Pop Clture

[steve_bank]

Jumping over from Toms thread

Thread 'Yes I'm a Dylan Fan (for Steve Bank)'

Jul 19, 2024

In a post in the General Religion section Steve Bank includes the following opinion. I told him I’d like to start a dialogue on the topics of pop music and Dylan in particular. So here it is:

My favorite example of human behavior in this aspect is Bob Dylan. He started off imitating Woody Guthrie and 60s counter culture types turned his largely incoherent lyrics into prophetic works. and Dylan into a prophet. Books and PHD theses were written about Dylan, yet if you listed to what he said if interpret his lyrics that is up to you.

I’ll parse the above opinion in a bit, but first...

• Tharmas
• Replies: 23
• Forum: Miscellaneous Discussions

• 

Do you derive meaning from pop culture influences? Is pop entertainment the new religion?

The counter culture turned Dylan into a folk hero. When he showed up at a Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar backed by a band fans were dismayed.
What does it cost to see Bob The Prophet these days?

In the 60s 70s I went to the Fillmore East in in NYC and other venues. Airplane, Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, Sly And The Family Stone,Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin and others.

Up through the mid 70s for me it was all about music, sex, and getting high. I grew out of it.

I read bios and watched documentaries on Dylan. In a video clip he is in a room with Joan Baez at a typewriter, he says 'These lyrics are going to drive people crazy'.

If you get off on somebody's music that's your trip, but if you derive some kind of profound revelations then it is more like Chist8ans interpreting Jesus.

Dylan said explicitly his words had no particular meaning and if you find meaning it i up to yo

In interviews Clapton and Garcia both said they had no idea why, they only know if they played a certain way people liked it.

Art and aesthetics, meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I saw a Warhol sexhbit a an art museum in the 70s. A can of Campbell soup hanging on a canvas.

Dylan the hero of the counter culture was and is an entertainer getting rich.. The counter culture was mostly young white middle class hanging around and slacking.

I read a piece o Mick Jagger in the 80s. He invested the band's money ad made them all rich. He became a financial player in Europe. He goes on stage in his rags contuse singing rebellion, yet he is the system.

Nothing wrong with that our free market system, but how do you relate to modern pop icons?

Can ypu get trough the day without music or video entertainment?

Do you quote pop culture?

Is pop culture the new religion?


If you criticize corporations and profit versus wealth inequity do you also call our wealthy pop culture figures?

So Toe, do you follow the words of Dylan as Christians the words of Jesus?

 

[bilby]

Is pop culture the new religion?

No. Religion was (in large part) the old pop culture.

We grew out of it.

 

[Tharmas]

As you have not confined this discussion to Bob Dylan, but to all of "Pop Culture," I will start by making some observations about pop culture in general. First l note that you seem to equate popular artists with phoniness. Let me point out that Shakespeare produced pop culture, and is still quite popular today in film and on the stage, as I understand it. Same goes for Mozart, who frequently wrote for the masses. Chopin was also an enormously popular artist in his day. There are too many other examples to name. My point is, there is absolutely no reason to equate popularity with phoniness or lack of quality.

Do you derive meaning from pop culture influences? Is pop entertainment the new religion?

I wonder what you mean by "meaning." Am I able to parse the words of a song and understand the syntax? Yes.
You don't define "religion." In its most casual form it's just a metaphor for a mild obsession: his religion is girl watching."
Then there's the full sense of religion, including liturgy, clergy, congregations, creeds, ritual, belief in a higher power, etc. There are of course other shades of meaning in between.

The counter culture turned Dylan into a folk hero. When he showed up at a Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar backed by a band fans were dismayed.
What does it cost to see Bob The Prophet these days?

If you read what I wrote in the other thread you will understand the folk music fad and the "purists" that were a part of it. Some of them objected loudly at Newport when Dylan did a double set - one electrified and one acoustic. Others cheered. Some objected to the sets being so short (15 minutes). The scene was not nearly as simplistic as you describe it. Furthermore, folk performers had been playing with amplified bands for years. The thing is, it was a black thing, which Dylan probably appreciated but his fans were just beginning to. One clue is the band that backed Dylan at Newport - the Paul Butterfield Blues Band - was set to perform themselves. They were largely (but not completely) white men from Chicago playing what they'd been hearing on the south side.

What does it cost to see Bob The Prophet these days?

There you go again, money equals bad art. I'm guessing you thought of Dylan as a "prophet" when he started out. You were one of the few. I think it was Time magazine that declared him the "spokesman for a generation." Time magazine does not represent the "counter culture."

In the 60s 70s I went to the Fillmore East in in NYC and other venues. Airplane, Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, Sly And The Family Stone,Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin and others.

Up through the mid 70s for me it was all about music, sex, and getting high. I grew out of it.

I agree with you on "getting high." I'm sorry you "grew out of" music and sex. Even at my age, I continue to enjoy both.

I read bios and watched documentaries on Dylan. In a video clip he is in a room with Joan Baez at a typewriter, he says 'These lyrics are going to drive people crazy'.

If you get off on somebody's music that's your trip, but if you derive some kind of profound revelations then it is more like Chist8ans interpreting Jesus.

Dylan said explicitly his words had no particular meaning and if you find meaning it i up to yo

In interviews Clapton and Garcia both said they had no idea why, they only know if they played a certain way people liked it.

Art and aesthetics, meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I saw a Warhol sexhbit a an art museum in the 70s. A can of Campbell soup hanging on a canvas.

I explained in the other thread how most artists resist attempts to get them to explain their works. You've added Clapton and Garcia to the list. Thanks for the info. "Meaning is in the eye of the beholder." I believe that's largely true. As I heard the novelist Margaret Drabble say, speaking of her own novels, "There are as many books as there are readers." I wonder what you opinion of Warhol is. He even called it "Pop Art." What about his contemporaries, Mark Rothko or Jasper Johns? I advise you not to look at Jackson Pollock. You'll have a heart attack.

Dylan the hero of the counter culture was and is an entertainer getting rich.. The counter culture was mostly young white middle class hanging around and slacking.

Dylan calls himself an entertainer in the interview he did with Time magazine that I mentioned in my thread. Dylan strongly objected to being the "spokesman for a generation." He wanted freedom to explore, as he was doing when he went electric. As for the counter culture being a group of kids slacking, you must have been really stoned to miss what was happening with the counter culture in those days. Civil rights workers were being murdered in the deep south. Gay activists were being beaten and going to jail at Stonewall. Anti-war activists were being beaten and jailed in Chicago. Pushing for women's rights was upsetting older men. There were many other facets to the counter-culture movement. As Peter Coyote said:

I think it’s fair to say that we lost all our political struggles in the sixties. We didn’t end capitalism, we didn’t end imperialism, we didn’t end racism, we didn’t actually end the war in Vietnam. However, we did win all the cultural battles. There’s no place in the United States you can go today where there’s not a women’s movement, an environmental movement, alternative health movements, alternative spiritual practices, yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, organic food, alternative ways of eating and nutrition, gay rights. These things are locked in the culture and these things are exerting long-term pressures that are deeply and subtly transformative, and it is the Diggers’ assertion that they were more powerful than politics, and I still hold to that.
Bingham, Clara. Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul (pp. 526-527). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Nothing wrong with that our free market system, but how do you relate to modern pop icons?

I'm fine with them, just as I am with professional athletes. The billionaires make their billions off them, so let the performers have a few millions.

Can ypu get trough the day without music or video entertainment?

Do you quote pop culture?

Is pop culture the new religion?

I watch very little video, but I often listen to music.
"Quoting pop culture" is so broad a question that it's meaningless.
No, I don't believe pop culture is a religion, new or old, in any meaningful sense.

If you criticize corporations and profit versus wealth inequity do you also call our wealthy pop culture figures?

So Toe, do you follow the words of Dylan as Christians the words of Jesus?

When entertainers act like corporations in the sense of overlooking social responsibilities for the sake of exploitative practices, I would criticize them. Frankly, I don't follow pop icons that closely.
I follow the words of Dylan in the same way I follow the words of any excellent poet.

 

[rousseau]

Dylan's rich because he brought value to millions of people. That value was in the form of magic that his fans would otherwise not have experienced during their mostly drab lives. That's the power of music.

People were drawn to Dylan in particular because he's a genius (everyone is drawn to smart people, both within and outside of popular culture). But the prophet analogy might be a little overblown, people didn't see him as a religious figure, just a very smart person who was worth paying attention to.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Dylan and John Lennon had an instinct for the inscrutable lyric. Doesn't matter if it doesn't always parse, or if five different fans have five different explanations. And it's not just nonsense -- it's not easy to bring off a memorable line that leaves everyone saying, "What did that guy just say??" All I know is that I've heard lines like 'Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall' and 'To live outside the law, you must be honest' for half a century, and they still rope me in. A lot of the time I'm not sure if I -- or the artist -- could explain what they mean (which is the point.) The alternative is 'Raindrops keep fallin' on my head', I suppose.

 

[rousseau]

I wonder if what was really needed was the right personality to pull the lyrics off / break the ice. Before Dylan the entire music industry had more of a conservative, traditional style, but with Dylan there was some of the former, and some of the latter. He bridged the gap between the past and the present.

I mention this because I'm not sure that his lyrics are actually that sophisticated or hard to reproduce, he just happened to write them first, along with having the drive to perform the music. I was a big fan when I was a teenager, and in my early twenties, but now a lot of his work just feels a bit cloying, as if he was deliberately trying to strike a chord in his audience. His music is maybe just a bit disingenuous. That's an important point, because it was likely the very act of trying to strike a chord that won him such a massive audience, people ate it up. And it took someone like Dylan to have the gall and ability to do it.

Contrast to Cohen who almost always wrote directly from the heart. It won him a following, but not nearly as a big.

 

[Politesse]

Pop culture is not a term with clear boundaries; it is usually employed somewhat critically or derogatorily, with a strong implication of classism. High art is opposed to pop art, as though they were non-overlapping categories both topically and in quality. But art, both "high" and "low", "popular" and "erudite", "fine" and "profane", deal with the same fundamental human themes. Life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt. Not only are art and religion overlapping categories, I do not see how they could possibly avoid being such. Means of expression may differ, but all of the human arts are aimed at understanding, coping with, triumphing over, or celebrating the full complexity of our lives. Some artistic expressions have more staying power than others, but I have every confidence that as time passes, much of what gets termed pop music now will survive the test and migrate to the classical music stations of the future, just as happened to many, many musical offerings over the centuries. There are plenty of people whose work made the evolution into high art through no other means than the passage of time and people's unwillingness to put them aside. Satie and Liszt have now made the cut because people kept listening to their music, not because the inherent quality of their music changed in some way with their composers' deaths.

 

[Tharmas]

I wonder if what was really needed was the right personality to pull the lyrics off / break the ice. Before Dylan the entire music industry had more of a conservative, traditional style, but with Dylan there was some of the former, and some of the latter. He bridged the gap between the past and the present.

I mention this because I'm not sure that his lyrics are actually that sophisticated or hard to reproduce, he just happened to write them first, along with having the drive to perform the music. I was a big fan when I was a teenager, and in my early twenties, but now a lot of his work just feels a bit cloying, as if he was deliberately trying to strike a chord in his audience. His music is maybe just a bit disingenuous. That's an important point, because it was likely the very act of trying to strike a chord that won him such a massive audience, people ate it up. And it took someone like Dylan to have the gall and ability to do it.

Contrast to Cohen who almost always wrote directly from the heart. It won him a following, but not nearly as a big.

I don’t entirely disagree with you, although I wouldn’t use the word “cloying” to describe Dylan’s writing. There are a couple of points I’d make.

One, Dylan’s background, his training if you will, was almost exclusively in folk music. He remained/s almost exclusively a song writer, without Cohen’s background in the printed word. They are two different arts, as I’m sure you know, although with some overlap of course.

Second is Dylan’s age. He was twenty two when “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” was released, his first album of original songs, including “Blowin; in the Wind” among many others. He was twenty-five when Blond on Blond was released, his sixth album. That’s an extraordinary production in three years. My personal favorite is (to me) the much more mature “Blood on the Tracks,” released in 1975 when Dylan was in his thirties.

I will add that many of the songs on “Another Side of Bob Dylan” (his fourth album) impress me as being “from the heart.”

But for all that, as I said, I don’t entirely disagree with you.

 

[Elixir]

“he just happened to write them first”
Was my first thought when “like a rolling stone” hit the charts.
But Dylan kept on writing stuff that he just happened to write first. Most sounded like I’d heard it before but couldn’t say where. It was all clever compilation of catchphrases that happen to dovetail… not much to see here.
After some decades it dawned on me that those things are attributes of great song lyricism.

 

[rousseau]

I wonder if what was really needed was the right personality to pull the lyrics off / break the ice. Before Dylan the entire music industry had more of a conservative, traditional style, but with Dylan there was some of the former, and some of the latter. He bridged the gap between the past and the present.

I mention this because I'm not sure that his lyrics are actually that sophisticated or hard to reproduce, he just happened to write them first, along with having the drive to perform the music. I was a big fan when I was a teenager, and in my early twenties, but now a lot of his work just feels a bit cloying, as if he was deliberately trying to strike a chord in his audience. His music is maybe just a bit disingenuous. That's an important point, because it was likely the very act of trying to strike a chord that won him such a massive audience, people ate it up. And it took someone like Dylan to have the gall and ability to do it.

Contrast to Cohen who almost always wrote directly from the heart. It won him a following, but not nearly as a big.

I don’t entirely disagree with you, although I wouldn’t use the word “cloying” to describe Dylan’s writing. There are a couple of points I’d make.

One, Dylan’s background, his training if you will, was almost exclusively in folk music. He remained/s almost exclusively a song writer, without Cohen’s background in the printed word. They are two different arts, as I’m sure you know, although with some overlap of course.

Second is Dylan’s age. He was twenty two when “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” was released, his first album of original songs, including “Blowin; in the Wind” among many others. He was twenty-five when Blond on Blond was released, his sixth album. That’s an extraordinary production in three years. My personal favorite is (to me) the much more mature “Blood on the Tracks,” released in 1975 when Dylan was in his thirties.

I will add that many of the songs on “Another Side of Bob Dylan” (his fourth album) impress me as being “from the heart.”

But for all that, as I said, I don’t entirely disagree with you.

I likely have a bit of a lower bar for calling music cloying than most. There's definitely much worse than Dylan, but lately I have trouble listening to most popular music for this reason.

 

[rousseau]

“he just happened to write them first”
Was my first thought when “like a rolling stone” hit the charts.
But Dylan kept on writing stuff that he just happened to write first. Most sounded like I’d heard it before but couldn’t say where. It was all clever compilation of catchphrases that happen to dovetail… not much to see here.
After some decades it dawned on me that those things are attributes of great song lyricism.

There's definitely talent there, I think my point is more along the lines of.. after Dylan, a lot of people did it. But Dylan literally ushered in a new era of music, he had the exact combination of skills and fortitude to make it happen. It wasn't just his lyricism, it was the entire package.

After the music industry shifted there are quite a few artists who I find just as interesting as him, maybe moreso.

 

[southernhybrid]

I was only a Dylan fan when I was a teenager. Does it not annoy my fellow atheists, that he spent years writing gospel tunes, after he becomes a so called born again Christian? Just wondering. I've never listened to any of them but I read a few articles about them. Still, he was very influential in his day, especially during the early years of the Viet Nam War.

I agree with what Politesse said. What starts out as pop music often become classic music. This is true of a lot of soul music. Stevie Wonder, The O' Jay's, the Temptations, Ray Charles, James Brown, Parliament, ( okay that's funk ) just to name a few. Their music is as relevant today as it was when it was created. For that matter, most people don't even know half of the songs and real jazz that Ray created. A lot of soul was popular back in the day when we were protesting wars, fighting for civil rights, disgusting with police brutality etc. Sadly, those things never want away, so the music continues to speak the language that we still feel today. Plus, a lot of those artists had amazing back up bands. Regardless if their music was considered pop in the day, younger generations now appreciate it a lot. Music is one of the greatest things we have. Maybe we got it from the birds. I think I read a book that mentioned that. I can't imagine living in a world without music, and I like most genres of music, although at my age, it's primarily old school stuff.

Think of a few songs like "What's Going On" or the lyrics from "War". 'War, what is it goof for, absolutely nothing, say it again". Then came the concept of "Music with a Message". I don't understand people who don't appreciate music, regardless of genre or the period it came from. There is something for everyone.

 

[Tharmas]

Does it not annoy my fellow atheists, that he spent years writing gospel tunes, after he becomes a so called born again Christian?

Dylan's Christianity was a phase he went through for a few years. It didn't last. In 1997 he told David Gates (Newsweek) the following (quoted from Wikipedia):

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain" or "I Saw the Light"—that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

I don't know about "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain," but "I Saw the Light" is a Hank Williams tune.
My mother, a professional musician, always said her religion was the music.

 

[southernhybrid]

Does it not annoy my fellow atheists, that he spent years writing gospel tunes, after he becomes a so called born again Christian?

Dylan's Christianity was a phase he went through for a few years. It didn't last. In 1997 he told David Gates (Newsweek) the following (quoted from Wikipedia):

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain" or "I Saw the Light"—that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

I don't know about "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain," but "I Saw the Light" is a Hank Williams tune.
My mother, a professional musician, always said her religion was the music.

I forgot that we have a lot of Dylan music because then late Alex Cooley, a famous music producer in ATL who was my former sister in law's uncle and we downloaded all of his music to our computer in exchange for us doing the same for him. I just don't find anything appealing about Dylan's music, other than the nostalgia that I have for my teen days when my friends and I liked it.

I read something similar to what you posted Tharmas, but the fact is that he did a lot of gospel music regardless of the reason. I read the lyrics to a few, but then I'm not a fan of gospel, despite loving soul, which has its roots in gospel. Gospel is a lot better than most Christian music. That's for sure.

 

[Tharmas]

I read something similar to what you posted Tharmas, but the fact is that he did a lot of gospel music regardless of the reason. I read the lyrics to a few, but then I'm not a fan of gospel, despite loving soul, which has its roots in gospel. Gospel is a lot better than most Christian music. That's for sure

I can understand your aversion to religious music in general. I myself like a lot of it, from Bach to Mozart to Mahalia Jackson. I can get into the music without believing the message, just as I can get into Christmas without believing the story is anything more than a story. I like the Easter Bunny too!

 

[southernhybrid]

I read something similar to what you posted Tharmas, but the fact is that he did a lot of gospel music regardless of the reason. I read the lyrics to a few, but then I'm not a fan of gospel, despite loving soul, which has its roots in gospel. Gospel is a lot better than most Christian music. That's for sure

I can understand your aversion to religious music in general. I myself like a lot of it, from Bach to Mozart to Mahalia Jackson. I can get into the music without believing the message, just as I can get into Christmas without believing the story is anything more than a story. I like the Easter Bunny too!

I like the classical music and I love Mozarts Mass in C Minor as well as Gregorian chants and things like that. I used to listen to them in the winter to lull me off to sleep. I haven't done that in over a. year. Maybe I should start again next winter.

I hate the Hallelujah chorus as it reminds me too much of my childhood. But there are other beautiful concerts that are in Latin and despite taking one year of Latin in High School I have no idea what the words are to those chants or that Mass.

I even enjoyed the enthusiasm at the Black church I visited for a dear friend which was supposed to be just a celebration of her parent's 60th Anniversary. We had fun swaying back and forth with the other people and being the only white people there, but I have no intentions of attending that church again, unless it for a funeral as her parents are in their 80s.

I hate most Christian music because I have a little bit of emotional damage from being raised in an evangelical home. Anyway, have we gone off topic, or does it really matter? I just don't care for the music Bob Dylan at this point in my life. To each their own.