Articles Tagged with Bob Dylan
A Face like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan’s Voice, Personae, and Lyrics
This article seeks to examine the literary pleasures derived from Bob Dylan’s songs, paying special attention to how Dylan’s poetical texts are performed and rhythmically rewritten by his voice, as well as the ways in which Dylan uses the songs to “write himself” through the creation of numerous and competing personae. Close reading of the lyrics, this article argues, must therefore be supplemented by a “poetics of the voice” and a detailed analysis of the theatricality of his “games of masks.” While a stylistic approach to the lyrics reveals a thrust towards writerly openness and new poetical idioms that fuse oral traditions with high poetry, the aesthetic and semantic uses Dylan makes of his voice are equally sophisticated. A study of Dylan’s “masks” will show that the artist uses archetypal poetic identities (prophet, trickster, man of sorrow, and so on) as fictional figurations of himself offered to the audience.
Read more »Living, Breathing Songs: Singing Along with Bob Dylan
Taking issue with approaches to Bob Dylan’s art that are preoccupied with his lyrics, this article suggests a route into thinking about his music by focusing on how Dylan’s vocal melodies work at the intersection of speech and singing. Drawing on Gino Stefani’s work on popular melodies, this article explores this issue through a discussion of how people sing along with Dylan’s songs at concerts. The discussion focuses on the song “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and examines more general points about the ways in which Dylan’s melodies connect with the everyday lives of his listeners.
Read more »Vocal Performance and Speech Intonation: Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”
This article proposes a linguistic analysis of a recorded performance of a single verse of one of Dylan’s most popular songs—the originally released studio recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”—and describes more specifically the ways in which intonation relates to lyrics and performance. This analysis is used as source material for a close reading of the semantic, affective, and “playful” meanings of the performance, and is compared with some published accounts of the song’s reception. The author has drawn on the linguistic methodology formulated by Michael Halliday, who has found speech intonation (which includes pitch movement, timbre, syllabic rhythm, and loudness) to be an integral part of English grammar and crucial to the transmission of certain kinds of meaning. Speech intonation is a deeply-rooted and powerfully meaningful aspect of human communication. This article argues that is plausible that a system so powerful in speech might have some bearing on the communication of meaning in sung performance.
Read more »Never Quite Sung in this Fashion Before: Bob Dylan’s “Man of Constant Sorrow”
Many of Bob Dylan’s early compositions were drawn from pre-existing musical sources. This article traces the song “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” recorded by Dylan on his first LP, from its composition in the 1910s to the point at which the song entered Dylan’s repertoire in 1961. This article proposes detailed transcription and comparison as a way for scholars to address issues of song transmission and dissemination, as well as intellectual property rights.
Read more »“‘Sólo Soy Un Guitarrista’: Bob Dylan in the Spanish-Speaking World—Influences, Parallels, Reception, and Translation”
This article examines key aspects of the relationship between the work of Bob Dylan and the cultures of Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin America, including the Spanish/Latin American presence in Dylan’s songs and prose texts; the reception of Dylan’s work by Spanish-speaking critics and intellectuals; influences and parallels between Dylan and Spanish/Latin American musicians and writers, notably Federico García Lorca; and the translation of Dylan into Spanish. Dylan’s work is seen as a hybrid cultural phenomenon, generating connections between high-cultural and popular elements. Its two-way relationship with Hispanophone culture is seen as an interesting case of bridge-building between cultural systems.
Read more »A Semantic and Syntactic Journey Through the Dylan Corpus
This article is a corpus-based exploration of Bob Dylan’s lexicon and syntactic structures based on an examination of the 400-plus songs published to date. By means of a simple concordance program, this article analyzes vocabulary frequencies for each main word class (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). A look at modal auxiliaries illustrate a definite mismatch between large corpora and our corpus, which the author interprets as a deliberate will of Dylan’s to avoid being viewed as a “prophet.” A short exploration of complex noun phrases (the 3 patterns N Ø N, N’s N, and N of N) sheds new light on the specific vehicles used by Dylan to convey his flamboyant imagery. Last but not least, a look at some syntactic idiosyncrasies (especially the use of “do” and the “a-Ving” form) shows a peculiar use of archaic syntax.
Read more »“The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters”: Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan’s Verbal Art
Applying the linguistic category of style as put forth by Dell Hymes, this article seeks to identify the poetic devices borrowed by Bob Dylan from lyrics of traditional blues masters. The author highlights rhetorical form as it is connected to personal and cultural meaning in Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine,” as recorded both by McTell and later by Dylan. Among the stylistic operations examined, we find a description of the phenomenon of songfulness as defined by Lawrence Kramer, metaphoric designs of Southern American English, expressive grammar deviations, and the syntactic formulation the author defines as “binary blues clauses,” commonly used in the AAB blues structure. The study is illustrated with a close analysis of language and genre use in Dylan’s “10,000 Men.”
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