodity; it is life. For my final paper, I’d like to use Bob Dylan as an example to further explore and discuss the importance of sound and the variability of it to music and music artists. I will analyze some of the noise Bob Dylan has made over the past 50 years and explore how the sound he’s made has evolved over that time.
Popularly regarded for his lyrics (and not always his voice), I will focus on Dylan through the frame of music as message. Dylan’s work relates to some of the readings from class (Cage, Burroughs, Rothenberg, and “Listening”), and I will also pull from literature on Dylan, such as his autobiography, Chronicles, and critic reviews/opinions to define how he creates his music and how it is revered or criticized from the music community. Doing so is important to show the different levels of how sound aesthetic is affected by visual aesthetic.
I will analyze how he sings the same song differently, for example the differences between the Blood on the Tracks and 1975 bootleg versions of “Simple Twist of Fate” and “Tonight I’ll be Staying here with You” – it’s not just the lyrics that change, but also his vocal quality/sound, phrasing, and emotion. These different performances likewise garner variable reactions from fans. These differences can be recognized not only over time, as the differences between his earlier albums and recent ones, but in live performances over the past few years. Whether others sing Dylan’s songs or Dylan sings his songs differently, they have the power to take many shapes because of the base quality of his work—his message and how he originally conveyed it.
Through this discussion of Dylan, I argue that although visual aspects of music are currently more significant that sound in popular culture with such emphasis placed on image, fashion, videos, and awards, the sound aspects are what eventually prevail with music and manipulations of sound are what notably affect us as listeners. Dylan partakes in the visual aspects of the industry appearing in commercials and selling paraphernalia and performing at live events, but his sound is most influential. When we close our eyes and listen to the music, what we hear is most important – the sound and the message.
It kind of sounds like I’m justifying Bob Dylan’s fame, but in a way I’m asking “Why is he famous?” It seems like many artists rely on either their image or their voice for their fame, if not both (Miley Cyrus=image, Aretha Franklin=voice, Elvis=I like to think both). But, Dylan has had success with his nasally voice that many people have parodied and that many others dislike. It’s what Dylan does with his voice and his sound and his message that make him work as a music artist and help others relate to him. Some say he’s more of a poet than a musician, so his recordings could be considered a type of sound poetry.
(These are a bunch of my ideas, and I’m not sure if this topic will end up working well or not. I’m wondering if the idea’s too broad and/or if I should quickly try another one. I was also considering writing about the way sound functions differently in public versus private spaces – the way people speak differently, and the differences in the listening that occurs in these spaces.)
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ReplyDeleteMary: I see this paper as being “Dylan as a sound poet.” This makes a lot of sense. You might structure it by introducing Dylan, then sound poetry, then the combination of the two, then the analysis. My sense is that the visual is probably too much to deal with. Focus on the sound in a few songs.
ReplyDeleteMary: I'll give you a couple suggestions based on a few of the ideas you are grappling with. First, I'm interested in your discussion of how his sound has changed over time. I recently read a review of his latest album which basically argued that he is finally "genuinely" able to sing the songs that match the image he's fostered all along. In other words, he's not an old man who can sing about loss and pain etc., whereas before he was a young kid trying to become this kind of performer. I think this idea is interesting too because it could link to your discussion of why he is famous.
ReplyDeleteOk, next. You also discuss the difference between his live and recorded performances. It seems that Dylan in particular doesn't want his live performances to sound like his recordings. So you might do something with this in discussing the difference between recorded and live sound (something that many of the works we read for class address).
Finally, it seems that you might be getting at the big question we started with: how do we know what a poem sounds like? For Dylan, we think of him as a poet, but how is he more poetic than another performer? Is he simply better? Or does the image he has created scream poetic. You might compare a few of his songs and try to find a pattern that makes his work seem like poetry.
Not sure any of this will help, but perhaps it will help you focus.
Hey Mary, I have a couple ideas I'll run by you, too. Your mention of Dylan's image vs. voice and visual vs. sound was interesting to me because I have always heard that Dylan felt unwanted pressure to become the poster child of the antiwar movement, but this kind of public image brought a lot of responsibilities and audience expectations that Dylan was uncomfortable with. I don't know how accurate my memory is, but I remember hearing that before; and I was just thinking that it demonstrates the tension between image and sound that I think really hinges on message. His message was what eventually had implications on his image. I think I'm adopting a slightly different definition of "image," here, but you get the idea.
ReplyDeleteYou might also discuss how his "sound poetry" influenced the form of artists that followed him. I know some people think Dylan was a parent of rap and rap-rock.
In any case, I see a lot of room with this topic to talk about the relationship between message and form. Rock on!