Articles Tagged with audience
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.
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